take my money, please

The 2007 Women's World Hockey Championships are in Winnipeg this April. Ever since I heard about last summer, I've been excited to go. Especially when we got our act together enough to realize that we'd actually be living here when the tournament was on, so we wouldn't have to work in a visit to Winnipeg in April. (Personally, I feel that Winnipeg is not at its most attractive in March and April -- the weather is too unpredictable, so driving can be a gamble, and you don't know if you're coming to winter or slush-season. Of course, Thunder Bay is the same, but I digress.)

So I've been looking to buy tickets. I'm not particularly interested in seeing a lot of games, but I definitely want to go to the gold-medal final to (knock on wood) cheer Canada on. Beyond that, I thought I might buy walk-up tickets to a game or two if I had a free evening. So I've been checking the Ticketmaster website and going to the arena box office on a regular basis since Christmas, only to be told that I could only by six-game packages and that individual games wouldn't go on sale until sometime in March -- and they wouldn't even tell me when in March.

Now, I understand full well that packages are attractive to the organizers, and I can see why. But let's face it, women's hockey is not that much of a draw, especially games that don't involve Team Canada. I mean, the Kazakhstan women's hockey program really can't be considered very strong, and the gap between the Canadian and American teams and the rest of the world is wide enough that one can make a legitimate case for eliminating women's hockey as an Olympic event on the grounds that it's really not much of a competition (I disagree with this argument, but that's another story). Frankly I'm not really interested in China vs Switzerland or Sweden vs Germany.

But less than a month before the tournament and I can't buy tickets for the one or two games that I want to see? Do the organizers really think that I'm going to say, "Well, I can't buy tickets for only one game yet, so I'll buy them for six"? Who has time to see six hockey games in ten days?

I have a hard time thinking any business model that is refusing to take my money is a good one.

we saw two good movies

We went on a bit of a dry spell with movies for a while, but we've seen two in the last couple of weeks that we liked. The first was Breach, which was about a spy named Robert Hanssen. He was an FBI agent who spied for the Soviets/Russians from 1979 until he was caught in 2001, and his betrayals were called "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history" by the Department of Justice. The movie is not about the spying, but rather about a young, inexperienced agent who was tapped to help catch the spy. It's a story about character development, both of the young agent and of Hanssen. It was fascinating, although not at all the spy-centred suspense story I had anticipated.

Last night we saw Unknown, a suspense movie about five men who wake up trapped in an industrial facility, with no memory of who they are nor why they are there. Are they friends? Enemies? It quickly becomes obvious that they are in the middle of a crime, but they don't know what is going on, nor who is committing it. It's a fun movie -- not a thinker like Breach, but engaging and original.

some music that i like

I have essentially changed over almost completely from listening to music on CDs to listening on my iPod. The main reason is that all my music can go on my iPod, plus audiobooks, podcasts and even movies. This is a fantastic thing on trips. I don't have to figure out which CDs I want to bring, find the cases, realize that the CD is missing, hunt for it, and then bring along the relatively bulky CD case, and then as likely as not realize I don't really want to listen to any of the CDs I brought. Plus as long as I don't mind watching a tiny little screen, I can also transfer movies onto my iPod. We finished watching season 5 of 24 on our flights to and from Mexico in January -- it made the five-hour flight, uh, fly by.

So far I've transferred about 1500 songs from CDs onto my computer. I've also bought a fair chunk of music online, plus some audiobooks. I also download podcasts on a daily basis. My iPod holds 80 GB worth of stuff (that's the same size hard drive as my computer) and it's about 20% full. That means I have something like 20 days' worth of continuous listening before any repeats.

The iPod, or any similar music player, is just a way easier way to take music with me than a tape or CD player.

Music I'm listening to these days: Wailin' Jennys, Beck, the Perpetrators, Jeremy Fisher, Joni Mitchell, Xavier Rudd, Crooked Still, Lovin' Spoonful, Men Without Hats, Mark Reeves, Neil Young and Leo Kottke. Hardly an exhaustive list, but I just made up an iMix and they were on it. You can see the complete list on the iTunes store (well, at least all the tracks that iTunes has) -- I'm calling the playlist Klassikal II. (The original Klassikal was a CD mix I burned several years ago that I still like a lot.)

we've had a request for more pictures

Mainly the problem has been that you can't do very much on Blogger with Safari. But I'm using Firefox now, so things are different.

This is an orangutan we saw on the beach when we were in Mexico. Don't ask me why there was an orangutan on the beach, but there he was.














This is a picture from the 2006 Grey Cup Parade last November. I've never seen so many bagpipers all in one place. This is not a real high quality photo because it was taken with my cellphone.









This was last August. We were hiking at Sleeping Giant. Griffin The Brave will happily wander into the water for a drink or to get a stick, but he has no interest in swimming. What he does in the water could better be described as panicked flailing than swimming anyway, so maybe it's just as well.