posted 2007/10/08 at 21:04
I can't say that I'm too happy that the Tigers didn't make the playoffs this year, but I'm even more disappointed that the Yankees made it in, which has caused the usual amount of disturbing behaviour from the other members of this house. The highlight came last night when my sister discovered that some of the frozen meat patties she had bought were from one of the companies that recently recalled a lot of cow carcass because of e.coli contamination (and gee there have been a lot of those lately), so she decided to have them cooked up, crumbled up and tossed out on our front porch along with the other foodstuffs we put out there for the squirrels and birds and such. Now, this in and of itself is kind of worrisome but not that big a deal, except for the fact that when my sister decided to put the patties in the fridge to thaw, she put them on the top shelf. To be more precise, she put them on the top shelf directly below my part of the lower shelf of the fridge. For all that my sister loves all the television chefs I can't stand (Alton Brown and Paula Dean to name two) and plays their television shows loudly and quotes them at every opportunity, this was an egregious error to make in terms of food safety, and I'm still kind of steamed about it.
On the subject of baseball, I wanted to say something about the tens of thousands of annoying, obnoxious insects at the game in Cleveland on Friday, but then I thought that if I was going to write about the game, I should write about the bugs that swarmed the field. Oh, I kill me. (See, this is why as much as I love Dennis Kucinich, I could never work for him, because I still have that anti-Cleveland thing going in my head from decades of being a Detroit sports fan. Well, that and the whole Democratic party thing.)
Anyway, it's hard to care much about baseball when I've got hockey again, with a Red Wings game on my television as I type this now. I had to laugh when I saw a recent news article talking about the problems the Red Wings have had filling Joe Louis Arena that mentioned things like Michigan's poor economy and the resurgence of the Tigers as reasons for the attendance downturn. Not that those reasons don't have some validity, but nowhere in the whole article was there any mention of the Wings letting Darren McCarty go and the Red Wings being at the bottom of the league in fighting majors in every year since. (I didn't know until a few days ago that Anaheim actually led the league in fighting majors last year, which is certainly cause for rumination.) Seriously, unless NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman starts embracing fighting soon, the whole league is going to be in even deeper jeopardy than it's already in. It's not like hockey's ever been that popular outside of the "hockey belt" here in the States, and now even in traditionally hockey-loving states, we're just getting sick of the NHL and Bettman's rule.
If there is one plus side to the Red Wings' attendance downturn (the Joe wasn't even close to being sold out for their home opener), it's that I think it's finally time for me to go catch a game there. I may have missed seeing a game at Tiger Stadium before it shuttered, and I'm not old enough that catching a Wings game at the Olympia was ever an option for me, but it's about time for me to go catch the Wings in action while there are still plenty of good seats. My only real problem is that there's no way I'm going up there by myself, and with the family all Yankees-dazed I'll have to find a friend locally to go up to Detroit with me. Given how few friends I have in town these days this could be a bit of a problem, but I think I may know a couple of people who'd be willing to keep me company, at least if I bought their ticket and Little Caesars for them.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon