what's in a name?

The Super Bowl is over. The little Vader boy can start a car using old Jedi mind tricks. Keep an eye on that one. Would the future be better if that Volkswagen had a Toyota moment and lurched forward at just the right moment? Would the population of Alderaan still be alive and Obewan not have felt a sudden disturbance in the force as if a million voices suddenly cried out? Would Natalie Portman have turned to ballet in an effort to blot out the awful knowledge that she had fallen in love with and married a psychopath and had carnal knowledge of him and begat him twins; one dweeb and one with breakfast rolls plastered to the side of her head? All of that tragedy could have been averted with one little sticky accelerator? 

Yes, the Super Bowl is over. The Packers won. The Steelers lost. Jerry Jones found that just because he wanted 4000 more seats doesn’t make it so. He should have listened to his grandma. “Don’t let your eyes be bigger than your tummy.” To all of my psychologist friends out there, what is the diagnosis for a person who would pay $200 to stand outside just outside the event site and watch the Black Eyed Peas on a big screen TV? Is there medication for that? 

I have always been interested in how teams got their names. Take the Packers. Who knew that a region of the country would have a high enough concentration of domestic servants whose job it was to make sure the master and mistress of the house had enough shirts, socks and unmentionables stowed away before their trips. Don’t get me wrong, Packers deserve to have a team named in homage to the work that they do. That is especially true in the age of TSA. Four ounces of this, two ounces of that, plastic baggies, do we check the guns, the master loves his talcum powder; it is all enough to make lesser domestics break down in tears.  It is better to have a person who specializes in packing. However, I would have thought that packers would be scattered to the four winds taking care of the rich and famous, keeping the critical nomenclature mass away from Green Bay Wisconsin. What roots they must have had to identify with a region so strongly that its sports team took on their moniker.

While I feel for the Pittsburgh fans, I must admit that I found it hard rooting for a region of the country that glorifies thievery. I believe that your team would be more beloved and find a broader fan base if you just started returning items. Common courtesy is all that I am suggesting. A few please and thank you’s and in no time you will be known as the Pittsburgh Borrowers. Mean Joe Green had something there when he threw that jersey back to that boy.

While the rest of the world’s media focused on the game and tried desperately to get us to ignore the monster storm, Indianapolis media had an additional side show.  As you may know, Indianapolis is (maybe) home to Super Bowl 46. Yep, we spent $12 million for a Super Bowl that might be wiped out because of a labor dispute between the owners and the players. The local news has been covering the situation closely. Every other day a panel of experts looks at all sides of the issue and makes their prognostication. Punxsutawney Phil predicts that there will be no Indianapolis Super Bowl especially after that stupid Borrowers joke earlier in this blog

But I digress. It seems that the city and state fathers, and mothers all went down to the Dallas “metroplex”  to learn lessons about how to run a Super Bowl. Yes, it sounds like we applied for hosting without any real life experience. But the fathers and mothers learned a lot while there and they are confident that Indianapolis will do a great job as the world’s host next February. They took most of their confidence from the fact a snow storm blew through Dallas and left them struggling for the entire week.

Here are two quotes:

"This is not a criticism of Dallas, but this is something we deal with all winter," said Allison Melangton, the CEO of the Indy Host Committee. "We have the salt, we have the equipment. And the fact that everything is so interconnected Downtown, you can still get wherever you want to go without going outside."
"I feel a little sorry for these guys because they don't have the equipment, they don't have the expertise," Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard said. "If something like this happens to us, we'll have 80 trucks out there going 24 hours a day, plus some smaller trucks to get into places where the big trucks can't get into. We know how to handle this very, very well."

No offense but what are they smoking? While the mommas and poppas were spouting off about what they don’t understand, the children in Indianapolis were getting on their parents nerves because they couldn’t go to school for 4 days that week.

I obviously have forgotten that we live in the myopic world of professional sports, and for the next year we have entered the vortex of that myopia. Never mind that 40% of the high school children don’t graduate, that our libraries can’t stay open, and the kids in Indianapolis are wondering if the Indy Parks pools will be open for Independence day vacation as they make up snow days, if so much as a snowflake falls during the 2^nd week of February, we will have 80 trucks out there going 24 hours a day.

No wonder Pittsburgh calls them the stealers.

Take care,

Roger