Oh Canada...

Sunday afternoon was the day of the well-hyped Hertiage Classic, the second outdoor NHL game played in Canada between the Calgary fLames (like what I did there?) and the Canadiens du Montreal (the Montreal Canadiens to the rest of us).  The game was so well-hyped that Tim Horton's even did a Heritage Classic donut. 

Seriously people - a donut?  That's the equivalent to... well, it's like the highest honor in Canada.

I went.  Not because I am a fan of either team that was playing, but because I wanted to see a game played outdoors at a football stadium with 42,000 other people (yeah - this is Canada... we can't fit 90,000 in football stadiums up here), and I'm a hockey fan.

The atmosphere itself was great.  But it was cold.  Like glass-cutting nipplitis cold. 

But by god (and this totally wrecked my day)...

Paul Brandt only sung the Canadian national anthem in English.

Oh. My. God.

You see - the Canadiens are now bitching (or whatever bitching is in French) that we didn't sing a bilingual anthem.  Really?

Really?  Seriously?

You're pissed off that we didn't sing the anthem half in French for this game, yet you don't seem to throw your arms up in the air when the anthem singers don't normally sing the anthem half in French at an indoor game, or against any other team in Canada playing in their own arena.

(We won't even go into the fact, that during the part of the anthem when it normally switches over to French, my brain actually switches to "French" as well, but in my head it sounds more like Kermit the Frog and he goes "tante tante blah" to the same tune as the English words.  My French teachers in high school would be so proud)

If the game was in frog-land (I mean Montreal), I'd expect a bilingual anthem...

But I was far more perplexed when they sung the American anthem at a game between two Canadian teams than I was that an Alberta-born country singer didn't throw out half the anthem in French.

Blah (that's French for "find something more useful to bitch about you damn Frenchmen").