puckishly

Since I follow sports primarily via The Onion's sports page (mostly by way of asking more sports-literate friends to explain the jokes to me), I was informed that apparently, there's still at least one professional hockey league (it's called the "NHL," which stands for "National Hockey League." That's kind of a funny name for an organization whose teams are almost evenly distributed between two nations, but I digress...). I was under the impression that there had been a strike, and I'd just assumed all the players had realized that actually, they weren't all that interested in chasing a little rubber thing around the ice with a stick and had gone home to drink beer and watch TV like the rest of us.

In fact, that's a rather parochially American view. Canadians, it seems, so depend on their hockey fix that its absence can affect the caliber of the nation's thought: the void left by the missing season of hockey so messed up the Canadian mindset that they went and elected a Bible-thumping conservative as their prime minister (Stephen Harper) in the first election after the missing hockey season.

I wish I could say there's a lesson here...but I can't. Maybe we should invade the next Republican convention with a phalanx of skating Canadians. (I'm sure many Republicans are offended at a sport which actually allows a guy out there on the ice with a jersey that says SATAN on the back, in front of the Canadian God - who's called "Brian" - and everyone.)