Well, here’s a familiar photo. It was just 10 months ago that I was fired from The Washington Post for posting this here picture and boasting of being drunk while watching Super Bowl XL in a bar in my free time. But, hey, now I get to write about football-related dick jokes from home as a job now.

Will Leitch has already detailed how he dreamt at age 11 of Matt Leinart or some other left-handed QB winning the Cardinals a Super Bowl. Can’t say I’ve always had the same visions for my team this year, but I’d like to think the football gods smiled upon me for my blog martyrdom BECAUSE IT’S ALL ABOUT ME ME ME though probably not. I, unlike Leitch, can’t claim to have seen this Super Bowl coming for Pittsburgh, what with an impossible-looking schedule, Bruce Arians and a sieve of an offensive line. Yet here we are.

This summer I was told by Daulerio that I’d become Deadspin’s roving correspondent, which would include covering the Super Bowl for them. In the time since, Gawker had been cutting budget for months, so it seemed less and less likely that I would be going to Tampa. The definitive news came down from Daulerio at the beginning of January, so it was then that I figured the Steelers pretty much had to go. Just to fuck me over.

The rest of the Gay Mafia will get you through the big day. I, meanwhile, will be at the same place I was when watching Super Bowl XL. Whether the parrot shows for more pics I can’t be sure. Either way, I’ll be back this evening to mock the Steelers haters until my typing fingers are sore if the team wins or subject myself to your unstinting collective ridicule if they lose. Should be fun.

With no Marion Barber, Romo will have to keep his throwing pinkie warm, as the expected wind chill at kickoff in Pittsburgh is going to be in the neighborhood of 7 degrees. In the meantime, I’d like to extend a hearty fuck-you-in-the-pants to NFL Network for playing Super Bowl XIII on loop all weekend, you jinxing assholes.

So how are Dallas fans dealing with yesterday’s news that Barber will be absent? Cautious optimism tempered with wisdom and restraint?

I love you, dipshit Cowboys fans. Don’t ever change.

Somehow this is only the third meeting between Steelers and Cowboys since Super Bowl XXX. Reading the chapter in Boys Will Be Boys about the game exhumed some rather unpleasant memories. But the most embarrassing for me was the fact that I bet our school’s equivalent of Jimbo, Dolph and Kerney $100 straight-up that Pittsburgh would win that game, knowing full well they weren’t gonna give me shit even if I won the bet. I was tired of being taunted that there was no way the Steelers were going to win and wanted the stupidest way possible to show I had faith in my team. Well placed, of course!

You stupid sexy, sexy kid!

Then two months later, I contracted Bell’s Palsy (Just like Jim Ross!) and had to spent the next five months getting electroshock therapy on my face to clear it up.

Fuck, I hated 1996.

Only one of my friends is as much a scatterbrain as me, but I can at least hold over him the fact that he took eight years to finish undergrad at Howard. After changing his major four times, I was curious to see what he’d get into once he finally got out. So I dropped by his place for the first time in months and out of nowhere, hundreds of toys are strewn about the place. As in, action figures and Micro Machine playsets and shit. It looks like a Chester’s wonderland. Of late, it seems, he’s spending his time raiding the area thrift stores, buying up their toy stock and trying to sell the playroom detritus online.

Me: “You can’t be serious.”

Friend: “I just had a sale for $186.”

Me: “What’d you sell for $186?”

Him: “A bunch of Choose Your Own Adventure books.”

Me: “How many?”

Him: “40.”

Me: “Is that the complete set?”

Him: [A little too aghast] “Are you kidding? There are hundreds. There’s the [Something] series and the [Something] series. This doesn’t cover anywhere close to all of them.”

Me: “Oh.”

He had initially gone into this scheme with another friend of his, but they had something of a falling out. Now they’re each going at it alone. On a few occasions, one has caught the other coming out of a local thrift store post-purchase and an ugly scene has ensued.

My takeway from all this is that I need new friends.

Anyway, early in the week we at KSK were chiming in with our respective homeristic choices for Meast. Maj wanted Portis, I wanted Roethlisberger, Ufford naturally demanded Brian Russell and while Drew never actually said anything about Antoine Winfield it’s safe to assume he has his replica jersey coming in the mail.

Because I’m a man of compromise, I’ll give it to LaMarr Woodley, who had another two sacks Sunday, giving the second-year pro and first-year starter five and a half for the season, putting both he and fellow Steelers outside linebacker James Harrison in the top five in the league. Weeeee!

Oh wait, they were playing the Lions and the Bengals. I guess that makes sense. Still, how the fuck does Michael Turner go over 200 with a rookie QB starting? (more…)