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2006-09-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

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Seahawks Rule!

2006-07-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Super Bowl 40 arrives next weekend, when millions of women and mostly men will sit before their newly purchased 60” plasma screens and go hoarse rooting for either the Pittsburgh Steelers, led by the coyote ugly, major sourpuss coach Bill Cowher, or The Fantastic Seattle Seahawks, led by the fatherly and fashionable coach Mike Holmgren. Guess who we like at our house?

We love the Super Bowl. Every year we host a party, which is attended by several of our closest friends, who could basically not care less about football, but love to come see what kinda crazy shit we dream up for The Big Day. In 2005 we were into Tacky Foods, as I related in my Super Bowl Blog Entry last year, including, among other things, Cool Whip Trifle, which I must admit is one killer dessert. Blaine and I always request that Marie come up with the party theme, ‘cause we want her to be invested too, for if it were just about football, well, I am afraid we might lose her to some fabric sale, where zillions of women go to spend Super Bowl Sunday, away from the maddening crowds of stinky, rowdy, drunk husbands and brothers and sons, with their Nacho Cheese and Chili breath, lounging in the confines of formerly pristine and foofy living rooms and dens of America, scratchin’, belchin’, and sayin’ fuck real loud.

This year, Marie has asked us to each come up with a food of some kind that starts with either a S or an B, get it?, the first letter of the words Super and Bowl. So I am going to order a Beef Tenderloin Roast, bake it, slice it, and pour a healthy amount of Burgundy Reduction over the whole thing, as in Beef Burgundy, which truly fills the need for a letter B food. I could use some ideas for some other S or B foods though. Any suggestions?

We are extra pumped this year too, since my grandson Joseph and his Dad are actually gonna be there, in Detroit, somewhere in the nosebleed section, hollering for all of us. My daughter Stacey holds a couple of Seahawks season tickets, and when they held the lottery to see which ticket holders would be offered Super Bowl tickets, she won! So Joe and his Dad will fly to Detroit and likely come home with a pile of souvenirs and great memories.

As you can see from the photo above, Blaine and I are ready to roll. We made those Packers Cheese Heads into Blue Cheese Heads several years ago, because, oh I dunno, I guess ‘cause we are big Hawks fans, whose main team color is blue, and we have been a’wishin’ and a’hopin’ for the Hawks to go to the Super Bowl for years. I myself was living in Seattle, all those years ago when the franchise was established, and the Kingdome, which has already been demolished, was built. I once owned a framed and very large pen and ink drawing of the Seattle skyline, titled “My Silver City”, by Seattle artist Christopher Bollen, which depicted the Kingdome half finished. So I go way back with the Hawks, and we are gonna be there, watchin’ the game, screamin’ our asses off for Matt and Shaun and Bobby and Coach Mike, and Jim Zorn, and running back Curt Warner, and all the other guys who played on lesser Seahawks teams over the years, all the while suckin’ down our Buds and Millers and Beef Burgundy. Feel free to stop by. I’ll be the one with beef blood stains on my white tank top, and if we win, tears in my eyes.

Stream Ric's song "Superbowl Andy" here
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Sex and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, or Why I Don't Understand Men ...

2006-07-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

First, I don't understand men's magazines. Seriously, why does an issue of Men's Fitness have a scantily-clad woman on the cover? Shouldn't a fitness a magazine for men have a picture of a ripped man on the cover? Shouldn't they advertise "This is what you can be if you read this magazine!" instead of, um, whatever they're advertising. Maybe they are advertising "This is what you can get". If that's the case, you might be able to rationalize the fitness magazine covers, but what about the car magazines?? Or, more inexplicably, the gamer and gadget magazines? Yeah, playing Nintendo will help you get laid. Right.

Anyway, speaking of men (Okay I needed some kind of segue, even a lame one), I don't think I like Chuck Klosterman. It's not a strong dislike I feel towards him, but this sort of queasy feeling: a combination of uneasiness and bafflement. I was pretty indifferent towards Klosterman, only skimming his Esquire columns once in a while, before my boyfriend linked to his excellent Super Bowl blog on espn.com (you now have to be a subscriber to read it, unfortunately). Anyway, I immediately decided Klosterman was awesome because he revealed in his blog that:
1. He had a soft spot for the Steelers.
2. He hated Crash (the -- vomit -- Oscar-winning one, not the one starring James Spader).

So I decided to jump on the Klosterman bandwagon (which comprises of almost everyone between the ages of 18 and 35) and borrowed the much lauded Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs from the library. But as I read on, I just kept getting progressively more disappointed. Well, it wasn't really a progressive thing. There were spurts in between where I found myself into certain essays, and I'd think "Okay, things are looking up," and then I would come across another dud, which would make my disappointment all the more palpable.

The thing is, people say that Klosterman is such a great pop culture anthropologist, but I don't really think the things he says are that insightful or interesting most of the time. Of course he has some little gems, such as "people who say they like all types of music don't like music" and his essay comparing The Empire Strikes Back and Reality Bites, and his one-paged interludes are funny. But most of the time, his "observations" or "analyses" are just mildly amusing or odd instead of interesting and read like the products of someone who has way too much time on his hands. You only need to read his essay on the Sims, which reads more like a magazine feature btw, to see this. And while likening Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe does seem interesting, Klosterman takes so long to finally rationalize his thesis that it feels like he just decided to compare these two seemingly disparate icons just to see if he could convincingly do it.

He also makes some weird conclusions and generalizations, like women hate Pamela Anderson because she shows why women hate themselves (or their bodies). Now I don't hate Pam Anderson, I'm completely ambivilant towards her, but I don't think she's attractive, and I would HATE having huge boobs like that, they would just get in the way. Even though I like to make self-deprecating comments about my tiny chest, I secretly love my A-cups. I can move about freely, not to mention that it greatly expands my options as far as shirts and dresses go: I can pull off just about anything. But, I'm getting side-tracked. Klosterman, I think, would say that I'm lying to myself, and I think he'd accuse any man who claimed to find Anderson physically repulsive a liar too.

That's what makes me so uneasy about Klosterman. He has this air of superiority that permeates throughout his writing, and it's profoundly unsettling. And it's completely asinine: he'll have contept fot you if, say, you like a popular band like Coldplay, but he'll also have contempt for you if you can't appreciate G'n'R or Billy Joel, because then you're, like, elitist or something. You can't have it both ways, Chuck, sorry.

Sex and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, or Why I Don't Understand Men ...

2006-07-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

First, I don't understand men's magazines. Seriously, why does an issue of Men's Fitness have a scantily-clad woman on the cover? Shouldn't a fitness a magazine for men have a picture of a ripped man on the cover? Shouldn't they advertise "This is what you can be if you read this magazine!" instead of, um, whatever they're advertising. Maybe they are advertising "This is what you can get". If that's the case, you might be able to rationalize the fitness magazine covers, but what about the car magazines?? Or, more inexplicably, the gamer and gadget magazines? Yeah, playing Nintendo will help you get laid. Right.

Anyway, speaking of men (Okay I needed some kind of segue, even a lame one), I don't think I like Chuck Klosterman. It's not a strong dislike I feel towards him, but this sort of queasy feeling: a combination of uneasiness and bafflement. I was pretty indifferent towards Klosterman, only skimming his Esquire columns once in a while, before my boyfriend linked to his excellent Super Bowl blog on espn.com (you now have to be a subscriber to read it, unfortunately). Anyway, I immediately decided Klosterman was awesome because he revealed in his blog that:
1. He had a soft spot for the Steelers.
2. He hated Crash (the -- vomit -- Oscar-winning one, not the one starring James Spader).

So I decided to jump on the Klosterman bandwagon (which comprises of almost everyone between the ages of 18 and 35) and borrowed the much lauded Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs from the library. But as I read on, I just kept getting progressively more disappointed. Well, it wasn't really a progressive thing. There were spurts in between where I found myself into certain essays, and I'd think "Okay, things are looking up," and then I would come across another dud, which would make my disappointment all the more palpable.

The thing is, people say that Klosterman is such a great pop culture anthropologist, but I don't really think the things he says are that insightful or interesting most of the time. Of course he has some little gems, such as "people who say they like all types of music don't like music" and his essay comparing The Empire Strikes Back and Reality Bites, and his one-paged interludes are funny. But most of the time, his "observations" or "analyses" are just mildly amusing or odd instead of interesting and read like the products of someone who has way too much time on his hands. You only need to read his essay on the Sims, which reads more like a magazine feature btw, to see this. And while likening Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe does seem interesting, Klosterman takes so long to finally rationalize his thesis that it feels like he just decided to compare these two seemingly disparate icons just to see if he could convincingly do it.

He also makes some weird conclusions and generalizations, like women hate Pamela Anderson because she shows why women hate themselves (or their bodies). Now I don't hate Pam Anderson, I'm completely ambivilant towards her, but I don't think she's attractive, and I would HATE having huge boobs like that, they would just get in the way. Even though I like to make self-deprecating comments about my tiny chest, I secretly love my A-cups. I can move about freely, not to mention that it greatly expands my options as far as shirts and dresses go: I can pull off just about anything. But, I'm getting side-tracked. Klosterman, I think, would say that I'm lying to myself, and I think he'd accuse any man who claimed to find Anderson physically repulsive a liar too.

That's what makes me so uneasy about Klosterman. He has this air of superiority that permeates throughout his writing, and it's profoundly unsettling. And it's completely asinine: he'll have contept fot you if, say, you like a popular band like Coldplay, but he'll also have contempt for you if you can't appreciate G'n'R or Billy Joel, because then you're, like, elitist or something. You can't have it both ways, Chuck, sorry.

New York, New York

2006-07-13T19:45:00.000-07:00

Did they finally fix up Blogger so that it would use the rich syntax highlighting that was missing like forever?

I'm typing my first blog on my new Macbook. It's pretty sweet, though the laptop is heavier than I expected. I suppose it's not so bad that it's sitting on my lap. I just got in on Friday, but due to me rushing off to the Jonathan Coulton music thing Friday night, then having to wake up and head to the Amtrak to catch a (rather expensive) train ride up to NYC, then having dinner at a Southern style "soul food" restaurant where I ate pig's feet (turns out I used to eat this as a kid, Chinese style--who would have thought this was a Southern delicacy?).

Two things. Pig's feet are a pain to eat. It's like cartilage or fat wrapped around unseemly bone. There's just no polite way to eat it. Second, you probably couldn't convince a non-Southerner (or non-Chinese, since we'll eat anything) to come within ten feet of this concoction. It's probably repellent enough to ward away all but the most brave.

I wasn't able to set up my Macbook until I reached New York, and then, not until Sunday, the second day I was there. I'm now completing this entry a week later, which is unusual, because I often don't get back to doing this stuff ever.

Sunday was spent walking all around eternity. To be honest, I have no idea where I was in NYC most of the times. I was on the subway. I was on the bus. I was walking. We passed by H&H, which is apparently the most famous bagelry in NYC. We were walking around Chinatown, SoHo, the upper West side.

Although I joked about going there, we did not go to the Statue of Liberty. And apparently, we weren't near the former site of the twin towers. I was apparently in the subway underneath Fog Creek somewhere.

One of the first things I noticed about the subways in New York is that it's far more cramped than DC. When you get off the subway, you could almost fall forward and hit the wall--that's how close up they are. The walls have these tile like patterns that resemble tidier tiles than bathroom tiles. Subways also reek of urine, though not as bad as some places I've been.

Because New York is bigger and the subway system older, their subway system is correspondingly bigger, and, to me, not as well laid out as the DC Metro. However, they do have express trains, which would be nice in DC.

For whatever reason, subways in NYC also have musicians and performers where DC metro does not, at least, not inside. There may be a few hanging outside the MCI, er Verizon, Center, but not within the facility itself.

Most people seem to use a Metro card, which is this thin flimsy plastic thing. Unlike the DC metro, the NYC subway is one fare to all destinations, payable on entry. That's neat too, as I find waiting in line to exit something of a pain.

The nice thing about Chinatown is how cheap the stuff is. I suppose you'd go there to get two things: Peking duck and pork buns. But we didn't get the duck, but did get the buns. As 85 cents, they're cheap. Throughout Chinatown, there are people outside hawking their goods. I don't know if I've ever seen lychee that often, nor people willing to paint my name (which I didn't get done) in Chinese-style calligraphy.

I also went to Dean and DeLuca for the first time where I had beef stew, some kind of knish, and some kind of diet cherry soda. I know, some combination. I also had iced coffee.

On the Saturday, (the day before all this walking), before Saturday night soul food, I ate at an Italian deli, where New York rudeness was at hand. I wanted ice coffee, and they asked how I wanted it. This is odd. Every other place would give me ice coffee, and I'd figure out what to do with it. The woman wanted me to decide between cream and milk, sugar and sugar substitute. Rather than say it in a cherry voice, she, of course, had to be pissed off. New York impatience is heralded throughout, and you know what, these people don't care.

That evening, we went to the soul food place where I had pig's feet, as I mentioned before, as well as collard greens and macaroni. Not exactly healthy food, but that's fine.

I had wanted to go to the Apple Store, which had just opened up in NYC. It stays open 24 hours a day. I had thought about getting a backpack there, but once we got there, even though it looked significantly cool (the cube structure and the floating white apple), the actual store was eh.

Really, what the NYC Apple Store ought to do, though they'd be so deluged, is to discount stuff, say, between the hours of 1-3 AM by 20%. Heck, if they always discounted it around the clock, people would really pile in there, and it would make it a kind of mini-Mecca, as the place to go if you want to buy your Apple stuff cheap. But no, it cost the same there as any other Apple store.

I was disappointed with the backpack selection. They could have had more to pick from, and had significantly less inventory than expected. We wandered inside for maybe an hour, if that.

Sunday was spent foot walking and on public transportation. Saturday was in a car. Chris drove around, and I discovered the true New York pastime which everyone participates in. No, not Yankess baseball--many folks don't care about that. Not Knicks basketball (especially not Knicks basketball). It's route planning.

Suppose I want to go to Montgomery Mall, which is just outside DC. I'd take the beltway, then up 270, on Democracy, and voila, I'm there. I'm not sure there are many variations that are worth their while.

However, in New York, there are plenty of ways to get where you want to go. Since it's so large, most people don't remember optimal paths, so any time there's more than two New Yorkers in the same car, there has to be prodigious discussion about how best to get where you're going. You can cut across that street and head down. No, you can come under. No, I was planning on going this other way, doesn't that work?

I had hoped to get to Fog Creek on Monday, but Monday was Memorial Day, and just as I had it off, so did the Fog Creek cognoscenti. Maybe that was a good thing as I would have had to decipher the train system or something to get there and get back.

I had wanted to go to a real coffeehouse, but alas, the closest thing was Starbuck's at a Barnes and Noble. That's culture in the Bronx for you. Even there, every seat was taken up. These places assume that people will share a spot but most people were set up one to a table, and planning to sit for a while. We headed back to Chris's which was good as I forgot to pick up the bagels (there's bad news about that--I forgot to eat it, and had to get rid of it---sad).

Didn't do much on Monday except talk, mostly about ideas about how to go teaching, as Chris has said that he feels he needs to reach out to his students more, given the lack of real programming skills they seem to have, and the fear the department has in actually failing anyone.

I don't want to sound cruel, but from the sounds of it, if these kids weren't much further along, they wouldn't have real careers in programming. You need some proficiency writing loops in programming, and it's almost the equivalent of being able to dribble in basketball. These kids aren't short of making 360 windmill dunks, they're short of being able to play the game at all.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that they lack the knowledge of where they need to go. They're not used to the idea that they need to code frequently, and spend hours in front of the computer, and really, get things to work. This can be frightfully tedious. I recall one kid who said he spent twenty minutes looking for an error. Any serious coder would laugh at that, many who've spent days trying to track down a bug, only to have been on the wrong trail.

As teachers, we need to imbue a sense of what it takes to program. Some of it is time. Some of it is knowing what to look up. Some of it is reading and tracing code.

I've always thought it would be good to provide sports analogies. Gilbert Arenas is the star player for the Wizards. He's known as something of a gym rat. After games, he's often practicing an hour, two hours, or more. The biggest difference in basketball and programming is that, at some level, it's obvious what to work on. The goal (partly) is to get the ball in the basket. Sure, there's other things, like footwork, knowing the basic rules, knowing basic strategy, and so forth. Those are all important too, but it's not exactly a secret.

Take any class in programming, and you'll see how little time is spent debugging code. We just don't know how to teach it. But it's time we figure that out if students are going to be any good.

Anyway, to get the sports analogy, I'd tell students if they thought, say, Michael Jordan got as good as he did without spending hours at the basketball court. Yet, how often do they spend programming each day? It's true that new programmers need more guidance, and so we need more drills for new programmers.

I have a bunch of obvious ideas when it comes to teaching intro programming, and I suppose I should blog on it sometime.

Anyway, my train was scheduled to leave NYC at 3ish, so I was dropped off at the train station. I hadn't taken the train in maybe 6-7 years, probably since the last time I visited Chris, which was when he was at Yale. We were heading off to Alex's wedding in Toronto, and I was going to drive with him from Yale there. That was a longish drive, taking about 12 hours one way.

When I got on the train Saturday around 10:30, I had left my place at 9:30. I then thought I might miss the train. I live near one end of the Green Line, and the train sits there for quite a few minutes before leaving. It didn't move until 9:40. I could have taken a long way to get there, by staying on the Green Line for many stops, then switching to the Red. That seems absurd, but I was wondering how often the red line picks up at Fort Totten vs. the other spot I would have picked it up (most likely Metro Center).

But I figured that long way was at least 6 stops longer, so I got off at Fort Totten, and two minutes later, got on the red line. I was at Union Station at a few minutes after 10, for a 10:20 trip. At first, I thought I had to get in line, because the kiosk, which look like ATMs, appear to be for buying tickets. Turns out, you can pick them up there too. Fortunately, I asked, and a few minutes later, I picked up the tickets.

Ah, tickets.

These thing suck, especially on trains, but even airplanes. First, you get this large stub, which the ticket taker takes, and leaves you a tiny stub, which I'd imagine would be easy to lose. I'd rather have the large one.

Trains still use this old-timey way of checking tickets. For example, only when I got aboard did sorta check IDs. And then, they have this narrow slip of paper, which they punch a hole out of, and place in the metal wedge just above where I'm seated. The slip of paper has a bunch of three letter codes, that I have to guess at. Apparently, on the way up, RYE, refers to New Rochelle, despite not having a "Y".

I'm surprised what an outdated system they use.

First, the tickets use same sized fonts. This means the train you get on is written as some other useless information.

There's two pieces of information you need. When to get on the train, and which gate to get on, and I suppose the train number. These should be prominent numbers. They are not. You have to hunt and peck to finds these numbers. It's amazing they don't use a nicer printed that can put important things in big print.

They should have a bar code scanner for these things too. And they should ditch the slip of paper. Instead, they should scan your ticket, which should then print up a new slip, with your name and destination on it.

The only nice thing about taking the train is that there's no security, so there's no long waiting. The one place we had to wait for a while was at New York Penn Station (which is, alas, one stop from Newark Penn Station--thus, one should change their name, since it's awful...call it Newark Jersey Station, or something else, for heaven's sake).

Riding the Amtrak a second time, I realized that these are nearly as expensive as airplanes, but there are two things that make it somewhat tolerable. First, Memorial Day traffic is supposed to be bad, so I could easily add two hours to the trip if I got caught in traffic. Furthermore, I'd have to pay attention the whole time, where I could sorta sleep on the train. Second, the overheard of getting to and from the airport tends to make it more painful as it adds time that I simply don't care for.

I got back to my place around 8ish. Dave came and picked me up. Our house was hosting our annual Memorial Day cookout (something that's likely to end this year, as no one else is likely to be up for the cookout). By the time I got back, the party was sort of finishing up. It lasted maybe another hour longer, but some people were leaving, and I was kinda tired, and wanted to play a bit with my new Mac.

I don't know what I think about New York. It has a different vibe to it than DC (or more properly, DC suburbs). I can see, given the way the subway system works, why people walk so much (since all trips on the subway cost the same, it's only worth going on there when you have to go very far).

Super Bowl Running Blog

2006-07-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

The sporting event minute-by-minute blog is a time-honored tradition for columnists too lazy to put together a meaningful opinion, since all it does is essentially transcribe what is going on. The Super Bowl blog, then, is the crown jewel of sporting event blogs – the Zeus of tripe. But in a greater sense, that's what writers do: we take what we see and draw out a deeper meaning. And that's what I do: watch people who are much more physically fit on TV and write about them. I'm practically the next Hemingway.

Starting with the pregame show:

5:19 – Chris Mortensen lets us know that the officials have designated a "no-fly zone" between the 45-yard-lines to keep the peace during pregame warm-ups, and that three security guards have been assigned to watch Joey Porter, as if he were Hannibal Lecter. This seems excessive, given the fact that a)he is a man and not an unleashed Bengal tiger and b)he must know that starting a fight and getting ejected before the Super Bowl even began would get him killed back in Pittsburgh.

5:30 – Apparently players from both teams get to take still photos with the Lombardi Trophy before the game, which seems weird. Wouldn't you refuse, to avoid jinxing yourself? Has Matt Hasselbeck learned nothing about the power of a good jinx?

5:32 – Al Michaels suggests that Seahawks linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski, who graduated from Harvard, is probably relaxing before the game by doing a crossword. That's right – doing a crossword is an intellectual challenge that a pro football player could only take on if he had an Ivy League education.

5:45 – Look, I know this is a tribute to Stevie Wonder, but did they really have to let him dress Michael Irvin?

5:59 – Things are finally getting started. We have two TVs side-by-side, which allows my girlfriend to watch the Puppy Bowl on mute. I have to say, if the Super Bowl wasn't on, I would have no problem watching puppies sniff each other's butts for 3 hours straight.

6:01 – Tom Brady is in charge of the pregame coin toss, which seems to have no purpose other than to make NFL management's collective desire to fellate him even more obvious.

6:03 – Wow, Kurt Warner is still alive.

6:07 – I swear to God, McDonald's has to be making their commercials stupid on purpose. I never thought I could understand the mentality of a suicide bomber, but I think I'm getting there.

6:15 – So apparently the premise of Adam Sandler's next movie is that he has the ability to stop time. And all he uses this for is to watch women's boobs in slow motion and embarrass his neighbor's children. This seems pretty unrealistic. If I was suddenly granted this power, I wouldn't even stop to put on shoes before I went out and started looting stores.

6:27 – We're finally underway. Troy Polamalu looks like he's possessed by demons. A solid, well-balanced opening drive by the Seahawks immediately stalls with the sack by Farrior.

6:34 – Either every domain name except brownandbubbly.com was already taken before Pepsi got on the Internet, or they're being blackmailed by a German porn site.

6:43 – Great protection from the Seahawks' offensive line this series, but a costly holding penalty on Chris Gray. Three drives, no real offense from either team.

6:48 – Bud Light, 0 for 3 so far on commercials. The Seahawks have a short field, but still can't get anything going.

6:53 – More ads pushing a TV news magazine piece on Natalee Holloway. It's true – news producers must high-five one another every time a white teenage girl disappears.

6:54 – Finally, a big play. Touchdown Seahawks… followed by the immediate reversal due to an unnecessary offensive PI. Seattle picks up a field goal from Josh Brown after a drive that is still obviously a failure.

7:00 - Quality commercial from Ameriquest. ("Well, that killed him.") Bud Light: 0 for 4.

7:04 – A relatively uneventful first quarter; both offenses look tight, and the Seahawks have basically gotten their points as a result of field position. Ben Roethlisberger is yet to complete a pass over about five yards.

7:06 – I really hate when shows like "Dancing with the Stars" try to market themselves to guys by using sex. So guys now have two options to get their rocks off: a)watch an hour of ballroom dancing featuring one or two marginally attractive girls in revealing outfits, or b) porn. I can tell you which one wins.

7:12 – Another Seahawks drive stalls. What determines when a pass over the middle becomes a completion and then a fumble instead of an incomplete pass? Because apparently catching the ball, turning upfield, and then getting the ball jarred loose isn't enough. Also, wow – the Steelers still don't have a first down.

7:18 – I guess I would use CareerBuilder.com if I was looking for a job, but what I'd really rather have is a job where I actually did work with chimpanzees. In fact, if a chimpanzee ever interviewed at my office, I would threaten to quit if my boss didn't hire him as a janitor.

7:20 - Terribly underthrown pass from Roethlisberger results in an interception. The poo stain on the back of his pants should become visible any second now.

7:21 – Be honest with yourself. Can you watch a movie with Tom Cruise in it now without wishing for him to die a horrible death?

7:22 – Dove: Justifying unsightly upper-arm fat since 2005.

7:35 – The Steelers bring a floundering drive back with a ridiculous catch at the 3-yard line by Hines Ward, who dropped a TD pass about two minutes ago.

7:41 – Roethlisberger, for the moment, sneaks it in for the touchdown. Referee Bill Levy is about to become a household name all over America, no matter what the result of the review is. This is an incredibly close call – and it stands. Probably the correct decision.

7:53 – Costly clock-management gaffe from the Seahawks, followed by a missed field goal. "A very weird sequence," according to Al Michaels. John Madden is "scratching his head." All in all, an uneventful first half. Both teams are obviously still feeling each other out and the Steelers, surprisingly, haven't put much pressure on Hasselbeck.

7:58 – Look, ABC, there is no way we, as guys, are watching "Desperate Housewives." I know you think I'll do anything Hugh Hefner says, but I'm sure Hef had no idea what "Desperate Housewives" was right up until you delivered a suitcase full of money to the Playboy Mansion. Other than a theme idea for an upcoming issue.

8:06 – Man, I know it's a tired joke that Mick Jagger is old and frail and all, but he looks like a wad of Silly Putty that was stretched into the shape of a man and left on an Arizona sidewalk.

8:32 – Willie Parker breaks off the longest rushing play in Super Bowl history, and the Steelers have a 14-3 lead. It's starting to get a little sweaty inside Mike Holmgren's mustache.

8:41 – Josh Brown misses his second field goal of the night. Ouch.

8:50 – The commercial with the Godzilla clone and the giant robot was a good commercial, but I'm not sure it was good for Hummer. Not what I was expecting.

8:52 – Roethlisberger throws a HUGE pick to Kelly Herndon, who probably should have taken it in for a touchdown. Nonetheless, ABC thanks you, Kelly Herndon, for preventing the wave of channel-changes that would have accompanied another Pittsburgh touchdown.

8:54 – Touchdown, Hasselbeck to Jerramy Stevens. Just like that, it's 14-10.

9:07 – Pittsburgh ends up punting again, but they pin the Seahawks inside the 5. This has settled back into the trenches.

9:14 – Seattle appears to be putting something together – big third-down conversion from Bobby Engram.

9:20 – Jerramy Stevens puts the Seahawks inside the 5 – and again, it comes back on a holding penalty. Flags have been killing Seattle all day.

9:22 – "We want the ball, we're gonna score!" Bad timing for a sailer from Hasselbeck, and the Steelers are in control again. "Mistake-filled" is becoming a more and more appropriate adjective for this game.

9:24 - Emerald Nuts – best commercial today, hands down. Not that that's a remarkable accomplishment.

9:27 – Wow. You knew sooner or later the reverse pass from Randle El was coming, and it was perfect: 21-10. That could be the dagger.

9:33 – "Fumble" by Hasselbeck after a 20-yard run. Oh man, here comes an opportunity for the refs to screw the Seahawks. Looks like this is going to get overturned, though.

9:37 – Justice has been served. For all those of you who don't like instant replay: Exhibit A.

9:40 – OK, I understand the use of Derek Jeter and Ichiro in the "flag face" ads for the World Baseball Classic. But Mike Piazza representing Italy? Come on. Other things that would have made this commercial better: half of America's flag and half of the Dominican flag on A-Rod's face, followed by Barry Bonds, with no flag at all. Or just a flag that says "Barry."

9:47 – Big first down from Randle El, and now the Steelers are in clock-chewing mode.

9:56 – Code black means a bomb threat, okay? There, I just saved you an hour.

9:57 – The Seahawks are delaying the inevitable at this point, although those Josh Brown missed field goals really hurt now.

10:02 – Cowher is already soaked and grunting with joy, and it's over. I can honestly say I could have gone my entire life without seeing Bill Cowher cry. Today I am less of a man, just by association.

10:14 – Your Super Bowl XL MVP: Hines Ward. Loudest cheers: for Jerome Bettis.

10:15 – Skip Bayless begins writing a column claiming that the Steelers are the worst Super Bowl team of all time.

Super Bowl Running Blog

2006-07-12T10:19:00.000-07:00