Monday, February 4, 2013

The (Super Bowl) Week That Was

So. Hello. I'm going to start trying to round up all the writing I do over the course of the week and put it in a post. Some of this is for my personal accounting, so that I can have both a sense and a record of how ridiculously many words I'm writing per week. The rest of it is a belated attempt to bring this site back to its original non-dog-video purpose, which was for me to put the stuff I write. As that column on the right is already both overloaded and outdated, I figured maybe this is the best way. Anyway, we'll see if I can keep it up. But yeah, here is what I did on Super Bowl Week. (The picture of Rickie Weeks is because his last name is Weeks.)

I wrote about Alex Rodriguez, sad robot and totally opaque human being, for Sports On Earth. The commenters there, as is their wont, didn't like it. I was too hard on A-Rod, or defended him too much; I "obviously don't watch baseball." So all in all a success. Anyway, I liked it:

To live in that moment of command -- and yes, even A-Rod makes an out more often than he doesn't, but the game is incalculably easier for him than it is for most humans who have ever lived -- must be strange, like a dream of flying that somehow never ends. It seems reasonable to assume that this would do some things to a person's sense of self. In a way, the things we revile about A-Rod -- his prickly superiority and relentless rule-flouting, and the presumption of personal impunity from which those behaviors spring -- all have their basis in a sort of fact. He actually is superior in the ways that matter most at his workplace, and he has effectively bent or broken rules without consequence; we may not like the way that he presumes he can lie or cheat or gamble or otherwise act like A-Rod, but his entire career stands as proof that his arrogant presumption of impunity is not exactly false.

I also wrote about Breitbart Sports, the new and familiarly bilious vertical at the late conservative media mogul's website for raging right-wing mutants, at Vice:

The genius of Breitbart was that he greeted the acolytes in his comment sections as revolutionary brothers at the bottom of those low and fatuous trenches he dug; he encouraged them to get to know each other, loosen up, and maybe scream at each other about how there should be a White History Month. Breitbart didn’t discriminate on ideology in this respect; he helped create the Huffington Post, too. Breitbart was in the echo chamber business. His job was creating spaces where people could agree with each other stridently and mostly wrongly about various easy outrages, safely out of earshot of those who disagree. It’s only fitting that after a career spent treating politics like a long football game between Black Nazi Communists and the Founding Fathers, Breitbart has posthumously lent his name to a sports-news website.
... and about how a Mardi Gras float featuring a giant, awful-looking vulva consuming NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is more than just a terrifying thing that really exists, for The Classical:

This still seems something like the right float at the right time, and not only because, as Guidry says, "If you ask just about anyone on the streets of New Orleans, 'Would you like to watch the demise of Roger Goodell by a giant man-eating vagina?' Their answers would be 'yes.'" There is that, of course, but there's also everything else.

Among the not technically columnar writings were two Daily Fixes (Monday and Thursday) for the Wall Street Journal, one amusing enough but typically erroneous prediction column in the form of a discussion between me and co-Fixer (and fellow supershitty prognosticator) Jeremy Gordon, and a goofy little thing for Joshua David Stein on proper Super Bowl Party Etiquette to which he added rather more French and wine-friendliness than was in the original, and improved somewhat in that way. Also I wrote about Chris Culliver, no-homo nickelback of the San Francisco 49ers, and his 750,000 fake Twitter followers, for The Classical. I wrote some other stuff that isn't published yet, but I'm going to limit this to bylines-of-the-week. The total is eight. The word count for all those is depressingly large, the amount invoiced poignantly small. You might as well just infer that part going forward.