Roethlismurdered!, and Other Sunday Observations
Like Pete I spent a chunk of Sunday afternoon getting ornery in front of the T.V. Instead of getting mad about that Grandaddy song in the Toyota commercial*, though, I got to be dispirited by the content of the Steelers/ Eagles game. Somehow the line of eight sacks against Pittsburgh doesn't seem to summarize the game story adequately. This photo by the Post-Gazette's Peter Diana conveys the proper tone if not the full scope of the affair:
Just about every snap looked like what happens in the venerable Nintendo game, Tecmo Super Bowl, when the player on defense chooses the correct coverage: Eagles streaming in on the quarterback from all directions. Roethlisberger's hand was apparently injured near the end of the game but I'm happy the man is even alive; the Philadelphia defense did just about everything to him short of taking off his helmet and making him crash his motorcycle into Brian Dawkins' car.**
I can really only think of two highlights from what I watched yesterday, both involving Troy Polamalu. One was an improbable, leaping, one-armed interception of a tipped pass that actually looked more convincing in instant replay. (Basic outline of couch-based play-by-play directed at not wholly interested girlfriend in kitchen: "Whoo Troy! That won't possibly hold up under review, will it?... Yow. That's hardcore. Go Troy.")
The other was much later when Kyle and I were watching an episode of "The Daily Show" from last week: Jon Stewart, milking a joke about the scraggly-looking genitals of a bull in a Merill Lynch commercial, remarked not unfairly that "that bull[bleep] looks like Troy Polamalu of the Steelers". This, incidentally, illustrates one of the jarring aspects of transitioning from the baseball season to the football season as a Pittsburgh fan, in that the Steelers have bona fide star players that casual observers of the sport have actually heard of. The Pirates are not in a place where our nation's premier TV satirist is likely to compare, say, longtime shortstop Jack Wilson to animal genitals of any kind.
The process of watching the game itself was still fun enough, thanks to the culinary pleasures of some Rogue Shakespeare Stout and a batch of chicken wings that Kyle and I made in her slow cooker. The rest of the day was awfully nice too: We woke up early and drove out to the Columbia River Gorge for a four-mile hike up to Angels Rest. The view from up there was mostly obscured by clouds and persistent light rain but we did get a nice, moody view of the bend in the river to our west, plus a test run of the attitude (widespread and pretty necessary out here) that during the six months or so of glum weather you just have to put on your raingear and get out into it.
(Photo by Kyle; the arm's-length ones I took of the both of us came out off-centered for some reason.)
Right before dusk we headed over to Chapman Elementary School to watch some of the thousands of migrating vaux swifts that spend nights in an old chimney on that building every fall. It's pretty remarkable; a vortex of swifts gradually accumulates overhead, sometimes growing suddenly denser, sometimes dissipating, until the group reaches some critical mass and the swifts start swirling in batches down into the top of the chimney. The crowd, mostly gathered on blankets and in folding chairs on a grassy bank above the school, react with appropriate "oohs"; the much larger bird of prey that made a single, apparently unsuccessful try at nabbing one of the peripheral swifts was greeted with some cheers and a smaller number of boos; the pervasive shrill twittering overhead more closely matched the effect of Bernard Herrmann's ambient sound-effects score for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds than any actual bird sounds I've heard before. The evening had happily cleared up enough for some painterly sun-on-clouds effects in the sky, out of which flocks of small swifts would suddenly materialize. Neat.
The moral: Always make sure the happiness of your day isn't wholly contingent on some professional meatheads correctly blocking some other professional meatheads.
* "A.M. 180" is indeed a great song, and it is with a feeling of giddy -- dare I say Pete-like -- contrariness that I note that I'm listening to it on my iPod as I type these very words, having bought that song as a single mp3 download several months ago.
** My personal odds of misidentifying Eagles linebacker Brian Dawkins in conversation as "Richard Dawkins": Like one in six.
Just about every snap looked like what happens in the venerable Nintendo game, Tecmo Super Bowl, when the player on defense chooses the correct coverage: Eagles streaming in on the quarterback from all directions. Roethlisberger's hand was apparently injured near the end of the game but I'm happy the man is even alive; the Philadelphia defense did just about everything to him short of taking off his helmet and making him crash his motorcycle into Brian Dawkins' car.**
I can really only think of two highlights from what I watched yesterday, both involving Troy Polamalu. One was an improbable, leaping, one-armed interception of a tipped pass that actually looked more convincing in instant replay. (Basic outline of couch-based play-by-play directed at not wholly interested girlfriend in kitchen: "Whoo Troy! That won't possibly hold up under review, will it?... Yow. That's hardcore. Go Troy.")
The other was much later when Kyle and I were watching an episode of "The Daily Show" from last week: Jon Stewart, milking a joke about the scraggly-looking genitals of a bull in a Merill Lynch commercial, remarked not unfairly that "that bull[bleep] looks like Troy Polamalu of the Steelers". This, incidentally, illustrates one of the jarring aspects of transitioning from the baseball season to the football season as a Pittsburgh fan, in that the Steelers have bona fide star players that casual observers of the sport have actually heard of. The Pirates are not in a place where our nation's premier TV satirist is likely to compare, say, longtime shortstop Jack Wilson to animal genitals of any kind.
The process of watching the game itself was still fun enough, thanks to the culinary pleasures of some Rogue Shakespeare Stout and a batch of chicken wings that Kyle and I made in her slow cooker. The rest of the day was awfully nice too: We woke up early and drove out to the Columbia River Gorge for a four-mile hike up to Angels Rest. The view from up there was mostly obscured by clouds and persistent light rain but we did get a nice, moody view of the bend in the river to our west, plus a test run of the attitude (widespread and pretty necessary out here) that during the six months or so of glum weather you just have to put on your raingear and get out into it.
(Photo by Kyle; the arm's-length ones I took of the both of us came out off-centered for some reason.)
Right before dusk we headed over to Chapman Elementary School to watch some of the thousands of migrating vaux swifts that spend nights in an old chimney on that building every fall. It's pretty remarkable; a vortex of swifts gradually accumulates overhead, sometimes growing suddenly denser, sometimes dissipating, until the group reaches some critical mass and the swifts start swirling in batches down into the top of the chimney. The crowd, mostly gathered on blankets and in folding chairs on a grassy bank above the school, react with appropriate "oohs"; the much larger bird of prey that made a single, apparently unsuccessful try at nabbing one of the peripheral swifts was greeted with some cheers and a smaller number of boos; the pervasive shrill twittering overhead more closely matched the effect of Bernard Herrmann's ambient sound-effects score for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds than any actual bird sounds I've heard before. The evening had happily cleared up enough for some painterly sun-on-clouds effects in the sky, out of which flocks of small swifts would suddenly materialize. Neat.
The moral: Always make sure the happiness of your day isn't wholly contingent on some professional meatheads correctly blocking some other professional meatheads.
* "A.M. 180" is indeed a great song, and it is with a feeling of giddy -- dare I say Pete-like -- contrariness that I note that I'm listening to it on my iPod as I type these very words, having bought that song as a single mp3 download several months ago.
** My personal odds of misidentifying Eagles linebacker Brian Dawkins in conversation as "Richard Dawkins": Like one in six.
3 Comments:
Brian Dawkins is a machine that preserves genes in the Steelers' backfield.
Not Roethlisberger's genes.
That picture is hilarious (if you're not Big Ben). And that video you posted is hilarious too.
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