Well, with the NHL now officially off OLN for the year, and with the Cup series not lasting too much longer on NBC, I thought I'd offer the Top Five Things I won't miss about OLN's coverage of the NHL:

1. Those boating and fishing commercials. The particular offender features the painfully dragged out line, delivered by an old man, "take me fishing ... ... because I miss ... ... my boy." We'll see if the new "Versus" network maintains the same Outdoor Life Network roots or tries to shed them.

2. Same category as 1, that annoying Dodge Caliber commercial with the "silly little fairy" that zaps a pedestrian into the unfortunate stereotype of a homosexual crybaby. Apparently, the ad writers thought it funny that the penalty for calling a fairy a "silly little fairy" might be becoming a "fairy". I find it beyond sad that Chrysler thinks it is ok to imply being homosexual is a punishment. I hate the ad, I hate the premise, I hate the music and sound effects. It is far too annoying for it to be repeated every commercial break in every game for the whole playoffs. I doubt it sold a single car. Silly little Chrysler.

3. The intermission team was, as expected, inane, but somehow I found myself missing Barry Melrose who is a better mulleted commentator than Brian Engblom (although, to be fair, Engblom was the best of the lot). Even better than the old ESPN coverage though, at least for entertainment, was Don Cherry from CBC's Hockey Night broadcast who while incredibly inane was oftentimes just fun to laugh at. I had a friend who looked just like Ron MacLean growing up and watching the teaming of Ron and Don was made more fun almost just for this reason.

4. OLN adds a goal horn sound when an opposing team scores a goal into their broadcast. The first couple of times I heard this, I was wondering when we got player X on our team or, if on the road, when we traded player Y to the other side. The best sound in hockey is probably the stunned silence when a visiting team suddenly takes a lead. The home team gets the horn and the load screaming and no one else. Shame on you, OLN!

5. In this day and age, sports broadcasts should not lose reception/pixelate/etc. every five or ten minutes. Somehow, perhaps as OLN is in the darkest reaches of basic cable, their satellite feeds aren't as solid as they should be. Admittedly, it would be worse to have the whole audio feed cut out during an (in)famous home run like #25 experienced for 715*, but you can imagine watching a tense playoff overtime game and suddenly losing the video when a shot is going at your net and getting far too frustrated by it.

But that's just my opinion, and I think I've moved on to watching the World Cup already. Such great futbol!

So I was doing the first "irregular toroidal sudoku" I had seen made by r.e.s. and posted here and also here - depending on which of the sudoku forums you really prefer to visit. I wrote a solution up on Wayne's forum at sudoku.com and had actually commented about same of the names I had given to the nonets. Admittedly, I have a better way of drawing "New Hampshire" with 9 squares (shift the top 4 rows over one, NH has a bit of a hub on the lower right), but after another poster (jokingly?) referred to a different nonet as "Illinois" I asked myself this question: "Could you make a jigsaw sudoku out of US state shapes?"


Well, my answer after much fiddling this evening is below. It is very hard to draw states in just 9 squares, let alone pack them together, and have the puzzle solved with just their initials. I made this by hand, and would be glad to hear what people think of it. It is completely solvable with logic, but has a couple tricky steps so don't be discouraged if you get stuck. Enjoy: