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.

Holy Cats! Football!

All right, guys. It's starting for real. Football season. I can't pretend any more, and I can't slack off, no matter how much time I spend mincing around in plays that literally no one will come to see, no matter how hard my husband tries to convince me that he is worth paying attention to, no matter how many sleepless nights I suffer worrying about getting my word count up.

Training camp starts this coming week, and it's time to get down to business. Real news is starting to happen. Nfl.com (my main source; check it out) has begun speculating about each team individually, and suddenly the amount of information I've been ignoring for the past six weeks has multiplied exponentially. It's time to get on the stick and see what a few key teams are getting up to in order to prepare.

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS – It's vital that we take a look at the Saints because they won the Super Bowl last year, so they're currently the collective Kings of the Football Mountain. The main news story about the Saints is whether or not they will be able to win the Super Bowl again this year, and the consensus is: probably not, because it is very rare for a team to win two Super Bowls in a row. I just saved you a lot of non-actual-news reading. You're welcome.

MIAMI DOLPHINS – The Dolphins, as previously chosen, are “my” team (although I am seriously reconsidering this choice due to remembering how much I hate all things Floridian (also I still know basically nothing about the Miami Dolphins)). The thing to know about the Dolphins this year is that they have a new coach, and it is Mike Nolan. Nolan is famous for the “suit issue”-- Nolan's father was an NFL coach back in the days when looking classy was still a thing people did, so when Nolan Jr. was first appointed to be an NFL coach, he wanted to wear a suit on the sidelines as a tribute to his dad. This was not allowed, due to the fact that so few tailored suits bear NFL logos. They later decided to give Nolan a pass, and let him wear a suit on the sidelines twice a season. I have no idea whether or not he can coach.

BALTIMORE RAVENS – I thought I'd check up on the Ravens because of the books I've checked out of the library regarding the NFL, two of those books were coincidentally about the Ravens: The Blind Side (tangentially—the book is about Michael Oher's life previous to signing with the Ravens), and Next Man Up (entirely—John Feinstein Jr. followed the Ravens through their 2004 season). So I feel like I know a little bit about the Ravens. As it turns out, I do not. I think I know all of the individual words on their camp preview page, but together they make absolutely no sense to me. One thing I will says about the 2010 Ravens: Awesome, awesome names. Here are a few: Anquan Boldin, Lardarius Webb, Cam Cameron, Terrell Suggs. Full points for creativity, Raven moms!

DETROIT LIONS – The Detroit Lions are so well known for being consistently awful that even I know about it, so it's kind of fun to like them in an ironic, hipster kind of asshole way, but it's a tragedy for anyone who was like, born in Detroit and thus obligated to follow the Lions as their home team. The big question for the Lions this season is, will they stop sucking? My answer is that I certainly hope not, because comedy. The “experts” have written up an optimistic profile for the Lions on nfl.com, but it sounds like a company trying to convince its shareholders that their utter lack of profit is nothing to worry about. Oh wait. That's exactly what it is.

Ocho Cinco Ultimatum

One of the sweetest slash strangest compliments I have ever received was given to me by a ninth-grade girl when I myself was about twenty-three. She said, and I quote, “I love the way you talk because you always sound like somebody out of Shakespeare or something.” As delighted as I was to be told such a thing, I realize that it is far from true. And it's not that I don't ever speak in iambic pentameter (because I frequently do), but because I only have one bed and it's not that good.

But I still choose to boast about this years-old compliment now, because I think it helps to illustrate the impression I give to people who know me only slightly, even today. I use lots of big words. I listen to public radio. I read books—in public. Any or all of those things might be presented as a reason for why people are surprised to find out that I also enjoy watching reality television.

Now, I'm not an indiscriminate viewer; I won't watch just any unscripted television show. Most of them, I don't know if you know, are basically crap. BUT NOT ALL.

Allow me to present to you: Ochocinco: The Ultimate Catch.

To be fair, this show does violate my number two rule of reality series that I will watch, as normally I boycott television shows that offer people as prizes. It is not right to treat human beings as objects that can just be handed out willy-nilly to the skankiest rose holder. I care strongly about this issue and I had to do a lot of soul-searching before we set our DVR to record The Ultimate Catch, but since I have made a decision to watch the show, I want to allay the doubts of any of you out there with similar misgivings:

Nobody who has ever, ever won a romantically themed reality show is still with the person they competed against multiple other empty-souled fame whores to win. Not the winner of Rock of Love, not the winner of Flava of Love, not the winner of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, or the winner of I Love New York, or I Want to be Friends with Paris Hilton for Some Godawful Reason, or Sure, I'll Have Sex With Somebody Who Lost On a Different Show. None of them.

So I'm sure that as soon as they finished taping Ochocinco: The Ultimate Catch, he went right back to the open arms of his waiting girlfriend.

Five days after writing this, I realize that I have nothing to add just yet. I'm watching the first real competition episode right now (last one was the pilot), so expect more on this tomorrow.

Kiss the baby, as Ochocinco would say!

Warming up the Bench!

The best way to make something happen in your life is to make other plans.

Like, for example, maybe you get a fun idea for a really silly blog regarding a topic that you know next to nothing about. You set to with a will, going gangbusters for a good couple of months, impressing no one less than yourself with your sparkling wit and consistent work ethic. And then, just as your job gets busier for the tourist season, you get cast in not one but two plays (neither of which you will earn any money for doing, mind you) so you're never home to spend time with your husband and when you are you fight because the house is a mess and you start to suffer anxiety attacks because you haven't had a real day off in over ten weeks. Just as a for instance, you understand.

On the plus side, the children's play will sell out the theatre.

What I'm saying is, I've been busy. The timing was actually pretty good because it's still the preseason, so there hasn't been a lot to talk about in the football world. I have been spending lots of time on the bus, reading up on Pete Rozelle and Howard Cosell and Howie Mandel and the 2004 Ravens (except for Howie Mandel—I just threw that in for scansion), and I could have written book reports, I guess, but as much as I enjoy increasing my nerd factor I think I'm done with looking backwards here at the Bench. I don't regret the break; I needed it and the players needed it. I don't know anything about you, but I'm going to say you probably needed it too.

I hope you're all rested up because pretty soon things are going to get busy. The various teams are going to be starting training camp by the end of this month and kicking off the preseason on August 12, which gives me exactly one month to figure out how I'm going to afford an NFL cable package. But that doesn't mean that we, the fans, have a month to rest.

Our season begins tonight. And it's all thanks to Chad Ochocinco.

Mini-post: Yes. Yes it is.

I am waiting for the employee shuttle to take me to the train station at the end of my work day. As is my usual habit, I am reading a book, as a sign that I do not want to be engaged in conversation. As is equally usual, I am approached by one of my least favorite coworkers.

Coworker: “What are you reading?”

Me: “A book.”

Coworker: “You're funny. No, what's it about though?”

Me: “It's called Next Man Up. This writer followed a football team around for a year to see what it was like behind the scenes.”

Coworker: “Wow. So you must be like, really into football.”

Me: “Not really.”

Coworker: “?”

Me: “I'm trying to learn about football. It's for a blog that I'm writing.”

Coworker: “Oh cool. Well, that's one way to learn. Reading.”