Friday, September 24, 2010

He's not just the Quarterback...


One of the luxuries we are afforded, living in a first world country in the twenty-oneth century, is the leisure to care way too much about non-issues, and I for one would like to express my gratitude that I live in a nation where we are all free to take time away from making sure that our nation is fed and housed to worry hard about how strangers are dressing, and whether celebrities get rehabbed. It is in that spirit that this past week, our nation has come together to marvel over and pray about Tom Brady's hair.

Tom Brady's hair definitely looks stupid right now, everybody agrees. And searching on the internet you can find lots of pictures, plenty of mockery, and a quote from Brady himself in which he states, “You'll have to ask my wife [about the hairstyle].” But no one seems to be going to the root of the problem—why is Brady sporting the bowl cut? Faced with a dearth of information, I am here to speculate with you. Here are some possible reasons for the hair, that I came up with:

One: Popular wisdom tells us that the simplest answer is the most likely to be true, and there are millions of people who have reached the obvious conclusion that Brady is suffering from Bieber Fever. This would also explain the comment about his wife. Not many people know this, but Giselle Bundchen is a practicing Christian Scientist, and if Brady were to take antibiotics to cure his Bieber Fever, she would divorce him. Some are denouncing her as a hypocrite for this; there are unsubstantiated rumors that she herself used a topical cream two years ago to treat her Timberlake Shingles.

Two: Brady's forward-swept bangs totally conceal his forehead. Could this be because he has something to hide? Possibly. My favorite possibilities so far are the Mark of the Beast, or a lobotomy scar.

Three: This may be just a transition phase. Hair takes a while to grow, you know. Maybe the mop top is just a coincidence, and what Brady is actually trying to do is grow his hair all the way out like Clay Matthews, to see if it will give him the same superhuman strength (for the record, the long hair will give him superhuman strength, but it won't be the same superhuman strength as Clay Matthews).

Four: It's a fake meltdown. You know, like Joaquin Phoenix had to make us all hate him, and then revealed that it was all a put on to make us hate him more. Like that. No big. Let's all laugh about it!

Five: It's a silent protest. Remember in Ender's Game, how he thinks he's playing a video game the whole time but at the very end of the book he finds out that all of the spaceships were (spoiler alert) a real army and he was sending real people out to completely destroy an alien race that hadn't ever shown any signs of aggression? That's how Tom Brady felt when he found out about the illegal taping. So he was like, “All right, Bill. I'll sign this new contract for $48.5 million dollars, but I won't cut my hair until you stop cheating.”

You know, the more I think about it, that's got to be it. I bet Bill Belichick is throwing away all his cameras right now, crushing them with golf clubs so he won't be tempted to use them anymore. So expect Tom Brady to get his hair cut any day. Also, expect the Patriots not to win anything this season.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Week Two Status Update

So, Week Two of the season has ended and people are actually asking me for a status report, which is very flattering.

Let me first say that the season began just in time for this blog to survive. I had a very rough summer; if it had been rough and interesting in a way that was funny, I might take up the space to regale you with hilarious tales. As it is, it was rough in a way that my husband has been able to make funny. As for me, have you ever seen a cat that has been systematically tormented by children for so long that it twitches all the time and it starts trying to eat its own tail and all of its fur falls out in strange ways? That's how I feel when I look back on this past July and August, and I've spent the last three weeks just trying to smooth out my metaphorical fur, so I'd rather not write about it. In a year, maybe, I'll tell about the terrible play I was in with an asshole costar, and the sixty-hour work weeks, and it will be delightfully amusing because it won't be actually happening.

So lately thinking about football, which does not come naturally to me, has not been as high on my list of priorities as taking naps and enjoying days when I don't have to go to work (in the month of August I only had two days off, and they were because I was forced to call in sick due to injury). Nobody discovered my brilliantly hilarious early entries and offered me a book deal, so I was ready to just quietly let it go. But football season was just starting, and fortunately I had enough real football fans around me (read: boys) to keep the dream alive, though admittedly anemic and feeble.

So here's how we're doing: I love my fantasy football team. I love it. I am proving to my husband's friends week by week that you can put together a team of guys with silly names, and refuse to draft any player with a girlfriend you don't like, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a complete embarrassment when it comes to the scores. You will almost certainly not win, I certainly haven't, but Chad Ochocinco and Knowshon Moreno are doing very well so far, and Golden Tate is making a nice showing as well, whereas Reggie Bush (who used to date Kim Kardashian), was not only shamed into returning his Heisman Trophy this past week, but was also injured in the Monday Night Game and will be out for at least six weeks, so maybe Lousaka Polite wasn't such a bad pick after all. Manners are never overrated. I will have to drop Chris Cooper, though. He's been so busy giving a powerhouse performance in The Town that he hasn't even been playing. I should have learned by now that people named Cooper don't ever really play.

I like watching football more than I used to, but I like it more with other people. I think this might prove that I'm not a real fan yet—I know more than one guy who has to watch his team play without anyone else around, so that he won't be distracted from thinking as hard as he can at the television to help his team win. I still watch the game like I'm at a baby race—I don't care about the score so much, I just get really happy whenever I see someone running the direction they're supposed to go.

I didn't get to watch a lot of football this weekend, but here are some things that I learned just from Week Two: Peyton Manning can beat Eli Manning, even though Eli is the one with the most recent Super Bowl ring. In the fight of brother against brother, the South has triumphed against the North. Randy Moss can catch a football with one hand. And the Denver Broncos have an attractive retro argyle pattern in their end zone, so if they ever make an episode of Mad Men where somebody needs to go to a football game, they could totally do it in Denver.

Monday, September 13, 2010

After Week One, a Domestic Interlude

Now that football season has officially started, my husband is thrilled to have somebody in the house to talk about the game with. I was having trouble thinking about how to write about this first weekend of the season, and he was trying to help me out. Here's how it went:

Husband: Well, what do you think you learned this weekend, from watching?

Me: Um, I learned that football is much more interesting to watch if you either care which team wins, or if you're watching Red Zone.

(I usually do not care which team wins, having no home team loyalties. Red Zone, for those of you who may know, is a channel which shows nothing but football all day Sunday with no commercials, and switches between all games that are playing at once. Whenever a team gets close to scoring they switch to that game to see what will happen, and whenever a particularly exciting play happens anywhere, they switch to that game to replay the moment and cover the aftermath. If you have no vested interest in any particular game, it's the perfect way to watch football, because it's never not interesting and the football never goes away. I have been trying hard to watch the evening games so far, but if anything else grabs my attention, I'm gone. It's an uphill battle. I'm not saying that Frontierville on Facebook is fun, exactly, I'm just saying that when I play it I forget that I'm supposed to be paying attention to the Chiefs kicking the Chargers' ass.)

Husband: What else?

Me: Um....I think that's it, actually.

Husband: How about that Michael Vick is still one of the best players in the league, despite having spent all that time in jail?

Me: Well, Vick was good yesterday, but I didn't really know how good he was before.

Husband:
Okay, that's fair. What about this—you learned Drew Brees is dreamy.

Me: Oh, I've known that since he won the Super Bowl in February. He's super dreamy.

Husband:
Fine then. How did your fantasy team do?

Me: Okay, not great. The Ravens defense did a good job. How about you?

Husband: I'm worst place in the league. The Chargers are still playing, you know. You should pay attention.

Me: Hang on, I have to chop down this tree.

Husband: You know those games are stupid.

Me: I know, but if I get one more neighbor I can build a barn! Please be my Frontier Neighbor!

Husband:
No.

Me: I hate you.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Game One Report, a Little Late

There is a sequence in To Kill A Mockingbird in which Atticus tells Jem and Scout they have to go over to some old lady's house and read to her every day, which they do. However, after Jem has been reading for only a short time, the lady is no longer able to pay attention to him, and then she goes into convulsions for no reason that the children are able to see.

While watching the Saints/Vikings game on Thursday night, I felt a lot like that old woman. The first quarter was interesting, I could actually follow what was going on, Drew Brees was playing well and it was easy for me to watch. I felt like a really good student, and as I saw what Brees was doing, it made me want to see Favre get the ball to see what he would do with it, to compare and contrast. Would their styles be noticeably different? Would I be able to tell whether Brees was doing well on his own or depending on his offensive line, by watching how the Vikings offense compared?

As it turns out, I ended up with no idea. I don't know if my attention span needs to be built up, or if the commercials took me too for out of the game, or if Brett Favre has just aged into the least compelling quarterback alive, but I couldn't keep my eyes on the screen after the first quarter. I take heart from the fact that most actual fans only keep one eye on a game while they're doing something else, but still, I'm a little disappointed in myself.

I work on Sunday but I plan to watch the night game, and some of the guys who are on my fantasy team will be playing, so maybe I'll feel more of a personal stake in what's going on. And maybe it won't be boring. That would be nice, I think.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Fantasy Football, just in time!

I hate Dungeons and Dragons. There, I said it. Can't stand it. Never could. Tried hard in college to like it. Failed. Lost the ability to be friends with people who played it.

You'd think that Dungeons and Dragons would have been tailor made for me, especially during my late teen years. I was a fantasy geek. I was a drama geek! What could be more appealing than sitting around with my geek friends pretending to be wizards? I did really like the idea. I had a brief flirtation with the SCA when I was about sixteen that probably would have blossomed into love if the Association Chapter had actually been in the same state where I lived.

Anyway. It turns out that D&D is less whimsy and creative teamwork than it is thinking of ways to magically fuck your friends (both figuratively and...well...figuratively, I guess) and then argue about whether it's legal in the “universe” of the “game.” Oh, and don't get me started on dice. I don't care how long ago it was or how young you were, if you have ever been excited to own a new set of dice, we have nothing more to say to each other.

I realize that fantasy sports is a whole different sort of game for a whole different sort of person. But it still involves using complicated math to determine a reality that does not exist, and for that reason I do not trust it. However, in the spirit of getting into the spirit of things, I went ahead and joined my husband's fantasy football league/ Here is my team:

Quarterback – I'm not a complete idiot, and I decided that if I was going to do this fantasy thing I was going to be in it not to lose it, so my first pick for quarterback was Drew Brees. Unfortunately, I picked sixth in my league's live draft and he got taken before that (no surprise). So I went with Matt Ryan. Ryan's a solid pick; as a matter of fact, he's so good I can't make a joke about him. It's like Meryl Streep and TMZ. They don't bother following her because there's no dirt there. But if there were, it still wouldn't hurt her career at all--she's that damn good. As a backup QB I picked Tyler Thigpen, because he's my favorite.

Wide Receiver – Since Drew Brees got snapped up immediately, I used my first pick to go with Chad Ochocinco, who my husband has dubbed the patron saint of this blog. I don't care what anybody says, I like Ochocinco. He's a little bit dumb, he's a lotta bit crazy, and he's really, really good at football. So there. I went with several backup wide receivers, which seemed like a wise choice because there are more receiver slots on the fantasy team than any other position, and craziness in a celebrity is delightful to me, but may lead to a professional athlete getting suspended from play. So I backed up the Och with Dez Bryant (also delightfully crazy and probably risking some kind of suspension in the upcoming season), Golden Tate (normally well behaved unless there are donuts nearby), and I picked Pierre Garcon and Mohamed Masssaquoi as a package deal in honor of the memory of the French and Indian war.

Running Backs – My running backs are Ricky William, Knowshon Moreno, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Lousaka Polite. I don't know anything about any of them. I hope they're good.

Rest of the Team – I picked Chris Cooper as my single defensive player because he was fantastic in Seabiscuit. I mean, I love that guy. He's a chameleon! You practically can't recognize him from one movie to the next. Boo Robinson is everybody's favorite character from To Kill a Mockingbird, so I was lucky he didn't get drafted before I could get to him. For my defensive line I went with Baltimore because (as I've mentioned before) they seem to have had more books written about them than any other NFL team, and I like that sort of intellectual initiative.

The only players left on my roster are Jason Witten as the tight end and Rob Bironas as kicker. I don't remember why I picked either of them, as I don't really remember doing it and I don't recognize either of their names. I think I just needed to fill those slots and they were the highest-rated players still left.

Anyway, there are no pictures or links with this post because I've procrastinated writing it for a good week and now I'm scrambling to get it up before the opening game tonight. And I'm missing Project Runway to watch it, so I hope Drew Brees is grateful.