What passes for interesting in Ohio these days.

O.M.G., as the kids say.


Have we talked about the Cincinnati Bengals? I don't believe that we have had a chance to discuss the Cincinnati Bengals. So, let me tell you about the Cincinnati Bengals. It's a pretty good story.

So, once upon a time there was a man named Paul Brown, who didn't want to do anything but win football games. Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good player. But he was smart and determined, and by working hard and sticking to his goals, he became a coach. He coached high school football, then college football, and finally, when Cleveland decided to field a professional football team in 1946, they not only asked Paul Brown to be the coach, they even named the team after him. The Cleveland Browns. It's awesome ideas like that that have made Cleveland the cultural Mecca we think of it as today.

Paul Brown won lots and lots and lots of football games in the 1940s and the 1950s. All of Ohio loved the Browns, and people in Cleveland were so happy they almost forgot about the “living in Cleveland” part of their lives. But as time passed, it turned out that Paul Brown was kind of a jerk. He was mean to the players on his team, and made them practice in the snow while he stayed in his car with the heat on. Other teams would call to offer his assistant coaches better jobs for lots more money, and he would burn the messages so they wouldn't find out. There were rumors that persist to this very day that he didn't like black people. Paul Brown wasn't smart enough to not bite the hand that fed him, so after a decade and a half of being an asshole and two solid years of regularly insulting his boss, Art Modell, Brown was told that his services would no longer be needed in Cleveland.

He was angry. Some stuff happened.

And in 1967, like a Phoenix rising from the Middle-American ashes, Paul Brown announced his return to football as the owner, general manager, and head coach of a new team, the Cincinnati Bengals. So from the very beginning, the Bengals have cherished a spirit of condescension and spite towards their fellow NFL teams. Blah blah blah forty years something something Boomer Esiason which brings us to today.

For the last nine years, the Bengals have fielded (that's right, isn't it? fielded?) a wide receiver who came to the team as Chad Johnson. In 2006, Johnson asked to be allowed to wear a jersey reading “Ocho Cinco” instead of 85, in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. When this was ruled outside uniform regulations and thus unacceptable, Johnson, in the true Bengals “fuck you” spirit, had his name legally changed to Ochocinco, had the changes made to his jersey, and was fined $5000 by the league. During the 2010 off season, he starred in a reality show entitled Ochocinco: the Ultimate Catch, which has now aired three episodes in which nobody seems to truly imagine that any of the women on the show will ever be romantically involved with Ochocinco. Other than that, the show is pretty good. My current favorite is Ericka, who looks exactly the way that Jennifer Coolidge looked in Best In Show. You can tell she loves soup.

A great deal of Chad's time on the show seems to be devoted to gauging the deceitfulness of the individual women, and believe you me, these women are full of deceit. On the very first episode, Chad invited his good friends Terrell Owens and Some Other Football Player to a ball (yes, a ball, like, the dancing kind), where the three of them assessed Ocho's prospective mates and then convened to rank them. And while all of this was going on, Terrell Owens asked one of the girls for her phone number. He told Ocho he was pretty sure he would have gotten it if there hadn't been cameras everywhere, because the girl kept saying, “I can't give you my phone number because there are cameras everywhere.”

You see? Deceit! Trickery! Drama! And now----

Terrell Owens is joining the Cincinnati Bengals!!

So, that's pretty awesome. They're both wide receivers, they're both getting a little old for the game, and they're both famous drama queens (TO has his own reality show that comes on after Ochocinco's, but I don't watch it because it doesn't have weekly eliminations).

So we'll see how this goes. What I'm really hoping for is some kind of crossover with the Kardashians.