"Street's wet, you can tell by the sound of the cars..."

A lyric from one of my favorite Elliott Smith songs - Clementine - and never more true than in this city. As much of my day during this time of the school year is spent inside my basement apartment (incidentally, a basement on a hill for you Smith fans keeping track) this is a surefire way of detecting whether you should venture outside.

Today was more of the same: lengths of studying interrupted by brief respites of whatever was on TV. I had to settle for American college football, and boy, is that a brain numbing exercise. I'll tell you what is the biggest loss of the current missing NHL season, it's the dearth of informed and intelligent commentary.

On CBC, in addition to the relatively exhilarating play-by-play, you can always count on each commentator to know illustrative stories about EACH player. It's like the network has spies that follow these guys around. I don't know how they do it, but it adds to the game and I admire it. No such luck with American broadcasting. The talk breaks down something like this:

PHIL (because someone is always named Phil): That's number 44, Rusty McDonald, who sure runs for a lot of yards.

BOB: You used to have a dog named Rusty, didn't you Phil?

PHIL: I sure did, Bob. And although he's long dead, he never ran as much as this Rusty did. That's a lot of yards.

Actually I wish it was that interesting. I don't know why I've wasted so much of this blog on sports, because I'm not a sports fanatic in the least, but when you're inside due to rain, and can't leave if you wanted because of all the studying you have to do, crappy commentary like this just makes things worse.

On a brighter note, it's exactly one month until my birthday! For anyone needing ideas, I like diamonds. Expensive, marketable diamonds.