A breath (and a wave of the towel)

I certainly can’t complain in this economy about having a busy workweek, but I’m happy to take a breath for a bit now, having just handed in an article and with another hard project I need to start straightaway. I’m not so good at back-to-back stress, hence the need for a breath, a workout, a shower, and maybe a trip to the post office to mail that pretty-but-not-pretty-enough cottage garden needlework I bought on eBay last year and just resold.

In between stressing about work, I’m savoring being a citizen of Steeler Nation this week and getting psyched watching things like these amazing kids (age 11 to 13!) or this bit of inspiration from the AFC Championship game. I wonder what the stadium will look like on Sunday — a repeat of Detroit with its sea of black and gold would be fantastic. (Am I the only one bummed the Steelers will be wearing their white jerseys?) I’m torn between watching (and listening to Bill and Tunch) from the comfort of my living room and trying to go to our local hangout bar down the street, as Mike suggested. Hmmm, if we stay home, I have to make the food (although Emeril’s jalapeño poppers I made for last week’s game were awesome!); if we go out…great bar food and endless beer. But, can I last for the 4 hours or so we’d have to hang out before the game starts to get a seat? Such decisions…

I hope you’re pondering equally weighty matters as the “wintry mix” continues to fall. Time to drag myself (kicking and screaming) to the dungeon cellar for my date with the devil NordicTrack, which just turned 15 this month. Imagine if I had actually been using it steady all these years…

Oh, and you know you’re in Steelers heaven when everybody’s favorite local eatery does this for the Super Bowl and has to post disclaimers like this!

blackandgoldsmiley

What an enormous magnifier is tradition!
How a thing grows in the human memory and in
the human imagination, when love, worship, and all
that lies in the human heart is there to encourage it.

                                         ~ Thomas Carlyle

Yay! (And get your own damn icon.)

Afterglow. Nothin’ like it. 

Here’s wishing a speedy recovery for Willis McGahee. And kudos to the Ravens for playing a hell of a game — we were worried. Thank you, Troy!

———————————–

Lounging in bed this morning watching the news on Channel 4, I saw a piece by Bill Hillgrove about the Terrible Towel. The gist, as you might expect, “He who desecrates the towel, beware.”

What struck me most was Bill’s comment that the NFL was looking into introducing towels (or facsimiles) of their own. Then I found this P-G article that describes the effort.

What the hell? Ripping off Myron Cope’s brainchild and making money on a team icon whose sale funds a charity in honor of Myron’s disabled son? What an insult.

They couldn’t do a pennant, or a flag, or a foam whatever? Had to be a towel?

Or wait, maybe it’s appropriate that all those other NFL teams wave the white towel (in surrender) when the Steelers come to town.

Or maybe that’s what Steeler fans should wave in disgust when the refs make lousy calls against us or fail to notice when James Harrison gets held on nearly every play.

Or maybe it’s that imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.

Nah. It’s just the NFL trying to make a buck off a Pittsburgh original. Good luck with that.

Right now, though, it matters not. Pittsburgh’s goin’ to the Super Bowl!
HERE WE GO, STEELERS, HERE WE GO!

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. 
                                                                  ~ John Dewey

$121.40 a month for this?

We get 8,760 hours in a year. In good years, 3 of those (180 minutes) can be spent watching a Steelers playoff game. In a really good year, you can watch the Steelers WIN a playoff game in those 3 hours. It’s one reason, maybe the only reason, to occasionally not despise January.

Yesterday, during those precious 3 hours, all Comcast services went out in the Greensburg area (for us, no TV and Internet), along with TV-only outages in some other Westmoreland County areas, from a few minutes left in the 3rd quarter to a few minutes left in the 4th quarter. So, we basically lost a WHOLE QUARTER. 30+ minutes. Of a playoff game. While the Steelers were kicking butt.

I couldn’t even get through to Comcast to scream at them — busy for 10-15 minutes. (Good thing we don’t have Comcast phone, or I couldn’t have even done that.) When I did get through, I heard a hastily recorded message about network problems and an apology for “any inconvenience.”

Yeah, inconvenient. That does it justice.

In the 3+ years we’ve lived here, we’ve never had an outage of this sort. Nope. It had to happen during A PLAYOFF GAME.

Of course, we already had the radio on listening to Tunch and Bill. Thank God for that (I love you guys).

For a brief few seconds, I thought, “I wonder if it’s worth it to pay for cable and satellite, so if one goes out during a playoff game, you won’t miss anything?”

Yep, the thought crossed my mind. (“I bet that’s what rich people do.”)

It’s scary to love a team that much.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common
denominator.
 Shorn of the game’s aesthetic pleasures,
or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you,
or the sense of security that you get when you
see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less
where they should be, all that is left is naked fear. 
                            ~ Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, 1992

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