Music City Madness

The Nashville Predators. Why, oh why, did the NHL need to expand to Nashville? To go with the teams in Florida, Arizona, Texas and other unlikely places for a hockey game to break out, I suppose. The Preds are out of their expansion era and are now a number one team, and have been beating powerhouse teams all over the Eastern Conference. The bad news is, nobody cares. Nashville has one of the worst attendance records in the league and may find itself out of the league's full revenue sharing if they don't get more butts in chairs by the end of the season. Both TSN and CBC, and possibly some US channels that aren't available north of the 49th, have recently televised stories bemoaning the attendance, or lack thereof, in the Music City. So now, of course, the question is why.

I'll tell you why. It's Nashville. Not exactly what you'd call hockey country. The NHL's recent expansion strategy of "build it and they will come" doesn't seem to be paying off. Apparently proving that your city has 15 - 20 000 people who even understand hockey and could therefore sell out an average-size NHL rink isn't part of the expansion agreement. Nor is proving that people would rather see a hockey game then go to the local NCAA football contest.

Consider this, the 6 Canadian teams (20% of the league) account for 33% of the revenue. The reason is simple; grass roots support for hockey at all levels is great. Pretty much every small town has a team at some level, from peewee through junior up to the big cities with pro teams. It seems more likely that having your kid play peewee in many states means peewee football. And when those kids grow up, what sport will they most want to see?

Meanwhile, there are markets in Canada that simply cry out for teams that have been basically ignored by the NHL in its seemingly endless quest to grow our game south of the border and reap the benefits of an overall richer and more populous country. Want the Preds to sell out the building for every home game? Move the team to Winnipeg. Rather then focusing on larger markets where maybe one person in five is a hockey fan, try mid-sized cities where 9 people out of every ten grew up loving the game.

Camera Obscura

Specifically, the third(ish) album Let's Get Out of This Country by the band of the same name, not the centuries-old art technique from which the modern camera is derived. Camera Obscura is another reason to believe in pop again. After being hi-jacked by the big 5 (and little beast Jive) c. 1998 and subsequently driven into the ground c. 2004, good pop has once again emerged from the indie scene where it has long been influential.

Let's Get Out of This Country is not a long record, with 10 tracks, but there is really no wasted space, every song contributes to the 70's-drenched whole. Stand out tracks include the single Llyod, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken to the wide and lonely Country Mile.

Why Always the Fighting?

A little food for thought about February 2nd. And no, not about the fact that its groundhog day.

On February 2nd, 1943, 91 000 starving, beaten Axis soldiers (mostly German, but also Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops) surrendered to the Soviets at Stalingrad, ending months of brutal fighting in the key city on the river Volga. Of course the Soviets regarded it, rightly, as a decisive victory (the German Army was in retreat on the eastern front for essentially the rest of the war), but also as a demonstration of the superiority of communism over national socialism (or Nazism). I'd argue that neither idea worked out particularly well, but the best laid plans of mice and men. Propaganda aside (because no one in their right mind would commit hundreds of thousands of troops to battle just to prove a political point, right?) Stalingrad was a disaster for the simple reason that over a million people died violently there and the city was utterly destroyed. I have no conclusion for this, just some food for thought. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad.