Another reason to avoid TV Tropes’ Wild Mass Guessing section: it tainted my reaction (and possibly the speed with which I posted this) by keeping me focused on what ended up being one of the LESS important revelations.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized liberated jokes.)

As it turns out, Act 6 marked the introduction of two sessions with import on the final outcome of the war, and the other one isn’t the one that has come to be called “A1”, the pre-Scratch troll session, though we have become quite acquainted with it. Rather, it’s the supposedly two-player session involving the two personages who have made contact with the kids.

The first sign of this, of course, was the cryptic panel during Dirk’s description of the rise of the Condesce depicting what appeared to be Lord English with his legs in shackles with the Ophiuchus and Serpentarius symbols on them. Recently, however, we’ve also seen actual events within their session (and their home) depicted, even though we didn’t even know their names. We’ve also learned a lot more about the relationship between them, the sort of world they live in, and the backdrop for their session.

As it turns out, the two of them are not trolls at all, but an entirely new race called cherubs. Considering some of the things Calliope has said in the past that backed up the notion of her being a troll, combined with her explanation for presenting that impression, it’s worth wondering how many of those things are still trustworthy. If they can, then cherubs have unique blood colors like trolls, with Calliope being a “lime blood” and her brother having human- and Karkat- like red blood.

What we know for certain is that, if you thought the trolls were isolated, they have nothing on cherubs, who apparently live their entire lives completely isolated from anyone else, to the point that the only other person who knows what Calliope looks like is her brother. This isolation also explains why her brother got so turned on by two humans merely touching one another when Dirk drew it for him. Although cherubs apparently do have a form of romance, they have no equivalent to human romantic love and only ever meet another cherub to mate, in a “highly confrontational and violent” fashion; my impression is that it’s probably what it would be like if humans only had “spade” relationships instead of “heart” relationships. (In addition to the clues from her brother, Calliope once told Dirk that “my species has a completely different Understanding of romance than yoU do. it woUld probably offend yoU deeply. it might even sicken yoU!”) Calliope also once told Jake, though she was still keeping up appearances of being a troll at the time, that she “never knew those who one woUld identify as my parental eqUivalents”, explaining that “oUr ancestors precede Us by millenia.”

Oh, and she also happens to bear a striking resemblance to Lord English.

Apparently they live inside a building on a meteor that’s stuck in some planet with a bunch of Statues of Liberty very near a red giant on the verge of death, which is probably what they need the game to escape from. It’s been implied they may be the only two on the entire planet, and that they have no idea who previously inhabited it (cherubs don’t even have a “home planet”), but it’s likely to be a planet long past going through the Reckoning.

According to Calliope, the two of them have been “forced” to play a game (separate from Sburb) “for as long as we’ve known each other”, a game so all-encompassing it has affected what she’s been able to say to the kids. The rules, according to her, “are complicated, and often shifting. and they don’t always make sense! at least, they woUldn’t to yoU.” Her brother takes the game so seriously he refuses to drop it even for the sake of the new game they’re taking up, to the point he hires Jack Noir to kill Calliope’s dreamself. (And somehow, the “porn” he made Dirk draw has something to do with it.)

The two are basically confined to a single room, with each being confined to a single side within that room. Each wears a shackle bearing the other’s symbol (reminiscent of that cryptic image from earlier), which only the other can remove, and each shackle is connected to some sort of block thing in each side of the room. When one of them goes to bed, they slip on the shackle removed earlier, enter a “sarswapagus”, and come out as the other. (They apparently also switch when someone utters the name of the dormant sibling, but they have agreed not to give their names away to anyone else, presumably so the woken sibling doesn’t free him- or herself of both shackles.) Much of the “game” and its “rules”, therefore, presumably consists of the agreements they’ve made to keep one party or the other from taking too much control of the aggregate. (My hunch is, most of the rest have been imposed by the brother, who certainly sees killing Calliope as his desired win condition.) There are other weird things about them, such as the “juju modus”, with which anything one of them captchalogues can only be accessed by the other.

I’m morbidly curious to know more about the nature of cherubim and how this “game” got started, and whether it’s more accurate to consider them one person with split-personality disorder or two people who happen to share a body. (Calliope once cryptically claimed “we are genetically similar, bUt in many ways qUite different.”) I get the impression that cherubs are quite different from any other race and may in fact be a part of the game. Their session, a two-player session that Calliope has admitted will actually be more like one, was already rather weird; all the depictions have some sort of dark, gray tint to them, and Skaia is completely clouded over, utterly shrouded in storm clouds, a far cry from the bright, blue place we were first introduced to. But that weirdness would be increased exponentially if the player(s) was/were from a race that never should have had the ability to play to begin with – especially one with the potential for as much power as Calliope’s brother might turn out to end up having.

Calliope’s surface resemblance to Lord English (and her outfit’s resemblance to that of Doc Scratch, and her talking as though she was British – get it?) is not the only thing linking the demon to them. There have been some pretty strong implications that her brother is, in fact, a young Lord English. Some of the earliest, subtlest signs were his repeated vows to kill not only Calliope, but the (post-Scratch) kids as well. But the hints have been piling up once we entered Calliope’s home, from his vow to “paint everything – even my words” with her (green) blood, to the white gun in her strife specibus, to the “sarswapagus”‘ resemblance to the casket Lord English travelled in. Even Calliope’s interpretation of the page in Rose’s book with Dave and Karkat’s random scrawlings, as evidence of the presence of her brother in their session, could prove to be a case of being “right for the wrong reasons”. (He has helped Dirk and told him to destroy Lil Cal, but who knows what his motivations would be there; at least part of them may be his own fear of Cal.)

If Calliope’s brother is, in fact, a young Lord English, that implies he’s probably not one of the horrorterrors, which means it’s likely that he’s the one menacing them, especially when the plot of Complacency of the Learned is taken into account. On the other hand, we have likely gained more insight into his eventual defeat as well, namely from Calliope’s admonition to Roxy to say her name to him and, hopefully, wake her up; the cryptic panel from earlier suggests that the shackles might be used to control him as well. For the first time in Act 6, I actually feel like we’re approaching the climax we’ve been building to for more than three years.

Spoilers ahead if you haven’t been reading Gunnerkrigg Court. Especially chapter 31.

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(From Gunnerkrigg Court. Click for full-sized dream discussions.)

It figures that the first full chapter of Gunnerkrigg Court I read as it comes out is quite possibly the most confusing one imaginable to start with.

So… what the hell just happened? Apparently Antimony is out cold and Zimmy and Gamma come in to help her… and start ribbing Kat for some reason? And Zimmy enters Annie’s dream-world where she wanders about with her eyes closed, hanging out with some forest spirit and Kat, and has a white mask for some reason? And she dives even further into Annie’s psyche where the fire-thing inside her has a bunch of stuff sticking into it that apparently leads to her dad, who Zimmy punches in the face? But then Annie and this other guy who has a crush on Zimmy start playing with her, and Zimmy cracks Annie’s mask? And apparently Kat looks like some sort of horrendous monster to Zimmy? And Gamma grabs Kat’s headband before they leave, and now Kat thinks the whole thing was just a dream? Was it all a dream? And what does the title of the chapter have to do with any of this, and why did we start it with events from Zimmy‘s perspective?

It’s hard to figure out exactly what to take from the whole thing with all the nonsense going on around it, and I wouldn’t have decided to write a post about it if it weren’t for the implication that Antimony’s father had something to do with her condition. The implication is that Antimony’s optimism is unwarranted and her father actually has sinister plans for her specifically, but given the circumstances of how Zimmy finds this out, I suspect he’s trying to find a “cure” for what ailed her mother and what could end up killing Antimony as well… even if Annie herself ends up being collateral damage.

The chapter does make a little more sense read all at once, but then it’s not as though there wasn’t a plot when read when it came out.I’m hopeful that future chapters will be a bit more comprehensible, to justify my continued reading of the comic.

(And my fears of how slowly the plot advances have proven warranted. I read two months’ worth of comic in maybe ten minutes.)

Hopefully the last streak-filler-post.

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This is going to take some explanation.

If you’ve been reading Homestuck, you know that over the weekend Andrew Hussie dropped a bit of a bombshell on his audience.

Now, in retrospect, I should have done a post on it on Monday, but I felt that, even with as much as Hussie had already dropped, he was about to drop some more. Part of it was that I was looking for the answer to a question that I had no way of knowing was going to be answered that imminently. Towards the end of the day, I did have the vast majority of a Homestuck post written, but a lot of it was rushed, and by the end of the day there was another page that convinced me even more that the bombshell-dropping wasn’t over.

Instead, we’ve gotten the standard look-around-the-new-character’s-home, and right now any post would be an after-the-fact post, so in effect I’m rolling this up into the post I’d need to put out for whatever this is leading up to. Which I hope isn’t the end-of-act flash…

Summer plans

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I intend for this to be quite possibly the biggest summer in the history of Da Blog, so here’s what you can expect.

First, there will definitely be a Homestuck post at some point this week. Probably Tuesday or Wednesday. Recent events, shall we say, have seen to that.

Also by the end of this week, the webcomic reviews may start up again. I stress may, because it depends on a number of factors.

I have hinted at another political series, and I’ve tentatively scheduled the start of that for July 2, so in two weeks. There’s an off chance I’ll start it a week sooner, depending on how the writing goes later this week.

Before that series starts, I need to make a major cleanup of the forum, which has literally hundreds of spam accounts (and to my knowledge, only me as a legitimate one). I need to figure out how to make a registration page that weeds them out.

Once the series starts, it will dominate Da Blog other than webcomic reviews, so that will be the main proximate consequence of the summer.

The most important parts of the summer, though, are going to happen later, maybe not even really during the summer.

Stay tuned.

To think, a couple weeks ago I was going to write a post about my concern about the encroachment of robot racism into the comic.

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(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized special requests.)

Part of the reason why I started doing full-fledged webcomic reviews again this spring was to rope in more comics for me to follow and do semi-regular posts on, so I wouldn’t be doing OOTS and Homestuck (and nominally, Ctrl+Alt+Del and Darths and Droids as well) over and over. On that, Gunnerkrigg Court and Questionable Content (forever linked in my mind) fit the bill quite nicely, but the Court in particular has not only been advancing the plot as slowly as I knew it would, but has been particularly mind-screwy in the current chapter. As for QC, being a slice-of-life comic, big events happen less often and aren’t as big as with the others, so I haven’t really felt the need to write a post until recently.

Although the three interns Marten has been tasked to train were initially hinted at and speculated as being new full-fledged additions to the cast, it’s only been in the last few comics that they’ve started to be fleshed out as actual characters, especially in relation to each other, as opposed to mere vehicles for Marten’s torment, though Claire’s attitude was apparent before.

This is largely a result of a weird and somewhat abrupt shift in the relationship between Marten and the interns. Things started out completely uncomfortable between them, with Marten being thrust into a position of responsibility he completely wasn’t prepared for, feeling the interns being in judgment of him and his lack of qualifications. It’s a relationship of subordination, with Marten expected to be teaching the interns knowledge they need to know, and his inability to do so only furthering the gulf between them.

That changed when Marten went to get coffee. I was a little surprised Marten had them come with him at all, rather than wait while he got coffee himself, but it did have the effect of normalizing the relationship between them as Marten, possibly to stall, started asking them questions. I imagine Marten wanted to diffuse the tension between them by trying to have a more relaxed conversation and get to know them better. As such, I don’t have as much of a problem with the shift as I might have otherwise.

I honestly do wonder, though, whether Jeph is trying to turn the Smif College Library into a second social circle for random conversations to be held in the comic, beyond just Marten and Tai (Momo doesn’t count). The Secret Bakery may have been intended for the same purpose, but they’ve been awkward additions to the cast, there haven’t been that many of them (with one of them leaving), and the ones we have seen have been explicitly mirror images of the existing characters. These characters, by contrast, seem like they should mesh into the existing comic better and be more interesting as a whole. As such, they could be welcome additions to a comic I had a number of concerns about when I reviewed it last month.

Although, why is the fat black chick the one that’s received the least characterization thus far?!

@sportsguy33, the Sonics, and me

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I have a confession to make. When the Sonics were stolen from Seattle? I was kind of apathetic about it.

Part of the reason was that the Sonics were in a lengthy phase ranging from mediocrity to sucking. Part of it may have been that even then, I was developing into more of a national sports fan than a local one, or a fan of any particular team. Part of it was the aura of inevitability surrounding the notion of Oklahoma City getting an NBA team after the Hornets’ post-Katrina exile there, even though, of all the teams it could have been, why did it have to be the Sonics? Why couldn’t the Hornets have just stayed there?

Whatever it was, I couldn’t get myself too worked up about what was happening to the Sonics, even though like everyone else I could see it coming.

These days? These days I simply cannot refer to the Western Conference champions directly. The closest I come is to call them the “Sonics-in-exile”. It’s hard for me even to refer to the city they play in.

What changed? Bill Simmons. While Clay Bennett was still holding the city hostage, Simmons started repeatedly harping on the issue in his columns, pointing out what an asshole Bennett was being and how David Stern was falling asleep on the job. After the team moved, Simmons refused to refer to it by name, coming up with a wide variety of euphemisms to refer to it.

But the funny thing is, as time went on, even as Simmons’ outrage was affecting me, he seemed to be becoming less outraged. He regularly referred to the team as “Oklahoma City” with “Zombie Sonics” becoming the only euphemism used. He praised the team, Kevin Durant, the city. And in yesterday’s column, he basically announces he doesn’t hold a grudge against OKC, while noting at the end he still doesn’t like the situation in Seattle (complete with “Thunder” in the title!). I’ve been ginned full of outrage I never felt in the first place by someone who doesn’t feel as much of it himself anymore.

Honestly, even before that column I wasn’t sure how I felt. I wasn’t sure whether I should root against the Sonics-in-exile, because they stole our team, or for them, because… hey, if they win, it’s really the Sonics winning! The general consensus around here seems to be to root against them, and I do already have reason to root for the Heat, and I’m not sure I’m ready to live in a world where the Sonics-in-exile have a championship after leaving Seattle. But if they do, I hope Seattle throws them a faux “championship parade”, if only to give one last reminder to the rest of the country where they came from.

State of My Life and MorganWick.com

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As I type this, I have had an actual good night’s sleep exactly once since Sunday.

The worst part? I’m still not sure whether I did enough fast enough to pass my classes.

On the plus side, I’ve started the process of paying for hosting; I should have a year’s worth of hosting paid for by the end of the week, so I’m taking off the donation link that, predictably, no one clicked on anyway. That means both the domain and the hosting will be coming up for renewal in a year’s time, so I’m going to spend the summer working on something to provide a long-term underpinning for the site.

I think.

Oh! And I got my OOTS Kickstarter package while everything else was going on. Basically, I bypassed all the other stuff and just dug into the main book I got. I don’t know if that says anything about anything.

What is the NBC Sports Radio Network?

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On Monday, the NBC Sports Group announced that they would be forming the NBC Sports Radio Network with Dial Global Networks, broadcasters of the NFL and NCAA Tournament. Jumping into the fray already occupied by ESPN, Fox Sports Radio, and Yahoo Sports Radio, and becoming the third of the three major contenders in the sports TV wars to start a network they can hook up with their TV rights, eh? Well… not so fast.

The network will launch with regular sports updates and occasional commentaries from NBC Sports personalities, with actual shows starting later. So that will form the basis for an actual network, with a full-day schedule like the other three, right? Well… maybe? Probably? Given the emphasis on streaming and podcasts, you’ll forgive me for scratching my head at how many of the shows would actually be heard on terrestrial radio stations. And will Dial Global’s NFL and NCAA coverage be rebranded as NBC Sports Radio Network programming? At the least, I would expect the NFL theme music to change from the current CBS theme to the Sunday Night Football theme…

Regardless, it’s an intriguing development and a sign that NBC is trying to catch up in its deficiencies to ESPN and Fox for the coming wars, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re trying to help Dial Global pick up baseball rights. With Dial Global’s reach, I would expect them to immediately leapfrog Yahoo for third place among national radio networks, especially if they can pick up distribution for NBC Sports personality Dan Patrick’s radio show from Fox – which could also be a big boon to NBC Sports Network. But considering how few stations Yahoo has, it will be very difficult getting stations to switch from any of the existing three networks, especially given most stations’ tendency to replace national with local programming whenever they can. Perhaps a streaming- and podcast-heavy strategy is the best one.

The race in sports talk radio – and perhaps even more, the radio play-by-play rights wars – just heated up considerably.

The State of Boxing

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WWF Superstars, 6/2/12

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Mean Gene Okerlund, “I’m standing backstage with World Wrestling Federation heavyweight champion Manny Pacquiao, and his manager Bob Arum. Manny, next week you’ll be defending your World Wrestling Federation championship against Timothy Bradley on Saturday Night’s Main Event on NBC, in a match where if you lose, you get an automatic rematch at the Survivor Series pay-per-view Thanksgiving week – ”

“I’m not going to lose, Gene,” Pacquiao interrupts. “I’ve beaten everyone they’ve thrown in front of me for years, and I’m not going to go down now.”

“Well, Mr. Pacquiao,” Okerlund continues, “you’re going up against a former Intercontinental Champion that hasn’t lost a match in the World Wrestling Federation. Are you concerned about the challenge he poses compared to what you’ve faced in the past?”

“I’m not worried,” Pacquiao replies. “He’s never faced anyone as tough as me.”

“Everyone wants you to fight Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, Manny,” says Okerlund. “What do you think are the odds of that happening once he returns from his suspension?”

“If it happens, it happens,” says Pacquiao. “Right now all I can worry about is my match against Tim Bradley at Saturday Night’s Main Event.”

“One last question, Mr. Pacquiao,” says Okerlund. “It’s been reported that your contract with Bob Arum ends at the end of this year, are you going to – ”

“I’m just worried about my match with Tim Bradley, Gene,” says Pacquiao as he walks off.

Later that night, Okerlund conducts another interview with the challenger Timothy Bradley, but only gets one response out of him before Bradley walks off:

“Don’t believe the hype,” Bradley says. “I know how good Pacquiao is. But trust me, there will be a rematch at Survivor Series. I guarantee it.”

Saturday Night’s Main Event, 6/9/12

Pacquiao comes out like a man possessed, whipping Bradley from pillar to post. Bradley can barely get any offense in against the champion, and at one point Okerlund begs the official to stop the fight. But the fight continues, and Bradley starts to come back, getting more and more offense in, eventually getting Pacquiao in his Desert Storm submission move. Pacquiao begins struggling to break the hold… and then the bell rings.

“Did he tap?” asks Okerlund. “I don’t think he tapped!”

Pacquiao looks incensed as Bradley quickly grabs the belt from Arum and runs off with the official raising his hand in victory, boos raining down from the rafters and garbage being thrown into the arena. Pacquiao looks around for Arum, who takes off like a rocket through the crowd. Pacquiao spits in his general direction, then storms off in a huff as Okerlund expresses his astonishment at the spectacle we have just witnessed.

WWF Superstars, 6/16/12

Okerlund informs the audience that WWF Commissioner Jack Tunney will not investigate what happened in the Pacquiao-Bradley fight at Saturday Night’s Main Event, news that does not sit well with the audience in the arena or with Rowdy Roddy Piper, who expresses his displeasure at the outcome in rather colorful language before introducing Pacquiao as the guest of his Piper’s Pit segment. Before he can get a question out, however, Pacquiao grabs the mic from him.

“I don’t want questions, I want answers,” says Pacquiao. “I want Bob Arum to come out here right now. I want him to answer for what he did to me last night.”

“Manny,” says Arum, “I’m as upset about this as you are. What happened to you last night was an outrage, and I have an official complaint in to the WWF Board of Directors. In fact, I’m not going to allow there to be a rematch at Survivor Series until there’s been a full and thorough investigation, I assure you of that.”

Pacquiao ponders these words for a few seconds, then steps up and embraces Arum… before giving him Pac-Man Fever and dropping him through a table, then ripping his shirt off as the fans go wild.

“April 7th,” yells Pacquiao into the microphone. “Me and Floyd Mayweather are gonna have the Fight of the Century at WrestleMania and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it!”

The crowd goes nuts and Pacquiao soaks in their adulation as his theme music plays.

Okay, maybe that’s not what happened, but doesn’t it say a lot that it’s close to what people THINK happened?

The NHL’s Dirty Little Not-so-secret

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I hear hockey fans say that hockey is one of North America’s four major sports.

I hear hockey fans say it’s an outrage that hockey doesn’t get coverage on SportsCenter befitting a major sport.

I hear hockey fans say that, however lukewarm the United States is to hockey, it is so huge in Canada that it makes up for it.

I hear hockey fans say, above all else, they hate Gary Bettman for expanding the NHL into southern states in areas outside hockey hotbeds.

To those people I say: Take a look at page 14 of this.

This is an effort by Canada’s TVB to rank Canada’s media markets alongside America’s media markets using Canada’s measure of number of persons over the age of 2 (Nielsen ranks American markets based on number of households).

By most standards, based on this list, there are a grand total of three Canadian markets worthy of a place in an American sports league. For the record, the NHL has seven Canadian teams. The three markets are, not surprisingly, the only three any other American sports league has even tried to put a team in: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Toronto is in the next tier below the American Big Three of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Montreal is knocking on the door of the top ten at about Detroit’s size. Vancouver is a mid- to low-size market, about the size of Denver or Cleveland.

The rest? Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa are on the low side of borderline of where most American sports leagues would be willing to put a team in. Their peer markets are the likes of Buffalo, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City. And Winnipeg? Why, Winnipeg makes freaking Green Bay look like a bustling big city.

Don’t try to tell me that Canada is enough to make hockey a major sport. Canada has an eighth the population of the United States. Canada is peanuts compared to the large swathes of the United States where hockey may as well not exist. Los Angeles has barely even noticed the Kings’ run to the Stanley Cup. Most of the teams in the South haven’t been getting fans or respect from hockey’s old guard. The team in Atlanta – a top ten market by Nielsen’s measure – couldn’t get out of Dodge fast enough, making tracks to Winnipeg. Winnipeg! You leave behind a market with 5.8 million people to move to a market with a sixth that total. And what’s worse? The main objection I’d have to it if I was one of those myopic hockey fans was that it wasn’t to Quebec, if only to leave open the possibility of the Phoenix Coyotes returning home. (By the way? Phoenix is knocking on the door of the top ten as well. Had they moved to Quebec, they would have left a market of nearly four and a half million people to one a quarter of the size at barely over a million.)

Here are the sums of the populations of the markets occupied by the so-called four “major” professional sports. To be fair, I gave all non-NHL leagues credit for only two-thirds of New York’s population, all non-MLB leagues credit for only half of Chicago’s population, and basketball and hockey credit for only half of the Bay Area’s population, to reflect the number of teams each league has in each market. To keep things simple, I didn’t count any outlying markets whose proximity to existing markets keeps them from having a team of their own, except that the Packers were counted as a Milwaukee team.

MLB: 144,679,333

NBA: 137,180,333

NHL: 133,652,000

NFL: 129,237,833

Now consider that the NFL’s numbers are depressed by not having a team in Los Angeles. Give the NFL the same one-half credit for the Bay Area as basketball and hockey, then give them one-half credit for LA (the effect of moving the Oakland Raiders), and the NFL’s total shoots up to 134,261,833. Now consider that the New York market is so massive that the one-third bonus the NHL gets for having a third team is topped by only a handful of entire markets. Give the NHL the same one-third penalty as the others, and the NHL drops down to 127,052,333 – less than what the NFL started with.

The NBA, NFL, and NHL all have propensities for having teams in odd markets, though in the NFL’s case it’s almost accidental. MLB’s smallest market (Cincinnati) is bigger than four NBA markets (San Antonio, Memphis, New Orleans, and that team that just won the Western Conference), three NFL markets (Buffalo, Jacksonville, and New Orleans, not counting Green Bay), and five NHL markets (Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Buffalo); of those, San Antonio is the only one within ten spots of Cincinnati. So the NHL has more teams in tinier markets; it has two teams (Ottawa and Winnipeg) in markets smaller than the smallest non-Green Bay market in the other three sports (New Orleans).

Now look at what the NHL is missing compared to the others. The only thing the NFL is really missing is LA and maybe Toronto, the latter of which is perfectly understandable, and they’re constantly trying to fix the former. The NBA doesn’t have a team in Seattle, Pittsburgh, or St. Louis. The NHL? They don’t have teams in Atlanta, Houston, Seattle, arguably Cleveland… not even Milwaukee, which would seem to be a great hockey market! The NHL is the only league in America that doesn’t have teams in three of the top 15 markets in the US and doesn’t see any of them as a problem – and it’s the only league in the history of history whose fans want that number to be higher! Do you realize why this might sound like lunacy to someone not in your little club?

Maybe the NHL’s fans like things this way. Maybe they’d rather despise the southern teams’ existence than root for them to have success and growing fanbases. Maybe they like having passionate fanbases in some places where it actually snows and empty (or nonexistent) arenas everywhere else. Maybe they like their preferred solution to having more of the former being just not caring how many people are there to make it up. Maybe they’d prefer to just keep things in their own exclusive club and keep out anyone who just doesn’t “get it”. Maybe they don’t care about the already far-from-their-supposed-peers Stanley Cup Final ratings dropping like a stone. If they want to do that, that’s fine with me. Just don’t try to tell me you’re a major sport worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as baseball and basketball, and certainly don’t try to tell me you deserve national coverage on par with those other two.