The CBC, as one of several attempts to overcome the ratings disaster that is the NHL lockout, came up with a viewer contest to name The Greatest Canadian.

All summer, the network and its website asked viewers to nominate the most significant Canadian citizen, past or present. This fall, the network aired documentaries about each of the top ten figures (all male, and including two of the network’s own air personalities).

On a Monday-night live special, the winner was announced. It’s T.C. Douglas, founder of what’s now known as the New Democratic Party and originator of the nation’s universal health care system.

Douglas, a prairie populist of the old Depression-era variety, remains a big reason why Canada’s now a more progressive, more Euro-oriented land than our sorry place.

(Incidentally, among the non-finalists in the contest: Margaret Atwood, Marshall McLuhan, basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith, Emily Carr, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, and William Shatner.)

So there likely won’t be a NASCAR track in my ol’ Marysville neighborhood after all. The reason: The city and county balked at the heavy subsidies the developers wanted.

For all the talk this election season about conservative “NASCAR dads” as a target voting block, it turned out the stock-car circuit (via its corporate alter-ego, International Speedway Corp.) shares no self-reliance, private-sector-primacy ideology. It’s just as perfectly willing to live off the taxpayers’ proverbial teat as any factory farm or football team.

…those, including me, who wanted a Massachusetts/Texas World Series matchup were mistaken. Bush, Armstrong reminds us, used to co-own the Rangers, not the Houston Astros. Bush’s former Rangers partners now own the Cardinals.

Why, W. even threw out the first pitch at the Cards’ opening day this year in (no relation) Busch Stadium. Armstrong notes: “Cardinal officials piped in fake applause when Bush strode out to the mound.”

The game’s a couple of hours old, and I’m still giddy as a boy on snow day. The formerly-accursed Boston Red Sox, having previously prevailed in the playoffs against the dreaded Yankees, easily swept their way past the St. Louis Cardinals and won their first World Series in 86 years.

The Boston-area team already won the NFL title earlier this year. Let’s go out for a hat trick next week.

The ’04 baseball finals will match two “red” teams, the Red Sox and the Redbirds (Cardinals). Both are oldline, pre-expansion teams that haven’t had great success in recent years. I’m still rooting for the Sox.

In the sports miracle of the century (thus far), the surprising BoSox came back from a three-game deficit to win the AL pennant. The hope of an MA/TX baseball battle, just before the MA/TX electoral battle, remains alive, at least for one more day.

AS A BREAK from the potentially-tedious rites of politics, enjoy these images from the Seattle Storm’s victory rally last Friday in Westlake Park.

Here’s a sign of hope for the future—boys rooting for girls!

(via Wendi Dunlap-Simpson):

“Currently on MiscMedia: ‘After a quarter century, Seattle finally has another pro sports championship, thanks to the mighty Storm.’But to quote another friend of mine, David Steinberg: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present your 1995 AND 1996 A League Champions, the Seattle Sounders.’

The first Sounders playoff run was during the M’s 1995 run, so you know no one paid any attention. But it still qualifies!”

The “Yeah, but…” part: The A-League is the second rung of U.S. pro soccer, beneath Major League Soccer. The old Seattle Rainiers occasionally topped baseball’s Pacific Coast League, but nobody considered those pennants to have been major championships.

The Sounders’ achievements were great. But the Storm’s achievement counts as a national title.

After a quarter century, Seattle finally has another pro sports championship, thanks to the mighty Storm. ‘Twas a truly smashing victory, in a game whose lopsided final score belied its physical intensity.

Though somehow, it just doesn’t seem like a world title if there’s no rioting in the streets. Heck, even the Wildrose was Tuesday-night quiet. We’re gonna have to do something to pump up the rowdy, non-role-model factor if women’s B-ball’s ever gonna become a true mass-appeal spectator sport.

Storm stars Sue Bird (with her aborted “spanking” radio promotion) and Lauren Jackson (with her stunning nude pix in an Aussie art-photo mag) have done their part for this. Now it’s our turn.

Next late-spring, I want to see some real Storm-mania—in the sports bars, outside the home games, and everywhere. Drink-per-dunk competitions. Everybody wearing copies of Bird’s clear plastic face mask. Male cheerleaders in Speedos.

Glenn Stout has a long but fascinating essay debunking the “Curse of the Bambino” legend, the idea that the Boston Red Sox have gone without a World Series title since 1918 because then-owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth’s contract to the Yankees. Stout claims the “curse” myth dates back only to 1986, and that in any case what drove Ruth, and later Frazee himself, out of Boston baseball was an anti-Semitic smear campaign against the non-Jewish Frazee, led by that notorious race-baiter Henry Ford.

…of the baseball playoffs is over, and the Boston Red Sox and Houston Astros are both still in. This raises the possibility of a World Series matchup of Massachusetts vs. Texas, just days before another such battle.

LIKE A, WELL, YOU KNOW: Most of the pro-Bush arguments I’ve read have left been short on logical reasoning, long on crude insults and appeals to fear and hate.

In his Tuesday column, P-I business writer Bill Virgin at least attempts to make a thinking man’s case for Bush. I commend Virgin for this effort, though I still disagree with his conclusions. Yes, the world’s a more dangerous place now than it was during the Clinton years. But the man Virgin wants us to re-elect is at least two-thirds responsible for making it this dangerous.

And even the normally conscientious Virgin can’t help but make cheap potshots at Bush’s critics, potshots that require the reader to already believe in the Fox News gang’s character-assassination stereotypes.

The Montreal Expos have left with a whimper, not a bang. A three-point-five-decade tradition of bilingual baseball finally sputtered out with the last home game Wednesday night, following four years of threats by Major League Baseball to move or fold the team.

The Expos’ home-game attendance has been abysmal for some time. Their field performance has been abysmal ever since the 1994 labor lockout. One fan, in a letter to the Anglophone Montreal Gazette, blames baseball’s post-1994 business structure, hostile to “small market” teams, for the team’s demise. Yeah, except Montreal’s not a small market but a big city whose media reach extends to six to eight million people.

No. The handwriting was on the wall (or the domed-stadium roof) for the Expos by their ninth season in 1977. It’s a long story, and it involves Seattle.

The Expos were one of four teams added to Major League Baseball in 1969. Among the other three were the Seattle Pilots. After one pathetic season in the long-since-demolished Sick’s Stadium, owner Dewey Soriano sold out to now-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. He moved the team to Milwaukee. The City of Seattle sued the American League. Following years of litigation, the league agreed to award Seattle another expansion franchise, which became the popular and fiscally successful Mariners.

But adding just one new team would’ve screwed up league scheduling. To maintain an even number of teams, the league awarded a second expansion franchise for 1977—the even more successful Toronto Blue Jays.

For their first eight seasons, the Expos had been Canada’s first and only MLB team. They enjoyed coast-to-coast TV coverage and print-media attention.

But once the Blue Jays showed up, the Anglophone Canadian media, and the Anglophone Canadian public, reclassified the Expos into a team of merely local significance within the province of Quebec. The Blue Jays became the “home team” for all the entire rest of Canada, from Labrador to Vancouver Island. The Expos’ newspaper coverage, merchandise sales, and broadcasting contracts all diminished. At one point the team didn’t even have an English-language radio contract.

The Expos never recovered in the marketplace. With reduced sponsorships, they couldn’t get the backing to replace Olympic Stadium, one of those dull domes of fluorescent lights and artificial turf so popular in the ’60s and ’70s among everyone except fans and players. Attendance diminished, as did political support for a new publicly-funded stadium.

The rest was a long, slow denoument, ending with this week’s announcement that the team will move to Washington DC (no team name or owners have been announced).

My ol’ hometown of Marysville just keeps getting in the news. The big new casino, weird teen murder cases, and now a potential NASCAR car-racing track. The course, and its 75,000 seats, would be situated four miles due north of the little home on 67th Ave. NE where I grew up.

At the time, I was usually bored out of my skull, frustrated at the quiet rural lifestyle. That all since went away for suburban sprawl long ago, of course. But there are still a few parcels of undeveloped land, still occupied by horses and a few cows. A developer has chosen a block of those parcels, totalling 600 acres, to build its track.

Auto racing was never a huge sport in Washington. Evergreen Speedway (east of Marysville in Monroe) and the old Seattle International Raceway were, even at their peaks, minor stops on the second-tier racing tours. The Indy Racing League has had stops in Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR, but never here. NASCAR, the old stock-car circuit that’s become America’s fastest growing sports enterprise, has ignored our entire quadrant of the continent until now.

The track will only operate four days a year, turning the whole area into a temporary traffic hell. The rest of the time it’ll probably be available for other events (Wrestlemania, The Big Ol’ Used Car Sale, rock concerts, international rugby matches, swap meets, RV parking, performance art, etc.).

There are, of course, folk in the area who don’t want the thing. They want to preserve the area’s country lifestyle, as if it still had one.

And the notion of a NASCAR track in Puget Sound country represents almost a “perfect storm” of everything my conformist-nonconformist pals love to hate—suburbia, pro sports, automobiles, gasoline consumption, rednecks, crowds, noise, urban sprawl, corporate endorsements, straight white males, Southern accents, fast food containing meat ingredients, and (horrors above all possible horrors!) television.

So of course I want it.

From a land-use standpoint, it’d be better if the developers built on an already-paved site, such as that of Evergreen Speedway or some of Boeing’s surplus Renton/Kent land.

And I’ve few illusions about the supposed economic boost of such a facility. Race-goers will stop for food and/or gas on the way to and from the races, but they might not do so in or near Marysville.

But I want them to build it anyway. Anything to bring some excitement to the place.

And besides, city and suburb folk could use some contact with the oft-stereotyped “NASCAR dad” fans. They might learn we’re not really all that different. We all want a better life for ourselves and our kin. We’d all rather not die prematurely, whether due to a lack of world peace or to a lack of health insurance. We all like life, liberty, and happiness-pursuin’.

And a goodly number of us, of all political stripes, like to see stuff go fast.

The Seattle Storm hosted a WNBA basketball game at KeyArena Wednesday night.

Just steps away, the visual-arts portion of the Bumbershoot arts festival held its free preview shindig. The theme of the opening, and of one of the exhibits: “Girlie Fun Show.”

I mean no irony by mentioning this. Women are different from other women. Some get their kicks by shooting dunks, others by drinking shots. Some even like both activities, at different times.

And some just ilke to create intriguing art. Such as Jodi Rockwell, whose walk-in installation surrounds a giant ball of frozen beet juice, slowly dripping onto a salt-covered floor.

On the gents’ side, W. Scott Trimble’s got a series of coin-op machines. This one uses wooden pieces attached to a mechanism that might be compared to the wheel tracks of an army tank.

This is either a robotic mannequin created by Mr. Juniper Shuey or Mr. Shuey himself.

There are plenty of other visual treats to enjoy over the long weekend, including a Matthew Kangas-curated group exhibit on the theme of “Consumables,” a bunch of classic art photos from the files of Aperture magazine (including such famous creators as Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Sylvia Plachy, Imogen Cunningham, Chuck Close, and Ansel Adams), and street-cred group shows from Cut Kulture and the Bluebottle Gallery.

And the Girlie Fun Show exhibit itself is, well, fun. It’s femininity without guilt. Nobody’s vilifying anything. Any and all possible expressions of womanhood are welcomed within the room, though the more outrageous ones are preferred. There are stereoscopic nudes you watch on genuine View-Masters, and a video all about the eating of chocolate.

But for now, let’s return to the opening night festivities. There were “cigarette girls” selling small art-trinkets, and “flamingo girls” providing hospitality.

There was a double-dutch jump rope demonstration, and the enticing avant-jazz sounds of the Bethurum Collective.

The night’s star performers were the Vargas Girls, an all-singing, all-dancing troupe named in honor of longtime Esquire/Playboy pinup illustrator Alberto Vargas. Their moves and their banter were even tighter than their attire.

The art exhibits continue, with regular Bumbershoot admission, through Monday.

The original Olympic Games were performed naked. The current Athens incarnation of the event has come as close to that as the world’s more conservative broadcasters (i.e., NBC) would allow.

It seems as if Nike and Adidas decreed that all the players they outfitted for the Games, in any sport, would look more like beach volleyball players.

Even the track-and-field women this year are wearing midriff-bearing tops and dorsal-cleavage bottoms. Only the fencing, sailing, equestrian, baseball/softball, and indoor volleyball competitions still involve full attire, and they’re not getting much prime-time air in this country.

The guys are showing off more, too; especially in bicycling and weightlifting, not to mention swimming and diving. Where the men wear longer duds, they’re still tighter duds. Even the men’s basketball uniforms, at least from some countries, are significantly less baggy than the “long shorts” look of today’s NBA.

I happen to like half-naked women, and I don’t mind half-naked men. As I wrote about Seattle Storm player Lauren Jackson, who posed nude for an Australian art-photo mag to promote her appearance with the Aussie women’s basketball squad, athletic nudity represents a wholesome sexiness, a sexiness based on strength and achievement.

(By the way, just how did Australia become the new East Germany, winning medals far out of proportion to its scant population?)

Anyhoo, I’ve been watching with the sound turned to MUTE, switching between NBC, the various NBC-owned cable channels, and CBC. I’ve not followed any particular sports or athletes, but have enjoyed the whole spectacle of the thing. If I had cared about any one particular sport, NBC’s coverage would’ve disappointed me greatly.

The whole shtick about Olympics TV coverage in this country, ever since Roone Arledge formulated it for ABC in the ’60s, has been based on one big contradiction: Try to get the whole country interested in the Games, but assume your viewers don’t necessarily like sports and aren’t particularly interested in any of these esoteric competitions.

So, every four years (then, when the Winter and Summer games were biennially split, every two years), we got hours of human-interest profiles sandwiching minutes of athletic footage. When we were allowed to see the action (tape-delayed and selectively edited), what we saw almost always focused on US players, with the rest of the world pretty darned much ignored.

This time around, NBC seems to be finally starting to get it right, at least in its daytime and cable incarnations. The prime-time shows are still disjointed mish-moshes of whatever somebody’s decided will generate the hottest storylines that day. But the rest of it, scattered around the clock and the cable dial, we’ve gotten to see individual events more or less from start to end (though not in real time). Many of these events have even starred champions from other lands.

On the whole, though, I still prefer CBC’s barer-bones, more direct approach. Of course, CBC covers Olympic-component sports year round, unlike NBC, making its crews and its viewers more familiar with them.

(It’s a shame North American viewers are blocked from viewing the BBC’s streaming online video coverage.)