My Bubly Flavour Journey - Peach

Peach Bubly. The favourite flavour of that short Italian plumber, his taller brother, and the turtle guy they frequently fight against. The next flavour that I’m going to be writing about as I journey through all the possible flavours of Bubly I can try. I thought it was going to be ten flavours, but it might be more. Plus the American flavours I might be able to get when I go over there next. This could be a much longer journey than my original intention.

This is one of those flavours I haven’t been drinking for too long. The idea of peach flavoured stuff, outside of peaches and fuzzy peaches, doesn’t seem too appealing to me. Personal bias and all that, though I don’t know where the bias comes from. I picked up my first case a week or two ago and I was pleasantly surprised by it. It’s not one of what I would consider the classics. It wasn’t one of the original eight flavours. Looking it up, they seem to have recently migrated to Canada. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t really noticed peach before.

Let’s get into what the flavour is like. I pop open the can and I get a smell that’s stronger than almost any other flavour I’ve had. It might be the strongest smell. It absolutely smells like peach. The flavour, not the Super Mario Bros. character. It’s like there’s an immediate punch of the smell into your nose so that when you get to the sparkling water itself, you’re not overwhelmed. That’s right. Overwhelmed.

Peach Bubly also has a strong flavour to it. Something about the peach hits as soon as the water touches your tongue. There doesn’t seem to be so much flavour in the carbonation, even though it’s clearly there from the smell. It tastes like the flavour is in the water. It lingers more than the carbonation does, leaving behind a peachy aftertaste. Not full peach like you’re biting into it. More of that actual peach aftertaste when you were eating a peach two minutes ago. That sort of thing.

The peach taste doesn’t drop off as much as some of the other Bubly flavours. It stays in the can until the last drop. To be completely honest, I had a can that I left out half full for a couple hours last week. When I went back to it, the carbonation was almost completely gone, but the flavour was still present. I have to give peach some points for that.

The only thing keeping it from being within my favourite flavours (it’s on the outside looking in) is the peach itself. It’s a personal thing. Peach is a flavour I prefer in moderation. I like it, but I wouldn’t want to constantly eat or drink something with that flavour. That’s different for things like berries and apples (You can probably see where these ranking will skew), which I could regularly eat or drink. There’s just something about peach that doesn’t fit into that upper echelon of flavours. For me. It might for you.

Now it’s time for the fun part. Where would I rank peach Bubly on the Michal Bublé scale? Which song fits this flavour the most? Based on everything I’ve written, I’m going to have to go with Haven’t Met You Yet, one of his biggest hits. I like the song. It’s a delightful little ditty that I’ll always associate with the Hamm and Bublé sketch from Saturday Night Live. But if I had to hear the song for more than ten minutes at a time, I would get tired of it. Just like I get tired of peach. Then, after some time away from it, I will be able to go back and appreciate it again. That’s peach flavoured Bubly.

So far, my ranking is peach at the top, lime at the bottom.

Jerry Springer

The news dropped yesterday morning that prolific television personality Jerry Springer passed away. You might have known him for the television show named after him, but he was more than that. He was more than the trash television that everyone held him up as the standard of. His passing leaves behind a long legacy of television and film work, as well as a landscape of productions inspired by the work he did.

Most people know the Jerry Springer show. They know that he would bring on people who were normally looked down upon and used them to facilitate a bunch of drama based on cheating, lying, and throwing chairs. Fights would break out regularly. Security would frequently step in to pull people off one another. It was the mayhem of the lower class, funnelled through the container of Jerry Springer. Audiences ate it up.

Now, if one show was all that Jerry Springer did, people probably wouldn’t think of him as fondly as they do. Sure, it was a massive, long-lasting show. That’s true. But it was the way he approached the show that made Jerry Springer more than the bringer of trash television. He was the facilitator of the mayhem, but he didn’t egg it on. He came at it from a place of reason. He was the straight man to the lunacy that occurred on stage. There was no fighting for Jerry Springer, just fighting in front of him.

This idea was furthered by the movie Ringmaster, which was a fictionalized version of putting together an episode of Jerry Springer. It followed the people who would be on the show, with a little bit of following the Jerry Springer surrogate, played by Jerry Springer. In the end, Jerry mentioned that his show was about shining a light on the stories of people that society would rather brush aside than pay attention to. And, in a way, I kind of believed him. Sure, Jerry Springer was a tabloid show meant to entertain through shock value. But it also showed a side of American society that, at that time, was often ignored in entertainment. Jerry Springer was shining a light on those people, giving them their moment of stardom, even if that moment likely had a negative impact on them.

Later in the run of Jerry Springer, one of his security guards, Steve Wilkos, got his own television show. The Steve Wilkos Show is still running, which goes to show the lasting impact of Jerry Springer. Not only did Jerry Springer’s show go for nearly three decades with a successful string of direct-to-video releases of unrated cuts of episodes, but The Steve Wilkos Show spun off in 2007 and is still running. That’s a long-lasting franchise that hasn’t shown any signs of stopping, beyond Jerry Springer being cancelled and Jerry Springer dying.

The other way Jerry Springer left a lasting impact was in the material shown on the show. Infidelity was a major topic. Incest came into play. These kinds of stories ushered in a bunch of shock-value television and, kind of, paved the way for the reality show boom. Jerry Springer and Maury grew into these types of shows at the same time. They set the stage for things like the Attitude Era of WWE, South Park, or reality shows like The Real Housewives. I know that one is about wealthy people. The infighting on those shows took a lot from the fighting that happened on the Jerry Springer stage. Audiences are watching the same drama in a different package. The television landscape was partially shaped by what Jerry Springer did with his show.

He wasn’t just the host of a tabloid-style show, though. There was more to Jerry Springer than his show. He was a news broadcaster. He was a politician who was, for a year, the mayor of Cincinnati. He hosted other shows like America’s Got Talent and Judge Jerry. He was featured in The Masked Singer. Jerry Springer did a lot of things during his life. Every single one had an impact.

Jerry also wasn’t without his scandals. During his time as a politician, he was forced to resign from a position because he solicited a prostitute. Sex work is taboo now, but it was much tabooer (weird word) in the 1970s. He performed political stunts to make his stances on issues clear. At one point, he spent a night in jail just so he could understand the prisoners better. When he ran for governor of Ohio, Jerry’s political campaign poked fun at his own prostitution scandal. The guy left an impact in whatever work he did.

Now, I don’t have any major emotional connection to Jerry Springer in the sense of being a fan or not being a fan. All I know is that he was a part of my life my whole life. Whether it was seeing clips from his show during a day home from school, or watching America’s Got Talent when he hosted it, or seeing his mask taken off during The Masked Singer, he was there. He was a presence that I knew my whole life. He was a piece of my life. And now that piece is gone. I’m not sad that he won’t be making any more Jerry Springer or Judge Jerry. Those shows were done. I never really watched them, aside from the aforementioned clips while home from school.

However, his legacy will live on. The work that was inspired, partially, by his trailblazing tabloid show is infinite. People saw what he was doing. It helped them create their own ideas. Without Jerry Springer, the entire entertainment landscape would be different. Would someone else have eventually travelled down the same path? Yeah. It would have happened, regardless of Jerry Springer being there or not. But would anyone have done it the same way he did? Not at all. His life before the show informed how he tackled the show. And, see, that personal touch is what made Jerry Springer outlast many of the similar shows that came in the wake of his. He was someone special.

My Bubly Flavour Journey - Lime

I first got introduced to Bubly through the lime flavour. It wasn’t the first flavour I tried. That was a completely different flavour altogether. No. Lime was the first one I saw someone else drink. That person told me it wasn’t that good. They said that there wasn’t enough flavour in it to make it anything more than sparkling water. But, you see, that’s kind of what I was looking for. I wasn’t looking for a replacement for the flavour of pop. I was looking for a replacement for the carbonation that it gave me. Bubly might have been what I was looking for.

It was still a while before I got into it. That’s another story for another day, however. This day, I’m here to talk about lime. I’m here to talk about the flavour of Bubly that comes in the plain green can. When you think of Bubly and all the commercials featuring Michael Bublé, Lime is one of the cans that comes to mind. What better place to start with my journey through the flavours than with this classic. Let’s crack open a can and get drinking.

Obviously, this isn’t my first time drinking lime Bubly. In the now two or three years that I’ve been drinking Bubly, I’ve had lime many times. It’s not my favourite flavour. It’s not even in my top three. It might crack the top five, but I won’t know until I go through all the flavours in this journey. Or, at least, all the flavours available to me. Then I’ll know. Let’s just say that this isn’t a first impression.

The thing about the lime flavour is that it’s actually stronger than I was told by other people. If you chug your way through it, yeah, you’re not going to taste it that much. That’s the same for anything, really. If I were to take a milkshake and slurp gulp slurp gulp it without letting it sit for a moment, I’d be missing out on some of the flavour, too. The lime Bubly is very much a sit and let fill your mouth kind of flavour. It doesn’t hit immediately. The more it sits in your mouth, though, the more it tastes like you’re licking the peel of a lime. It ends up being spot on.

When I popped open the can, like any can of Bubly, the smell was there. I’d say at this early point in my Bubly writing journey that a lot of the Bubly flavour comes from the smell. The carbonation bubbles pop and release a lot of that flavour right up your nose as you take a sip. If you didn’t look at the can before opening it, it will always be apparent what flavour it is when you open it. You’ll be able to smell it immediately and the smell is spot on. Especially with the lime.

I only have one issue with the lime, which is how quickly the taste dissipates. It’s true that if you leave it in your mouth longer, kind of like a wine tasting, you’re going to get more flavour out of it. But when you’re drinking it, each mouthful has less and less taste. The first mouthful will have the most taste and everything after it will have a diminishing return. Maybe that’s why I was told there wasn’t enough flavour. It’s not a lasting flavour, in this case. In this single can.

On a level of Michael Bublé songs, I would put lime Bubly on par with Bublé’s cover of You’ve Got a Friend in Me from his 2013 album To Be Loved. You go into it with familiarity, and you enjoy it for what it is. Yet, by the end, you can’t help feeling like the novelty wore away and you just want to listen to the Randy Newman version that was in your head when it started. It’s completely passable, it just doesn’t live up to the excitement that the first taste gave you.

So far, my ranking of Bubly flavours is lime at the top, because only lime has been written about.

My Bubly Flavour Journey - Introduction

I used to drink a lot of pop. I mean a lot. I could go through a case in a day. It wasn’t good. Drinking that much soda, pop, cola… Whatever you want to call it… Isn’t good for you. I still drink some pop. I don’t think I’ll ever get away from it completely. I have cut back significantly, though. Instead of drinking a case every day or two, I’m down to maybe a can. More if there’s some sort of get together, or I’m at a restaurant. A lot of times, though, I don’t even drink pop in a day.

Most of the pop I drink at this point is paired with restaurant food because you need to buy a non-water drink for a special. Or it’s a crazy, just released flavour that I want to try out of curiosity. But I realized that most of the reason I used to drink pop wasn’t the taste. I could take or leave the tastes for the most part. It was the carbonation. I liked the feel of the bubbles in my mouth. That sounds a lot weirder than it’s meant to be. I liked the feel of carbonation. So I’ve transitioned out of pop, for the most part, into carbonated water. Specifically, I’ve turned to Bubly.

You might know Bubly. You may have seen it’s bright, solid colour packaging on the shelves at the local grocery store. You may have seen the commercials that feature Michael Bublé trying to convince people that the drink is named after him. Or you may have seen people drinking it. Whatever the case might be, you have likely seen Bubly in some form.

I’ve been drinking Bubly for years now. I’ve tried most of the flavours that I’ve seen. More recently, I’ve been wondering which flavours I’ve liked more than others. I’ve wondered which Bubly tastes I’ve thought were the best and which I’ve thought were the worst. Now I’m at the point where I want to write about them. I want to write about what I think of the flavours and maybe some of my history with them. Yes, I have history with a few of them. It’s not great history, but it’s there.

There are ten readily available flavours of Bubly in Canada, where I live. I’ve tried most of them. There’s lime, pineapple, grapefruit, blackberry, cherry, strawberry, orange, peach, watermelon, and the new raspberry. I’m want to go through the ten flavours to see what I think of them. I haven’t had cherry before, and I don’t remember if I’ve had orange. I’ve definitely had the rest. I’ve even had apple, which was a limited time release last summer.

As I go through the flavours, I’ll write about them. I may even find some other flavours to write about. Living in a border city makes it easier to find the American flavours. Who knows what could come of that? This might not be the journey you want to read. It’s the journey I’m going to write. I hope some people come along for the ride. I’ll be writing about them anyway. I’ll see you soon for the first flavour.

The Seattle Kraken Made the Playoffs!

A regular season of NHL hockey is 82 games where a team gets to play every other team between two and four times. There are 32 teams separated into two conferences of 16, which are then split into two divisions of 8. Every time a team wins a game, they get two points. If they make it to overtime (tie game after three twenty-minute periods gives a five-minute overtime period), they get one point, with the winner (if someone scores, or the winner in a shootout) getting a second. If they lose without going to overtime, they get nothing. At the end of the season, the three teams with the most points in each division make the playoffs. The next two teams in points in each conference then make the last four spots. In total, 16 teams make up the playoff bracket. The rest of the teams are out until the next season.

As I am writing this, it is the final day of the regular season. Two games are left. Then we are off to the playoffs on Monday. All the teams in the playoffs are known, though one of today’s games will determine which teams play each other in the playoffs. That’s another important thing about the points. They not only determine which teams make the playoffs. They also determine which teams face each other. It’s a convoluted process that I’m not going to get into. The playoff format isn’t what I’m here to discuss.

Most people who watch hockey, like any sport, have a team they root for. My team is the Seattle Kraken. I’m not from Seattle, so that might seem a little strange. I live in Canada and the closest Canadian team is the poorly grammaticized Toronto Maple Leafs. I fell off them when I went to university in 2009 and never really got reinvested in the team. Then there’s Buffalo, which is closer to me, but has an international border in between. I went to two of their games this season, one being when the Kraken were in town. The Buffalo Sabres might be my number two team right now. Number one is still the Seattle Kraken, and that likely won’t change.

Why am I a fan of the Seattle Kraken? Most people would think it was because they were a new team, and that’s partially it. But that’s not the whole story. You have to go back to 2009 to fully understand. I was a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. Local blackouts were a big reason for that. Unless it was the playoffs, or you were watching national broadcasts, anyone in my area was going to get Toronto games. It was what was accessible. Hockey Night in Canada, the national hockey broadcast on Saturday nights, prioritized Leafs games. The local media was all about the Leafs. It’s what I was inundated with if I wanted to watch hockey. This made me a Leafs fan out of not really being able to see anything else.

I went away to university in 2009. I wasn’t far away. It was maybe an hour and a half between home and school. Toronto Maple Leafs were still the local NHL team. I had a lot of schoolwork, though. For three years, I went to school to become an engineer. I eventually dropped out of the program, but the damage was done. I had stopped watching hockey to focus on schoolwork and just plain have a social life while I was there. By the time I was out of school, the Maple Leafs had overhauled their roster and I didn’t know who anyone was. I had no investment in the team.

It took a few years for me to get back into hockey. I always enjoyed it. If it was on, I would watch a game here or there. I would watch clips of some of the best moments. I didn’t fully dive back in until a few years ago, though. It was around the time when the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship and I thought, “I like hockey. Why don’t I get back into it the way most of Canada got into basketball for the Raptors’ run?” Since I hadn’t been invested in the NHL in a decade, and since streaming had become such a major part of entertainment, I decided I’d consider teams other than Toronto to follow.

As I was getting back into hockey, Seattle was gearing up to join the league. That wasn’t what got me interested in the Seattle Kraken. I wasn’t going to choose them just because they were a new team. I mean, it’s fitting. Re-introducing myself to the league while the team was being introduced. It was the announcement of their name that got me interested. I’m the kind of person who will do something to follow through on a bit. When I heard about The Cloverfield Paradox possibly being announced during a Super Bowl and dropping on Netflix when that same Super Bowl ended, I said I would eat a hat if it happened. It happened. I made a paper hat and ate it, with video proof. The Seattle thing kind of went like that. I was talking to a friend about the possible names. Seattle Sockeyes, Seattle Whales, Seattle Firebirds (which would later be their AHL affiliate’s name, Coachella Valley Firebirds), and Seattle Totems. The Sockeyes sounded the most likely, but I said that if they went with the Kraken, I would follow them. Kraken is a cool name. And they did. So I did.

I didn’t just dip my toes in the water when I got back into hockey. I went all in. If I was going to root for the Seattle Kraken, I was going to root for the Seattle Kraken. I eagerly awaited the expansion draft, where the management would select the players to join their team. I was excited for free agency to see who the team could pull in. There was also the entry draft where, among others, the Seattle Kraken would select Matty Beniers. Summer 2021 was a busy time for the Seattle Kraken and I was along for the ride.

That was around the same time I got back into collecting hockey cards. Upper Deck, Parkhurst, Allure, Authentic, Skybox Metal… Whatever hockey cards I could find, I started collecting again. I split up the collection into binders that held the base sets. The doubles, triples, etc. went into boxes. There were three other boxes separated out for different reasons. One of them became all the specialty cards from sets. One of the boxes filled up with rookie cards. And the third box became my Seattle Kraken collection. I put cards for every player who had been a part of the organization into that box. They could have been in two games. They could have been drafted and traded before even playing a game. If they were ever a Kraken player, even if only for half an hour, their cards went in that box. I have cards for Matty Beniers, Mark Giordano, and Vitek Vanecek in that box. One of them is still with the team. One of them was traded at the trade deadline of the first season. One of them was drafted in the expansion, then traded as soon as free agency started. They were all Kraken, though, and all got a place in the box. Cards from other teams, cards from Kraken. Doesn’t matter. If they were a Kraken player, I collect them.

Beyond that, I got back into watching hockey on a regular basis. For the first season, I was finding ways on the internet to watch Kraken games. They weren’t the best ways. They probably did more damage to my computer than I need. But I was able to watch the Seattle Kraken play on a regular basis. They didn’t play well. Like most expansion teams outside of Vegas, Seattle had a rough go their first season. Their record was the worst in the Pacific and third worst in the entire league. I want to attribute some of that to having players who didn’t want to be there. There were players, like Nathan Bastian, who went back to New Jersey part way through the season and mentioned how much he missed playing for the Devils. That was just the nature of the expansion draft. Any player that wasn’t protected by their team could be snatched up, whether or not the player wanted it.

If you paid any attention to the Kraken over that first season, you would have noticed they improved after the trade deadline. Many of the players on expiring contracts were shipped off. It was now mostly players who were on multi-year contracts, had signed with the team in free agency, or, in the case of Matty Beniers, were drafted into the league by Seattle. Most of these players seemed to want to be there. Most of the expiring players who remained re-signed with the team. Having players who wanted to be there was a big boost that gave the team a better energy. It was a better energy that continued into the second season.

The Kraken didn’t come out of the gate firing on all cylinders when the second season began. They had made a few changes to the roster. Haydn Fleury was out on the back end. Justin Shultz was in. Andre Burakovsky came in on the forward lines while Joonas Donskoi was placed on the long-term injury reserve. Chris Driedger was recovering from a torn ACL, so Martin Jones was brought in to help tend goal. There were changes and it took a few games for everything to click. But when it did, it really did. The Kraken were the best 5-on-5 team in the league. Their scoring went up. They played better defense, allowing some of the lowest shots against counts in the league. This was a vastly improved team, bolstered by players who wanted to be there. Players who finally found the chemistry they lacked in the first season. Seattle was well on their way to success.

I had already seen the improvement in their play during those final twenty or so games in the first season. When the players who wanted to be elsewhere were elsewhere, it brought the rest of the team together. They weren’t playing for anything but their own pride, and they were doing a decent job of that. They didn’t look nearly as bad as, say, this year’s Anaheim Ducks or Chicago Blackhawks. The second season saw that same sort of play, except the results started to show. The few extra pieces that were added in Shultz and Burakovsky, alongside trade acquisition Oliver Bjorkstrand mid-season waiver pickup Eeli Tolvanen, boosted the team enough that it made them tough competition for many of the teams they faced. Who got the first regulation win over the Boston Bruins at TD Garden this season? The Kraken. In a shutout. It was a huge turnaround for a team at the bottom of the standings last year.

Something I had been saying last year was that the Seattle Kraken were a better team than their record might show. They had most of the pieces they needed for success. It was simply a mixture of the few players who were already thinking about what was next for their career, a captain who didn’t seem to want to be there, a couple injuries to key players, chemistry needing to build, and some bad luck with opposing goalies. Most of those issues are gone, now. The players have bought into the current system of coaching. The chemistry is better. The goalies they play against aren’t having their best game of the season every time they face the Kraken. Everything has gelled that much better, which brings me to now.

The Seattle Kraken locked up a spot for the playoffs. When I started this post, it was the last day of the regular season. As I’m writing this portion, it’s the first day of the playoffs. The Kraken don’t play until tomorrow night, so I still have some time to finish writing. This is the first time in franchise history that the team will play in the playoffs. The journey to get to the playoffs included some record-breaking on the Kraken’s part. There was a road trip in January where they went undefeated, marking the longest undefeated road trip in NHL history. The Kraken also saw the biggest points improvement between a first and second season for an expansion franchise, breaking that record, too. They made it to 100 points in the regular season, and Jared McCann got to forty goals for the first time in Kraken history as well as his career.

As a fan of the Kraken, this was exactly what I wanted out of the season. I didn’t need them to contend for the Stanley Cup. They’re only a second season team. People keep comparing them to the Vegas Golden Knights, but that team was the exception to the expansion standard. Most expansion teams suck when they first join the league because they’re given the leftover players that teams didn’t save or want. But, based on the improvement they showed after the trade deadline in the first season, and based on the players they had from the start, it didn’t seem out of the realm for the Kraken to sneak into a wild card spot. For most of this second season, it looked like they might make it out of the wild card and into the divisional spots. They almost did at the end. But they landed right where I hoped they would at the beginning of the season. They landed where they probably deserved to land.

When I was a kid, I grew up watching the Toronto Maple Leafs. I watched them when they had playoff success. I remember Toronto beating both the Islanders and the Senators in 2002 to move onto the Eastern Conference finals. I remember bits and pieces of when I watched hockey back then. I know the feeling of watching a team I’m invested in play through the playoffs. I’m about to get more of the same. I watched the playoffs last season. There were teams I wanted to win and teams I didn’t. But this year will be more like those younger seasons for me, where the team I root for will be the one fighting for the Stanley Cup. The players I know. It will be more stressful, but in a good way.

I’m excited to see what will happen when the playoffs begin tomorrow. The Seattle Kraken will face off against the defending champions, the Colorado Avalanche. Having watched this season, I know the Kraken have a chance to pull off an upset. I don’t think they’ll do it. They will, for sure, put up a fight along the way. I can’t imagine they get swept. This will be a lot of fun. Let the playoffs begin!

I have to cut in here with just a little bit more because this post is going up late. A lot of life things came up this past week that I had to prioritize over getting this post out, as much as I wanted to. It is now Saturday as I’m writing this and as I release this post. It’s a night of game threes for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. In fact, it’s a night where the Seattle Kraken are playing their third playoff game, the first in their home arena. So far, the series has been split. The Kraken took the first game in an upset win. They were winning the second game until a mid-second period push by the Colorado Avalanche tied it up. The Kraken never really recovered and ended up losing the second game.

Very few people took the Seattle Kraken seriously. Whether it was the first season in which they stunk, or the second season where they turned things around. Only the Seattle fans believed in the team during the second season. Everyone else placed that first season’s team’s lack of success on the second season team. Time and time again, the Kraken proved them wrong. They started winning games when people expected the same team. They won all seven games in a seven-game road trip, breaking an NHL record. They took down Boston, the fastest team in NHL history to 100 points. For a few days, the Seattle Kraken had the best record in the Pacific Division. They even took the record for the biggest improvement in points between a first and second season for an expansion team. Yet people still didn’t give them the credit for it.

Going into the playoffs, many of the prognosticators thought that the Colorado Avalanche would run away with the first-round matchup against the Seattle Kraken. I thought otherwise. I thought Colorado would win, and I still think Colorado will win, but I knew the Seattle Kraken could put up a fight. In the regular season, Seattle put up a fight against Colorado every time they faced each other. Seattle won two of the regular season games by a goal, while the third went to the shootout. Yeah, Colorado might be the defending Stanley Cup champions, but sometimes a team can just play well against another team. The Kraken just play well against Colorado. So far, the playoffs seem to be showing just that.

Game three is tonight. It’s the first playoff game at Climate Pledge Arena. I’m excited to hear the crowd. They always sound so invested in the arena. It should be a good time. Maybe I’ll have more to write about the Seattle Kraken once the series is over. Whether they win or lose, I’m happy they made it this far. I’m proud of what the team had been able to do this season.

 

A Few Ideas I Have for Future Posts

Here I am, once again, writing nonsense that nobody will read. That’s fine by me. At this point, it’s more about getting the ideas out of my head than it is about having people read them. I’m going to keep writing whether people read it or not. That’s why I’m not so worried about a set schedule. If I give myself more time to write something I feel comfortable with, that’s better than rushing something out that I don’t like. It’s more of a personal quality thing. And a burnout thing.

Anyway, I thought I’d toss together a quick post about ideas that have been kicking around my head. I am in no way saying that all the ideas are good. They won’t all be ideas that the few people reading my blog would want to read. I may not even write all these ideas. This is simply a case of turning a post into a brainstorming session. Or, at the very least, listing the ideas so I don’t forget about them. There might be ideas that come along before I write some of these in full. I might even scrap some altogether. Who knows what will happen? I sure don’t. The release of posts and the topics I write about now are kind of fluid. So here goes.

Obviously, at some point, I’m going to get back into the Sunday “Bad” Movies posts I spent ten years working on. They won’t be nearly as frequent. They’ll come and go when I feel like writing about them. There could be a new sequel to something I’ve watched that I feel obliged to write about. Like, if they make another God’s Not Dead movie. I’m going to end up writing about that other God’s Not Dead movie. There are a few that I was partially through writing when I came to the full realization that I couldn’t pump out post after post after post, week after week after week. I’ll get those done. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation and The Princess Switch trilogy. Valentine and Ringmaster. I’ll get to those, and I’ll get to others.

On a similar note, I want to keep going with the Amityville movies. I had a series of posts in Sunday “Bad” Movies I wrote about the first fifteen or sixteen of them. Yeah, there were some terrible entries. I still want to see where that series goes. I’ll be doing that at some point. I also want to check out the Puppet Master franchise in full. I watched the first a couple years ago and was saving the rest for later Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. I’m actually writing that post right now, and I’ll put it up for Sunday “Bad” Movies when it’s done.

Transitioning out of that, I thought I could maybe do a post on the different franchises that Charles Band put out. I’ve seen The Gingerdead Man franchise and most of the Evil Bong franchise. As I just said, I want to check out the rest of the Puppet Master movies. There are also franchises like Killjoys, Trancers, Demonic Toys, and Decadent Evil to check out. Robot Jox and Re-Animator could be thrown in there, too. This one would be a bigger task to get through as there would be so many movies to watch and rewatch. Charles Band has been producing b-movies since before I was born.

Finishing off what people might consider the bad movie stuff, an area I’ve been entrenched in for a decade, I want to take some time to go over my favourite moments from movies people would consider bad. However, I would want to skip over the standard moments that most people know. I wouldn’t cover the “they’re eating her” moment from Troll 2, but I might discuss the popcorn death. “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa” wouldn’t be a feature, but maybe Mike’s facial expressions during the blowjob scene in The Room would be brought up. There would definitely be a mention of “I’m a clone, not a cuck” from Bigfoot vs. Megalodon. I have half an idea here, and would like to flesh it out to more.

The only other movie or television related idea I have right now is one I’m almost assuredly writing next week. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always will be released on Netflix and you bet your bottom I’ll be watching it. I’ll be writing about it. I’m not entirely sure what angle I’ll be coming from for it, but I will absolutely write some sort of post. I’m all about those Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Let’s move away from scripted entertainment with the next few ideas I have. I’ve already written one post about hockey. It had to do with the lack of personality in arenas, as shown on television broadcasts. There are very few things that make one arena stand out from another. I’m not done discussing hockey. My next hockey post will be about the Seattle Kraken making it into the playoffs in their second year, with maybe a sprinkle of how I became a Seattle Kraken fan when I live far away from Seattle. This one is more of a personal post than, say, any of the movie related ideas. It’ll have some stuff about me, a lot about the Kraken, and how I feel about them going into the playoffs. Juicy stuff there. Not really.

Along those lines, I want to write something about collecting hockey cards. This one is a very vague idea. I don’t have any direction for it. I’m a collector but I’m not super hardcore about it. I don’t know what I would really have to say about the topic unless I came to it from a personal side of things. I might have to do that. I don’t know, yet. This could end up being one of the scrapped ideas. Or it could be an idea that comes to fruition further down the line.

That idea is along the same lines as wanting to write about going on hikes. The only way I could possibly pull this one off is to simply write about my experiences. I haven’t gone to as many places as some people. I definitely don’t have the same knowledge as avid hikers and campers. I mostly just hike at a few of the trails around my region. But I still want to write about the experiences that I have had, as semi-casual as they have been. Take from that what you will.

I have two more ideas that I want to run by you and these ideas are kind of out of left field. The first one is that I just want to review all the different flavours of Bubly. I have no reason to want to do this outside of a strange desire to do so. I drink Bubly. I’ve been thinking about what my ranking of flavours would be. Maybe it could make a half decent post. Maybe it could be something to break up the monotony of movie posts. I keep going back to movies because it’s what I know most. It would be nice to have variety, much like the variety of flavours I could be tasting. Not that anyone would care what I think tastes the best out of the ten different Bubly flavours.

And, finally, a much more personal post than most. I’m someone who tends to fall out of touch with people if I’m not seeing them on a regular basis. I don’t really text or email too much and nobody really texts or emails me. It is what it is. But I’ve, within the past few years, reconnected with some of my university friends. I’m thinking that a post, or a few posts, about reconnecting with people might be something interesting. Perhaps. It could, at least, be good for me to write it out. For myself. Just a thought.

That’s what I have for now. These are a few ideas I’ve been mulling over. I have plans for most of these ideas. It’s just a matter of finding the right time to write them. Then edit them. Then release them. It’s a time commitment that I sometimes don’t have, though it always feels good to get to the end of a post. That’s one of the most satisfying feelings I know. Typing that last word, knowing you created something out of nothing. Clicking that button that says “Publish” on Blogger. Now that I’m releasing these whenever I feel ready, as opposed to forcing them out for a certain time, those things might feel even better. Only time will tell. Until then, we can look forward to most of the ideas I just laid out.

The NHL Has a Personality Problem and Here's One Reason Why

I’m going to get right to the point here. Hockey has a problem and it’s a personality problem. I don’t mean that in the sense of players, personnel, or teams. Some of them have big personalities. John Tortorella thrives on his personality being out there. Brad Marchand has an on-ice personality that comes through in every game. Many of the commentators have distinct personalities that make the broadcasts for various teams different. Where the league really lacks personality is in the arenas.

Think about some of the other sports out there. In a sport like Formula 1, you have a season filled with uniquely laid out tracks. Every time you see a Grand Prix, the cars traverse through different turns and terrain. It makes an event out of going to each location. The same could be said for golf. No two golf courses are the same. The distance from tee to hole will be different. The weather could be different. The curvature, elevation, and hazards within a hole will be different. It makes each Open feel unique. Now, these are sports where nobody really has a home advantage. At least, not a frequent one.

Let’s go to a sport where teams have a home field advantage on a regular basis: Major League Baseball. Each team plays half their games at their home park while they play the other half at their opponents’ parks. With the season being 162 games, that means that there should be 81 games at each park each season. As a viewer, you would probably want each park to feel a little different. You wouldn’t want to see 162 games that felt like they were happening in the same place. You would also want the 81 games at your favourite team’s park to feel different than the games in other parks because it would make your team feel that much more special. And, for many teams, that’s the case.

My mind first goes to Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox. There are a few features to that ballpark that give it a unique feel, the most notable being The Green Monster. I don’t even watch baseball beyond what I see in passing, and I know about The Green Monster. It’s a giant wall in left field that has been there since the original ballpark was constructed in 1912. They never got rid of it, even as the rest of the park was renovated. There have been modifications to it, mostly in protective material added to its exterior and the green paint that gave it its name, but it has been there as long as the ballpark itself. It gives the Boston homefield a unique feel.

The same could be said, to a lesser extent, about The Great American Ballpark. Now, this one isn’t quite as obvious as The Green Monster. This isn’t a feature in the park that makes it feel unique. The park is situated in Cincinnati and is the home of the Cincinnati Reds. Right outside the park is a highway, and right on the other side of the highway is the Ohio River. This puts The Great American Ballpark on the border of Ohio and Kentucky. This means that, theoretically, if someone were to hit the ball hard enough, they could hit it into another state. And that theory has come true, one time, when Adam Dunn hit a home run that left the park, crossed the highway, and bounced down the riverbank onto some driftwood. His ball was in Kentucky. If a chance, however slim, to see that happen again is a part of the park, that makes the park unique.

Many other ballparks also feature unique qualities. The Blue Jays play in the Rogers Centre, known for having the first retractable roof in a baseball stadium and for the hotel within the stadium. Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, has thinner and drier air, which affects the density of the baseballs, making them easier to hit farther. The Mets have a giant apple and the Astros have a train. The Cubs have ivy lining their walls. San Francisco is another interesting one. They have a bay right outside their stadium. People will get in their boats and sit in the bay hoping to catch a home run ball that flies out there.

Those aren’t even all the unique features in ballparks. That’s only a handful. But, as you can see, each one of those features gives each ballpark a personality. The Blue Jays games at Rogers Centre, formerly SkyDome, wouldn’t feel quite the same without the retractable roof and the chance sighting of someone having sex in their hotel room during a game. The Mets games wouldn’t have the same personality if the apple didn’t come up after a home run. These things are part of the teams’ personalities. The ballparks are extensions of the teams’ personalities.

The NHL doesn’t work like that. Yes, I’m finally bringing things around to the NHL, the place where I wanted to start this whole thing. NHL arenas don’t feel unique to outsiders watching on television. Sure, when you go to the arena, there might be differences in the food and the eateries, in the hallways, and in the memorial areas (each team has a different history of success). But when you watch a game on television, it doesn’t really matter what arena the game is in. Aside from the stanchions possibly being a different colour, the advertisements being different, or the number of seats being different by maybe a thousand, the arenas all feel the same.

Think about it. What’s the difference between the Ottawa Senators’ arena and the Florida Panthers’ arena? Not much. They’re relatively close in size. Things look the same, outside of some paint and logos. There’s not a whole lot that would make one arena feel different from another arena. With 82 games a season, 41 of them at your home arena, you should want your home arena to feel different.

In the past, the NHL had a few standout arenas. Madison Square Garden is still kicking around as the home of the New York Rangers. The current venue is the fourth to share the name. It opened in 1964 and I don’t see it changing as the Rangers’ home arena any time soon. Much of the personality that comes from Madison Square Garden is just the history of the place. It’s a central hub of New York entertainment and, as such, has managed to create a legendary status that few other arenas can compete with.

Another standout for unique arenas were The Hartford Whalers. They were a team from the WHA, a league that competed with the NHL in the 1960s, that was absorbed into the NHL during a merger. While in Hartford, they played at the Hartford Civic Center, which was attached to a mall. Many people dubbed their arena “The Mall” because it was essentially an extension of the mall. The shots of the exterior that played around commercial times showed that. Just the fact that the team played in a mall was enough to make things feel unique. You were going into a different world when watching a Hartford Whalers game. The mall and their Brass Bonanza theme would do that to you.

But here’s the main issue, most of the arenas that had personality, which came from history, have been replaced. Civic Arena, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins until 2010, had a retractable roof. That’s a rarity for hockey. Maple Leaf Gardens, Joe Louis Arena, and the Montreal Forum were some of the most storied arenas in hockey history and have all been replaced. None of the new arenas have the personality that the older ones had, and they all kind of feel samey when watching on television.

Only a handful of current arenas stand out. Climate Pledge Arena, home of the Seattle Kraken, stands out for two main reasons. For one, the rink itself is below ground level. Instead of going up from ground level to higher seats in the arena, you have to go down from ground level to get to the lower seats. There are also two score boards, one over each team’s end instead of one above center ice. Those two details help make Climate Pledge Arena look and feel a little different than most of the arenas around the NHL.

The other team that really stands out, and the one that pushed me into this feeling that the NHL needs more personality in its arenas, is Mullett Arena. This is, for now, the home arena of the Arizona Coyotes. It is also the home arena of the Arizona State Sun Devils. Mullett Arena is located on a university campus as part of Arizona State. The Arizona Coyotes are playing in a college arena. At face value, this might seem like a knock against the Arizona Coyotes. They couldn’t get their own arena and had to resort to a non-professional venue. The thing is, that may have worked in their favour. It may have given them the personality they needed beyond “Boy, this is one of the worst teams in the league.” The university arena has a much smaller capacity than an NHL arena. This means that the density of fans will be much greater, though the total number might not be. Having the fans packing a smaller venue raises the energy from the stands. Having fewer seats makes the game look more intimate. Everything about a game at Mullett Arena feels different than a game at any other arena. That’s what I think every team should strive for.

Okay, let me clarify. I don’t think every NHL team should strive to play in a college arena. Not at all. If every team did that, we would run into the same problem where twenty-five to thirty teams have arenas that feel more or less the same. I think every team should strive to make their arena stand out in some way. There should be something that makes that home arena feel different than every other home arena, outside of the team that plays there and their fans. I’m sure the energy in Nashville is great, but that’s the energy of fans who will make up a chant on the spot to insult another team. That’s not the arena, itself. Going from arena to arena is like going from house to house in a new subdivision. They all look and feel the same, aside from the people inside.

One other thing that should be noted is something that has come into effect in the past couple seasons of NHL broadcasts. I’m going to have to both sides this part in order to say that I understand why it happens, but also show why I believe it takes away one crucial piece of personality that most arenas have when you’re there in person. Over the past couple seasons, the advertisements on the boards have been replaced for television broadcasts with digital advertisements. The main reason, which is understandable, is to give more advertising space to local broadcast markets. Say an Edmonton fan is watching an Edmonton feed of an Edmonton game, but the Oilers were playing in Dallas. Those Dallas advertisements would be almost guaranteed irrelevant to the Edmonton fan. The digital replacement of the advertisements allow the Edmonton feed to superimpose advertisements relevant to Edmonton viewers onto the boards and the ice. Better bang for the advertisers’ buck.

My issue is that this erases any locally unique advertising from the arena. All the ads at all the arenas become the same ads, game in and game out. That same Edmonton fan, watching a five-game road trip that takes their team to five different arenas, will see the same advertisements every single time. The variety is gone at that point. I get that the NHL can earn more money doing things this way, but it takes something out of the personality. When I watch a game played in Toronto, I want to see Mr. Sub and Pizza Nova ads on the boards. Or things like that. I don’t know what other local or Canadian brands might be there. When I went to a Buffalo Sabres game, I was delighted to see the Zambonis decked out in ads for Cellino Plumbing. That’s the kind of local ad branding that makes a home arena feel like a home arena. The digital boards take away from that, thus leading to some extra lack of personality.

The NHL’s personality problem comes not through the broadcasts, the players, the fans, or the management. It comes from the home arenas that don’t quite feel like home. You can have all the family (team) photos and trophies you want, but it won’t truly feel like your home until there’s some random item or feature that makes it yours. Something where you can say “No other team has this. This is part of our identity.” And, I guess that’s just it. Without these home arena features, it feels like a team might not have an identity. That leaves the NHL feeling like there’s a lack of personality. It’s a problem that I hope gets fixed soon.