I worry that USA will have to deal with a couple things that could hurt them today. 1 – They kind of embarrassed the Canadians last Sunday. 2 – They only had to play really well for about ten minutes in their last game and the early goals they scored had a much higher luck/skill ratio than most hockey goals.

But what do I know about hockey? Answer: nothing.

Nevertheless, I’m gonna say 7-2 Canada. Let’s hope this prediction is as good as my Super Bowl one was.

update: 1-0 Canada after the first period. Once again, I don’t know anything about hockey really, but the US looked better in the first half of the first period than they did last Sunday. They just didn’t get the good breaks on their shots like they have in the last few games. We’ll see how this turns out.

update #2: 2-1 Canada after the second period. If I were Canada I might be a little nervous that the game is still close, considering the US didn’t play all that well in the first half of the second period.

update #3: Holy crap! The US scores a goal with less than a minute to go in the game and we’re going to overtime. I guess it was only a matter of time before Canada’s goalie ran out of luck, because (at least according to the guy on TV) he kind of sucks.

final update: Sonova! Stupid Canada.

The Democrats and the President keep doing things over which they flipped out when Bush and the Republicans did them. I guess they were just flipping out because they though Bush was doing these things the wrong way and that they could do them better.

Weird, though. I’m pretty sure they thought that these things were wrong on principle. I mean, did I just miss something? It’s almost like Democrat and Republican politicians are all unprincipled pieces of crap who will do whatever they feel like doing when they’re in power, no matter what their stated “principles” are. And people wonder why I’m registered Independent.

I’m horrified by this development, horrified. This kind of thing would never happen if I was in charge.

Sorry I haven’t posted all week. The US Curling teams’ horrible failures really bummed me out. I just came out of my room this morning after four days of being curled up in a dark corner sucking my thumb.

The US-Canada men’s hockey game on Sunday was great, and I don’t even particularly enjoy hockey. I do feel bad though, because after we won on Sunday I said something to the effect of “Sidney Crosby can suck it! USA! USA!” and then after Canada’s women’s team beat us today for the gold medal their fans were like Air Force Academy football fans at the medal ceremony, all cheering loudly and enthusiastically  for the US players as they got their medals. Canadians are better winners than Americans, I guess. Then again, maybe they just haven’t won enough things to be bad winners. Being gracious in victory is something that gets tiring after a couple hundred years of awesomeness. Canada may discover that someday. And in all honesty, if we can’t win something I guess it’s okay if Canada wins, unless Australia can win instead.

I was wondering the other day why I always find myself rooting for Australia if the US isn’t a contender to win something. In fact, I’d rather see the Aussies win than Canada, New Zealand, OR the Brits. We’re not even going to discuss anyone else because I don’t root for people who don’t speak English as a first language. I know, I know, I’m a xenophobic bigot racist, but what are you gonna do? It’s not like I can go back in time to last year and vote for Obama, can I? Of course even if I could, I wouldn’t. Because I’m a xenophobic bigot racist. Also, I prefer a President who can do things other than talk about how awesome he is. If I wanted to hear someone go on and on about how awesome he was, I’d record myself in an everyday conversation and play it back through some headphones.

But I digress. Why do I root for Australia at the expense of the other Anglophones in the world? I think I’ve figured it out. The Brits are like our snotty older brother who used to pick on us when we were little but stopped once we hit puberty and beat their ass a couple of times. Now they’ve got a PhD in sociology or something useless like that and always kind of look down their noses at us, but we know we could always call them if we really, really needed anything. We’d just kind of hate ourselves for doing it, and they’d probably never stop complaining about it, even if we’d bailed their ass out of jail a few times ourselves.

The Canadians are our little brother. They’re always there, sleeping in our room, making annoying clicking sounds when they eat, and getting all the praise from our parents. Of course, we can’t really blame them for resenting us a little, considering we do stuff like set their stuffed animals on fire and “accidentally” push them through plate-glass windows, not to mention that we rarely fail to jump on the chance to mock them when they do something stupid. But we’re so close that we kind of get sick of the sight of each other, and when we fight, we don’t mess around. Hell, we tried to invade them twice and that didn’t really work out. They retaliated by inventing hockey and being really good at it, and we responded by stealing their hockey teams and putting them in places like Phoenix, which is like the opposite of Canada. Anyway…

New Zealand? They’re like a distant cousin who lives across the country and is into weird crap like the Dalai Lama, patchouli, and organic food. They’re nice enough, but we don’t really know them all that well, so we don’t give them much of a second thought. Also they’ve never really done anything with their lives other than make their own bio-diesel and learn to play the acoustic guitar.

But Australia? They’re our cousin who’s pretty close to our age and does all the cool stuff we WISH we could do. You know, they were roadies for Metallica (Speed of Sound Tour) and ride around in bad-ass motorcycles and sports cars and seemingly have hot chick in bikinis around them all the time. We don’t get to see them too often, but when we do we have a damned good time. And we usually end up hung over. And when they’re gone we look in the mirror and ask ourselves why we aren’t as cool as they are. Never mind that they’ve been working as bartenders for the last fifteen years and still live with their parents. They’re still kind of our heroes in a way.

And that’s that. I think I captured the gist of international relations within the Anglosphere pretty handily, don’t you?

The American women valiantly faced off against the dirty redcoats in the most recent reenactment of the Revolutionary War. And just like 230 years ago, the Americans, though underdogs, managed to topple the mighty Brits.

In your face, redcoats!

The US women’s curling team beat the dirty sloots from Russia 6-4 today. IN YOUR FACE, COMMIES!

Today’s results bring the US curlers’ combined record (men’s and women’s) to a gentlemen’s 1-6. But the men are playing the French today and I can’t imagine the French being good at anything other than smoking cigarettes, being conquered, and sneering at anyone who isn’t French.

USA! USA!

update: Burn on France! The only thing they do better than us is suck and die.

…is not a Ferrari, nor is it a Porsche. It’s not a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Bugatti Veyron. Nope.

It’s a 2005 Honda Pilot.

Laugh all you want, but it’s the kind of car that makes women swoon when men drive by in one. It has upwards of 450 horsepower. AT THE WHEELS! It can do a quarter mile in nine and a half seconds, all the while carrying four adults and three infants in car seats. It can tow an M1A1 Abrams tank and still beat a Ferrari Enzo off the line.

YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW!!!

And it handles like a dream too. The other day I was on the way home from work and took the sweeping turn from Powers Blvd. onto U.S. 24 at 75 miles per hour and the car stuck to the road like it was welded to it. I don’t know where all these worries about rollovers come from.

Of course in these trying times gas mileage is a common concern. Well, have no fear, because the 2005 Honda Pilot gets anywhere between 60 and 80 miles to the gallon in the city and 95-120 on the highway. You can actually drive this car from Denver to Pittsburgh without refilling the tank once. Now that’s money you could spend on hookers.

It’s a sport-utility vehicle. Heavy on the sport, yes, but not skimping any on the utility. This car can actually scale rock walls at angles up to 85 degrees. It can drive into water up to 45 feet deep and emerge on the other end, none the worse for wear. Christian Bale actually drove an ’05 Pilot up to the top of the mountain in Batman Begins where Liam Neeson was waiting to teach him how to be a ninja. They edited it out because Hollywood is fake, of course.

Speaking of bats: the original Batmobile? a 2005 Pilot. They had to go to plan ‘B’ sometime during initial production because Cary Grant (the original Batman) got the Pilot/Batmobile up to 88 miles per hour and traveled through time. To where, we still don’t know, but that was the last anyone saw of Cary Grant. The point is, not only can you smoke some punk in a Civic, you can witness the birth of Christ or see the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That’s a feature European automakers aren’t willing to provide the consumer, and it’s something American manufacturers just haven’t figured out yet.

So if you’re in the market for a totally awesome sports car that will actually increase the size of your genitalia (if you’re a man) or make you twenty pounds lighter (if you’re a woman) you should get a 2005 Pilot. And I’ll totally sell you mine if you have trouble finding one.

You’re bad at your job and you should feel bad.

• Luge is morbidly exciting now knowing for a fact that people can get killed doing it. Before we just had a sneaking suspicion, so we didn’t really care, especially since Americans never win. But now? I’m glued to the TV, expecting to see some poor Swiss dude fly off the side of the track and go into orbit before slamming into a mountain. Or something.
• You’d think we’d be better at the biathlon. Michael Moore made an Oscar-winning documentary about how gun-crazy and bloodthirsty we are. Then again, Al Gore made an Oscar-winning documentary about how we’re all going to catch fire and die screaming as a result of the chemical we all exhale, so I guess documentaries don’t really have to be all that accurate to win awards.
• Bobsledding won’t be the same without the Jamaicans and Grace Kelly’s son battling for 26th place.
• Any sport where you can wear jeans is 1) not really a sport, and 2) totally sweet. Because you get the impression that anybody could do it. You know, like tennis.
• Skeleton is like luge, only more bad-ass. If you can die going downhill at 90mph on your back, imagine how much more awesomely you can die going down the same hill head-first on your belly. Plus, it’s called “skeleton” so you know they have a sense of humor.
• Olympic Ice Hockey isn’t the same without dirty commies for us to embarrass. Maybe Obama will join the team of some country he likes (i.e. France’s or Iran’s or something but definitely not America’s) in time for the next Olympics to remedy this.
• One reason the Winter Olympics suck in comparison to the Summer Olympics: figure skating vs. gymnastics. They’re both “sports” that aren’t really sports because you have to attend crazy judge school to figure out who wins. Also the people who do them are crazy freaks of nature. The difference is that gymnastics is really easy to make fun of. For example. Figure skating you can’t mock because it’s so stupid it mocks itself better than any comedian ever could. For example. Thus, gymnastics is watchable and figure skating isn’t.
• Every time I see moguls on TV it makes my knees hurt really bad. I think I tore a PCL the other night watching that American chick whoop the dirty Canadian.
• Speed skating is like track only in speed skating there’s a much better chance that you slash your leg open and almost bleed out on the track. Thus, and it pains me to say it, speed skating is more bad-ass than track.
• During the opening ceremony this year I was talking to Ben Jammin, who was watching it on the east coast. He kept saying, “Who is this dude singing? He looks like Barry Manilow.” An hour later it came on our TV. Turns out it was k.d. lang. Anybody could make that mistake, actually.
• If the Olympics are being held in North America, why does NBC have to tape-delay everything? It’s really irritating to have to avoid any sports-related websites all day for fear they’ll spoil the surprise later on in the evening. Really, is it still 1974 or something? We can see the World Cup game between Zimbabwe and Ghana live, but we have to wait all day to see some crazy broad who looks like a cross between Drew Barrymore and Courtney Love fall down in a snowboard race? Really?
• I’d be more likely to watch the Olympics on NBC if Faith Hill would dress in tight clothes and sing some kind of Olympics-based theme song beforehand.
• For some reason I keep getting Faith Hill mixed up with that fat chick with the screechy voice who was married to Biggie Smalls.
• Proof the dirty Scandis have nothing interesting to do up there in igloo-land: cross-country skiing. I’d rather be waterboarded and then have my genitalia attached to a car battery while Jack Bauer yelled at me than cross-country ski. It looks terrible.
• Curling is quite possibly the most awesome sport ever. I don’t know what the rules are, I don’t know how you win, and I don’t care. As far as I can tell it’s shuffleboard with fewer old people.
• They should replace figure skating with a snow-angel contest. If they’re gonna have “sports” that you have to add quotation marks to the word “sport,” why not have one everyone could identify with and mercilessly criticize?
• You’re imagining it now, aren’t you? “That idiot Belgian SUCKS at making snow angels! Look! He doesn’t even have the wings the same size! Damn, why couldn’t I have been half-Dutch or something? I would kick ASS at this!”
• We could compromise and leave the snow-angel contest out, and the Olympics could get rid of figure skating. Everyone wins, right? Including the Belgians, who would really suck at making snow angels and thus be more of a sporting laughingstock.
• Skiing looks terrifying and awesome at the same time.
• I felt kind of bad by the end of the little parade in the opening ceremony because I spent the entire time making fun of Canadians and then they cheered like hell for the US when our team came out. But then I remembered they’re just Canadians and no one cares about them anyway.

That’s all. Enjoy the Olympics everyone. USA! USA!

You know, in case any of you care.

Good game so far. I can see how some reviewers were disappointed with it, because it’s really pretty simple when it comes to the gameplay itself. Mashing buttons, mashing buttons, and mashing buttons.

But sometimes you need a game where you mash buttons. And if that game also has a compelling storyline, excellent graphics, and a whole buttload of customization options, that makes it good.

Also, Deadpool is an awesome character, and anything that includes him gets an extra point or two just by his presence.

Initial review (after only playing it over the weekend) – 4.5/5