Tuesday, February 3, 2009

It's my party, I'll eat meat if I want to...

Get ready, we're going crazy with the homonyms this week...

My streak of bringing championships to cities is safe for one more hometown. My presence in Pittsburgh compelled the Cardinals to ignore their tried and true passing game for 3 quarters, almost forgetting that Larry Fitzgerald existed until it was too late. For those of you counting at home, this is my championship tally:

Chicago, 92-95 - Bulls 3peat.
New York, 96-99 - Yankees 3peat.
Boston, 99-08 - Patriots win 3 Super Bowls, and the Red Sox win 2 World Series.
Pittsburgh, 08-present - Steelers, Super Bowl win no. 6.

My offer to Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and Dallas still stands - if you want any of your teams to win a championship in the next few decades, pay me several hundred thousand dollars, and I will gladly move to your city. Because I want to spread the love.

Steeler fans truly believe they are the craziest. And pound for pound, in terms of sheer volume, they may be right. But Red Sox fans are just as passionate, and Patriots fans just as annoying. Yankee fans are, if anything, worse, because they expect all that cash to buy them wins. And Red Sox fans are getting to that point, but still get to burn off 86 years of misery, so they get a pass for say the next year. After that they can be snooty and proud all they want, but they have to concede that they are the new Yankees. A fair trade-off for all that success, I say.

A quick word about the actual Super Bowl "party" I attended. As some of you may know from my weepy phone calls, the menu was dairy. Furthermore, I was asked to bring a salad.

I'm not normally an angry person, and I like to believe I give people the benefit of the doubt. But the whole thing seemed like a setup. The hosts know me well. They are all too aware of my disturbing fixation on raw animal flesh, preferably fried or ground up and shoved into some sort of bun, or maybe a wafer cone. And yet there I was, picking up a forkful of ziti and trying to keep from sobbing. I don't know the complicated physics behind the equation, but everyone knows that

Football = meat.

It can = poultry, or ham, or fish (although that too is a reach unless it's well fried beyond recognition as such), but football does NOT = leafy greens, or kale, or jicama, or any other roughage. I could have sworn I had moved back to the Midwest when I came to Pittsburgh - the clear disdain for nonfatty foods, the pleasant bovine-like expressions on drivers obeying speed limits, the suspicious looks cast at people with foreign accents - but now I'm not so sure.

As for the other crappy party, I want to say this: for a group of people who are allegedly supportive of taxes, and using them to generate revenue for use by the federal and state governments, the Democrats sure are forgetful when it comes to actually paying those taxes.

If I wanted people who were out to cheat the government to run the government, I would have voted for McCain. Right now it's a little embarrassing. I guess it's something that Daschle is stepping down, but don't they have a vetting process for this? If you were a White House staffer, trying now to push through a massive stimulus package that both cuts and raises taxes, wouldn't you want to be sure that your political appointees knew H&R Block's phone number? I would think that would be a priority. But what do I know.

6 comments:

DGB said...

Who hosts a Super Bowl party without meat?

"If I went to a barbecue and there was no meat, I'd be like 'Hey Goober, where's the meat?' You don't win friends with salad, Lisa."

Unknown said...

First of all, did you move before the Celtics won this past year? If not then you missed that one.

Secondly, Cleveland is winning a championship this year without you.
Plus, is that really your list of potential cities you'd live in or cities desperate for a title? Seattle, Cleveland, Cincy and Dallas? You totally missed the Detroit joke, as in "With all that bailout money you're gettin' you can afford to pay me a milli to bring sports joy back to the city.

And you're right, the salad thing confirms it, Pittsburgh is not Midwest (or mid-Atlantic, whatever that means) it is most definitely East Coast, and Northeast at that. Lousy hippies!

Rambling Man said...

Yes, meat is a basic food group required for any gathering which includes a fork and or a bun.

So, Mr. I am a Liberal with Ethics and not one of the those cheating Republicans ... I guess the Democratic leadership is showing you what they are full of. Let's see, you can have a Chairman Charlie Rangel writing tax laws but forgetting that income from Costa Rico is taxable on his own return, or you can have Secretary of the Treasury Geithner who does not understand self-employment taxes, or you can have Senator Daschle who after receiving $5 Millions Dollars from the Health Care Industry was going to work on reforming it ... oops forgot to pay $140,000 of income tax or you could settle for poor Nancy Killefer would have been Federal Performance Officer but got dumped for a mere $1,000 lien due to failure to pay payroll taxes on nanny.

Or you can have a "we will not torture policy except we will create a commission to study when we can torture" all in the same news conference. Or we will close Gitmo as soon as we can find someone to take this scum which of course the U.S. does not want on its soil but we will close it soon. Yes, consistent policies.

Or you could eliminate the imperial presidency of the low life Bush, with the new and improved imperial, we will eliminate the cabinet, presidency who now or will have a new Czar or special envoy for every major task. Why do we care if Hillary is Secretary of State if all her work has been farmed out to others?

Yes, we do still have Hope so please pass the raw meat.

Ali said...

i wouldn't have gone to a superbowl party that didn't have meat. i'm just saying.

Rambling Man said...

Like IRS, Congress is being lenient on tax debtors in these tough times. It will approve a nominee for Treasury secretary who fudged on his taxes.

When Timothy Geithner worked for the International Monetary Fund, he was told he had to pay self-employment tax on his salary, and he asked for an extra allowance to cover the tax bill. But he didn’t pay any self-employment tax until he was audited by IRS. To be an effective head of the Treasury Dept., which oversees the Service,he will need to have more respect for the tax system than he has shown thus far.

Arica said...

You had fair warning...they asked you to bring salad. That is when all the bells and whistles should have gone off. Salad eater.