The "Totally Toronto!" station is giving hourly updates that Toronto Maple Leafs general manager John Ferguson hasn't been fired yet.

From the Onion:

Perfectly Marketed TV Show Somehow Fails

NEW YORK—Executives found it "inconceivable" that a television program supported by 1.25 million promotional coffee-cup sleeves could perform so poorly.

Saskatchewan and Winnipeg have both figured in some of my most nightmarish Grey Cup memories.

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Your once-in-a-generation Grey Cup win has been delivered!

The Saskatchewan Roughriders won Grey Cups in 1966, 1989 and ... just now. :)

They beat the Winnipeg Blue bombers 23-19 (CFL quarterback-turned-TSN analyst Danny McManus predicted the score, but got the result wrong).

I said two weeks ago I would cheer for the 'Riders in the playoffs, closing the post with, "May the team with the best fans win!" As it happened, the team with the second-best fans lost.

One thing you can say about 'Riders fans is they have supported the team through every crest and trough of the sometimes stormy seas that flatlands franchise has sailed. I don't know how many Toronto Argonauts fans drive round trips of eight hours or more from the Ontario equivalents of places like Leader and Prince Albert to catch a game. However, I'm willing to make the following guess: Not many.*

* About 1,000 people came out to Regina's airport at 1:30 a.m. to welcome the team back after it beat B.C. in the Western final on Nov. 18. That would be equivalent to almost 13,000 Torontonians showing up to welcome the Argos. Eric Tillman, the 'Riders GM, said recently that about two dozen fans showed up when the Argos returned after winning the 2004 Grey Cup.

I heard one story about a guy flying to T.O. from Vietnam to be there for the 'Riders Cup appearance. One of my old friends from my Saskatchewan days came up from Charlotte, N.C.

I genuinely hope the 'Riders fans enjoy the party tonight and in the coming days.

But mostly, I hope my beloved Edmonton Eskimos climb out of the toilet and start winning again, so the natural order of the universe can be restored.

However, methinks 'Riders fans should make plans to attend the 2020 Grey Cup. I got a feeling about that one ...

You might also want to see Grey Cup traumas past.

The decline and fall of a uniquely American pursuit can be attributed to a number of factors - The Internet, the rise of poker, expensive gas and larceny.

From the NYT commentary by L. Jon Wertheim, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated:

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On a trip to Russia in 1989, I was on my way to a Russian journalist's office in downtown Moscow for a chat.

I was using Moscow's subway to get there. At some point, I became lost. Totally, completely and utterly lost.

The subway map, was, unhelpfully, in Cyrillic text (damn those Russians).

I didn't know where I was, where I was going, or how to get back to where I started.

Standing in front of the map on the subway car and frustrated as hell, I blurted out a "FUCK!!" and gave the map one hard shot with the bottom of my clenched left hand.

This had the phlegmatic Muscovites on the car looking at me out of the corner of their eyes.

One man approached me. "Vat is problem?" he asked warily, in Russian-accented English.

I told him. He showed me where I was, where I had to go for my appointment and how to get there.

Problem solved, stress evaporated, tantrum gone! :)

As a police reporter in Fort McMurray, Alta. in the late 1980s, I got to know the local constabulatory reasonably well. One cop in particular struck me as a decent guy in low-stress situations, but this sentence from him summed up his problem in high-stress ones: "It's a war out there, and you can't lose."

This guy laid a disproportionate number of charges such as obstruction or assaulting a police officer when compared to his peers. I suspect his them-or-me attitude made his job more difficult than it had to be.

While most police officers are decent people doing an exceedingly difficult job, and there are mercifully few genuine creeps in the mix, I think a big part of the problem when conflicts erupt are the scaredy-cat cops.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders have earned themselves a trip to The Big Smoke to play in the Grey Cup next Sunday, knocking off the B.C. Lions at B.C. Place in Vancouver by a 26-17 margin.

This was not an outcome I predicted. That's not a knock on the 'Riders, who are a beat-up club these days.

But they weren't the team that coughed up the football five times. And while they won ugly, the 'Riders were the better team today and deserve the title of Western conference champions.

The 'Riders will face the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, who toppled the hometown Toronto Argonauts in the Eastern conference championship 19-10.

You know, the 'Riders won their last championship in 1989 in (wait for it) ... Toronto!

Addendum

By the time I got back downtown, it was pushing 6 p.m. When I got to my subway stop, I popped into a nearby watering hole to catch up on the game.

Any TV set that had football on it was tuned to some anonymous NFL game.

I suspect that almost any other bar I went to would have similarly ignored a Western conference CFL final.

People in this town largely don't give a shit about the CFL. It's too bad the Grey Cup is being played here.

While walking home, some guy was out with his Yorkie, which wasn't much bigger than my foot.

The guy was stooping and scooping, as all dog owners should, but he could get by the scooping part with a single fallen maple leaf, rather than using a plastic bag or, for the really big dogs, something even heftier.

Small dogs, small poop. One of the most immutable laws of nature.

I get on the TTC subway at Kennedy. There's a guy exiting one car's set of doors. His outfit and demeanour screams drunk, mentally ill, homeless guy (in comparison, my outfit and demeanour merely whispers drunk, mentally ill, homeless guy).

I enter the car, and somebody had obviously pissed all over a seat.

The stench was horrible.

I moved to another car, but amazingly, somebody went and sat pretty much in the Hot Zone.

His nostrils must be much more clogged than mine.