Sharkboy won us tickets to last night’s Raptors game against Cleveland. Not having ever been to a major sporting event in Toronto, EVER, I thought it would be fun to go and check it out.<\/p>\n

It helped that the seats were in his company’s executive box. Weep for me, dear readers, the box was NOT catered last night, but we did have an attendant who wanted to take our coats and go get us stuff. We’re not too use to being doted on so we opted to touch elbows with the commoners at Pizza Pizza in the lower levels. After paying $45 for two beers (regular can sized), two bags of popcorn and a diet coke for the second half, we settled in for some hoops.<\/p>\n

I knew they played funky music at time outs and did little things to keep the energy up during the game like a 4-beat rising crescendo of music sound byte when the ball entered the Rapt’s end of the court, but I kept on wondering when sporting events started to pander to the public’s attention deficit disorder. I found the band of digital ads at bleacher’s height to be rather annoying and detracting from the game, especially when switching from a dark to light ad. From where we were sitting the Jumbotron was on the same level as the band of ads, and lighter ads hurt my eyes. I was forced to look down at the live <\/em>action!<\/p>\n

I kept on thinking of Rollerball<\/em> – the 70’s version, not the hideous remake – and Romans cheering on their favorite gladiators as names of players were hollered over the loudspeakers. Stadiums and the shared collective experience, fascinate me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sharkboy won us tickets to last night’s Raptors game against Cleveland. Not having ever been to a major sporting event in Toronto, EVER, I thought it would be fun to go and check it out. It helped that the seats were in his company’s executive box. Weep for me, dear readers, the box was NOT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WjY-ic","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}