(Not so) Big Bang

This morning, I sacrificed a few hours of precious weekend sleep, in order to watch the implosion of what was left of the old Winnipeg Arena. I'd like to say that I have a lot of great memories of the old barn, but I don't have many, and most of the memories I do have involve watching the Jets lose in the playoffs on TV. But I like explosions and loud noises as much as the next guy, so my roommate and I turned out at 7:15 am to see it go down.

Click here for a rather amateur looking video I took with my digital camera.

Evidently, it did not go down as planned:

Most of the frame of the Winnipeg Arena remains in tact, despite 200 kilograms of dynamite that was detonated...

Hundreds of onlookers gathered at locations around the Old Barn to see it imploded.
They were a bit disappointed.

The three-second bang went off as expected, however, only portions of the Arena came down.

The main cement pillars and steel girders are still standing. Officals on scene say all the detonations went off, but the main structure was too strong for the dynamite.

Not unlike the Winnipeg Jets with a one-goal lead in the third period, things did not work out as planned.

The before and after pictures I snapped show that the big bang didn't make a big difference. Who knows, perhaps I'll get to attend another implosion next weekend.

Update: I guess I missed the grand finale.

And, further: A slightly (and by slightly I mean quite a bit) better video is available here. Better angle, no folks in the way, and audio. Plus slow-motion. You can see more clearly what fell down and what stayed up after the explosion.

I, robot

At work today, I was reading a fairly interesting article about the World Baseball Classic. The author, one Jayson Stark, contrasts the baseball culture of the two countries competing in tonight's final, Japan and Cuba. All was well, until this paragraph:

The Japanese, on the other hand, often play the game like the men of science they are. Is there any fundamental they haven't practiced at least 4.9 billion times in their lives? Is there any skill they haven't studied and perfected with machine-like precision?

Is that racist? Or politically incorrect? Are the Japanese a nation of Sudoku-solving, technology-producing, sushi-eating automatons? The author also calls Cuba "a nation stuck in a 1950s time warp in more ways than we can comprehend", though at least in that case he can call upon their cars as evidence.

RIP CTG

This guy is gone.

Book fair

I added a link on the sidebar to the book(s) that I am currently reading, since people always seem to be asking me that. Right now it is singular. The book is Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend, by German author Thomas Mann. I've already made two renewals of three-week loans, so it is not exactly a page-turner, but I do expect to finish it. Eventually.