Jon Marthaler bakes up a batch of delicious links just for you. Other times, you can find him here and here. Jon?

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As always: Happy Saturday! Here's hoping you have your seasonal shopping done already, or you will have to fight your way through the Christmas hordes that are currently massing around every retail establishment in the area. It's a day for panicky gift purchases for the impossible-to-buy-for. Here's a fact I just made up: 82% of all calendars given as gifts are purchased on the Saturday before Christmas. It's science*. (*Note: not science.)

Anyway, on with the links:

*Getting in to the end-of-decade spirit, Sports Media Watch put together a definitive list of the ten worst sports TV shows of the decade. I strongly agree with these rankings, especially #1, which we will speak no more of except to say that it pretty much ruined television.

*I'm sure going to miss Peter Gammons. Goodbye, sir. At least we'll still be able to fall back on... John Kruk and Steve Phillips? NOOOO!

*Via Western College Hockey, some interesting numbers from Behind the Net: it would seem that the top junior hockey league in America, the USHL, is producing NHL players at about the same clip as Canadian juniors (on a per-team basis). That speaks well for the growth of junior hockey in this country - though I'm not sure if any conclusions about college hockey (the more important junior form, in this part of the country) can be drawn.

*The Daily Gopher has graphed out the numbers for the past decade of Gopher football. I'd tell you more, but I had to avert my eyes almost immediately AAAGH BLINDING PAIN.

That's it for me - and if you didn't find what you were looking for here, roughkat helpfully pointed out a (somewhat foulmouthed) treatise on why Canadian money is useless. (I'm not sure, but I think it may have been written by Gary Bettman.)