Stealers win....we all lose.

Nice Timing

I thought we might have reached the “nobody cares” threshold regarding Michael Phelps but recently the Olympic….err, umm, athlete who won something at the recent games in…uhh…that one country issued an apology for getting caught on film taking a bong hit.

Man, with his lung capacity you’d better hope he brought his own.

Look folks, Phelps is 23 and he’s spent a significant portion of his childhood competing at an Olympic level which means he hasn’t had a childhood. If you think Lindsay Lohan has had it rough, check out the schedule of a world class amateur athlete sometime. He’s allegedly a world record holder and he can get across open water faster than Jesus Christ so let’s cut him a little slack and let him chill. He deserves a break and a family-sized bag of Goldfish snack crackers. Unless this was all a publicity stunt on his part to get a little ink right before the Super Bowl…you know, kind of like Santonio Holmes telling the whole world he used to sell drugs. Sorry, but if Santonio wanted to be a humanitarian he would have made that revelation upon starting up an outreach program.

Super Sunday


I watched the Super Bowl in spite of a full two weeks of idle threats not to. Yes, it's because I'm bitter and jealous because the Cleveland Browns are a joke, but let's be honest Steeler Nation: most of you weren't old enough to remember when the Steelers won two thirds of their titles. I know this because of been to Pittsburgh and can attest to the fact that the average life expectancy there is 40. Seriously, if you see somebody who looks 60 it means that they're getting ready to graduate from trade school. Ok, enough Pittsbugh bashing. They've got a great organization because they have owners who aren't stupid. DO YOU HEAR ME RANDY LERNER????

I did manage to avoid too much of the hype by watching a reruns of House but I forgot that the FCC requires at least 40 full minutes of verbal masturbation before every deciding championship game and I caught part of Faith Twain singing the official national anthem of WalMart shoppers and conservative Christians who burn books during the work week. God Bless America? Please, has anybody noticed how our “anthems” are simply reworded versions of English songs? I guess it was good in the sense that it reminded me why I hate country music. You know it’s bad if it can make the beauty pageant rejects they sign to Nashville record contracts seem unattractive. I used the remaining 3 minutes to round up some snacks.

Unfortunately I returned in time to be subjected to a really lousy arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner which was screamed at me by a chunky Jennifer Hudson. It opened like a Disney movie and turned into a Tim Burton joint. J-Hud, as the homies like to call her, seems to be on the Aretha Franklin diet program. Yeah, go ahead and call her curvy but when they have to reserve two seats for her at next year’s American Music Awards I’ll be sure to tell you I told you so. The girl can sing, but she didn’t do it on Super Bowl Sunday. I think she ate some of my guacamole instead. Right through the TV. That’s how bad she sucked.

The game proved to be pretty good although the officials seemed to have it in for the Cardinals all night long. They avoided ringing Pittsburgh up with penalties until the Steelers started snatching purses from women in the stands late in the game. The Cardinals managed to make a game of it in spite of tallying up more yards in penalties than the Cincinnati Bengals amassed all year. Still, you wonder if Deshea Townshend gets nailed for holding when he grabbed and dragged Kurt Warner out of bounds on Harrison’s 100 yard interception return for a TD, would the game have been the same?

Probably, especially considering that the Cardinals didn’t seem interested in playing unless they were behind. Once the Cardinals picked up the lead they quit and that’s why the Steelers marched right down the field and scored the winning TD with half a minute to play. I didn’t like a few of the calls that went Pittsburgh’s way but after everything was said and done the Cardinals laid an egg. Witty, no?

Then Ken Whiz-in-hut, the first Native American coach to advance to the Super Bowl, topped the whole thing off with the dumbest quote ever: we scored too quickly.

This is a popular thing for coaches to say when they battle back to take the lead only to have their opponent march right back and win in the final seconds. It’s like an excuse but it’s stupid because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SCORING TOO QUICKLY!!! That’s true during the regular season, it’s true on prom night and it’s definitely true in the Super Bowl. You score when you can. Too quickly, indeed.

Yeah, stupid Larry Fitzgerald had to go and ruin the whole game by scoring from 64 yards out because as we all know the NFL doesn’t allow a team to play defense if they are ahead with less then five minutes left. Shut up Ken. You play to win the game and you win the game by scoring more points than your opponent. If you try to get cute and burn up the clock you just might burn up your chances to win…especially against a defense like Pittsburgh’s. Tell it like it is: you thought the game was in the bag and you stopped playing to win. That's what happened. Idiot. That's why the Cardinals were 9-7...the coach doesn't know how to put things away.

You lost because whatever you were doing on defense to shut the Steelers down all game long either stopped working and you failed to adjust, or you stopped doing it and let the Steelers win. Either way that loss is 100% on the coaching staff and the handful of defensive players who decided that Santonio Holmes had cooties. The guy’s a good athlete but the Cardinals made him look like Barry Sanders out there. It’s too bad because right up until that final drive the Cardinals’ defense was outstanding. But the game is 60 minutes long...unless you're at home, where it lasts forever. I guess in the span of the four hours and change from opening kick to final gun it's easy to lose track of two or three minutes of game time. I managed to lose at least a third of a bag of corn chips in the cushion of my couch...unless Hudson got them.

In spite of it all the game was the most entertaining part of the whole affair…unless you count the one hour episode of The Office that followed. The commercials were dull, probably because all of the companies with a sense of humor are out of business right now, and the halftime show was tired and old, much like that wrinkled old guy who was screaming into the microphone the whole time.

(As an aside, why is Danica Patrick still doing Go Daddy commercials? She's not nearly as attractive as we once thought and she's a mediocre race car driver. At least Anna Kournikova made up for her lack of skill be being legitimately hot and Maria Sharipova is both hot and talented. Mostly hot, which is the most important thing if you're doing commercials. The only attraction to Danica Patrick is that she's surly, but so far it's all bark and no bite. Until she throws down I really don't need to see her. )

Of course the worst performance on the microphone had to be Al Michaels. There was a time when he was one of the best broadcasters in the business but for some reason he was tough to take last night. He seemed too excitable and kept repeating the same 2 big words he memorized before the game. I don't think that word means what you think it means. Maybe John Madden ate his thesaurus before the game.

I’m not saying Michaels is stupid, but everything seemed forced last night. Ben Roethlisberger, on the other hand, seems stupid. Every time I hear that guy talk he sounds a little dumber. He might be a heck of a football player but when he talks I think my brain starts to smooth over. Maybe it’s Pittsburgh. It seems to me just about everybody who has ever played the QB position in Pittsburgh ends up sounding like a rube.

The good news is that he’ll have a future after he retires because the “analysts” the networks to hire don’t seem to exude much in the way of brain power. Fox has already turned the pre and post game shows into frat parties for old guys who hawk Levitra in their spare time and CBS isn’t upping the ante with their lineup.