| Hockey and more |
[Mar. 16th, 2008|12:15 am] |
After winning their last two games the Wolves lost tonight.
The winning goal on Wednesday with a tenth of second left was a pretty hard act to follow, but last nights come from behind win was pretty exciting.
Tonight, alas, they lost. Possibly they were tired - I felt like I've spent a lot of time at the rink & I was only watching.
One thing about tonight was that it was one of the games that the AHL is experimenting with having two referees. Usually hockey has had one referee (with the ability to call penalties) and two linesmen. Linesmen call violations involving "offsides" and "icing" although they have a second major duty of forcibly disengaging players who are fighting.
Unfortunately two referees seem to be just as able as one to make at least as many bad calls and fail to call any number of incidents that seem obvious to the home fans.
But the really interesting thing tonight was the secondary entertainment. During the two minute breaks that are called for the benefit of television broadcasts having commercials, a wide variety of entertainment has been developed, but one popular thing with the crowd is putting camera shots of the crowd up on the big screens on the gondola.
One of the "events" for a break for some years now has been the "Kiss Cam." It started as a thing around Valentines Day, I believe, but it is done fairly often now. The camera scans the crowd and runs along rows finding couples, who are encouraged to kiss, and are cheered for doing so. (Or alternately there is fairly friendly laughter when one person or the other recoils, because seating sequences haven't put appropriate partners together.) Older couples, younger couples, sometimes parents & children - it all comes across as very sweet.
One feature of it has been mixing in at least one shot running along the opposing teams bench, and some of the time an opposing player will play along and plant a kiss on a team mate, which gets a cheer two.
Last game & this game both there was some additional mugging for the crowd that tickled me no end. Last game, they were running along a row (they do this fairly slowly) and one guy reached across the girl next to him and kissed the guy sitting beyond her. And this game, they were on a section and instead of kissing the guy next to her, a girl turned and kissed the girl on her other side.
And both of these got as big (or possibly bigger) cheers as any other kiss.
This helped take some of the bad taste of the attidudes that sparked the last post I made out of my mouth. In fact part of the pleasure was thinking how it would make Mr. Wright nuts. (or more nuts.)
Even if it is all mugging for the camera, it's a sign of change. I know it doesn't mean that the world overcoming heterosexist prejudices, and it even may raise troubling issues around respect, but it was still fun and oddly cheering to have as a norm in a place like a hockey arena, which you wouldn't necessarily expect anything GLBT friendly.
This post makes me realize I need to round up some more userpics though. |
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