That the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins will meet in the Stanley Cup Finals tonight is very fitting. I recently watched the run of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" on Netflix (great acting, surprisingly bad writing) and it was Bradley Whitford's Danny that didn't want to film a movie in Vancouver. "We’re not shooting in Vancouver. I’m drawing the line on the insanity. Vancouver doesn’t look like anything. It doesn’t even look like Vancouver. It looks like Boston, California." That was maybe the one laugh-out-loud line for this former New Englander. It's nice to think that Boston has a West Coast Canadian Dopplegänger. The Vancouver Canucks have not won the Stanley Cup in all of their 40 years of existence. Which include some of the most awesome uniforms in the history of all sports. My Boston Bruins have not won in my lifetime. They last won a Stanley Cup eight months before I was born. In the early '70s, Boston was a hockey town and Bobby Orr was its overlord. But I come not to write about hockey, today. I come to write about National Anthems. READ MORE

Why is nobody excited for the Olympics? The Winter Games are less than three months away, but I haven't heard a single elevator wisecrack about curling yet. This worries me. I suspect that many Americans are still reeling from the spectacle of watching over 15,000 Chinese nationals bang drums in perfect sync during the 2008 Opening Ceremonies in Beijing. As threatening geo-military shows of force go, that was far more terrifying than anything Kim Jong-Il has ever done. Each of those drums will be an American head if you don't fix the dollar stat is what these stone-faced proletariats were saying to me that night. Also: we will see your beauty industry and its devastating effects on the female psyche and raise you an innocent seven-year-old girl with mangled teeth. READ MORE