Did you know that AccuWeather has a dedicated “bloopers and outtakes” section? I had no idea! Oh, also, there will be some snow. But the arthritis index is low, so I guess it’s not all terrible.

More Juice On Illinois Lt. Gov Nominee

“It was a bad time in my life. I was trying to put muscle on.”
-Illinois Democratic lieutenant governor nominee Scott Lee Cohen, whose story just keeps on getting more amazing, responds to claims that he “abused anabolic steroids, displayed fits of rage and forced himself sexually on his wife before their divorce.” You may also enjoy this interview in which the reporter, after enumerating the allegations against Cohen, ends with a plaintive, “Dude.”

TreacherGate, in case you have not been following the blow-by-blow of the Daily Caller employee (Jim Treacher, real name Sean Medlock) who was viciously assaulted by a State Dept. Security Services SUV, is hotting up tonight. “A second DSS spokeswoman… claimed that ‘a jogger collided with one of the U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Security Service’s official vehicles’-as if Medlock, who does not jog, had somehow attacked the SUV.” But Tucker Carlson is on the scene.

by Abe Sauer

Maybe you have heard of football and the game’s championship “Super Bowl” this Sunday? And maybe you see football as the most American of games. But baseball is America’s game. Not football. And yet, so many identify football with America. This is so wrong. Football is American only in a few disparate, sometimes contradictory, ways-even while football may be the least American team sport. Now, football cheerleaders, they are American. I dare you to identify something more American than football cheerleaders. But football itself is practically European. It is a sport controlled by money-sharing, redistribution-of-wealth agreements and a strong labor union. No team is allowed to get too wildly rich. Everyone needs to work together to accomplish a goal. It’s downright socialist. The only way in which football is American is that coaches, like executives, always get new jobs after failing miserably and that Keith Olbermann ruins everything.

Football is also the most team-oriented major sport. No single person can carry a football team. Teams are made up of a large number of men who specialize in highly specific jobs, with almost none of them able to do any other one’s job. And their physicality is evidence of the specificity of their work. In what other sport can you find a 6’5″ 365-pound dude and a 5’11” 198-pound dude on the same field and on the same team?

Now, in the lead-up to Sunday’s Super Bowl, there will be a lot of story-lines. Haitian player supports the homeland. Peyton Manning plays dad’s old team. A Saints win means New Orleans has finally fully recovered and we can all openly stop caring about its plight (which of course we all did back in 2007). One narrative that will not bubble up to the surface, because it never does, is that of the offensive lineman.

Offensive linemen are statistical phantoms. Penalties are the only numbers offensive linemen ever accrue. Yet their duties are the foundation of every star’s on-field success, from the quarterback to the wide-receiver to the kicker. If the linemen don’t play well, the household-name players with endorsement deals fail to be superstars at all. And yet the cameras almost never show them, unless, once again, they screw up.

There is no fantasy football offensive line. And even fervent football fans such as myself can name very few linemen. The Baltimore Ravens’ Michael Oher is now probably the best-known lineman-and not because of his on-field play but instead because of the story of his hard-knock life. And even then, the protagonist is the woman who saves him, Sandra Bullock. Oher just blocks for her.

Drew Brees is a superstar quarterback who can find receivers and make tremendous throws. But what would announcers say about Brees if the Saints line had given up more than just 20 sacks this season? And what of the Colts’ hall-of-fame-bound Manning, who was sacked only half of that?

I asked Bob Bostad, the offensive line coach for the University of Wisconsin Badgers, what makes offensive linemen different than other players. “I will be short,” he said. “I believe that offensive linemen have a higher level of accountability. They don’t ‘make plays.’ They must allow others to, so assignment and consistency within the game plan is essential.”

One paradox of being an “offensive” lineman is that you are often on defense. That is to say, you are often trying to prevent a result. In pass blocking schemes, this means taking your drop step and then waiting to get hammered by a bull rush over and over again. Success is not measured by what you did but by what you kept someone else from doing. With the job that essentially boils down to “protection,” is it any surprise that so many offensive lineman are married family men?

Coach O’Brion is head coach of the Fall River Pirates middle school program in Wisconsin. Last year he went 9–0. He says it was maybe his best O-line:

There are two major misconceptions about linemen. That they are unathletic and that they are not smart. Asking the backside guard to pull all the way across the formation and kick out an outside linebacker is no easy task. Pass blocking is akin to playing defense in basketball… only rougher. At higher levels of football o-linemen are often asked to make calls and adjustments at the line of scrimmage and relay the changes to their linemates. The center is probably the most cerebral of the positions. In fall camp, I always try to pick my center first and find a smart kid to fill that role. And while coaches are always using cliches and metaphors, one of my favorites is five separate fingers on a hand are weak. However when all five of those five fingers work together to make a fist they can do some serious damage. The same goes for your offensive line.

Going into the deal, they know they will never get any of the credit and will do most of the work. The only time they get noticed is when they screw up. It takes a special kind of person to be a good offensive linemen… O-linemen need to have a ‘big picture’ view. Good linemen are often your hardest workers and humble, add in a little mean streak and you have someone special. I have always said linemen are the heart and soul of a team.

Before he was Coach O’Brion he was just Andy O’Brion, and I played offensive line with him. I was a pulling guard and later a center. A fairly bad one too, on a succession of teams that were not great. The Seattle Seahawks of our conference. But I contend that there is no more “team” feeling than being part of an offensive line as you break huddle and swagger up to a 4th and goal, shoulder to shoulder.

My only lament about being an offensive lineman is not the lack of recognition or the mangled fingers from being “cleated” or the play-after-play brutality, which even for a lover of physical violence such as myself, can grow weary and tiring by the 4th quarter (especially when the defense won’t do its job), or the defensive ends hands to your face that the ref never sees, or just the simple, annoying fact that you fall down on almost every damn play.

No, the biggest problem is off the football field. Offensive linemen are perceived as fat. But most really are not. That’s right, the offensive lineman has body image issues.

Bodies like an oil drum stacked atop another oil drum with another oil drum atop that; no fashion looks good on them. Thighs thicker than waists; no pants fit properly. Calves like two-gallon milk jugs. A sport coat is an absurd waste of a cotton field. Offensive lineman-especially great offensive linemen-are freaks of nature towering the height of some NBA players but with muscle on top of muscle on top of bone the thickness of baseball bats, and then some fat padding atop that. Banana Republic, J. Crew, Express-their cuts are hopeless. When one can even find a stylish size 46 (or 56) jacket, the arms are too narrow. Shopping at H&M is an absurd farce for any proper guard, tackle or center. Skinny jeans and the hipster aesthetic are a conspiracy against people who can lift their own body weight straight up over their heads, and then do it again.

So as you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, take a moment to consider the offensive linemen. They would appreciate it… even though they wouldn’t expect it.

Abe Sauer really has a hard time shopping.

Raekwon Serenades Sade In Heartfelt Display Of Gratitude

How much does rap love Sade? She gives Raekwon a quick little mention in a radio interview on Monday, and the rock-hard Wu-Tang MC dedicates a special Puttin’-On-the-Hits-style lip sync performance of Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed.”

Hot today: sperm! Science has discovered the molecule that tells sperm to stop sitting around and start sperming. “Now that we know what this channel is, then it could lead us to either develop a novel contraceptive for men, or perhaps find a way to improve the sperm motility for men whose sperm don’t swim as well as they should,” says the University of Sheffield’s Dr. Allan Pacey. (Other contraceptives for men: oral sex, and, possibly, smoking pot.) For more information on sperm, consult this handy chart. Or call me.

“Record company EMI has reported an annual pre-tax loss of £1.75bn in the year to 31 March 2009.”

Everything I know about Australia comes from the band Men at Work’s early eighties hit “Down Under.” Now it turns out the whole thing was based on a TISSUE OF LIES AND THIEVERY: “Australian band Men at Work copied a well-known children’s campfire song for the flute melody in its 1980s hit ‘Down Under’ and owes the owner years of royalties, a court ruled Thursday. ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ was written more than 70 years ago by Australian teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition, and the song has been a favorite around campfires from New Zealand to Canada.” I feel so betrayed. I think I’m going to go home and throw out my Young Einstein DVD just to be safe.

Recent talk of the phenomenon of preemptive irritation has made me more aware of the various sources of everyday rage, dismay and unease. But just one of these irritants is responsible for my accelerating descent into permanent anxiety. It’s the intellectual overload brought on by excessive exposure to the Internets.

Why I am so enslaved to the Internet, I do not know. Nor do I care, in the habitual manner of addicts-at least not until the consequences begin to rear their hydra heads, as they are rather doing right now. My first instinct is to say that it’s because learning stuff provides the communion with other minds that is the best defense against existential loneliness and ennui. The more you learn, the less alone you will feel. And by now the Internet must contain knowledge enough to cure all six or seven billion of us of that loneliness.

I often fantasize about that thing in The Matrix where you can just plug your brain into a network (rather like the Internet) through a socket at the base of your skull, and then information is downloaded right into you at lightning speed. (“Can you fly that thing?” “Not yet.”) The druglike nature of that injection-straight-into-the-brain imagery is no accident; it’s apt. What an attractive, gluttonous fantasy! The subject twitches a little as knowledge floods in. As I can quite imagine one would. I almost do that at my desk sometimes, after a little too much enlightenment has caused the brains to bulge. Perhaps your eyeballs will roll back into your head in ecstasy when, at last and instantaneously, you understand quantum mechanics… I’m longing to try it. Of all the inventions in all the fantasies I’ve ever read or seen, I love this one most.

At my desk there is, sadly, no such device, so I am reduced to a very plodding rate of intoxication. And I do, I spend enormous, unjustifiable amounts of time simply gorging on information. The worst of it is that I seem to need more and more, but the equipment I am using is too slow, it’s positively lumbering. No way can my head handle the rate at which I am trying to shove stuff in; the evidence of that is conclusive. I can never remember how to spell Aung San Suu Kyi. A Canadian friend ribs me for knowing so little about the Harper government. I still haven’t read today’s newsletters from Salon, japantoday.com, or The New Yorker. The books in this house are evidently multiplying on their own. It takes me forever to read even a newspaper article in Spanish, let alone Roberto Bolaño like I’m supposed to be doing. [1] I harbor a growing fear that I’m trying to pile more and more into an already-full bowl. What crucial contents might not already have spilled out of there, and long ago?

This chick Sue Halpern, who was panicking along the same lines I am (fear of bowl-leakage) wrote in Slate last month about these memory-enhancement devices she’d tried out; she is more or less a believer, and also she claims this stuff helped her beat her husband at ping-pong. I must say I perked up a bit at that news, because my husband is a perfect fiend at ping-pong. Nevertheless, I can’t quite see shelling out 350 clams for whatever mnemonic light-show goggle thing, or really believe it could do much for my own “2.8 pounds of electrified pâté.”

Sherlock Holmes had his own scheme for dealing with this problem. He said (in The Five Orange Pips) that “a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.” Like RAM storage, I guess, versus a hard drive. I despair of ever achieving anything like that kind of order. The condition of my own storage facilities is more like something out of one of those ghastly reality TV shows about hoarders.

What I should really do here is come clean and admit the truth, which is that I am a stone liar. Who am I kidding? I love this kind of crazy. I wouldn’t trade it away for anything and I only want more. I love the time in which we are living with a startling lack of reservation, despite everything.

A friend told me that there is a “Slow Media” movement brewing out there, somewhere or other. The Internet confirms. NO. I only want food to go slow! The growing advance of knowledge, the tantalizing proximity of answers to all our questions, the new ability to share and synthesize our knowledge, almost instantly-we’re so lucky to be experiencing all this. If the price is more anxiety, then let me wind up like the Tasmanian Devil, just a blur of anxiety. Of unbelieveably knowledgeable, totally undeceived anxiety. So what if the Internet has turned each day into a panic-ridden informational hot-dog-eating contest? So what if with the incomparable gift of access to limitless knowledge comes also a little melancholy, and anxiety that waxes sometimes into an Ernest-Beckerish sense of impending doom?

Allen Ginsberg’s My Sad Self is all about this very sense of simultaneous gratitude and loss, but it was another phrase of his that I meant to quote: “Misery and happiness are one taste.” This, from an extraordinary interview in the Times. I couldn’t quite remember, though, the exact words of Ginsberg’s memorable phrase. I had to look it up.

1 For the group read of 2666, which is really fun.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

That absolutely insane Carly Fiorina ad we mentioned yesterday? It is no less insane, but sadly much less original, when you consider it in light of its inspiration.