Oh lovely. One of the best things were the regional adverts. Each team has a regional TV network that will show its local games, what with the USA being quite big and all, and this naturally gave rise to some rather esoteric advertising slants:
Here's a clue - he's not selling chicken or ice hockey sticks.
Another thing that struck me as particularly absurd occurred when watching a game at the Joe Lewis Arena, home to the Detroit Red Wings. In an interval, the hospitality wheeled on a Country and Western singer, which I guess makes sense because Country and Western is rather a Big Thing in the states. The act was a fellow called John Rich, formerly of Lonestar, currently on hiatus from Big and Rich, but this chap looked to be a bit of both, the bigness and the richness being logical extensions of the marketability of Country and Western in the US:
However, more baffling was Big Rich's track selection. Being a man with the kind of face that has a story to tell, he decided to opt for his recent smash 'Shut Detroit Down'. In Detroit - Land of the Structurally Unemployed. It'd be like sending Margaret Thatcher to Rotherham to sing 'We Are All Bourgeois Now'. Most baffling was the generally positive reception to Mr. Rich's thinly-veiled putdown. The people of Michigan, clapping their foam fingers, supping on their $6 beers, must have been so in awe of everyone's favourite half of Big and Rich that they wouldn't have cared if he had have cranked out his latest hit smash 'Motown is shit, so is Eminem, as well as the White Stripes, and I love getting on eco-friendly municipal transport'. Still, when you think about it, Mr Rich does look rather familiar, doesn't he?
As yes, chubby-cheeked Gary Barlow: celebrity #1 of the 1990s and renovated pop-chap in man band Take That. Indeed, it could be magic. But hold on:
He also looks like chubby-faced demon-villian Jez Quigley from Coronation Street. Who would have thunk it?
