Raise your hand if you saw this one coming after Sweetie took me to see Avatar Thursday. This week's Hunk is:
Sam Worthington.
You don't know him without: I don't know. It's hard to say you know Sam Worthington if you saw "him" in Avatar since for most of Avatar he's a blue cat guy with a ponytail that plugs into things and that is not exactly how he looks in real life.
Not exactly.
But I don't know what else anyone would have seen him in. He was in Terminator: Salvation, but I never saw that, and if I haven't seen it, it can't be very good, right? Or popular? (That's the theory, anyway.)
So I'm not sure how you'd know Sam Worthington, who can probably walk around anywhere he wants and not get recognized because most people think he's a 9-foot-tall Cat Person, and I'm pretty sure he's not.
Also, Sam Worthington is kind of bland-looking. He's got the kind of looks that would make you not realize that you know him when you run into him a second-time. The kind of guy who you'd say "Oh, hey, hi, we haven't met" and introduce yourself, and he'd say "We have met, actually, last week." And you'd say "Oh, yeah, right, how've you been," but you wouldn't mean it, at all, you wouldn't actually remember him, a point that would be made right then when he said, in response to your question about how he's been, "I have a fatal brain cloud, remember? God, why would you ask that?" and he'd burst into tears, while you were still shaking his hand, and then you wouldn't know whether you should stop shaking his hand, or maybe grip it comfortingly, or turn to the guy to your left and make a comment about the weather.
You can see why I do not make friends easily.
Also, if Sam Worthington did introduce himself that way, I bet even I would remember him the next time. He should do that even if he doesn't have a fatal brain cloud.
(Sam, if you do have a fatal brain cloud, then I apologize for making light of that fact.)
(Or anyone reading this, who might have a fatal brain cloud. I'm sorry for your plight. I didn't know.)
(Wouldn't it be incredible if Sam Worthington read this? I bet he does. Say Hi to Sweetie in the comments, Sam!)
[Spoiler Alert!] As it turns out, it would not be so incredible if he read this... read on.
I ended up, I think, on "you'd know Sam if you have the uncanny ability to somehow picture someone as a 9-foot-tall blue cat, but otherwise, you wouldn't know him at all." Let's move on to
Things That Make You Go Hmmm About Him: How about this? I think he's kind of a pretentious dink.
Remember that I don't research these in advance; Sweetie tells me who the hunk is and I dive in and start writing. So when I got to this point, I tried to find out something interesting about Sam Worthington, and in that quest, I just read this whole article about him. The article left me with the impression that Sam Worthington isn't worth spitting on -- not even if he's lying below your face, and not even if you really, really have to spit. Like, say, you were eating Skittles and now you have Skittle-mouth and feel all gummy and need to spit, and Sam Worthington has fallen just below you. Even then I wouldn't waste the effort. That's the kind of impression I got from one interview with Sam Worthington.
I started reading the article because I got a link there in which it said that Sam Worthington, just before he was cast in Avatar was about to go on walkabout-- apparently people do that, or say they're going to do it, and some people are serious about doing that even though anything that's been done by Paul Hogan in a movie can't be taken seriously in real life -- Sam was going to go on walkabout with his clothes and a duffel bag full of books. I read the article hoping to find out what books he was going to take.
And I left with the impression that the books would be something like The Complete Idiot's Guide To How To Be A Jerk-Off, or maybe "I'm An A-Hole, What Of It?" You read that article, and that's the impression you get.
Sam says, at the start of the article: "Oh, isn't it cool? It's so cool being an actor! It's so cool having my face on a bus. That's bullshit. I hate people like that." But later on, he says he'd name his kid "Avatar" if it helps sell the movie. So, you're a jerk if you think having your face on a bus is cool, but you're an upstanding guy if you'd sell out your kid for commercial success? Got it.
"But I wouldn't glue my kid to the side of the bus. I have standards."
Sam also said, about some role or other:
"Hopefully I'm bringing more complexity to it than Jean-Claude Van Damme does. No offense to the dude." Yes. You want to see good acting? Watch Avatar, and wait for the scene where a completely-CGI-created "Sam Worthington" bites into a completely CGI-created "interplanetary fruit" and says how good it is. That is complex acting. I totally believed that his fake 9-foot-tall-cat-creature found that fake fruit delicious. It was way more complex then when Ms. Pac Man would eat the cherries and then turn the ghosts blue and eat them, too.
Sam is also known for his on-set BS: He caused so much trouble on one show that he shut it down. Sam thinks that's great, because his concern was to "elevate" matters. I'm sure his fellow actors, as well as the crew of that show, felt elevated as they waited for unemployment checks. Fellow actors call him a shouter, and Worthington describes that as his professionalism. He's proud of his professionalism, describing how he's never been afraid to throw a tantrum rather than do a scene he disagrees with.
"Professionalism," in Worthington's world, is synonymous with throw a tantrum. Which makes my 3-year-olds incredibly professional.
And which makes Sam Worthington a loser.
(So, Sam, I'd just as soon you didn't comment here.) Reason I Assumed Sweetie Liked Him:We can scratch personality off that list, right? That's one reason why I hate reading about actors. You get this image of an actor or actress, based on their character, and you think you like them, but what do you know, right? You're just assuming that Harrison Ford is like Indiana Jones, only then you see him on David Letterman and he's not, he's a weird, dumb guy. Or you think Jennifer Aniston is like Rachel, and she's actually a vapid chain-smoking tanaholic. Producers and directors should never let actors out in public. They should require, as part of their contract, that actors and actresses not talk, and not be interviewed, and not make retarded comments about their professionalism and how the process works and how intellectual they are.
It's acting. It's exactly what Mr Bunches does when he pretends that he's Wall-E and runs around his bed buzzing and beeping, and then falls down. That's your "process." Get over yourself.
I had this idea, after Avatar, that Sam Worthington might be okay, only he's an ass who's full of himself. So I'd have been better off if Sweetie hadn't named him hunk of the week, or if, instead of reading about him, I'd have just tried to find a clip of him in a barbershop quartet on Youtube or something.
But the damage is done. Schrodinger's Cat never comes back to life, and Sam Worthington is dead to me. So I'm just going to say who cares why Sweetie liked him?
Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: "He's got a cute baby-face."
Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: Picture that baby face saying these actual Sam Worthington quotes:
"I'm still yelling and screaming and don’t know what the fuck I'm doing, but at least I'm now standing up for myself a bit more.”"It was some shit, fucking bullshit, that. It was the most drunkest movie I've ever done in my life.""But I don't ever feel that there's a pressure of a suit going, 'If this fucks up, it's because of you,' because I'll go, 'You hired me, dickhead!'"
And I'm so sick of Sam Worthington, I'm going to take a drastic step and reveal that he's an android sent to kill John Connor in Terminator: Salvation.
I never wanted to see the movie, anyway.
Thanks, Sam Jerkface Worthington-- you made me violated my [SPOILER ALERT!] oath -- one of only two vows in my life I'd ever taken seriously.
(Yes, Sweetie, the other one was our marriage vows.)
Sweetie will likely never need maternity clothes again -- the Babies! have pretty much permanently scared us out of parenting -- which makes it kind of a shame that I only after-the-fact heard about Kiki's Fashions.
Kiki's Fashions offers actually cool, actually good-looking maternity clothes. That's a welcome change of pace, I'm sure, from the sweatpants, muu muus, and borrowing-hubby's-t-shirts that most pregnant women have to resort to in order to get through a pregnancy without also getting an indecent exposure ticket.
When Sweetie was pregnant with the Babies!, she had a lot of trouble finding anything that not only fit but looked nice -- and if we'd known about Kiki's Fashions, she wouldn't have had to worry. Dresses, tops, bottoms, whatever women wear to look nice, Kiki's probably sells it for pregnant woment, giving you a chance to be the most stylish-mommy-to-be on the block. Or any block.
If you're in the market for chic maternity wear -- for yourself or as a gift -- head over to Kiki's Fashions (kikisfashions.com) and check out what they've got. Tell them you know me and get a discount... seriously: when you check out, use coupon code "blogfriends" and you'll get a 20% discount.
I've had a kind of sore throat all week. It hasn't stopped me from talking, in the least, but it did make me google "sore throat" as a symptom, upon which I learned that a sore throat is a symptom of malaria. So I'm pretty sure I have malaria. Despite that, I at least have 3 Good Things from yesterday to help me recover:
1. An early Valentine's Day present from Sweetie: No, not that, you perverts. Sweetie took me to see Avatar, in 3-D. We went on a Thursday night specifically because we had some coupons for a half-price movie on Thursdays -- but once we got there, we found out that the coupon doesn't work for Avatar. So Sweetie paid full price for the movie -- part of why she's so great -- but she saved money anyway, as I opted to skip the popcorn due to my malaria-induced (probably) sore throat.
My quick review: The movie's great, the 3D's not as good as the 3D was for Final Destination 4: The Final Final Destination, and the glasses kind of hurt my nose. But the movie was great, really, and I kind of got goose bumps during Sam Worthington's big speech. (The only thing missing from the movie was a scene where the band plays bravely as the ship goes down. I still get misty-eyed about that. And the part where the old man and lady hugged each other while the water rose around them.)
2. I win, Mr. Trainer Guy At The Club Who Ignores Wedding Rings. Sweetie yesterday revealed to me that Wednesday night, while I sat home being a dutiful husband and doting father, she was getting hit on by a trainer at the health club - -a guy who'd offered, before, to "train her" for free, and who on Wednesday asked her out for drinks, despite knowing that she's married.
Well, Mr. Trainer Guy: She went home with me last night! Take that! You may have muscles, and the ability to put your pants on in the morning without breaking a sweat -- but I've got Sweetie.
3. I still had hot water for my shower. As a dutiful husband and doting father, I somehow missed, on Wednesday night, the fact that Mr F had gotten into the furnace room, thrown a brick into the cats' litter box, and turned off the hot water heater. In my defense, I was distracted from "actually supervising" Mr F because I was watching videos on Youtube with Mr Bunches.
Sweetie discovered the lack of hot water yesterday morning, and we restarted the hot water heater. Sweetie had to take a cold shower, but I put mine off long enough to get a nice steamy shower.
In the spirit of Ezra Pound's Metro Station (which would make a good TV show, right?) come two poems today which deal with a similar experience: Thoughts in a 'bus shelter at Ruddington by Barbara Buttery
I'm a poet of little fame. (You, surely, know my name!) I've written quite a lot of verse Which people tell me could be worse At least, that's what I claim!
Thoughts whilst travelling on a 'bus in Clifton at 3.30pm by Barbara Buttery
What's happened to Farnborough? It's not the school I knew Then the pupils all wore brown Now they're dressed in blue
Barbara Buttery calls herself The Bard of Sneinton, a town name I suspected came from Dr. Seuss. But I looked into it, and it turns out that Sneinton is a suburb of Nottingham, and, like everything does, it has its own website. And it also has a windmill of some sort that shows up in pretty much every article you read about Sneinton:
Update: You know what I just noticed, after posting this? English people put an apostrophe in front of bus. Like this: 'bus. I like it -- it makes the bus seem jaunty. But why is that, English people? Something to do with King George? It always comes back to him, doesn't it? That and crumpets.
I don't think about cell phone covers all that much in a given day, but that's because I'm an old dinosaur who views his cell phone as either a necessary evil or an incredible annoyance.
Or as the thing that falls out of my pocket when I'm sitting at my desk, and then I accidentally run it over with my desk chair, resulting in it no longer working anymore.
But the kids these days - -they do go nuts over things like cell phone covers, accessorizing their phones the way earlier generations dressed up their Trapper Keepers, or the way Paris Hilton treats boyfriends/chihuahuas.
Which gives me, as a parent, a golden opportunity to do two things: (1) lecture kids on how, when I was their age, we didn't go around making our cell phones look all fancy-schmancy, and you know why? Because we didn't have cell phones, that's why! We had the Atari 2600, and it wasn't even called that, it was just the Atari, and you mostly played Combat on it and I was pretty good at that game.
And (2), I get to give the kids cell phone covers as presents, and get extra-credit on birthdays and things like that -- giving the cell phone covers as an added little gift to the kids, like a stocking-stuffer, only better, because, like I said, not only do they like it, but it also gives me a chance to lecture.
And another thing! We had Pitfall!, and it was pretty fun, too, even though it was kind of repetitive.
Life is what happens when you're not working. -- Me. Jobs v. Life is an ongoing attempt to explore my life through the jobs I've had. Read it from the beginning here.
It seemed so harmless when I began forging newspaper subscriptions. Who would ever find out? I wondered, as I came up with the plan that would have, today, landed me in some sort of juvenile detention facility (Wales, we called it as kids, the Home for Boys located in Wales, Wisconsin), but which back then simply got me a disappointed look from the Milwaukee Journal circulation manager.
Life as a paperboy was largely routine: Every day, the papers would be dropped off by Mr. Ferris, every day I'd sub my share, inserting one section into another, and every day I'd ride around and deliver the papers. Once a week I'd go collect, asking people to pay me for the papers I'd delivered, a process that always seemed awkward -- and still does today, when I have to remind clients to pay me for the legal work I've done for them. There's always a slight sheepishness to my requests, a feeling that I'm not actually owed the money, that I have to ask them to pay me and hope they do, and I've had that feeling forever, at least since I did the collecting on my paper route and felt sheepish, then, about asking people to pay for the papers they'd been reading all week.
It would have been simpler, then, to get people to pay for the newspapers up front, and that is what we now do, in fact -- our subscription to the comically-tiny Wisconsin State Journal is paid for six months in advance, and my Kindle subscription to the New Yorker is deducted automatically, in advance, each month. Back then, it never occurred to me that I could do that -- that I could charge up front, go there on Friday and say If you don't pay me, no paper starting tomorrow. The world was different back then, and most people paid; only a few didn't pay regularly and those few were the losers of the world, the kind of men who answered the door with no shirt on, having obviously not showered, or people who came to the door with a beer in their hand and a baseball hat on. Back then, grown-ups -- the ones society valued, anyway -- didn't wear baseball hats regularly, and they did pay their bills on time.
Even if it had occurred to me to charge up front, or in advance, I doubt I would have done so, for the same reason I feel embarrassed now to bring up money; I'm one of those people who feels as though they maybe shouldn't be paid.
Don't get me wrong: I think I do really valuable work as a lawyer -- as valuable work as any lawyer can do, given that lawyers, as a class, add nothing of value to society and exist only because we exist; if you eliminated "lawyer" as a job beginning right this instant, society as a whole would not change in any great degree -- but regardless of the value of my work, there is always something in my head that feels as though I shouldn't have to ask to be paid, and that by asking I'm exceeding my boundaries, I'm doing something wrong, which in turn makes me uncomfortable talking about money with clients and customers, and in turn makes me try not to do that.
As a lawyer, I don't have the opportunity to ask for all the money up front -- that is, I could, when you hire me, tell you you need to give me $10,000, right now, but most people can't do that and in the back of my head, I think that if I insist on such a thing, insist on getting paid in advance, nobody will ever hire me and I'll have to find real work.
As a paperboy, I had the opportunity to ask for money up front but that same feeling, the resistance in my character and mind to asking for money kept me from, at the time, even thinking about doing so. It was awkward enough to ask the beer-holding, shirtless, baseball cap wearing deadbeats to pay me for the papers I'd already delivered. I wouldn't have been able to imagine asking them to pay me for papers yet to come.
That was all part of the routine, though: subbing, delivering, collecting. That routine existed every day, 365 days a year, with no real variation. Here and there someone cancelled or moved. Here and there someone started a new subscription. But my paper route was essentially the same for the years I held it.
Three times a year, though, there was an alteration in the routine, a new set of tasks to do. Once a year, paper boys back then delivered calendars to their customers at Christmas; and twice a year the paper had a subscription drive.
The calendars were delivered by paper boys in hopes of getting a Christmas tip. That was the only reason we ever took them. We'd tell the Milwaukee Journal how many we wanted, and then, a week or two before Christmas, we'd go around, at night, after dinner, and deliver the calendars. Delivering the calendars meant taking them right up to the person's door, trudging through the dark and cold and wet and snow up to unfamiliar houses with unfamiliar smells and weird decorations and unusual furniture -- all furniture was unusual when it was in the Mueller's house -- and ringing the bell, and waiting.
Someone would come to the door -- usually the housewife -- and say "Yes?" This was the first awkward part of the delivery, a delivery that hadn't been made since a year ago: Most of the people didn't know me, particularly. They saw me if I collected, but more often they saw my older brother who did the collections for a couple years, and other than that they never interacted with me, anyway. Collections were done during the day, usually on Friday, and yet here I was, in the dark, and bundled up in a winter coat and Green Bay Packer hat with the large pompom on top, standing on their porch, on a Tuesday, or Thursday, holding up a calendar for the next year.
So I'd have to introduce myself. "I'm the paperboy," I'd say. No name, just a title.
"Oh," they'd say, or something like that, and I'd have to go on.
"I've brought a calendar. As a Christmas gift." I'd hold up the calendar. "Merry Christmas."
Back then, nobody was really Jewish, or any other religion. Or at least, nobody worried about whether they were.
The housewife would thank me, open the door a crack and take the calendar, and sometimes get me some money. Sometimes they'd say "Oh, thanks, here," and they'd dig around and get a dollar or two, or maybe a five, or rarely a ten, and hand it to me. "Merry Christmas to you," they'd say.
Other times, they'd say "Oh, wait, I've got something for you," and they'd disappear, leaving me standing on a cold, dark porch looking into their house, the parts I could see, and judging how weird they were based on what kind of strange things they had -- dried branches in pots, or pictures of older kids in turtlenecks, or maybe a painting of some sort -- until they came back with some money or a check.
Worse than waiting on the porch was being invited inside to wait, being fully engulfed in a stranger's house with a stranger's weird odors, and dog or cat staring at me, odd throw pillows, and sometimes kids or husbands sitting on the couch. The kids would never talk. Sometimes the husbands would. "Hi," they'd say, and go back to watching TV until the wife came back out with a purse or check, and I could stop standing there dripping slush on their carpet and head back out to the next house.
All of that was done for, as I said, the sole purpose of generating tips at Christmas. I don't remember how much we got, annually, but I bet it worked out to less than it was worth, given the time commitment. Looking back, it might have made more economic sense to simply not order the calendars and stay home those couple of nights. Or, in the alternative, to at least let people know they were coming and explain to them that a Christmas tip was expected, because many people didn't get that: they'd take the calendar, say thanks, we'd all pause awkwardly, and then they'd close the door and leave me standing there.
Worse than that, or equally awful in a different way, were the subscription drives conducted twice a year. For these, we and all the other paperboys had to be picked up by a circulation manager -- generally someone we barely knew, or didn't know at all -- and driven to some part of the city where we didn't deliver papers. I didn't know, then, how they picked those parts of Hartland where we'd go to drum up new customers. I'd guess, now, that they went to areas that didn't have a high subscription rate, but I'm not sure there was that much science involved at the time. It might have just been whatever part of the city would be tolerant of a middle-aged man sitting and smoking in his car while 12-year-old boys walked around knocking on doors.
The idea was that we would go door-to-door and try to get people to subscribe to the Milwaukee Journal. The incentive for us was prizes: the more people we got signed up, the better the prizes got, using a point system that gave the most points for a daily-and-Sunday subscription, and the least for a subscription only.
We would be given little cardboard handouts, shaped like bookmarks, with whatever slogan was big that year. On the front was a picture of the slogan-and-ad, and on the back was some information about the Journal as well as a spot to fill out the name and address of the person ordering the paper, and boxes to check about what they were ordering. Set loose on some section of Hartland, we'd go and introduce ourselves, and ask people to sign up for the Journal, and, periodically, check back with the Circulation Manager and give him the cards we'd filled out.
I did that, year in and year out, with little success. I am not a natural salesman -- as you'd guess, from my reluctance to even ask people to pay me for what I did for them. I've heard that salesman are people that don't take no for an answer, and I've never understood that. No is a perfectly good answer, to me. When someone asks me whether I'd be interested in something, and I say no, I mean it. I don't want to take a second look, or hear more, or get a better bargain. I said no, and I meant no. I get irritated by people who persist after that, sometimes only mildly annoyed, and sometimes quite upset.
"I'm sure it's a bargain but I'm just not interested," I might say if I'm in a good mood and trying to be polite, hiding my bother. But if I'm not in a good mood or the saleperson has persisted, I can become rude: "Don't call here anymore. I'm not interested. Leave me alone." (And you can see another glimpse into my personality in that I think it's rude to tell people, total strangers calling for commercial reasons, not to bother me at my home.)
The people whose nights I was interrupting to try to get them interested in the Milwaukee Journal would, more often than not, tell me No, thanks, sometimes politely, sometimes rudely. They rarely talked to me, at all, beyond that. I'd venture to say that only about 1-in-20 was even kind of interested in hearing about a newspaper subscription, if even that high a percentage was.
Which made for discouraging -- and, in retrospect, frighteningly dangerous -- nights: A 10 or 11 or 12-year-old boy, wandering around an unfamiliar neighborhood where he didn't know anyone, at night, supervised by someone who'd never met his parents, knocking on strangers' doors and talking to them. All the really good episodes of Law & Order start out with a premise identical to that, and such a thing nowadays would likely end up in the authorities intervening with lightning speed. Back then, it was simply accepted; my parents just let us go, and I don't recall them even talking to the guy who picked us up and took us. It's a wonder that I didn't grow up as the indentured servant of some sultan or drug lord.
I wasn't really cognizant of the danger of those nights; I'd never been instructed in danger, or not as much as I should have been. Lectures from my parents about society and the people who made it up didn't focus, back then, on the deviants and serial killers and kidnappers and rapists who would someday become the almost-obsessive focus of my mom's talks to my sister and the reason she kept a steak knife under her pillow in later years; instead, Mom and Dad tended to discuss more the less desirable people around them -- the less desirable being people who lived in apartments or duplexes, people who didn't properly landscape their yards, and people who could be heard yelling at their kids, or each other, by their neighbors. I was raised to distrust people who fit into any of those categories, the result being that I got nervous when sent into an apartment building to solicit subscriptions, because apartment dwellers were, on some level, suspicious. If I approached a house with an unkempt lawn, my senses were buzzing with worry.
Between my natural disinclination to sell someone, and the constant state of nervousness generated by poor landscaping and rental units, I was a completely ineffective salesperson and never got very far in the prize-winning aspect of the promotions. I never got the Brewers' tickets, or the bike, or the Coleco Football head-to-head game. I got Penny Racers and things like that.
Then, on about the last year of my paper-delivering days, I had a genius idea: Why not just make up the subscriptions and turn them in?
I worked that through in my head, walking along Maple Avenue, cutting across the broad lawns underneath the giant old trees in front of houses set well back from the curb. What could go wrong? I'd just get the information from the people, fill out the card, and turn it in. It was a perfect scheme.
It never occurred to me that there was something missing from my logic, that there was something happening after the card got turned in; all I thought about was this: to make a sale, I talk to the person, I fill out the card, I turn it in, I get points and win prizes. If I were to, then, fill out the card with their name, and turn it in, I'd get the prizes and the people in the houses would be none the wiser.
I put it into action, immediately. At the next house, the old man listened to me for a minute, and then said "Thanks, not interested."
"Can I get your name?" I asked him. He paused.
"What do you need that for?" he asked.
"We've got to keep a record of who we talked to," I told him, a lie I'd made up on the spot.
So he gave me his name, and I thanked him, and I walked back to the curb, away from the porch light shining down on my misdeeds. I took out one of the cards, and the pen we'd been given to have people sign with. I filled in the man's name, and his address. I checked Daily and Sunday. I don't remember for sure, but I'm fairly certain there was a signature required, and so I signed the man's name. I likely didn't make any effort to disguise my handwriting -- forgery was new to me, and I wasn't an expert at it, or anything.
Before going on with the plan, I checked in with the circulation manager. I handed him the card. "I got one," I told him.
He took it, looked at it, put it on a stack. "Good job," he said.
I headed back out into the night full of purpose. I didn't forge every card, and I didn't forge a subscription for every house I went to; I'd figured that would be too suspicious, to go from an ineffective salesman to salesman of the year, and nobody ever got too many of these things. I meted the fake cards out, here and there, turning in a couple each time I checked back in... but I outdid every other paperboy that night, and I got some sort of prize, right up front. I don't remember what it was, but I recall getting it, and being extremely proud of my plan.
The next night when we went out again, the circulation manager pulled me aside.
"I want to talk to you about some of these subscriptions," he said. He held up the tickets from the night before.
"Um..." I said.
"They're not real."
I didn't say anything.
He said "How'd you get them?"
I didn't say anything, again, not right away, and he said "Did you make them up?"
I nodded, and he said "So they're all fake?"
I shook my head and said "Not all of them."
I remember him sighing and shaking his head and asking me to tell him which ones were real. I had to sort through them, going over them, while the other paperboys hung nearby, pretending they were going off to sell subscriptions but really wanting to see what was going on. I pulled out the 1 or 2, maybe that were legitimate, and told him the other ones were faked.
There were quite a few -- more than I'd have liked to own up to.
I stood there, wondering what was going to happen. Would he call my parents? The police? Would I have to apologize to someone?
He shook his head again. "Don't do that," he said. "It'll just screw things up."
Then he sent me off to try to sell subscriptions. I walked off into the night, feeling a little bad about what I'd done, but a lot bad about not getting any prizes. I didn't even try to sell subscriptions that night. I just walked around, looking at houses and trying to sort out just how terrible it was, what I'd done, and why I bothered doing this selling, anyway.
Not long after that I stopped being a paperboy -- but my resignation had nothing to do with the subscriptions fraud, or my feelings about the paperboy life in general, and had everything to do with the fact that I'd turned 16, and 16, in my dad's mind, was time to go get a real job.
Sweetie had a rough day yesterday... as you'll see. So on our drive to get me some shoes last night, I suggested that she think up 3 Good Things and I'd post those today. Here's what she came up with, in reverse order of how she named them:
1. Mr Bunches said "Nice?" before petting our cat Scruffy Jean MacDougal: Scruffy -- shown at right -- has a love/hate relationship with the Babies!. On the one hand, they're about the only people who will sit and pet her for any length of time. On the other hand, they're also the only people who might decide, while petting her, to see if her ears are removable. So Sweetie works on the Babies! to make sure they understand that Scruffy is not to be mistreated; she mostly does that by telling them "Be nice!" whenever they go within fifty feet of Scruffy. Yesterday, Mr. Bunches went up to Scruffy and before petting her, asked "Nice?" and then proceeded to be nice.
2. QUOTE: "I didn't get arrested." Sweetie and Mr F got a visit from the cops yesterday after Mr F accidentally called 911 and hung up, resulting in Sweetie first getting a call back from the emergency center, and then a visit from the local police just to make sure that everything was okay.
Of course, we only have Sweetie's word that Mr F was the one who called 911; I told Sweetie that I suspected that she gets so lonely for grown-up company at times that she might have dialed 911, in what was literally a cry for help.
3. Brooklyn Decker made the cover of Sports Illustrated. I'm not kidding; Sweetie actually picked this as a good thing, and picked it first. Then she said something about licking Brooklyn Decker's stomach, and we almost drove off the road. I am either a very lucky man, or a man who one day will come home to find the house cleaned out and a note on the counter explaining that Sweetie's run off with the SI cover models...
...And left me trying to explain to 911 how Mr F called again.
Anyway, here's hoping those help Sweetie have a better, and less police-involved, day today. I'm going to finish up with one of her favorite pictures of all time, Mr Bunches when he was about 1 year old:
Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars. It was murder to get there... or was it? Read Eclipse in hard copy or on your kindle.Buy it here, or Kindle it here.
You SHOULD, I suppose. "Gumblar" is a virus that redirects people from the page they wanted to be on on the Internet, to a fake page that will install malware onto their computer. And it could be your page they blame, either your blog or business website or social networking spot -- so your customers could be trying to find your website, and end up crashing their computers or being the victim of identity theft.
Or you could have that happen to you -- go to your home page or blog or email and end up on a phish site with your personal ID numbers being siphoned out of your computer.
And you'd probably never even heard of Gumblar. Who can blame you? It's impossible to keep up with all the new viruses and problems that stupid hackers can cause. That's why I don't even try. I just use Cyber Defender.
Cyber Defender helps protect a computer against pop-ups, spam, infected emails, and other troubles - - and if one gets through anyway, Cyber Defender can remove it from your computer, protecting you twice over. Using that program, I don't have to keep up with all the viruses and cures and hacks; I just have to keep my Cyber Defender current and I can surf the Internet in peace.
Cyber Defender can even protect you against the trojan horse virus, a particularly bad virus that lets a hacker use your computer like it was your own -- so that YOU'LL be blamed for the illegal downloads and problems caused. Trojan horses can give up your personal ID, log you into your bank accounts, send out spam, and worse. Why risk it? You can get Cyber Defender, or you can be a victim. I know which side of that line I want to fall on.
Yesterday, heading down from a conference with a client, I got on the elevator on the 7th floor and wanted to leave the building. I was confronted, on the bottom row of buttons, with "L," "G", and "2."
Guessing, I hit G, thinking Ground floor, right?
Wrong: It was garage. I had to hit L, which apparently stood for lobby -- something that might have made sense if there'd been a real lobby in the building, but there wasn't.
What's wrong with having the first floor be floor 1? Just number floors 1-- beginning at ground level -- on up. I don't care what you call the floors below ground level (although negative numbers would make sense -- so that the first floor below ground level would be -1, and so on), but it doesn't make sense to use Ground or Lobby or Atrium or Entrance for the first floor denomination, and then numbers after that, and it forces people to guess at the nomenclature you used when you designed the building.
What can you say about a Monday that'll lead you to be happier on a Tuesday? Find out by reading my 3 Good Things from yesterday...
1. Super Bowl leftover lunch! For the Super Bowl, we had what I like to refer to as "Things That Only Need To Be Heated Up," things like chicken nuggets and pre-made taquitos and pizza rolls and, of course, potato chips. Even with my and The Boy's best efforts, we didn't eat all the stuff, allowing Sweetie to pack leftovers for my lunch yesterday. As we all know, the only thing better than a dinner of Things That Only Need To Be Heated Up is a lunch of Cold Things, etc.
2. I was right about the snow... yesterday. When I woke up yesterday morning, it had snowed, and ordinarily that meant I'd have to shovel the driveway first thing in the morning, instead of slowly waking up by checking my email and doing some writing. But when I went outside to get the paper, I carefully analyzed the snow and decided that it was "Just a dusting" and would likely melt later that day, sparing me from having to shovel. In deciding that, I ran the risk that it wouldn't melt and it would instead become ice by the end of the day, and The Boy wouldn't be around to shovel it because he had to work.
But I was right, and when I got home last night about 6 p.m., the snow had (mostly) melted off the driveway.
(Of course, I woke up this morning to find 3" of snow had fallen last night, with weathermen predicting another five today, so I was out there shoveling today instead of yesterday.)
3. Mr F and Mr Bunches got to jump on the bed. (Don't tell Sweetie!) While Sweetie was working out last night, I was left alone and in charge of the Babies! We opted, before learning time, to clean up my room a little, and by "clean up" I mean "Watch The Colbert Report rerun while I put away my laundry and Mr Bunches and Mr F jumped on the bed," something Sweetie doesn't let them do, and something that I, officially, do not let them do, either. For the record, I said: "You should not be jumping on the bed." Twice. Buy my book, Eclipse, on the Kindle for just $0.99! Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars... but getting there would be murder.
As you know, my primary goal in life is to get on Jeopardy!, and once a year, I take the Jeopardy! online test to further that goal.
For several years, when I wanted to do that, I had to drive down to my office and use my work computer to take the test, heading downtown at 8 at night (the test is always at night) and logging into my computer -- a 60 minute round-trip for a 12-minute test.
I did that, though, because our home internet service was so unreliable; it cut in and cut out and would do so without any warning whatsover, leading to major problems if you're taking an online test to fulfill your game-show destiny.
Here's what happened: I was taking the test, and I was acing it. I knew pretty much every answer that came along; it was like Jeopardy! had decided to lob me a softball. I was six or seven minutes into the test and thinking I'm not going to get a single one wrong, and then...
Blurk.
The Internet cut out. Halfway through the test! The test I was cruising through! I was this close to meeting Alex Trebek and showing up Ken Jennings with my own fantastic run of wins, and blurk! It was all gone, and I had to restart the connection and couldn't log back in. My best test ever, and nothing.
Ever since then, I haven't trusted our home internet service for anything important. Yeah, I'll use it for banking and blogging and paying bills and making sure I haven't been sued, but for the big stuff -- Jeopardy! tests -- I use my work computer.
If you're stuck with terrible or unreliable internet service, maybe you should change, too -- no, you can't use my office computer, but you can use wild blue satellite internet service. They've got a variety of different plans to help you break free of slow, unreliable internet services, and for a limited time activation and installation are totally free: You can get satellite internet with no money down, and low monthly rates that are less than you'd probably pay for other services. No dialing, no delays, no big bulky dish: just smoother, faster, more reliable internet access for you.
Claudius' path to the stars was layered in blood and lit by madness...
As a little boy, Claudius would close his eyes and look to the stars in hopes of escaping from the pain and misery of his life.
As a grown man, Claudius murdered his two shipmates while the rocket disintegrated around them, leaving him drifting helpless and alone in space, awaiting a rescue that may never come.
Or did he?
In Eclipse, you'll follow the tortured paths of a mind reeling in madness, seeing the world through the ever-changing view Claudius has: astronaut, high school boy, patient, doctor, killer, victim. Follow Claudius forward and backward through his life, revisiting his childhood, his time at NASA and interviews with psychiatrists, and the ending of the first manned mission to the stars... while all the time, the mystery of what really happened, at each step continues to unfold and grows deeper.
Eclipse is a haunting science fiction tale in the Ray Bradbury mold, a story that takes on new life and new meaning each time you read it, and a story that you will never forget.
And it's now available on the Kindle! You can download Eclipse for just ninety-nine cents!
"You love the Ukulele," Sweetie told me the other day, and it's true. I do. I tend to be a fan of the more-unusual instruments, because the more-unusual instruments make the songs that they're being used to play quirkier and more unpredictable (or less predictable, however you want to say it.)
Sweetie was commenting on my finding the latest Ukulele Cover Version of a song I liked already. In this case, it was a cover version of a-ha's Take On Me, with Ukulele, done by a group called Shiny And The Spoon:
Shiny And The Spoon aren't the only people to ever cover Take On Me via Uke: Here's a version that predates them by almost 18 months:
That version doesn't have the sweetness that Shiny And The Spoon's does, but it is faster, and it has those all-important dramatic pauses. Too many musicians overlook the dramatic pause as a musical effect. That's what killed Bach, for example -- doctors theorize that if he'd used a dramatic pause a little more often, he'd have survived that bread factory explosion.
In between those two versions, mctrmt posted this version of Take On Me:
It is possible to cover the song without a ukulele. I wasn't sure, at first, why you'd want to do that, but A.C. Newman showed me it's possible and can be okay.
Sara Bareilles lent a stripped-down acoustic-y version:
As did "Anni B Sweet."
Then again, if you think the song sounds good stripped down and ukuleled, consider it as a choir version:
And while that's pretty good, this is by far the Most Awesome version of the Already Awesome Song:
(And I couldn't finish this up without putting in the literal version, so here that is:)
Not a single one of the 3 Good Things is the Super Bowl win. I mean, sure, I won the bet with Sweetie and The Boy and that means that I and the Babies! will be wearing Saints gear pretty soon, but the weekend was so chock full o' good things that the Super Bowl didn't even make the cut!
1. Thanks to the coupons, at least the movie was free. Sweetie and I tried to take Mr Bunches and Mr F to their first real movie in a real theater, opting for a 10 a.m. showing of Ice Age 3 on Saturday. (It was actually Mr Bunches' second trip to the theater. But the last time, when Sweetie tried to take just him, he wouldn't leave the parking lot, so that doesn't count, right?) We got into our seats about 9:52, with me thinking that the Babies! would last 8 minutes until the movie started, before getting restless. But then the movie started late, Mr Bunches got nervous about all the people and the dark, and Mr F bumped his head on the seat, forcing us to abandon our seats and wait in the hallway for a few minutes. We tried again, and they watched about 10 minutes of the actual movie -- but we had to leave when Mr F's boredom prompted him to roll like a log across the front of the theater.
2. Nobody was hurt in the disaster. During their naps yesterday, I had to repeatedly head into the Babies!'s room to calm things down and remind them that naptime is for sleeping, not for piling mattresses on top of Mr F, or stripping down and trying to jump off the dirty laundry basket in the closet. The lesson didn't take: the picture to the right is the scene that greeted me at 4 p.m. when I went in to "wake them up." That's in quotes because they hadn't bothered to actually sleep.
3. I got the regular 'puter working again, finally. After our laptop broke down, then got repaired, I needed to reactivate the internet service for it to begin using it again, and I'd been putting that off because of how time-consuming and tedious I thought it would be. But by Friday, I was tired of having our tiny 'puter and not having access to all my actual files and writings and stuff, so I took advantage of getting home from work early on Friday to get on the phone to my wireless provider and find out how to de-activate the netbook and re-activate the laptop. She walked me through the complicated process as follows:
Her: "Plug in the card, then click "Tools,", and "Activate."
Me: "Done. Now what?"
Her: "Now you're done."
I'm glad I could fix things like that.
(But it was good to get the laptop going again, because then I didn't have any more tiny screens to squint at, and we could use all our music again, and I had my stuff saved on the hard drive, stuff like my novel the After -- and I finally got to update that over on 5 Pages.)
(Sweetie, on the other hand, took advantage of the return of the laptop to download some Lady Gaga songs.)
Now that the Super Bowl is over, you can think about other stuff, like actually going and doing what some of the ads on the Super Bowl told you to do. First up: Get that vacation rental that Unitard recommended.
Have you seen Unitard? You watched the entire game plus pregame, right? If not, then check this out:
Like all superheroes, Unitard makes a good point. In this case, that vacation rental commercial drives home how STUPID it is to pay for a hotel room when you could get a whole house or a condo.
What's a hotel room, about 10x10, with a desk and a bed and an uncomfortable chair? Why pay for that when you could spread out through one of the whole luxury houses or condos they've got for renting on Vacation Rental.org?
Unitard -- who's my new hero -- doesn't just know how to get up and over a counter in style. He knows how to VACATION in style, and you should follow his lead. With Vacation Rental.org, you'll get more space for less money, resulting in a better vacation.
The other day, on the Dan Patrick Show, Jets Quarterback Mark Sanchez was asked how he would rather watch the Super Bowl: In person, in New Orleans, or at home. He said "At home," and explained that his reason was that it still hurt him that he wasn't playing in it.
Then, last night I saw on the news a story about a gathering of men who've never missed seeing a Super Bowl in person. These four guys (I'm not sure if they're a group, or just four guys who happen to share the same trait in common, that trait being an ability to spend a person's college tuition on seeing a game) have made it to all Super Bowls, from Super Bowl 1966 to Super Bowl 2010, where they were treated to a dinner by the NFL. (With ticket prices for Super Bowls in recent years averaging nearly $3,000 apiece, the NFL should've done more than give these guys some prime rib and a pat on the back.)
To TMQ, oddly specific includes setting a kickoff time for 5:28 p.m., as opposed to 5:30 p.m., and includes setting a contract at $451,000 instead of some other number.
Those numbers are no more, or less, specific than TMQ's preferred numbers, though: TMQ seems to think that there's something less specific about 5:30 p.m. than there is about 5:28 p.m., and he finds it absurd that someone would be so specific as to make a contract worth $451,000 rather than $450,000.
TMQ, in doing so, engages in the kind of uneducated snobbery he tries to decry; he feels superior to those people he claims are absurd for being so specific -- while not understanding that there's nothing more, or less, specific about either number: $451,000 is no more specific than $450,000. Both are numbers, and both are exact, specific numbers. $450,000 is an exact, specific number, and $451,000 is, too, and, for that matter, $451,929.32 is an exact, specific number, and it's no more, or less, exact or specific: In each case, the number is carried out to the same number of significant figures, and significant figures determine how specific you're being.
5:28 p.m. is exactly as specific -- because it's measured to the same degree -- as 5:30 p.m. What TMQ means is that 5:30 p.m. feels more general, and it feels more general because that's the number we all mentally round 5:28 p.m. to. If someone says something starts at 5:28, we all decide "that's about 5:30" and round it to that. Likewise, $450,000 seems less specific -- because it requires that we remember only two actual numbers plus placeholding zeroes, so we can easily remember it and it seems more general.
But people are oddly specific -- and they like to be oddly specific. Think of a number, right now, between 1 and 100. Got your number?
Mine was 43 (mine's always 43). I can't say what your number was (but feel free to leave it in a comment, if you'd like) I bet it was not a round number: I bet you didn't pick 10, 20, 30, or a number ending in 5, either; I bet you picked something ending in a 3, or 7, or 2 -- an oddly specific number, or one that seems so, anyway (because it's no more specific than 10, or 50). Ask others to do the same: I bet they'll never pick a number ending in a zero or 5 -- and they'll refuse to pick a "round" or not-very-specific number even though they don't know why you're having them pick a number.
TMQ, though, wants to make fun of people for picking oddly-specific numbers, so we can make fun of him for doing so because in the very act of making fun of the rest of us, TMQ has revealed that he's a pseudo-intellectual who doesn't understand the things he wants to mock. Numbers are specific only to the degree of significant figures they use; and people like oddly specific numbers, as evidenced by the score predicted by the Old Man Whose Been To All The Super Bowls; asked to predict a final score, the Old Man said Saints 35, Colts 32.
Why'd he pick those numbers, instead of any other two pairs of scores? After all, there are only a few scores a football game can't end in. A game can't end up 1-0 or 1-1, and that's about it; beyond that, all scores are possible. A game could be 2-0, or 3-2, or 4-3, and so on, with some scores being less probable than others. (4-3, for example, is pretty improbable because it would be one team scoring two safeties while the other scores only a field goal. Such a game is possible, but not likely.)
20-17 210 times 17-14 162 times 27-24 152 times 13-10 142 times 24-17 121 times
From that -- another set of Statistics That Sound About Right, a website I've really got to get around to creating -- it appears that the most common score in a football game, for one team or another, is 17; one team or another scored 17 points 493 times. 17 points is generally scored by getting two touchdowns, two extra-points, and a field goal (but you could get to 17 nowadays through three field goals, a touchdown, and a two-point conversion, or five field goals and a safety.)
The next most common score is 24 -- a team scored 24 in a game 273 times in that probably-not-very-reliable table.
So the most common scores by teams, according to that most-likely-fictional answer, are 24 and 17. If you were going to predict the outcome of the game -- any football game in the NFL-- you'd be smart to pick 24-17.
Which, by the way, was the final score of the first game the Saints lost this year -- to the Cowboys. They lost 24-17 in New Orleans, ending their hopes for an unbeaten season.
(Also, the Jets scored both the most regular scores in their playoff run: they put up 24 in a win against Cincinnati, and 17 losing to the Colts.)
With those articles floating around my mind, I decided to, for today, talk about how you might want to watch the Super Bowl by reviewing my own history of Super Bowls and how I watched them -- doing so because how I watched the Super Bowl in many cases, has turned out to be more memorable than the games themselves, at least insofar as I recall the details.
I don't recall details of almost any Super Bowl I watched since I began watching them back in the late 1980s. I can recall the teams that played, in most years, but I don't recall many specific plays or features of the games (or the commercials). Instead, I remember where and how I watched them, making those Super Bowls Past part of the history of my life, a yardstick whereby I can measure how I've progressed (or not) and see myself through the prism of time... and also give you (and Mark Sanchez) some advice on how to watch the Super Bowl, or not.
And, because remembering where and how I watched the games also brings to mind certain details of the games themselves that do stick out, I'll take my oddly specific memories of some games and provide you with some oddly specific predictions for today's Saints-Colts matchup.
I'll count them down from farthest in the past to most recent, and I'm not reviewing every Super Bowl -- just the ones that stick out in my mind. And I'm using not the NFL Numeral System preferred by the NFL, but the numbering-by-year system the NFL should use, because it makes more sense. Who uses Roman Numerals? It's impossible to remember which Super Bowl was which, using Roman Numerals, unless you count by year and then convert to Roman Numerals, and I don't want to get math involved in my football.
1. Super Bowl 1990:
Teams/Outcome: 49ers 55, Broncos, 10. Where I watched it: I watched this game sitting in the dorm room where my younger brother, Matt, lived while he attended UW-Milwaukee for about a semester before giving up on college. Matt lived in that dorm with a group of guys who had ridiculous nicknames -- names like Noodles, if I recall, and shortly thereafter left the dorms to live in an overpriced student house off campus, a house they shared with a ferret. I would have driven down to Matt's dorm from my parent's house, where I was still living in 1990, a fact I remember because I recall that in this Super Bowl, I bet against my boss, Todd, at the gas station where I was working, in Hartland. We'd bet on the game, and I got the 49ers. Our bet was that the person whose team won got $2 per point scored. What I recall about the game was that the 49ers just... kept...scoring, and I spent most of the game sitting on the uncomfortable desk chair that comes with dorm rooms, at one point making a call to my boss when the score exceeded 50 for my team.
Advice I can give you, and Mark Sanchez, about how to watch the game: Get plenty of seating, where ever you're going to be. The dorm room had a floor, two desk chairs, and two beds -- for a bunch of guys to watch a game. I staked out the desk chair early on so I wouldn't end up sitting on a bed next to a guy named Noodles, but either way, I was doomed to spend the game uncomfortably.
Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: That was the fourth Super Bowl for Joe Montana, and his first against the Denver Broncos, who came into the game with the much-heralded John Elway leading them. Joe seemed to take it personally, throwing for an estimated 53,000 yards, maybe to prove his point that he was the real great quarterback in the game. This year, everyone's talking about how great Peyton Manning is, and not commenting as much on how great Drew Brees might be by comparison. I therefore predict that: Drew Brees will take it personally, and will throw a touchdown pass of 68 yards.
2. Super Bowl 1991: Teams/Outcome: Giants 20, Bills 19.
Where I Watched It: By this time, I'd moved out of my parents' house and into the mouse-infested apartment on 21st street in Milwaukee -- back when 21st street was still in the kind of terrible neighborhood where a serial killer could kill 17 people and not attract much attention. (That really happened, not far away from the apartment where I watched this game, and during the same period of time.)
I lived in that apartment with my friend Flan, who'd found the apartment and who'd taken the better bedroom. Flan, though, had gone to watch the game at his dad's house. I don't recall why I wasn't going anywhere to watch the game, but I didn't. I watched it at our apartment, alone, in Flan's room because he had a bean bag chair and the better TV and I assumed (correctly) that he wouldn't be coming home that night, so he wouldn't mind my using his room.
That game was before I really cared about the Buffalo Bills -- it was the start of what Cruella De Vil might call my magnificent obsession with them -- but I had them in my first-ever Super Bowl bet with my brother Matt. We'd bet $50 plus a team jersey, and I had the Bills.
I fell asleep in the third quarter of the game -- that was the start of my habit of doing that, too -- and woke up only for the final drive, where the Bills got the ball not-quite-close-enough for a final field goal attempt that went wide right, sending the Bills on to loserville for four years.
That's something funny about championships: Two teams make them, only one wins -- and the loser is often deemed to be terrible, the butt of jokes for years and years. The Bills went to four straight championships, lost all four, and are deemed synonymous with failure. Only in America, and particularly only in football, can you finish second four years running and be deemed a loser. Teams that never make the playoffs get more respect than teams that get there and lose, and America needs to do something about that. As Jerry Seinfeld noted, though, people hate silver medal winners and second place finishers: Silver medalists, he said, are awarded for being the best loser -- nobody lost ahead of them. "Congratulations," he said, "You almost won."
Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: While Flan's bean bag was comfortable enough, and his TV nice enough, it was awkward sitting in someone's bedroom, without their knowledge, watching a game. I'd say not to do it. Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: Not being a big Bills fan -- yet-- I wasn't terribly upset when they lost because the game at least had an exciting ending to it. (I was more upset about the $50 plus the jersey. Those jerseys are expensive.) But I do recall the kick, that being one of the more dramatic moments in Super Bowl history -- and it was destined to be so, no matter how it turned out, because people think in terms of one-play outcomes (but that's for another day.) Missed field goals are a hallmark of this year's playoffs, too, and so I will make the oddly specific prediction that The Colts' kicker will miss a field goal, wide right, from 43 yards out.
Where I Watched It: I've lumped these two together because they marked the two of the three Super Bowl parties I've ever attended or thrown. I watched the Packers-Patriots Super Bowl with a group of law students at a friend's house, with about 20 or 30 people there, including a bunch of people I didn't know. I watched the Broncos-Falcons Super Bowl at Sweetie's apartment, about a year after we started dating, with a bunch of friends we'd invited over for the occasion.
In each case, the Super Bowl was less than fun; watching a game with a group of people, whether or not they're close friends, means distractions from the game, or, to put it another way, it means not watching the game. When you get a group of people together, they talk and make comments and a part of your attention is diverted from watching the game to conversing with them (and to making sure nobody takes your seat when you get up to get more snacks)(and to making sure that nobody notices how often you get up to get snacks.)
Sporting events are strange that way: While you might get friends together for any number of let's-watch-this type of evenings, only sports are deemed "Things You Can Distract Others From Watching." Imagine if your friends invited you over for a movie night, and throughout the movie you kept talking, about the movie and the things the movie reminded you of and your job and how tired you were going to be the next day, and other movies you'd seen. They'd throw you out.
But invite friends over for a Super Bowl, and they'll talk. And talk. And, probably, keep track of just how many snacks you're eating. The idea, I think, is that you're not supposed to watch sports, really -- it's just a mechanism to get people into the same room, the way "lettuce" is a mechanism to get "salad dressing" into my mouth.
I don't like that -- when I decide to watch a game, I want to watch it, and I mostly only talk (just a little) about the things going on in the game. Granted, a football game doesn't require the same level of attention and focus that, say, the movie Memento does, but still: I want to watch the game, not talk about your dumb job.
Another note: For the Broncos/Falcons game, I invented a pool called "Super Bowl Bingo," a Bingo game featuring squares marked with stuff that could happen during the game or commercials, things like The AFC kicks a 30+ yard field goal. I thought that'd be a fun way to bet on the game with all our friends, more fun than a "Final score" pool. I was wrong. Super Bowl Bingo was a disaster, as it meant that nobody could watch the game -- they were constantly checking their Bingo Cards: Was that a 5-yard run? To the left? Did that commercial have a green car in it? And they talked more -- distracting me from the game. Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: Don't watch it with others. And, if you do, don't worry how many Seven Layer Bars someone's eating. That's their business, not yours. Also: Make your Super Bowl bets simple. Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: I don't recall a single moment of the Broncos/Falcons Super Bowl -- Bingo distracted me far too much. As for the Packers' Super Bowl, the game began with a first-play, or early-play, long touchdown pass for Brett Favre's Green Bay Packers. But I've already predicted one of those. That game also featured Desmond Howard running back a kickoff for a touchdown, something that's happened in other Super Bowl. There have been blocked punts in the Super Bowl, too, but never a Blocked Punt Returned For A Touchdown, so I'm going to predict this: The Saints Will Block a Colts Punt, and Return the Punt 43 yards for a touchdown.
4. Super Bowl 2007:
Teams/Outcome: Colts 29, Bears 17.
Where I Watched It: This game, I watched at our house with the then-they-really-were-babies Babies!, who'd been born just a few months before. We watched it downstairs in our family room, on the big screen TV we'd splurged and bought for the family (justifying it, back then, by noting that Sweetie really liked to watch movies and The Boy and I liked sports, so it made sense for us to spend a lot of money on a big-screen TV for those purposes. Nowadays, though, Sweetie rarely watches TV downstairs, preferring, if she's going to watch TV, to do it up in our room away from the mess and noise. The Boy, meanwhile, used his own money to buy himself a Playstation 3 and a fancy TV and watches almost everything in his room. Our big-screen TV is mostly used, these days, to watch Little Einsteins.)
What I remember most about this game is that going in, I had my annual bet with The Boy in which we both, at the start of the playoffs, pick teams we think will win -- dividing the playoff teams up evenly and betting a t-shirt on the outcome. I had both the Colts and the Bears before the Super Bowl -- so I was guaranteed a win. But Sweetie was on The Boy's team (I had Mr F and Mr Bunches and Middle), and she likes the Colts, so I let them have the Colts anyway, but they had to give me odds -- if the Bears won, I'd get a sweatshirt, not a t-shirt.
Then, Devin Hester returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, and I celebrated and began rubbing it in: You're going to lose, I taunted The Boy, only to watch as the Bears faded away little by little, leaving me buying Sweetie and The Boy Colts' t-shirts.
Also, midway through the game, we had to go give the Babies! a bath and put them to bed, so I missed a chunk of it.
Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: Have your Babies! bathed ahead of time, and set the game to tape. You may not think you're going to get pulled away from the TV, but what if you are? And you miss the most dramatic moment in Super Bowl history? And the next day, everyone's talking about it and you have to say What? I missed that, I guess. That always happens to me. (It happened, in fact, with the Janet Jackson halftime show -- which I watched most of before going to get more food, missing Nipplegate. I didn't even know anything had happened until after work the next day, when I heard something on the radio while driving home.)
Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: Devin Hester's runback, which I'm pretty sure was the first play of the game. That was the fastest score ever to start the game. I'm going to go opposite, here. The longest time passed in a Super Bowl before a score, ever, was 26 minutes, 55 seconds (The Panthers vs. the Patriots*, Super Bowl 2004). I'm going to predict that The First Score Won't Happen Until 2 minutes Into The Third Quarter. 5. Super Bowl 2008: Teams/Outcome: Giants 17, Patriots* 14.
Where I Watched The Game: Again, I watched it in my own house, with just the family, including the Babies, who were now 1 1/2 years old. The two most memorable things about this game were that, first, I was rooting against the team I had in the bet: I'd ended up with the Patriots* as my entry, and I didn't want them to win, because they're cheaters. I'd never liked the Giants and Eli Manning very much, so I found myself in the odd role of having to root for a team I didn't like, with a quarterback I didn't like, against a team that, if they won, I'd get a t-shirt. (But they'd be 19-0 and I didn't want cheaters to get rewarded, so I rooted against them.)
The other thing I remember is that we had to be very quiet in rooting: Mr F was almost a year-and-a-half, and was becoming a bit of a nervous boy who didn't like loud noises. We didn't know that, yet, as Mr F hadn't been exposed to a great many surprises in his 16 or so months of living. He was, that night, when Eli Manning threw that great pass and David Tyree made that great catch, and we all jumped up and cheered and yelled and Mr F burst into tears and tried to go hide. After that, we all had to cheer quietly, so as great things happened, we'd whisper Yeah! or Excellent! while being very careful not to startle Mr F. Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: It's very hard to whisper a cheer. Practice it. Or put a movie on for the Babies! upstairs, so they can watch without getting scared. I'm surprised I didn't think of that. Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: The David Tyree catch, of course, sticks out in my mind -- more so than the touchdown reception that put the Giants ahead for good shortly thereafter. It was an improbable, thrilling, spontaneous moment that came at a time of the game when tension was high, earning it a spot in the most-memorable-plays pantheon. How many Super Bowls can you say that about?
In all the Super Bowls I've watched, only a handful of plays stick out: Wide right. Tyree's catch. Santonio Holmes' TD last year against the Cardinals, arms outstretched, toes dragging. Favre's long pass against the Patriots, and his run down the field to celebrate. Don Beebe chasing after Leon Lett to knock the ball out of his hand just before the end zone -- a startling, admirable display of effort in a foregone game. That's about all that springs to mind. So the odds are that there will not be a memorable play in this game -- after XLIV Super Bowls, I can only remember a few great plays, making great plays a statistical improbability in the Super Bowl, but I'll go ahead and predict an oddly specific great play, anyway -- and, like I always go for 43, I'm going to go for my usual suspect here, too: The Fake Punt. I therefore predict that there will be a fake punt for a TD, and that it'll come from the Saints. In the fourth quarter. With 5:33 left on the game clock. On fourth-and-two.
(How's that for oddly specific, TMQ?)
As for where I'll be watching the game, I've applied all my lessons, and here's the plan for the game: I'm watching it at home, on our big-screen TV, with just immediate family. We've got plenty of seating: Two couches and two chairs. We've got snacks ready to go, the kind of food that just needs to be heated up or put in a bowl and the kind of food that can be piled on a plate to reduce the number of trips to the kitchen to get more, reducing the people monitoring me. I've already set the game to tape, ready for Babies!-style distractions of any sort.
Which leads me to my final oddly-specific prediction: I predict that during the game, there will be three spills on the carpet, at least one of which will leave a stain. There will be two times that The Boy complains about me pausing the game to go take care of the Babies!, one of which pauses will be engendered by Mr F being pantless. And there will be three commercials about which Sweetie declares Terry Tate was better.
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