Feed Dump 225 - A Rich Head Canon

[Kathleen]

There are good times, and bad times, to call the police. Here are examples of both.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnTlorgJ4sY

[GSC]

That was a fine episode, but please let's avoid unnecessary, sequence-breaking abbreviations in video titles. They look bad in playlists and cause issues with searches.

[mikeyjh]

Thanks for the episode.

That was fun and funny and entertaining.

[Lord Chrusher]

I have gotten out of jury duty by going to a wedding in Las Vegas and by moving to Australia for grad school.


Does anyone in Canada outside of Toronto care about the Blue Jays? Is this a case of Toronto thinking that they are Canada and what excites them, excites Canada?

[mtvcdm]

Google Trends is actually showing a big Canada-wide uptick in searches for 'Blue Jays' (the territories and Expos-loyal Quebec aside), so there is clearly some nationwide fandom going on. US searches pale in comparison, with the exception of the Kansas City area, home of the Royals, who had been chasing (and eventually beat) the Blue Jays for best record in the American League.

[Master Gunner]

Looking at the "Regional Interest" column though, you see Ontario being the biggest source of interest, followed by PEI (which could be explained by one guy searching for it while bored), and then interest drops off rather sharply in other areas of Canada (with BC, where LRR is, second from the bottom).

[AdmiralMemo]

MOAR GRAM DUMPS!!!

[mtvcdm]

That's just comparing Canada to Canada... and I shortened the timeline there to just the past 90 days. Take it out to the past year. Interest jacked through the roof around early August, when the Blue Jays rattled off an 11-game winning streak, during which they took the lead in their division.

Americans would absolutely be searching for them, along with anyone else in contention. And you can run a control by looking for the search terms of the other contenders, for all of which you'll see the numbers basically reversed: US searching much more heavily than Canada.

I will allow there is something to be said for regionalism, though; for any team you look for, interest is highest where the team is; for the Blue Jays, interest is highest in the east- Ontario and the Maritimes. (Again, Quebec never quite let the Expos go, and they never adopted the Blue Jays after the Expos decamped to Washington. Ask Seattle about the Supersonics sometime; same story.) But look at any province, even BC, and any of them dwarf the US.

[Master Gunner]

Quebec will never adopt any sporting franchise (or admit to adopting anything else) from Ontario, that's just the way it is.

Overall, comparing the trends from the baseball season this year to the same time period last year (April - October), there actually hasn't being that much change in relative interest (though the timing of overall interest is basically reversed).

So yes, it looks like Canadians outside of Toronto are taking notice of their recent winning streak - but proportionally they don't care any more than usual. Overall, while interest outside of Ontario is increasing at roughly the same rate as interest inside of Ontario, the bulk of Canada (outside of some bored Islanders) don't care about the Jays and never have.

On a tangential note, I checked the trends for the Toronto Raptors, and yeah, we care about them even less.