A now a word from our sponsors

With "Black Friday" on the horizon, which kicks off the holiday shopping season, we wanted to take a moment to mention the shopping opportunities we have chosen for this blog.

First, is the Third String Goalie Online Shop, where you can purchase all manner of goods -clothing, carry bags, home office items and mugs - which feature our patron saint Georges Vezina's confident image.

The next item of note is the Third String Goalie Online Book Store. We have created our own storefront inside of Amazon.com which has several departments within it. Readers of this blog will certainly enjoy many of the hockey books on our front page, as well as the "TSG Recommendations", which are books we personally own, enjoy and endorse. There is also a section of DVD's, video games and jerseys and apparel to be found inside our store.

Staying in the Amazon family, we have a search box for Amazon.com's bookstore, where we update the search parameters frequently to reflect that day's topic. You can also enter any topic you'd like, hockey or not, to see if there are any items of interest to you.

Below the Amazon search box, we have the first two of three Third String Goalie Marketplace sections, which link you to a number of online retailers, most of which we have personally done business with, and the rest chosen because they deal in products we feel are relevant to you, our readers. We have made every attempt to freshen these sections with new artwork and new links, so if it's been some time since you have clicked on those ads, please take a moment to see what they have to offer.

The third marketplace section, lower down below our favorite blogs and links, is dedicated to the Canadian clothing company Roots, who have outfitted not only Canada's Olympic athletes, but the United States Olympic Team as well. Rather than a single link to the Roots homepage, we have created direct links to the most relevant products they have to offer the hockey fan.

Finally, in case you ever venture all the way down to the bottom of our front page, hopefully to take a look at our infinitely fascinating Third String Goalie World Map of locations of the jerseys we have written about, there are some additional banner ads for the same fine folks who populate our Marketplace sections.
None of these are paid ads, but "affiliate programs", where we earn a commission on any purchases you might make, and we do not get paid per click, such as with a program like Google AdSense, which we removed from this web site due to content we could not control, as it often posted links to sellers of illegal Chinese knockoff jerseys and other various irrelevant websites, such as the one for women's thongs, which we could never understand how it related to "hockey jerseys".
Our apologies for being so commercial today, but blogging is a labor of love and we just wanted to point out the various modules and sections down the right side of the page, the differences in what they have to offer and relate how they have all been chosen with you, our readers, in mind in hopes that you might find something of interest to you and that someday, perhaps, all our efforts on this blog might amount to a free tank of gas now and then!
Speaking of hockey and shopping...
Here is a 70 year old grandma winning a $10,000 shopping spree in a between periods "shoot the puck from the far blueline through the microscopic hole" contest. We love her reaction.

Next, members of the Blackhawks are asked if they ever shop for their own stuff on ebay.

Finally, only in Canada, a hockey rink at the shopping mall. Actually, we take that "only in Canada" part back, because the St. Louis Blues also practice at a rink located in a shopping mall.