Canada vs. the U.S....again

UPDATED April 9, 11:41 p.m. CDT

THE STAGE IS ALL SET.

They're all ready to give it 110 per cent (and other sports cliches).

On Tuesday night, it will be Canada and the U.S. -- as it always has been -- in the gold medal final of the World Women's Hockey Championship.

The picture above was from Saturday night at Winnipeg's MTS Centre, with the Canadians on the right and the Americans on the left.

The Americans probably deserved to win, but Canada stormed back to tie the game and they won the game 5-4 in an overtime shootout.

But it was a playoff round pool game that didn't mean much.

As expected, the U.S. beat Finland 4-0 Sunday night, guaranteeing themselves a spot in Tuesday night's championship game.

Canada beat Finland 5-0 Monday night and will now face the Americans Tuesday night for all the marbles.

Canada has never lost to Finland and now has a record of 40 wins, 0 losses and 1 tie against them.

The Americans won the last world championship in Sweden in 2005 when they beat Canada for the gold medal for the first time ever, winning an overtime shootout in Sweden.

Canada had won every other world championship before that and, last year at the Olympic Games in Turin, Italy, Canada won the gold medal while the Americans finished fourth.

An important side note is that the game on Saturday night featured in those pictures above attracted 15,003 fans to the arena here, the largest crowd ever to witness a women's hockey game in history.

The gold medal game Tuesday night is also a sellout. It should be a dandy...

ALL HAIL GOOGLE

OK, I submit.

I surrender.

I apologize (well, no, I don't apologize).

Google is an amazing company...I think there's little disputing that.

When Google took over Blogger and made a mess of trying to force us all to make the transition to its new way of doing things, I was among the frustrated whiners, and there was good reason to complain.

And, like some others, I considered giving up blogging altogether or going somewhere else.

When I finally relented to the pressure to switch over to the new Gloogler (Google Blogger), almost nothing worked, you had to sign on to do every little thing, and those who didn't switch over became alienated from those who did.

Blogging became a bore. It became a chore.

But eventually, it started getting better.

And the company that made every other Web search engine obsolete finally made the necessary changes to actually improve blogging rather than make it more difficult.

So after slagging Google in some earlier posts, I now feel it's only fair to salute Google for making blogging quicker, more user-friendly and, potentially, more entertaining and open to the imagination.

You might see I've added some of these new features to my blog on a trial basis.

They're called widgets and if you haven't made the switchover yet to the newer layout system from the old template system, I urge you to try it. You can always go back to your original blog because they save it.

It makes adding new elements to your sidebar or to the bottom of your blog possible more than ever before, at least for a computer imbecile like me, and it also makes it super easy to do, once you get the hang of it.

Follow the directions on your dashboard to change from template to layout. I'm convinced you'll be glad you did, even if you don't use the YouTube bar or the newsreel bar.

Adding pictures is a snap and so is adding other elements.

On a bit of a different track, however, as a journalist and as a consumer of information, I have to say that this line in little type at the bottom of my Google News homepage is a little disconcerting:

"The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program."

Eek. When a computer starts choosing which news stories I should and shouldn't see, I start to become a little redundant...

Blogworld Connects and Disconnects

Connections
Can be beautiful things
Springing to life, out of nowhere
Started on a smile, stirred by a sentence
Sparked by images and imaginations
Seeded by alluring avatars and high-speed harmony

Brought on by an idea, by a story
By boldness, by baring a soul
By sharing a moment, by shedding a tear
By opening a heart, by setting aside fear
By wanting and wishing and waiting

By a melding of me’s at 100 Mbp's

BUT

Connections
Can become Disconnections
With wrong expectations and hopes too high
With words blurted out, with pushes and prods
With pressure and prying and glaring of eyes
With feelings too strong, words all gone wrong

With hopes unfulfilled, proposals rejected
With desires ejected, words recollected
With misunderstandings or stating of truths
With values questioned, beliefs on the line
With offences taken and feelings flambed

The connection can wither and die on the vine

BREAKING NEWS FROM CMN'S SNITUATION ROOM

THIS JUST IN

TO THE CMN (CABLE MUSE NETWORK) NEWS DESK

Now over to Wolf Schlitzer in Warshington...

Thanks Lou...

CMN has just learned that U.S. President George W. Bush will address the Nation and the world this week and announce that he's withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and sending them to Iran.

Sources tell CMN the ongoing detainment of 15 British sailors is now being seen by the Bush administration as a politically convenient development that could allow him to finally remove troops from Iraq.

With every additional day the sailors are detained -- Bush has now called it a hostage-taking -- comparisons are being made to the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran in 1980.

Analysts contacted by CMN say Bush, suffering at the polls as a result of his Iraq policy and almost every other of his policies, increasingly sees the Iran situation as the perfect excuse to invade.

Such an invasion would be billions of dollars cheaper because Iraq and 170,000 U.S. troops are right next door to Iran. Sources say the 170,000 troops would cross the border into Iran and be joined by 300,000 others.

Some pundits say such a move could be Bush's last-ditch attempt to try to rescue his presidency from the ravages of public opinion while at the same time boosting the Republican ticket for next year's presidential vote.


Others close to the scene in Washington say an invasion of Iran would also keep the massive military industrial complex humming along at high gear while also expanding the U.S. oil interests in both Iran and Iraq.

Bush supporters also apparently believe that Iran's suspected buildup of nuclear arms could be curtailed, although Democrats cite Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction fiasco in the invasion of Iraq.

Plus, a successful invasion of Iran would put the U.S. in command of a country that is closer to Afghanistan, the suspected home of Al Quaeda and the domain of Osama Bin Laden, analysts suggest.

The Whitehouse refused to comment on the speculation.

They also refused to deny it was possible.

LATE-BREAKING UPDATE

The invasion of Iran has been averted -- for the time being -- after Iran agreed to release the 15 British sailors on Wednesday...