The sky turned as black as sackcloth, and the seven bowls of wrath are poured upon the earth-

As shocking as it may seem, the NHL has actually produced an amazing promotional commercial.

Check it out:



Seriously.

A great NHL commercial promo.

That's a sign of the apocalypse, right?

I mean, right?

The Cowboys Season

So there's a big stink about tomorrow night's Dallas/Green Bay game being on the NFL network and therefore only available to those with AB negative blood types or something. Allow me to add to the stink, but not because I want to see this game (I have to work) but because it's indicative of what's going on elsewhere in sports.

Driving around the Midwest lo these many months for comedy (and watching lots of big ten football on my Saturday afternoons) I've been subject to an advertising blitz by the Big 10 Network exhorting me to call my cable provider to demand they pick up the Big 10 Network. Hey Big 10 Network, do your own damn demanding! Don't stick me in the middle of your little fight between the cable behemoths and your attempt at a network. I'm tired of trying to follow my teams through the labyrinth of basic cable.

My basic cable package in NYC is a mess of old sports networks, a new one seems to crop up every season. There's Fox Sports New York, the Madison Square Garden Network, YES, and maybe they'll pick up the NFL network. Soon there'll be a Giants Network, a Jets Network, and the SIYES (the Staten Island Yankees... what the hell do the E. S. stand for anyway?).

Soon basic cable will be a wasteland of discarded networks, like the forgotten blogs that people start and never commit to.

Hey, I got it, what about The Nosebleeds Network?

The Curse of the Chihuahua

In 1998, Tony Bennett tried to bring his pet chihuahua, Bridget, with him into Yankees Stadium for Game 4 of the World Series, where he was booked to massacre the National Anthem in the normal way. In a startling manifestation of Nietzsche's doctrine of Eternal Recurrence - or ewige Wiederkunft - ushers at the game said the dog was too smelly and told Bennet that he had to leave. Nevertheless, Bennett went on to sing the Star-Spangled Banner before casting a curse on the Bronx Bombers by warbling to the crowd: "Dose Yankees, dey not gonna win anymore.” Hopelessly derivative, this curse is widely regarded as the weakest of the modern era, as the Yankees won the World Series for the following three years. Pathetic.

“The Curse of the Dragon Queen, Charlie Chan and”

Not technically a curse, but a major motion picture starring Peter Ustinov and Angie Dickinson. Its capacity to determine the outcome of the World Series is debated by baseball scholars to this day.