2017 Tim Hortons Brier
 

Began today in St. John's, Newfoundland. This (along with the Scotties) is one of those truly great annual Canadian events, pitting province against province and the best curlers in the world.

GO ALBERTA!

I'm cheering for my province: GO NORTHERN ONTARIO!!!

We won our first draw. :D

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EDIT:

A pic from FB of the opening ceremonies:

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Went for a walk down Water Street and a lot of businesses have Brier-related displays in their windows. Rock-shaped chocolates, or Canadian-themed/branded anything. It's nice. :)

Chatted with a few visitors already. I didn't even ask what they thought but they've basically all commented on how beautiful but windy/cold it is here. :haha: Damn it. Why couldn't we have had a 15C sunny break. :haha:

I hope it ends up being NL (Gushue) against NO (Jacobs) in the final. Both have won Olympic gold medals.

I'd like that final as well.

Go Team Jacobs.

This it notably the first Brier since 1999 that Alberta isn't being skipped by Randy Ferbey, Kevin Martin or Kevin Koe. Martin is, however, the coach for Team Alberta and his son Karrick is Bottcher's lead.

0-3 so far, this team is struggling in the early draws. Here's hoping they can get back on track soon.

Koe on the other hand is 2-0 to start.

I guess we're playing out most nationalist songs tonight to intimidate the other teams? :D Manitoba beat us. But we're beating New Brunswick thus far.

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From about 5 seconds in the lyrics are "Oh in Montreal, the Frenchmen say that they own Labrador, including Indian Harbour where me father fished before, well if they wants to fight for her, I'll surely take a stand, and they'll regret the day they tried to take our Newfoundland", etc. :haha:

Watched the Hearts earlier. For some reason I can't stand watching the Brier. I especially loathe having to watch Team Jacobs. Watched a bit of Jacobs' play today but had my eyes more on the pre-season baseball on the other screen.

As a game, I don't actually find curling to be significantly *less* exciting to watch than baseball, for example.

Had the Americans taken it up and their servicemen found ice readily available to play it in various countries, it would probably be played and popular in way more countries!

I love watching the Jacobs team. The level of physical commitment they've put into the game has raised the bar to levels never seen before.

It's the Innu who own Labrador. hehe

And the last verse of that song is interesting:

Now that the oil is on our shore we better take the time, to develop it more carefully or else you're going to find, what could have been the answer to our poor economy, has changed our way of living and destroyed our fishery.

What what you say about Jacobs!!! LOL

Next year the Brier and the Scotties will expand to a 16 team field.

There will be the 10 Provincial Teams, Northern Ontario, the 3 Territories, Team Canada (previous championships) and a 16th team. From my understanding the 16th team will be top-rated team that did not qualify. Had this 16th team took place this season. You will have Jennifer Jones qualify in the Scotties and Reid Carruthers qualify for the Brier.

The format will have 2 Groups of 8 play in a Round-Robin. The top 4 teams in each group will qualify to the 8 team Championship Round-Robin. Results from will be carried over from games involving the 4 teams the make the next round (3 games), and each team will play the other 4 teams in the other group. The top 4 teams will advance the Page-Playoff system.

Absolutely loathe this change. Whose "colours" will the 16th team wear? They don't represent anyone but themselves at that point really. It starts to take away from the whole idea of the championship. I'd rather they cut the territories down to 1 team for the 3 (Yukon and Nunavut still struggle to field competitive teams). They could also cut Ontario down to 1 provincial team. The original reason if I remember correctly was travel difficulties, but let's be honest, Team Jacobs travels extensively on the tour circuit... So, 10 provinces, 1 team for the Territories, and the previous National champion all in one big tournament. No pools :yuck:

lol Loco - very true.

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A cute moment from the opening ceremony:

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Wow I had never heard of that competition before... I am not really into curling, but the idea of having provinces competing against each other is interesting.

This is kind of related to your comments about Portage and Main. Assuming your friends and family are mostly Québécois, it's not really surprising that you and they don't know the Brier and Portage and Main.

I find a lot of the broader Canadiana is fairly unknown in Quebec. And not just stuff that is language-specific. Even for example the stereotype that Canadians are very apologetic (they say sorry when you step on THEIR foot) would leave most Québécois puzzled I am sure. (Most Québécois people certainly don't do that BTW. :haha:)

It is true that most of my relatives live in Québec, and despite the fact I now live in Ottawa, I sometimes feel like I am discovering different aspects of the "Canadiana". You are totally right about that, the over-apologetic Canadian cliche is unheard of in Québec, and that's only one example among many others.

For example, the other day I had a conversation with somebody who was flying to the "Soo", "up North". I knew he was refering to Sault Ste-Marie (most Quebecois would have no idea), and I also knew that despite the fact it is clearly west of Ottawa and a tad north, the fact the Soo is in Northern Ontario can legitimize the reference to "the North". If I didn't know that, I would probably have thought he was going to some Inuit village called the Soo in the Arctic.

How about Canadians being polite, reserved, quiet, non-exuberant and low-profile? And saying "eh" all the time...

De quessé? :shrug:

Québécois do however share in the classic Canadian themes of collectivism, looking out for each other, peacekeeping (as opposed to making war), being good global citizens, egalitarianism, a good balance between money and quality of life, etc.