Off Roading

Occasionally I'll take this blog off the hockey internet super highway it usually travels and head for the hills, sort of speak. I promise it won't happen too often, it's just that sometimes something catches my eye and I just have to go check it out, you know how it goes. Since I'm the one who has control of the steering wheel please bear with me and hang on. I'll be back on the hockey highway here in a second.

I love a good conspiracy theory just as much as the next person, maybe more. It's one of my many guilty pleasures. Don't get me wrong, I don't put much stock in them (well, maybe a couple) it's just that every now and then I REALLY enjoy finding a new one that entertains my brain with it's bizarreness and crazed characters. All of which brings me to this one here which is a duzzie that I just couldn't pass up passing along. Especially with whats been going on down in the gulf.

"There's a chess game going on in the sky," Stevens said. "It affects each and every one of us. It is the one common thread that binds us all together."

WEATHER WARS
Like I said it's a duzzie of a conspiracy theory, it's even got the Japanese Mafia in it and I'm a sucker for anything involving the Japanese Mafia... another guilty pleasure.

As far as other conspiracy theories I'm following at the moment, the NHL Advertising Campaign Controversy is one that I'm watching being played out before us (I told you we'd end up back on the hockey highway). I tend to follow Tom Benjamin's thought that the whole thing could well have been designed into the whole campaign on purpose.

The question I have is whether the ad was deliberately designed to offend the likes of Martha Burk. Ms. Burk is probably doing the NHL a favour in the United States given that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.

The #1 one thing the league wanted to accomplish during this reintroduction phase of the game was to get people talking about hockey again. This whole dust up starts the process moving. Just like the ABC Monday Night Football/Desperate Housewives locker room sex flap of a year ago which as a result of the uproar did nothing but boost the profiles of both shows, I think that same exact play is being tried again this year, this time by the NHL. I guess it doesn't matter how many times advertising agencies dip into that playbook and use that particular play, it works like a charm every time. Now that they have everyone's attention it'll be interesting seeing how they handle the next phases of the campaign.