Props all around
Super Bowl week. God bless us, everyone.
(Side question: Is Scrooge Charles Dickens’ most famous literary character? Discuss.)
With the Super Bowl comes super opportunities to harvest entertainment from a slew of directions.
If you are headed to a Super Bowl shindig that is big enough to have a betting board – a 10-by-10 grid with random numbers across the top and down the side that represent the final number in the scores at the end of each quarter and the game, and whoever is in those squares when the horns sound gets a taste of the pot – those are always fun.
If you are at a smaller gathering, we used to play a game called pass the pitcher. Make sure everyone has quarters, and after every play that does not produce points – including kick returns but not including PATs – you put 25 cents in the container and simply ‘pass the pitcher.’ If you are holding the pitcher when a score happens, you keep the contents.
One more we did back in our Super Super Bowl party hosting days were basic buy-in luck-of-the-draw contests.
You can do MVPs. Put all the meaningful offensive players on individual pieces of paper and sell them for $1 (or a dime if the crowd is not as risky, or $100 if you see Vader walking in). Make sure you include “Any other Rams player” and “Any other Bengals player” just to be sure.
You can do the same thing with “first halftime song,” too.
The most important thing is to have fun. And speaking of fun, let’s review our Super Bowl Props contest. Answer the following seven props, and whoever gets the most right (tiebreaker is included and will only be used if needed), gets lunch on me.
Deal? Deal.
– Head or tails?
– Color of the Gatorade used to dose the winning coach?
– National Anthem, over/under 102 seconds.
– Who scores the first TD?
– Who scores the last TD?
– Which player will have the most receiving yards?
– Who wins the MVP?
Tie-breaker: Combined total yards gained in the Super Bowl, and remember “The Price is Right Rules” apply, meaning that if you guess 856, and there are 855 yards gained, you would lose to someone who entered 1 yard.
Who’s with me?
Ski jumping into controversy
Clas Brede Braathen was in the news Monday.
And while Clas Brede Braathen certainly sounds like he could have been one of Hans Gruber’s henchmen as they were fending off John McClane in the fight for Nakatomi Plaza, he’s actually the Norwegian ski jumping bigwig.
(Side question: Do you prefer poohbah or bigwig? Discuss.)
So there are several shockers here. First, how does Clas not have a ‘ä’ or a ‘ô’ or one of those crazy vowel thingies in any of his three names?
Second, after admitting Monday that we’ll watch infinitely more “Law & Order” reruns than Winter Olympics, why are we discussing Clas and ski jumping?
Let’s focus on the second question.
Clas has our attention because five ski jumpers were DQ’ed from the Games on Monday because of non-compliant uniforms.
I wish I was kidding. Especially in China. And rest easy the violators were not shot or tortured by Chinese officials. At least not that we know of. (Just to be safe, though, we may need John McClane involved after all.)
Seriously, the skiers were booted from their sport’s Super Bowl for loose-fitting clothes. Sure, insert your “Kids these days with their baggy jeans” jokes here as you curse their rock-n-roll and shoo them from your lawn.
But extra material could create lift, which in pick-up hoops is meaningless, but when you are soaring through the air in a ski jump, well, it matters.
Still, five DQs in an event in which all of the competitors know the rules and spent years if not decades preparing for this moment seems surreal.
“We stick together no matter what!” German jumper Karl Geiger posted on social media in support of a DQed teammate. “Nevertheless, I have to ask myself whether the regulations for the women were changed overnight, with so many disqualifications?!? It was neither the right time nor the right place to disqualify so many athletes from different nations.”
Fair question that deserves an answer, because again, this is not one. It’s five DQs.
Yippee-kay-yay indeed.
Speaking of Oscar-worthy movies