Friday, April 23, 2010

Is it still a party if it's at the office?


When I was called in for jury duty last fall, I developed the unshakable opinion that the most entertaining setting in which to watch other humans behave is during jury selection. It's probably the only time that you can ever find one room containing a television producer, a retarded record store clerk, a sidewalk repairman, and a lesbian pet cremator all at the same time. I loved listening to the litigators interview each person; it's an amazing study in human nature because everyone (except me) claims that they would rather be anywhere, anywhere else, but none of them want to actually be rejected as jurors, so they really try to make themselves sound like they'd be super awesome at making fair-minded decisions about whether or not an old lady who tripped over a kiddie ride in a mall should get any money from the mall (correct answer: she should not).

A close second on the entertaining observational scale is going to a company event with your significant other, and I am referring specifically to your SO's place of business, not your own. There's just something very bizarre and interesting about watching a group of people interact who all know each other well, but none of whom know you. The best is when they hand out fakey awards: Office Flirt, Best Decorated Desk, Most Likely to Break the Copy Machine. Everything is based on inside jokes that you can't even hope to get. If you're like me, this is awesome for about an hour before it becomes infuriatingly dull. If you're not like me, it seems to take about five minutes.

I have been paying attention to the NFL draft, a bit—I mean, I feel that if I'm writing a whole blog about nothing but football, I should at least feign interest—but it all just feels like the husband's office party to me. In the two and a half months that I've been writing about the NFL, it feels like I've moved to a new town and sort of gotten a feel for the streets, so I know where to buy groceries and get a cup of coffee, but I haven't had a chance to get to know anybody—excepting the one guy who always gets drunk and tries to fuck the new girl, because everybody I've talked to has warned me about him, twice.

This is a metaphor-heavy entry but what it all boils down to is that I'm feeling uncomfortably out of my element. Which is the entire point, of course. I mean, it's really easy to just learn a list of the 32 NFL teams, and it isn't much harder to learn their quarterbacks, or their general managers, although I haven't done either of those last two. But it takes time to really get to know 32 teams with more than 50 guys on each of their rosters, let alone the rookies that they're pulling from the college leagues, and so I really can't even hope to understand why Sam Bradford was the number one draft pick overall even though he has a chronic shoulder injury and didn't even play for most of the 2009 season. HOW IS THIS GUY THE BEST CHOICE?? According to nfl.com he did well in the combine (for you non-fans, that's a sort of crazy steeplechase track meet that they make the draft prospects run because checking their teeth doesn't give a very good idea of their athletic ability), he's a quarterback and they're always valuable, and he was picked by the Rams, who apparently looked at their roster right before the draft and realized that they haven't been winning because they've forgotten to put a quarterback on the field since (as far as I can tell) former owner Georgia Frontiere murdered quarterback Jim Everett by putting arsenic in his tea (she then immediately moved the team from Los Angeles to her home town of St. Louis as part of a massive cover up and traded Everett's dead body to the New Orleans Saints for a stack of tea cozies and some bourbon).



So, yeah. I hope Sam Bradford's arm doesn't fall off and that the St Louis Rams end up feeling good about their decision.

Obviously I'm not going to go through the whole draft like this; it would take much too long for you to bother with, assuming you haven't given up already. But getting to know football means getting to know the players, so I'm going to work harder at that—and if any of you know more than I do, I'd be happy to buy you lunch and pick your brain, so hit me up for a free meal.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Yeah, Anything's Fun If You're Good At It


In true nerd tradition, I was always, always, always picked last for sports at school. I think the consensus on that is that it's supposed to scar you for life, but in hindsight, it really wasn't that bad. I mean, I'm not saying it was pleasant; it definitely sucks to be the last person standing there when everyone else has been deemed more valuable than you are, but it was never unexpected and it didn't ever last long. I was terrible at sports. Everyone knew me, and they knew that I was terrible at sports. I wouldn't have put myself on a team, either.

What actually was traumatizing was that our (female) gym teachers, in an effort to keep the nerdy kids from being so downtrodden, would pay attention to who consistently got picked last for teams, and then make them team captains, so that instead of not being chosen by others, we would get to do all the choosing. To an adolescent girl who hates physical exertion, this is like being put in front of an assortment of Hitler Youth and fellow Jews and being asked to choose which ones are going to accompany you to Auschwitz. I mean, the Jews are your friends and all, but they're already marked to go down. And if you pick the Nazis, thinking they'll protect you, you're looking at a lot of locker room wedgies and boogers in your food. In other words, we had the option of picking a friendly team that would never win or a winning team that would pretty much exclude you. I honestly don't remember what kind of team I put together, but even now I can close my eyes and see the disgust on the faces of girls who were regional soccer champions.

If you're reading this blog, you may or may not have put together the fact that the reason I'm taking this particular stroll down Suppressed Memory Lane is that the NFL Draft begins tomorrow. All the top college players (I have no idea whether graduation is actually a requirement, but it seems to be implied) will be sitting next to their phones in anticipation as the General Managers of all 32 NFL Teams gather together in a room that I can only imagine looks like the United Nations conference room from the original Adam West Batman Movie. Maybe darker. Anyway, these guys will spend three days going around in a circle choosing college players to pull for their teams until three days are up or someone tries to slip in a made-up player (it was ruled in 1978 that imaginary players have an unfair advantage and are ineligible for the draft).

There are loads of mock drafts all over the internet as everyone tries to guess who will actually be chosen and in what order, but I'm having a hard enough time following the guys who already play for the NFL, so as far as I'm concerned, one college player is as good as another, so I wish each and every one of them the vaguest of good luck.

Except for Golden Tate, who I feel can only ever truly be at home with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I really want his nickname to be “the Cabin Boy.”

Monday, April 19, 2010

Monster Chiller Horror Mini-Post!!

Hey, guys. Remember that old ghost story from elementary school about the girl who always wore a ribbon around her neck, and wouldn't ever let anybody touch it? And then she grew up and got married and lived to be super old and then one day, she asks her (also super old) husband to untie the ribbon from around her neck, and he does and her head falls off?

That girl's name is Myron Rolle.


(Thanks to Jesse Thorn for the link.)

Thursday, April 15, 2010

A Modern-Day Fable


Picture yourself in a boat, on a river. Possibly the Allegheny. Actually, no, this metaphor works better in the ocean, so picture yourself on a steel boat in the middle of the ocean, sailing to Heinz Field in Pittsburgh. You're about halfway through your voyage and there is no land in sight, when all of a sudden your navigator develops a pathological urge to punch holes in your boat all the time.

This is a problem, obviously, but you can't just throw the guy overboard for punching holes in the boat because he's the only one who knows how to figure out where you are without any landmarks and you'll all die without him. So you do your best to restrain him, patch up the holes, and look for any extra weight to jettison in the meantime. In your search for unnecessary cargo, you discover that one of your crew members has handcuffed himself to a big old steamer trunk full of hash. What is the most correct action to make at this juncture? YOU MAKE THE CALL!!

Now, if you're a member of the Rooney family, who owns the Pittsburgh Steelers, the first thing you do is trade Santonio Holmes to the Jets. Holmes (full name: Santonio Negron Holmes) has been suspended by the league for the first four games of the season due to violation of the NFL's drug-abuse policy, a fact the Jets may or may not have known when they agreed to take him off of Art Rooney's hands. It's not like they lost a whole lot, though. In return for Santonio (a name proclaiming a deep love of the state of Texas (Holmes has never lived in Texas)), the Steelers received a fifth-round draft pick.

For those of you who do not follow football, this means that the Steelers did not get anyone in return for Santonio Holmes. They got an extra chance to pick a new NFL player who probably won't be as good as Santonio Holmes, because whoever he is, he won't get chosen until the fifth round of the draft. Holmes, by the by, was voted Most Valuable Player of the 2008 Super Bowl. He's also been suspended twice now for drug use/possession, tweeted to one of his fans to “kill urself,” and was arrested for throwing a glass (not the drink, the glass) at a woman in Miami Beach. So, you know. It's a wash.

As for our boat-sabotaging quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, things are not looking good. On the up side, the unnamed woman he had sex with in Milledgeville has decided not to press charges. Unfortunately, that means that the investigation records of the case (minus the name of the Mysterious Milledgeville Miss) have been made public—and there are over 572 pages of them. As of right now, none of the Rooneys have opened discussions with other teams about trading Roethlisberger, but they're making it pretty clear to him that it's on their minds.

And the moral of this story is, if you punch holes in the boat with your penis, the other sailors might just decide to take their chances without you after all.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Please tell the abyss to stop staring at me.

All right. It's been a while since I posted and there's really no excuse for that. I mean, it's been a rough week, filled with rent emergencies and sinus infections, I'm not going to lie, some mistakes were made, and some of those mistakes were mine. But none of those things were legitimate reasons for not continuing work on this retarded made-up project that delivers no consequences either way whether I pay attention to it or not.

I think I still have the remnants of a fever and it's difficult for me to make sense just now, so I'm not going to try too hard. But from here on out, there will be more WtB entries about the actual, real-live world of football that's happening right now, so I'm going to have to like, read the news and stuff. I may post a bit less often, although I hope not, because if anyone's going to care about this thing it ought to be me.

That said, I need more Vitamin C and I think it's time for bed.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Whirling Towards the Future

First and foremostly, I would like to dedicate this Writing the Bench entry to Eva Solomon Wade, who suggested an entry about the history of football uniforms. Unfortunately, Eva, the history of football team uniforms is not remotely interesting. I was disappointed, too. I was really hoping for some juicy stories about like, the Buffalo Bills wearing brown, but then somebody forming the Cleveland Browns and of course they'd want to wear brown, and nobody being smart enough to say, like, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! There's no need to fight because home uniforms are white anyway!” and then a consultant from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would run in and declare that the Bills uniforms were ocher and the Browns uniforms were chocolate, and anybody who thought that those were the same colors should have their amateur pilot's license revoked because they were obviously colorblind. And then they'd all have a good laugh and go drink mojitos or something.

Nothing like that ever happened. But I did find this awesome photo of the 1904 OshKosh Normals (actual team). It took me a few minutes to realize that those sweaters have the letter O for OshKosh on them—it's not a team full of guys all wearing the number zero.



But don't worry, Eva, because all is not lost! Football uniforms as such don't really have much of a story to tell, but football pads have actually had a pretty interesting evolution. Apparently, the first game of what we now call “football” was a competition between Princeton and Rutgers, but it was less like a game of football than it was a very violent game of capture the flag with a ball instead of a flag. Then as now, the violence was the real appeal of the game, because, as we all know, Victorian collegiates were known mainly for committing mindless acts of violence.

That was a joke, of course. The violence was anything but mindless. In fact, during the first twenty years of football play, football games became more and more intense, featuring many common infantry tactics such as the “Flying Wedge,” and the most padding any player really wore was a handkerchief on their head. Players suspected of trying to wear any sort of protective padding were decried as “pansies,” “Nancy-boys,” and “future Tampa Bay Buccaneers.”

As more and more football games resulted in injury and death, however, the rules were continually adjusted to make things safer, and more and more players chose to wear leather helmets to make themselves look more like George Clooney, which in turn led to a major increase in the amount of sex that college football players were having with silent movie stars (a tradition carried out to this day by Reggie Bush and Kim Kardashian). By the 1920s these helmets were almost universally accepted, thanks to the efforts of Clara Bow.

Facemasks were added gradually but had become standard by the 1950s, and as America developed into the insurocracy in which we now live, players increasingly accepted their clubs' encouragement to wear more and more safety gear. Demand inspired supply: since the NFL made padding standard, and all players were wearing it, manufacturers decided to specialize, and for the last two decades, safety gear for each individual position in the NFL has become more and more distinct, and basic equipment has gotten more and more high tech—the University of Florida's College of Medicine has developed a way to air-condition shoulder pads as a means of regulating players' body temperature, and Skynet is working on a new robot that may change the face of football forever. I'm sure there's no way that can go wrong.