Sharks Gameday: What's your excuse?

Ah, Winnipeg. The Jets play the Sharks tonight, and if you're anything like my mom, just mentioning those two words means you start singing songs from West Side Story, the bold musical that dares to ask, "What if gangs were incredibly lame?" We've talked a lot about Winnipeg here, chronicling their year round love of slushees, stabbing, racism, and used articulated buses. But what about their youth?

The young people of Winnipeg are facing a choice, according to a guest opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press (a newspaper that, contrary to its name, is almost entirely devoted to Winnipeg). 8% of young people make the seemingly obvious choice to leave Winnipeg, but Joshua Morry, a business major and law student, has some thoughts on how to change that. I think. I'm not totally sure, because he writes how much of a joke it is to live in Winnipeg, quoting the Simpsons and talking about a Scotiabank commercial asking why anybody would go to Winnipeg in January. It's mostly a plea for the provincial government to think about maybe implementing policies that would favor young people staying in Winnipeg instead of taking off as soon as humanly possible to Toronto, Vancouver, or Calgary for some reason, without any specifics of what those policies would be. He finishes strong, though, with this quote.

Well, what the fuck is the problem, then? Also, LOLOLOLOLOL. "Hmm, where should I go this year? Barcelona? Bali? Hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu? Nah, I'm going to Winnipeg, world-class tourist destination!"

Here's what I found out about in an article about what to do in Winnipeg on New Year's Eve:

• Bars will be open and probably crowded.
• Social halls (??) will also be crowded.
• An 11:00 AM party at the Children's Museum was the first thing they mentioned after bars. Right after that, tobogganing.
  
• There will be a fireworks show...at 8:00 PM local time. If that didn't make you sad, there's this: '"In the winter, because of the cold, crisp air, the colours are a lot brighter and the durational shells last a lot longer; so it actually makes them better," said Candice Mitchell, general manager of Archangel Fireworks.'
• You can write your New Year's resolutions down on the ice sheet at an ice rink, then they put a new layer of ice over it and you can ice skate on your resolutions.

That's what you can do in world-class tourist destination, Winnipeg, on one of the biggest party nights of the year.

Jets @ Sharks

7:30 PM Pacific.

Prediction: If Winnipeg is a world-class tourist destination, then San Jose is Ibiza after an MDMA freighter has shipwrecked right offshore.