Attack of the 8-foot goldeye

Granted, he doesn't look like a goldeye, which is a kind of local fish, but that's Goldie, the mascot for the Winnipeg Goldeyes. And that's the baseball game I was at Saturday night. Enjoying the four-dollar "grass berm" seats as the Calgary Vipers fileted the Goldeyes in a 4-2 nail-biter (scale-biter?).

The Goldeyes are part of the eight-team Northern League, which includes teams from the States, such as the Kansas City T-Bones and the Joliet Jackhammers, and let me tell you, going to a game is a helluva good time for the whole family. First, it's cheap. Second, its attended by enthusiastic fans (the 6,000-or-so-seat Canwest Global Park routinely sells out). Third, the train tracks run right behind the stadium, so every ten minutes a train rumbles by (you can just barely can make out the bridge and a passing train in the background of the photo above). Fourth, and most importantly, plenty of free stuff gets tossed into the crowd -- chips, licorice, t-shirts... And every time someone comes around lobbing goodies, all the kids rush toward the thrower like starving refugees rushing toward a U.N. food drop. Highly entertaining.

And then there's the occasional middle-aged drunk man who thinks he's still a frat boy, heckling the opposing pitchers as they warm up. "Hey, 23! What's your problem?! Hey, 34! Nice mullet! What's your problem?!" After the fourth or fifth "Hey, __, what's your problem!" from the guy, even the little kids start turning around to tell him to shut up. And then the beleaguered dad looking after his four kids starts telling them to shut up.

Didn't catch any fly balls, but I did catch a package of tasty licorice, which I enjoyed with my perogies (another bonus of seeing a ballgame in the Peg -- perogies for sale at the stadium). And some great fireworks capped off the night. Best four dollars I've ever spent.

For you keeners out there, here's part of the "goldeye" entry from The Canadian Encyclopedia:

Goldeye flesh when freshly caught is undesirable due to its poor taste and quality. As early as 1890 it was found smoking significantly improved its taste. After 1911 the market for smoked goldeye increased rapidly because it was a new product that could be caught and processed in large numbers. Lake WINNIPEG was the largest commercial producer. By the 1930s overfishing nearly wiped out stocks; it took decades for them to recover.

The main fishery is now centered in the Saskatchewan River in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The fish are processed almost exclusively in Winnipeg, Man, where they are gutted, lightly brined, dyed an orange-red colour and smoked over oak fires. They are marketed as whole processed fish under the name "Winnipeg goldeye" and are considered a gourmet item. Goldeye are considered sport fish in some regions, especially central Canada where they are sought after for home smoking. The small size of goldeye limits their appeal as a sport fish in other regions.

From "undesirable" to "gourmet". It's like Queer Eye for the Goldeye, huh?

Table tennis, anyone?

Life in the Peg has grown sedate and uneventful, and I find myself spending more and more time working and less and less time dreaming of life beyond this computer. Between still trying to learn how to play Springsteen's Thunder Road on the guitar (not an easy feat when you can't play guitar in the first place) and watching fun DVDs like Peter Jackson's astounding mockumentary Forgotten Silver and Tony "Top Gun" Scott's almost really good revenge opera Man on Fire, the only other things keeping me sane are the fun things I find on the internet. Case in point, this site that offers pics of celebrities (such as Christina Applegate, above) playing ping pong (thanks to "The Fix" section of Salon for the heads-up). I smell a reality TV show... And how come this one of Castro isn't on a T-shirt?

In praise of T-shirts

While brunching at Stella's on the weekend the young couple at the table beside me caught my attention. "We noticed you're wearing a Hidden Cameras shirt (pictured above) -- and we're wondering if you could tell us where we can go for some good live music." Turned out they'd just made a permanent move from Toronto to teach at the local university. They had stunned looks on their faces. Obviously suffering from a bit of culture shock -- the sloooow pace of life here, the smallness of everything compared to the big city. And it was with some relief that they found out I was also from Toronto and could relate to everything they were going through. A bond formed between strangers -- all because of a T-shirt.

Brought me back to the time a month ago when I was walking down the street and an older woman, minding some kind of bizarre sidewalk sale in front of a crazy-coloured house, stopped me to comment on the New York Subway T-shirt I was wearing (also pictured above). She said it reminded her of home -- she'd been transplanted from Brooklyn many years ago. I coulda sworn she was getting all teary-eyed over it.

I bet even if Superman didn't have his powers, he'd still walk around with that big S stuck on his chest, hoping one day some other poor, lonely soul from Krypton would come up to him and say, "Hey, me too."

Twister

Yes, a tornado tore through Manitoba's cottage country Saturday, leaving one person dead and several communities devastated (report by ctv.ca here). I heard it called the worst tornado to hit Manitoba in a century.

According to Environment Canada's website, Winnipeg itself has been hit a dozen times by tornadoes, with one death as a result. Researchers are hard at work determining what would happen if a major twister ripped through the downtown core. Apparently, it would be bad.

A glorious weekend part 2: Food, fringe, frolic

Food: Last weekend while Andrea was in town we had a great sushi dinner at Wasabi on Broadway. And it hit me -- I've never eaten so much fish in my life as I have since coming to the prairies. So I did some checking and discovered that, according to the Water Stewardship Fisheries Branch, Manitoba has about 100,000 lakes. And I've been to... one of them. Lake Winnipeg, where Falcon Beach is shot. Once. For an afternoon. Apparently I spend too much time in front of the computer, writing about beaches without actually setting foot on them -- and my only enjoyment of the water comes in the form of consuming its helpless inhabitants, often with a glass of shiraz.

Fringe: By lucky coincidence, Andrea had a friend from Edmonton who was in town with his one-man play "Wool", all about his six months spent on an island in the Hebrides working at an inn surrounded by sheep. As Fringe plays go it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been -- the staging and performance were excellent (marred only by the fact that the actor read fifty-percent of the lines from the script he had with him on stage; note: no post-modern flim-flammery can pull the, ahem, wool over an audience's eyes when it comes to memorizing your damn lines). But the real problem could be traced, as is almost always the case, to the writing. A collection of half-interesting anecdotes that don't gel into a coherent theme does not make for riveting theatre -- especially when the performer is clearly more interested in using the play as a thinly-veiled form of personal therapy. My point is, if in doubt, stop being a douchebag and get yourself a story editor.

Frolic: Highlight of the Fringe came when Andrea wanted to relax on the grass in front of the public stage in the heart of Fringe Land. Some thick-necked guy with bad teeth and the face of a lifetime boozer was on stage rambling about one thing or another. I was having a lovely time until I realized Mr. Rambler was singling me out. "The guy in the blue shirt beside the girl in the skirt." I feined obliviousness, but Mr. Rambler was not to be thwarted, and eventually he pulled me up on stage to help with his "routine." It became clear that he was going to try to break the world record for the number of back-handed pushups performed in a minute. And he needed me to hold the clock and keep time for him. Another sucker had been conscripted to count the number of said back-handed pushups, and the two of us waited for, oh, about twenty minutes while Mr. Rambler yammered on, creating what must have been for him a build-up of tension but for someone like me who isn't really trained in dramatic ways of holding a clock on stage -- embarrassment and frustration. When Mr. Rambler finally removed his headset mike and got down on the backs of his hands and starting heaving himself up and down while I counted down the minute and Sucker #2 counted off the push-ups, kids in the audience started yelling, "Those aren't even real pushups"; and when he finished his one hundred back-handed pushups he was confronted by two drunk men (one in a wheel chair) both wanting to challenge his newly minted record. I feel like I comported myself rather well in my time-keeping role, but poor Mr. Rambler was ridiculed by the M.C. until he was out of ear-shot. I kept wondering if the guy actually travels the country with this routine, push-uping his way from Fringe to Fringe, from one country fair to another, and who the hell buys him beer?