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.

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.

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.

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(This is a verification code to get my blog registered at technorati.com, on the off chance that anyone is curious.)

Legends of Learning

As a super nerd, I have read not only every one of Malcolm Gladwell's books and both of the Freakonomics compendiums, but also Christopher Booker's wonderful 742 page opus The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (I read that one during jury duty (and I don't care what anyone says, jury selection is the highest form of comedy and I wish I did get called in every year)).

I like reading these books because they give me insight into aspects of our modern world that I would otherwise never have thought of, like why Heinz really has the best ketchup, or how many people really heard Kitty Genovese being murdered and whether or not they cared. But whether you're writing about teachers cheating on behalf of their students or why Blue's Clues is actually more educational than Sesame Street, understanding our world in an any aspect in any era boils down to one fundamental fact: human beings learn through stories.

For example, if I asked you what was the name of Ross and Carol's baby on Friends, most of you would be like, “Who's Carol? Was she even a Friends character? I remember Ross dated that Chinese woman for a while, but they didn't have a baby, did they?”

But those of you who watched the show would remember the episode where the baby was born, and you'd remember that Ross keeps fighting with Carol's girlfriend Susan about who is more helpful, and Phoebe has to drag them into a supply closet and they get locked in and almost miss the birth completely, but luckily a janitor wants some supplies and he lets them out of the closet just in time, so they name the baby Ben, after the janitor. So there we see how much easier it is to remember a fact when it is part of a story.

To that end, I have found a few current NFL players who have interesting stories going on in their lives. Hopefully by taking an interest in these individuals, it will help us all to take a greater interest in the league as a whole. It's like watching Friday Night Lights except you have to watch the news and you never actually see them having sex.


BRETT FAVRE – Brett Favre was the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers for ever and ever and ever, but he turned 40 last year, which is prime if you're an opera singer, but it's downright geriatric for Olympic athletes and ballerinas, and long in the tooth for football players. Knowing this, Brett Favre retired from the Packers in 2007. They had a party and gave him a cake and everything. But then he sat around for a whole summer and got bored, and there wasn't anybody to play with, and he didn't feel that bad, so he decided to unretire. Only problem was, the Packers didn't want him back. So there was duh-rama. Brett Favre played for the Jets in 2008 and the Vikings in 2009. He might play for the Vikings again in 2010, but he hasn't decided yet. I personally think he should do a farewell tour every year, like Barbra Streisand, and then when some space opens up at the Venetian he can run a permanent show four nights a week in Vegas, like all the other legends.

DONOVAN MCNABB – Donovan McNabb is interesting (to me, at least), in the same way that Evan is interesting on the Real World/Road Rules Challenge: he's pretending to play for everybody's team right now. And by everybody's, I mean his own(the Philadelphia Eagles) and Brett Favre's. You see, an “unidentified source,” which we will refer to as “Deepnovan McThroat,” apparently told the Philly newspapers that McNabb wants to be traded to the Vikings and take over Favre's spot if Favre retires. Then McNabb (as McNabb this time), went to the coach of the Eagles and told him that wasn't true and he's totally happy staying with the Eagles and not getting a huge raise or playing with a better team. So that's going on.

BEN ROETHLISBERGER – So, the Trials of Young Roethlisberger currently qualifies as the NFL's version of Gossip Girl. After sorting through all of the very repetitive articles reporting this story over the last two or three weeks, here's the story as I understand it: Bugs Rutabaga and some buddies fell down a flight of stairs and landed in a thrilling metropolis called Milledgeville, Georgia. They went to a nightclub and Bean Wafflestomper had sex with a girl in the bathroom, and then later she said it was assault. Rufflesteamer's lawyers feel like they have a good case, because she didn't go to the police immediately. Her lawyers feel like they have a good case, because Rumplestiltskin was previously charged with sexual assault in Nevada. I'm not going to take sides or anything because I'm sure he's a complete douche bag, but I would like to point out that according to basically everyone, sexual assault is not recognized as a crime in Nevada.

CHAD OCHOCINCO – This guy's parents named him Chad Johnson, but he wanted everyone to remember who he was, so he changed his name to Ocho Cinco because he wears number 85. He used the Spanish translation for “eight five” because he made the trade during Hispanic Heritage Month (October, 2006). He constantly proves his stamina to his fans by making hours-long entries on a video blog (see previous link), and he is currently a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. In other words, this guy is possibly the awesomest human being alive.

This entry has run a little long and I apologize, but I feel like it was worth it. Hopefully, these man can do for us what Achilles did for Greece, Arthur did for England, and Gandhi did for India, by making complicated and possibly fictional events into just a story about a guy, so that we can remember it.

I guess this is sort of news. Mini-Post 2

Ho (and I do mean ho). Lee. Crap.

We all have one month to perfect our spray-on tans and even out our boob jobs. April 24th will be tryout day for new Dolphins cheerleaders!!

So if you're skinny, double-jointed, and like to yell, and you're going to be in Southern Florida for the next year, you could do what I would do and kill yourself, or you could audition to be on the cheer squad for the Miami Dolphins, and be appreciated as the artist you truly are.

After wracking my brain to write an essay about this, I realized that I can't come up with anything funnier than the “How to Prepare” page they have provided themselves for potential applicants, so here's the link. Enjoy.

(PS - The girl in the picture says her name is Andrea and I used this photo without her permission, so if she or anyone who claims to know her contacts me and angrily asks me to remove it, I will.)

Football News Mini-Post 1

So, all the dicking around I've been doing here for the last six weeks has been fun. But even though Sandra Bullock totally won an Oscar and seems to be a strong contender for her husband's love (although not a front-runner; she doesn't have enough tattoos), if I want to be knowledgeable for the upcoming football season TMZ just isn't going to prepare me. So I spent a couple of hours going through the news on nfl.com and I learned a few things, but I have ultimately decided that this blog can only really handle one news item at a time. On the other hand, maybe I'll post a little more often for the next few days. Top news story:

It's free agent season!

Okay, so every week, somebody gets voted off of Project Runway, right? And then at the beginning of the next episode, whoever won the challenge gets to pick if they want to kick the loser's model off the show, or if they want to exacerbate their own model's eating disorder by picking someone else to wear their clothes. This is so heart-wrenching that it has actually inspired a spin-off reality series about the models, which I don't watch because I can't take anyone seriously if they consider walking to be a skill. Anyway, free agent season is like the NFL's model roulette, except that the models—I mean, football players—actually have some say in their own fate. During free agent season, any football player who has completed a stipulated number of seasons with their current team is eligible to receive offers from other teams to see if they can make more money. There's a whole equation for how much they're supposed to make compared to what they made last year and what other guys who play their position are also making, but I'm not about to pile math onto everything else here. The important thing is, this is the time when football players change teams, usually.

To someone who really follows football I'm sure this is fascinating. I myself enjoy a good round of crazy politics and intrigue every now and again—that's why I'm such a huge fan of the Real World: Road Rules Challenge. But as of yet I'm not familiar enough with enough of the participants to know more about free agent season than that it's happening. I'm hoping to be more caught up in time for the new player draft, but it will be hard to find time if I'm going to see all of Dancing With the Stars featuring Chad Ochocinco.