Here are 5 reasons:

5. Hockey is not popular. Living in Asia, the biggest sports around here are soccer (football), basketball and baseball.While I don’t have first hand experience of living in Japan, I hear its still a niche sport over there.

4. Its not cold enough. For obvious reasons, sports that require below freezing temperature are not very common at all.

3. Teams in the Japan Hockey League had absolutely horrible logos. I mean the the Kukudo Ice Hockey Team had an effing rabbit on their logo. I’m sure that says “Grr we are fearsome” in more ways than one. This was fixed (sorta) when the JHL became the Asia Hockey League.

2. Maybe the Japanese are too polite for hockey. I can’t really see the Japanese people doing this but who knows….

1. Japanese hockey player, own goal. He celebrates!

Japan’s Men’s National team are currently ranked 22^nd in the IIHF world standings. While it’s still quite a ways from the top, they are actually the highest ranked Asian team on that list. So where do they go from here? Building up interest in hockey is important. It generates fans (revenue) and also gets people into the game at younger ages (lots of young people playing the game means a bigger talent pool to draw from, etc).

On a related note, I happen to stumble onto Gravity’s (of Ragnarok Online fame) BodyCheck Online, a hockey MMORPG. Apparently you can level up and get better stats as well as get equipment upgrades and stuff too. WHERE DO I SIGN UP LOL.

Dasaku Podcast #01 (DVD bonus omake)

However, the world REALLY needs more Haruka.

I guess this is just one of those months where the list of things on my to-do list just seems to be getting longer and longer (and yes manga, I still remember your vectors that I have to finish).

So I thought to myself the other day, “man I haven’t been to bash.org in a while…” and wham!

*UPDATE*
I should have been more clear before, but here are the hosting details:
Bash is too big to be on a shared server.
We have a number of machines already, but are open to either colocating them or using a supplied machine.
Bandwidth is substantial but not ridiculous, remember we have no images, almost entirely text.
A trade or agreement can be made, but we try to:
A) keep the site free and clear of advertising clutter.
B) Not have substantial upkeep, as this is a hobby run by donated time and effort.

So, in effect, we offer some links to the host for their services, but no huge blocks of ads.
Thank you to everyone that has offered services thus far, there are too many to even respond to
and we genuinely appreciate the support from this great community.

———–
We’ll be back up in a few days.
Interested in hosting us? Drop a line to “qdb-info” – AT – bash.org.

orz

Moving on…
I’m at least glad Naruto is back onto main storyline stuff… now if they would stop showing these stupid clips from the movies as the OP.

And Kagamin for Saimoe 2008! (it’s a shame Kaguya lost though… but at least she went down fighting, which is more than what I can say about Kaaya and he humiliating 157 vote exit)

ps. I’ve fixed the rss feed thing so its using Dasaku’s feed burner combo feed. Thanks Hemi.