What is the best NHL logo--response

http://zorgreport.blogspot.ca/search/label/Sports%20-%20Hockey  (you have to scroll down)

( Well, I had meant to put this simply as a response to my own post.  However, googleminds does not allow more than a few phrases, so I have to go this way, and create a separate post.)

Man, did this post go viral, or what.   I got a lot of hits, but.  Only a few weeks after I posted it, I heard the guys on my “sports” radio station going over the same topic exactly.  Then lo,’ today I’m waiting in line at the supermarket, and I see the *cover story* is my topic—greatest uniforms—for the still relatively new Rogers Sportsnet magazine.  You’re welcome, mainstream media.  I think I even heard some bit of piped-in American media on this topic, too, but I can’t remember now.  Back in the day, a “magazine” would have some new idea to break, but the best Rogers Sportsnet could come up with was recycling mine.

Oh, it’s not an original idea, and it’ll come back again soon, but it’s nice to know I gave the mainstream media some ideas they’d otherwise be without and searching for like car keys under a brass rail. 

You could say, if you don’t like the blog, “No, dude, it’s just this unusually major coincidence,” but then you’d be faced with names and dates and this huge logic mountain to have to climb and get up over, and you’d need Lance on steroidal steroids to do that.

Anyway, whatever your perspective, it is an interesting object lesson in how the mainstream media, which always complains that the web and the blogosphere and so on have no credibility, are now beholden entirely to the very media they revile.  Mainstream “journalists” will often bemoan that webkids just repeat and retweet and don’t really have to ‘work’ like them.  I’m quite sympathetic to this mainstream media argument, really.  I do think that there’s such a thing as a journalist, but it’s becoming increasingly vestigial.  Take Mags Wente--holds a dinner party and writes about it and calls it work. Gets a hip replacement and it's "news." Take Christie Blatchford--Obie won't sleep with her and it's news.  Friend's in tough with a hockey rink and it's "news."  In fact, it could be that these so-called "mainstream" journalists were just the canaries in the coalmines.  By refusing actually to do any journalism, but rather have dinner parties and talk about dog parks, they inspired people to say, well, if that's what it is, I can do that, too, and better.

  These gals could get a job, but they don't have to--all they have to do is *just be right-wing enough.*  Brains checked at the door.  What a sad retroversion for women everywhere.

 

Anyway.

 

First of all, media and journalism is disappearing into partisan entertainment.  Second of all, there is no spectrum, owing to corporate mainstream media concentration, so if you want to work, you have not only to have Stalinist sensibilities, but to anticipate them.  And thirdly, media organizations and journalists themselves believe that they just don’t have the money or the time any more (in reality, they do) to actually do journalism, so they just end up like the boys at Rogers sportsnet, sitting at their computers reading my blog and riffing on it.  Back in the day, a Rogers sportsnet employee would get up and get out there and go find something to talk about.  Nowadays, s/he gets up in his/her underwear and has a coffee and scans the web for ideas to recycle—and his/her employers would probably fire him/her if she/he didn’t do exactly that--and come up with recycled pablum, pronto.  The very fact that Rogers Sportsnet would be recycling my ideas proves my point exactly.  Rogers could hire journalists, to do a job, but instead Rogers hires talking faces to. . .be talking faces reading me.

I know where I got the idea for the topic, but one sort of subliminal reason I must have come up with it for is precisely because, in relentless marketing pushes, so many once-proud franchises have introduced more or less a new jersey for every game—fans of the Oregon Ducks could be fans of. . . .?  In other words, the reason I came up with the topic imitated by Rogers Sportsnet and its affiliates was because I might have been tapping into something fans longed for—a time when a crest had an ineffable, as opposed to merchandisable, feel.

In the grocery-store lineup, I saw that Rogers Sportsnet magazine placed the Habs first.  Well, this is Canada.  But I stick to my rankings above, and it isn’t just because I spent a long time rooting against the Habs.  The crest is too small, the bands too wide.  The Habs look slow and stumpy—their uniforms look more like prison uniforms or nineteenth-century bathing dress of a country I associate with being colourful, like, say, Spain, or Venezuela.  Iconic uniforms like those of the Red Wings emphasize dynamism and fluidity—the Habs look like pylons.  Or take the Bruins, often the Habs’s (when the Habs contended now and then) greatest rivals.  The simple spoked B wasn’t made to make the team look fast, but those spokes somehow broadened the effect of the upper body of every Bruin, making them look a formidable force.  It’s just a farce to say that Habs have a great uniform.

 But I guess there’s the rub.  Sportsnet Magazine, or whatever it’s called, then added the Yankees, the Celtics, the NZ All-Blacks, Real Madrid, the Packers, etc.  In other words, the “greatest uniform” issue wasn’t really about that at all; rather, it was about: “what is the most successful franchise so that we can say they have the best uniforms?”  Sad.  Even their also-rans (Flyers, Cardinals) are teams that had more success than most teams.  So, if the point of your exercise, unlike mine, is simply to say “which franchise made the most money”. . . well, ok, it’s Rogers, Rogers Sportsnet.  Put a picture of Ted Rogers and his kids on the Blue Jays uniform and it’s #1, uniformly.  The Toronto Teds’ kids—that’s the best one of all.  Yes.

 Oh all right, I also justified some of my own choices that way.  Oh all right.  It’s just how they had to copy _everything_!!

Like me, the magazine also referred to jerseys of days gone by, but people, honestly, I only had really a couple of minutes before my groceries just advanced too far down that black rubber conveyor belt and there were other people behind me.  If I see a left copy of the magazine at the gym, I’ll look at it. 

If you want to find out which teams in history have made the most money and won the most championships (but you don’t really care one way or the other about uniforms)—then go check out Rogers Sportsnet magazine after you’ve found your way to my blog that came out months earlier.

-zr