The Box We Want Boffo Big Ben to Bust

Normal people of any stripe should not watch Super Bowl pregame shows. They offer bad history, bad biography, bad analysis and bad logic. Just when they finish laying waste to all of these, they also manage to be a bad version of Entertainment Tonight, country music concerts and daytime talk shows.

If you managed to overhear this year's pregame show while getting ready for a party or waiting seemingly forever for the game to start, you probably heard a lot of faulty analysis and logic about Pittsburgh Steelers starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Most fans of American sports can diagnose the bad analysis easily enough: "Ben Roethlisberger is one of the all-time greats because he just wins ballgames." But the bad logic was the more compelling. FOX NFL host Curt Menefee kicked off a theme that was carried throughout the pregame and into the game broadcast: this was Big Ben's "redemption season," and winning the Super Bowl would complete that redemption.

It takes an awful lot of question begging to construct any scenario wherein winning a particular ballgame can redeem anyone of anything, let alone two separate accusations of rape. What's more interesting is the converse implication, one the broadcast didn't address. To wit: if winning a Super Bowl morally redeems an alleged two-time rapist, then doesn't losing it confirm that he's just a piece-of-shit rapist? More importantly, why would anyone have any interest in an argument that tortured? What do they earn from that, and from whom?

Genre Fiction, Rennie Airth and the Blitz

During some sleepless nights this holiday, I found myself too tense to read anything with big words. Improving books about North Korea or the American Revolution satisfied for a paragraph before my mind drifted off, and I wound up turning pages with no clue as to their contents. Eventually, I settled on a trilogy of detective stories from Rennie Airth. After speeding through them over two nights, I felt what seems like a unique reaction to a trilogy of novels: that the second was by far the best of all.

Now, if you know a Star Wars fan or are one yourself, this is not necessarily a radical idea regarding film, but it's not something I've heard stated often about books (at least in part because good books rarely have a sequel and almost never have two of them). The argument in favor of The Empire Strikes Back is that it offers the richest character study, broadens the moral and spiritual parameters of its universe and increases the stakes for everyone. What's interesting about the Airth books, though, is that despite all of them featuring the same characters going over virtually the same plot for the same stakes, the second book tries the least to convince you of how grave they are and, in that process, creates a richer story for those same characters.

Of course, immediately after thinking of writing this down, I thought about a response I'd received to another piece I'd written about historical detective fiction. Midway through last year, I got in an argument on a message board with a guy who's read this site off and on. I suggested that a book he liked didn't really count as "literature," to which he replied (I'm paraphrasing), "What the hell would you know about it? All you do is review mystery novels." Ouch.

Harry Potter and the NFL Wild Card Weekend

Somewhere around hour #6 of the first day of NFL Wild Card weekend, I began to suspect that I'd been cured of my loathing of sports announcers.

Nearly two years spent luxuriating in the NFL Red Zone channel's absence of commercials and its frenetic jumps from game to game and from big play to big play meant that I'd experienced unmediated football. When big important things are happening in the game is when most announcers are too focused to go on inane time-filling mental jags. I had been spared about 30 weeks' worth of ads about THE ONLY TRUCK WITH A HEMI, Lipitor and dick medicine, and also "end zone" reporting from the obese Tony Siragusa, who needs to have a heart attack from mistaking his dick medicine for Lipitor — then have his corpse dragged into a ditch by a truck.

I was cheerful and, at times, a little bit rueful. This was fun. Who could fail to have total fun while watching football, and why had I failed at that so long? Could it be that I hadn't given people a fair shake?—that so much familiarity over so many years bred such contempt that I willfully blinded myself even to some announcers' good qualities? Were they actually good people, and was I actually just the jerk?

On the second day, during the fourth game of the weekend, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman dispelled all my doubts in less than three minutes. They didn't just suck; they sucked expeditiously. They sucked like they'd just gotten hired at Suck Co. by the Director of Suckery, and they were still in their 30 day probationary period wherein they could be terminated instantly for failure to suck hard, suck often and suck with vigor. Their ratio of minutes spent talking to minutes in which they were sucking approached one. They were truly doing yeoman's work, if "yeoman" is old English for the blowjob caddy on a ship that's falling apart because the people who built and run it are all assholes.

What I had forgotten to take into account was that minor but cherished delight of the NFL playoffs: that networks send out their best people to cover games because their limited broadcasting access allows them to know which is the game to cover. (For instance, of the four games this weekend, NBC covered the first two, while CBS and FOX covered the next two.) Generally, the people who have been around the longest are the people who viewers complain about the least, so networks send out the veterans expecting to satisfy the viewership.

This can still get screwed up, though. FOX Sports, for instance, is categorically horrible, which is how their premier announcing team can be universally regarded as the worst one on their payroll. Buck and Aikman have reached the top of the pyramid — and with any luck they will be entombed in it soon — but it's as if Egyptian civilization was based on the glory and immortality of turds. FOX Sports' national football (and baseball) empire is a ziggurat of cowpats lorded over by retards.

Let's go to the games.

Athletes Who Have Speed and Quickness Are Ballplayers

To celebrate the proud return of ENCEE DUBBLE-A FOOBAW this weekend, The Wife and I visited her friend Shana and Shana's husband, Jack. They're both smart, attractive and pleasant people, but I get the feeling that Shana (justifiably) hasn't really the faintest awareness of my existence pretty much 99.9% of the time, and Jack's eyes flash me a glint of neither-pleased-nor-fearful recognition whenever I go over there. Hence, my classification of them as The Wife's friend and the friend's husband.

I like to assume Jack thinks well of me, but I don't know, and in any case, he's probably in the same boat I'm in. I really have no idea how or why Shana became a friend of The Wife's — I strongly suspect that a mutual employer is to blame — but she appeared in The Wife's life one day and thus peripherally in mine. At first, I dreaded that she'd be some earnest, attention-starved matron, but I was pleased to find out she was roughly my age, exuberant, bright and funny. She also seems to more or less like me, which is always a good sign, especially because I more or less like her and wish The Wife bugged her to do things more often.

Jack, however, presents a consistently taciturn countenance, which leads me to suspect that I'm still identified less as me and more as Wife's Consort. Of course, this is perfectly fine: The Wife appeared in his life one day, and I peripherally as her husband. Frankly, I'm relieved not to get the "who the fuck are you?" glance when I'm in his house. But while I hardly expected an open embrace and sudden BFF status, the taciturnity is mildly intimidating, at least in part because he could probably break me over his knee, and one never knows what a wry non-committal smile signifies, especially after offering a potentially contentious observation about whatever's currently happening on his giant-ass TV.*