Every Time We Say Good Bye

I was anticipating a nice quiet weekend Under the Fedora.  A couple of NYFRBs, a little underdog rooting, and no stress.  Just me with a bowl of my kids Halloween candy, football, and relaxation.  But it was not to be. Thanks, Bye Week.  Thanks a lot.

Tricks, Not Treats

I miss Gray Boxes.  Not because they were part of the old site (like Recent Comments, which, by the way, I do miss, in case you didn’t know), but because you could avoid the Gray Box of Doom just as easily as you could embrace the Gray Box of Joy.  Sure, it would be there on the front page, mocking you, but you could always navigate away from it.  The Scarlet Banner of Misery, however, is unavoidable.  It is always there, much like the black 11W banner that gets burned into your phone screen.  Of course, the Scarlet Banner of Elation never seemed to bother me, for some reason.  It did cross my mind, ever so briefly, that this could be some sort of cruel Halloween fright, but alas, not even the overlords of 11W could be so devious.  I’m not sure there’s much more to be said about the issue, other than that bye week was worse than I had feared.

More “Fun” And Games

So, as I sat down on my couch Saturday evening to drown my sorrows in nougat and a less than mediocre slate of remaining games, I began rifling through my children’s Trick or Treat haul to exercise my parental right of Prima Chocta, and appropriate some interesting goodies for my own personal enjoyment.  Perhaps the memories of my youthful Halloweens are overly tinged with nostalgia (which might account for the sepia tones), but when did this abomination called the “fun-size” candy take hold in force?  I know that it’s been many years that these have been around, but this year’s "bounty" was seemingly entirely made up of these tiny tributes to real candy bars.  Can someone please tell me exactly what is fun about a candy bar you can eat in one bite?  When did the full-size candy bar go the way of the college pro-style quarterback?  When did America cease to be the land of the obese and the home of type 2 diabetes?  Fun-sized candy, like bye week sobriety checkpoints near campus, should be forever banned.

As for the football, I was eagerly switching between Minnesota/Michigan and Temple/ND, in the hopes that one or both might ease the pain of the morning’s news as well as my extreme disappointment in my choices for diabetic coma inducement, when the Mrs. entered the room.  “Is this what we’re watching?” she asked.  Now, those of you who are (or have been) married will immediately recognize this is what is known as a rhetorical question.  For the unindoctrinated, a rhetorical question is one, which if answered literally, results in an undesired stream of rhetoric from the questioner.  This particular question set in motion a series of calculations in my head that included the number of games that I had watched to date during the season (not to mention the marriage), plus the number of games that I still wanted to watch during the remaining season (not to mention the remaining marriage), times the joint probability of both of the games I was watching resulting in further disappointment (other probabilities were taken into account as well).  The end result of these cogitations was to respond (however despondently), “Well, this is what I was watching, but we can watch something else if you like.” Needless to say, I missed the end of both games, thus sparing myself the frustration of actually watching the outcomes live.  When I later learned (on 11W, of course) of the way in which Minnesota ended up blowing its chance at the upset, I thought that it surely couldn’t be as bad as everyone was saying.  I was wrong.  It was much worse.  But hey, didn’t Harbaugh do a great job of coaching Michigan to a victory in the aftermath of its loss to Little Brother?  The way he baited the Gophers into wasting all that time, and then enticing them into running a QB sneak against a stacked goal line defense was nothing short of brilliant.  It’s almost as if his brain function were enhanced by a strict diet of steak and whole milk.

Jinx, Schminx

I have been taken to task by Staff Members,  plagiarists Regular Contributors, and closet Taylor Swift lovers alike for my tongue-in-cheek Forum thread last Sunday about the latest Browns game debacle.  Anyone who has ever read any comment I have ever made regarding my beloved Brownies should know that my capacity to expect the worst of that team cannot be overestimated.  Much like you can’t triple stamp a double stamp, YOU CANNOT JINX A TEAM THAT IS CURSED.  The minute I start worrying that something I do has any impact on the Browns’ ability to rain down disappointment on me and the rest of its fans is the minute that the clock reads 0:00 on the Browns’ first Super Bowl victory.

TL;DR:  Halloween Tricks or Treats; Fun-size candy and Saturday night football; Jinxed Browns lose again