When I was in middle school, I used to sit at my desk figuring out all the Super Bowls that would spell words, like Super Bowl MIX, and, uh, well maybe it was just MIX. But there were, at least, some that you could pronounce, like CLIX and LIX. I wonder if Liv Tyler will sing the anthem at Super Bowl LIV in 2020. Or if that band CIV will play at halftime of Super Bowl CIV, live via satellite from the old folks' home. Or if the distant offspring of the punk band Millions of Dead Cops will have some sort of party in honor of Super Bowl MDC in 3566. You know, my old band was gonna play with them in Newtown, CT once, but they canceled. Wow. You know you've got no life when you're reminiscing about bands that nobody's heard of that you almost played with.

And that wraps up all football talk here at ARSFIPT. It's now officially baseball season.

"Now" meaning soon. In the meantime:

I was trying to figure out when Sleater-Kinney's gonna be playing around here (March 2-3 in NYC) and I came across the webpage of one of the band members,
Carrie Brownstein. I've enjoyed her music and activism for years. (If you can enjoy someone's activism. I know you can enjoy someone's Activision, like, if you borrowed Pitfall or Freeway from a friend.) But I admire her even more now, after reading her takes on Scrabble, Curb Your Enthusiam, Freaks and Geeks, and being anti-Friendster ("or anything remotely like it.") Amen!

Carrie on Yahtzee: "I think I like the sound that the die make when you shake the cup more than any other aspect of this game. If you really want to annoy someone, try shaking them for a few minutes before you actually roll."

A lesbian after my own heart...

I won't bore you with the full-length story of how I was so close to winning in the office Super Bowl pool, as surely you were, too. But I will say that if McNabb gets sacked in the end zone on any of those final three plays, I'm 200 bucks richer. But I'm not. Oh well, don't it just always come down to that desperate "Come on safety!" routine. And when the Pats kicked that field goal... had it been a TD, and it should have been, what with it being 1st and goal from the three, I would've been in position to win $500. And instead of cursing at the screen, begging the stupid Eagles to hurry up and do something on the following drive and stop acting like they only needed one score to win when they actually needed two, I'd have been laughing at them as they pitifully let the clock tick away. George Costanza was right, he probably could have been an NFL coach. And so could I.

Oh, but I had other bets. Christian Fauria needed to score the first TD of the game. No dice. I also took a chance on picking the Eagles exact score. 22 points paid 20 to 1 (I'm talking $5 nets here), so I went for it. They ended up with 21. But if you watched the game, you know they really had no shot at 22.

And then it came down to one last chance at some money. I bet that the MVP would be "2 or more players," as it also paid 20 to 1. I figured it might be the type of game where they give it to an entire defense or something. When they didn't announce an MVP right away, I had some hope. I thought that even if a receiver has a great game, the QB's stats would be still be better than that receiver's: At least as many yards and TDs. So it was perfect, Branch did great, but Brady has to get credit, too. And Bruschi played well, so I had this theory: Brady, Branch, Bruschi, Tri-MVPs in honor of the so-called "Boston Three-Party" (oh god). Also, the three BR-'s, in honor of Babe Ruth's number Three and initials on his birthday for the New England team winning. Well, we've already determined that the old Babe has nothing to do with this, and it turned out Branch got the MVP all by himself. But had I known they were giving away a CAR to the winner, I wouldn't have made that stupid co-MVP bet, because they'd have had to get two (or three) cars! That's BS, I want my money back. Well, five dollars of it.

According to that Nada Surf song, making football bets makes me popular. But the popular dudes at my high school all just smoked weed and drank brews while dating and forcing themselves on the popular girls, while I stayed home and watched Headbanger's Ball. So, yeah.

Watched American Dad, the new show by the creators of Family Guy, after the game. Pretty funny. It's got the makings of a good show, very similar to Family Guy. But now I can't call Arrested Development "AD" any more, since American Dad is also an AD. Don't worry folks, you need not lose sleep over this. I'll figure something out and post it here the second I do.

Super Bowl Commercials were pretty crappy this year. No, really crappy.

Tomorrow I'm sure I'm going to hear Mike Francesa say, "February is the toughest month for a spawts fan, dawg." Says it every year. Terrible job, Mike.

Did I just mention Nada Surf back there?

All right, that's it for me. Super Sunday, it's "unbelievable," as Billy Crystal said in an SNL skit from like '82. Congrats to the other World Champion team from New England whose name ends with "iots." (Even though I can't even pretend to be a fan of them and I was just rooting for myself to win money. But it was nice to see Philly fans disappointed, since they're mostly A-holes. If they weren't, I'd have probably rooted for the underdog, but they are, so I didn't. The only cool things from Philly are Atom & His Package and the Dead Milkmen, and probably other stuff that I'm forgetting, but it's late.)

"The truth is that it was with such shock and delight that I discovered that there were people in the world who would willingly listen to the noise I was making, that it overshadowed the fact that I was terrified."

--Joanna Newsom

She's talking about playing music in front of people, but feel free to let this quote inspire you in whatever it is you're trying to do in your life.

(Sorry if this is a little too Ed Cosette for anybody. Whenever I say anything serious, I think of the comedian Bill Hicks, who, when starting to lose his audience with a "serious" rant, would suddenly stop and say "There are dick jokes on the way...")

And if you don't know who Joanna Newsom, Ed Cosette, and Bill Hicks are, well, you must not know much about the Red Sox, so what are you doing reading Red Sox blogs?

The title I've chosen for this post is dumb. But, seeing the word "sundae" always reminds me of the old Woody Woodpecker theme on Channel 5, which included a scene where Buzz Buzzard put Woody in one of those big glasses, the kind you'd get a sundae in back in the fifties, and put ice cream on top of him, and syrup and whipped cream and a cherry, and then tried to suck the whole thing including Woody out through a straw. I guess it would've been an ice cream float, because he sprayed some seltzer in there. Either way, I always wanted eat that sundae right off the screen, because it was so colorful and delicious-looking. The word Sunday, on the other hand, makes me think of doughnuts. So I got that goin' for me.

Today is my mom's birthday (one she shares with two people who died in some fashion this past year, Babe Ruth and Ronald Reagan). Happy Birthday, Mom! Thanks for the life.

I thought Ruth's B-day being on Super Sunday would be a bigger deal, with the curses and New England and the Eagles who have never won and whatnot. You'd think somebody would have connected all these things.

"Now our guys can get some rest while these idiots pretend they won it all and revert to their previous level of unjustified overconfidence prior to the eventual coup de grace."
--some yankee fan after Game 4

There's this site called SoSH vs NYYFans, which shows all the posts about each ALCS game from the Sox and yanks' respective message boards. It's very cool, and must've taken a long time to put together. (Or some program did it in one second.)

I found out about it from a new-ish Red Sox (and Pats) blog called Hoo's On First.

Apparently part of the Red Sox Nation eyescan membership is that you get to watch all these games on mlb.tv. So tonight, as I was making my veggie dogs, I had Game 1 of the World Series playing on the computer. (The game is from a Los Angeles Fox station.) Of course I cut right to the eighth inning. I hadn't retained the information that Renteria misplayed a ball hit by Varitek right before Bellhorn hit his game winning homer. I did remember how Fox didn't catch the ball hitting the foul pole with any camera.

I just thought it was weird how all these things were happening that never would have happened, say, fifteen years ago: The Red Sox winning the World Series? Me casually flipping on a telecast of that Series on a computer? While eating a fake hot dog? That I made myself?!

It truly is the future.

Now I'm gonna go play a video game from 1987.

Bostondirtdogs.com headline: "David Wells will wear number three for Sox in honor of the Babe."

Guess what, dirt dick, Bullshit Memorial Stadium told me this ONE WEEK ago. Way to stay on top of things. And act like you're the first to discover this.

Then I was on SoSH, and to piss me off even more, I saw that the Unkempt Kollie is already getting credit from random people for "breaking" this story (7 days late). It's on this thread. It's the eighth post on the page.

A little while ago I was talking about the people twirling their arms behind home plate at Shea in the '86 Series. Recently I saw something funny about that on SoSH, from a poster called Kevyn:

"The only joy I get out of watching these 1986 games is the knowledge that the old woman twirling her arms behind home plate at Shea is probably dead now."

Nice! Come to think of it, they did show a close up of this one old lady with a weird hat on for a good five seconds during Game 2, and she was right behind the plate. By the end of that night's blow-out, she was long gone. But I guess that was her, back for Game Six, with her new, pitcher-distracting innovation. But, again, we should thank that lady, rest her soul, for making 2004 that much sweeter.

I used to work with this dude Greg. One day, all of us got "worker numbers," to more easily allow payroll to calculate our hours logged at work. Greg was in charge of going around and making sure we'd each received our number. So he got to my desk and said, "Got your worker number.....comrade?" He paused for just the perfect amount of time (which I've estimated here by using exactly five elipses), and it just cracked me up. Every morning I think of that as I write my worker number on my timesheet, and by the end of the day, it's out of my head. So today I swore I would remember to tell someone (you) this story. Hope it worked out for you.

Happy Groundhog Day, everybody. "Don't forget your booties cuz' it's cold out there."

Hey yankee fans, "I'll give you a winter prediction. It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be gray, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life..."

I learned from Singapore Sox Fan that David Ortiz is building a new house with his wife in Green Bay. So I just want to warn you about the possibilty that someone ends up calling him David Or-cheese. And this reminds me of something else I was going to say about Wisconsin. Their state quarter has a cow's head on it, with the word "Forward" in a banner below it. This cracks me up, because I see the picture as a basketball card of a cow who plays forward. Search your pockets, you may have one. You may not find it as comical as I did. That story reminds me of a blog I saw by a girl who's from Minnesota but attends MIT, who recently talked about that very quarter. Speaking of moving far away, why do people say "halfway around the world"? In my opinion, halfway is all the way, because the world is a sphere. Don't short change yourself, if you live on the opposite side of the earth from me, that's as far away as you're gonna get. I already am ALL the way around the world from myself, and I didn't even have to move. I could say Kansas City is 23/24ths of the way around the world from me, but there's a faster way of getting there. I thought of that because Singapore Sox Fan says he's the Red Sox fan from halfway around the world. I don't know, I think he deserves more credit than 50%. Speaking of that site....{return to beginning of post)