Carolina beat Montreal tonight, and earned the win in decisive fashion. Montreal seemed deflated after the game four loss when they had been leading 3-0. They weren’t skating tonight, and they weren’t playing the way they had recently. For the most part, that series was very entertaining hockey, clean hockey, fast hockey. I wish the Hurricanes the best of luck against either Ottawa or Toronto. I’m hoping that Ottawa wins, because the two styles should match up well for another good series.

As to the comment that Montreal has relied on Theodore too much - perhaps that’s true, but I don’t honestly believe that is the case. Montreal played a team game all year, and yes, Theodore was an important part of that team. Montreal played a gutsy game all year long, and they didn’t always come out on top. I look for a couple of moves in the offseason, likely to pick up some size on defense, but beyond that, there are a lot of good pieces in place in Montreal. Montreal joins 23 other teams on the golf course, and two more will join them in the next 24 hours.

At the beginning of the season, not many people gave them a chance to even make it to the playoffs, let alone knock off the top seed. I don’t think they’ll be viewed the same way next year.

Here’s to next year.

Well, the Habs managed to lose another one, so now they’re facing elimination tonight at home.  I think they’ll come out flying tonight, and I fully expect them to pull out the victory.  Should lead to an interesting game 7 in Carolina.  My other predictions?  San Jose will surprise Colorado tonight.  That will make for an interesting Eastern final.  Ottawa will win game 7 in Toronto, and despite what the media will have you believe, it will not be the ref’s fault.  I’m not going to get into the whole Darcy Tucker thing, because I don’t think it needs getting into.  It happened, the Sens scored, and that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned.  Whining about it afterwards doesn’t accomplish anything.

Ultimate starts tomorrow night, with our first exhibition game of the year.  I’m looking forward to it, though I think the first couple of games will be a comedy of errors.

Simpsons quote of the day: “Mmmm… invisible cola.” - Homer

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see all of the game last night - I watched the first, and the first eight minutes of the second, and then went out to Ultimate practice. When I left, the Habs were winning 2-0, and had pretty much dominated the game - playing as well as I’ve seen them play this year in the playoffs. I thought I’d hit record, then pause, but apparently I’d only hit pause, so when I came home at about 8:45, the receiver was playing what had happened at 7:45 (hour long pause buffer…) Anyway, that meant that there was only about 2:30 left in the game, with Montreal winning 3-2. I don’t think the puck left the Habs’ end after that, until the overtime, during which they played well, but got beat. That’s the the thing about sudden death - it only takes one shot to win or lose, no matter how you’re playing.

So, I’m kind of upset with myself, since I didn’t get to see a good piece of the game, and can’t judge for myself what happened. Oh well, at least Ultimate practice was fun. I learned how to throw the disc backhand, and we practiced it so much that I almost forgot how to throw it forehand. We played a quick scrimmage, just to see how the game is played, and from my inexperienced perspective it looked like we were playing “herd-ball” - we didn’t really follow any kind of strategy, and it wasn’t good. I suspect that we’ll get our butts handed to us a couple of times, then we’ll smarten up.

We got to play in a good stiff breeze, which made for some difficult throwing conditions. Overall I don’t think I’m going to be very good at Ultimate, but I’ll have fun trying anyway. It’ll definately get me back into some semblance of shape at any rate. That’s a lot of running around.

It’s pretty quiet around here today - a couple of people on holidays, a couple of people sick, and suddenly half the floor is gone. It doesn’t help that half the floor is actually currently empty - the rest of the IS department is being moved in over the next two weeks.

Simpsons quote of the day: “Oh, I don?t have the discipline to be a hippie” - Homer

I’ve been watching my share of hockey lately, though I’ve managed to mostly keep it to the Habs games, so as not to anger Erin too much but last night I actually caught only about five minutes of the game. I’m not going to mention which team <*cough*><*cough*> but one team has consistently performed what I consider to be a heinous act.

I have no problem with the occasional hack, or slightly dirty hit, or hooking or holding, or tripping or whathaveyou. A lot of that stuff is part of the game. I’ve enjoyed the Montreal games mainly because they’ve not had a lot of that kind of crap. But as I’ve just said, I can understand that stuff, because it’s a kind of “heat of the battle” thing. The one infraction that bothers me to no end is intentionally pushing the net off it’s moorings when your team is in trouble. I’ve seen goalies do it <*cough*> <*cough*> and I’ve seen players do it, and it really bothers me. There is a rule against it (51c), but for whatever reason, the refs never call it. If they make that call in the last two minutes of a game, it’s an automatic penalty shot, so the refs don’t call it, because they don’t want to be seen to be “deciding the game.”

That’s bull-puckey boy. The player who pushed the net off intentionally is the one who took the chance to “decide the game” by breaking the rule. It’s like a game of chicken, and the refs always lose. Don’t get me wrong - the play last night should have been stopped well before the puck even crossed centre ice, but given that it didn’t, I find the whole “pushing the net off before we get scored on” thing to be a big joke. I think it should be a suspendable offense. There’s no “heat of the battle” involved in that play. There’s no time during the game that pushing the net off is a valid play. Nothing even remotely close to pushing the net off intentionally is a valid play. It’s indefensible, and I will never cheer for a player who I’ve seen do it. In fact, I’ll actively cheer against them. (You heard me, if Jose Theodore was seen intentionally pushing the net off, I’d want him to be traded. I’m not worried about that though, because he’s a classy individual, and he doesn’t neet to cheat like that.)

Simpsons quote of the day: “Why must you turn my office into a house of lies?” - Crazy Dentist

So, one of my co-workers got beaten up last night while walking home from a poker game. I’m assuming that he didn’t have any money on him, since he usually loses at poker, which means that it was a senseless act of violence. I don’t have a lot of details, but apparently he got jumped by a group of four kids, who laid the boots to him.

I’ve got to say that I’m shocked and disappointed that this kind of thing goes on. The victim is a really nice guy, who’d never intentionally hurt anyone, though all kinds of strange things keep happening to him. I could probably write a couple of weeks worth of posts just telling stories, and I’ve only been working with him for two years now.

Hopefully he’ll recover soon, and be back into the swing of things. I don’t know how badly he’s hurt, or if he went into the hospital or anything like that, just that he’s not going to be in to work for a couple of days.

Really makes me sick

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Listen, you little puke. One of these days, I’m going to catch you, and I’m going to carve my name on your back with an ice pick.” - Moe

So Erin and I went to see Spiderman last night. As Arcanas pointed out in a comment to last night’s post, Spiderman was actually shown on 7500 screens, which effectively cuts my calculations in half - an entirely believable number, since there was easily 200 people at the early show (7:00) last night.

You want my review? (No worries, I won’t put any spoilers here) It was a good movie. Unlike most movies that I’ve paid full price for, I didn’t feel ripped off leaving the theatre. In fact I want to see it again (though not at full pop - Maybe at Rainbow, or I can wait until it comes out on DVD)

I can believe that it set those records, mainly because of all the hype (they spent something like $50 million on promoting it…)

As to Episode 2 - yes I think it can beat the weekend numbers, due to the simple fact that it’s got an extra day to do it, since it opens on next Thursday. I don’t think they’ll break any of the single day records though. The thing to remember about Episode 1 was that it didn’t open on nearly as many screens as Spiderman, and I suspect that Episode 2 will.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Hey Flanders, who put that bug up your butt?” - Homer

Spiderman opened with a $114 million weekend gross. It opened on Friday, so that’s three days. I’m going to make some assumptions, feel free to correct them yourself, or point out that I’m an idiot.

So, let’s say that there are five shows a day on average, which makes for fifteen shows per screen over the course of the weekend. Note that this is a generous estimate, since theatres around here are having four showings per day…There were/are 3615 screens showing Spiderman this past weekend, which means there were 54255 showings (assuming the five shows/day average) over the weekend. This works out to $2102 per show. NATO tells us that the average ticket price is $5.65, so this works out to an average of 372 people per showing. I’ve been pretty generous with my estimates here….Feel free to tell me that my assumptions are way off base, but I don’t think that 372 is reasonable to expect for the AVERAGE theatre…

Mind you, when they’re still packing that many people in on Monday night, maybe it’s possible…