An Annual Overblown Sports Extravaganza

Super Bowl About To Be Unleashed; NFL Fans Elated While Normal People Shrug

New Orleans (AP). It is the annual winter blowout game of the NFL. Along with endless commercials, a bloated halftime show that will leave people scratching their heads and wondering what that was all about. Couch coaches will be debating endlessly the merits of the game. Skeptics will be wondering how fixed the game really is. And those of us who don't really care about football in the first place will be wondering what the fuss is all about.

People have been gathering in New Orleans over the last few days, where Sunday's big game will be played at the Superdome and broadcast this year through Fox. This reporter has been assigned to cover the event by his editor, even though this reporter is not a sports fan (editor: the readers love your disdain for this whole thing, sorry. We'll make it up to you by not sending you to the Oscars). This reporter, heartened by that promise, has been spending time taking in the pre-game festivities and wondering what it is about this silly game that captivates so many Americans (editor: it's a mystery). 

The Philadelphia Eagles will be playing the Kansas City Chiefs, the two-time defending Super Bowl champion team. Much has been said about the prospects, with very little fan support for either team outside their respective markets, and some fans saying that a meteor strike would be preferable. Speculation has run rampant that the NFL has fixed the game. "Nonsense," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated to reporters on Friday. "I mean, we love the Chiefs, but we also love the Pennsylvania Eaglets."

When reminded that the actual team name is the Philadelphia Eagles, Goodell shrugged. "I said what now?"

Much has also been made of the ongoing story of the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce relationship. The singer and the Chiefs player have been a couple for over a year, creating headlines all the way. These days fans are speculating as to if an engagement ring is in the offing, or if this will all end in a revenge album when they break up. She's appeared regularly at his games, and many gossip and gush about the topic (editor: I have two teenage daughters. They're big fans. Of Taylor, that is). Speculation has ensued that a proposal might happen after the game, if the Chiefs win.

"We're busy focusing on the game," Quarterback Patrick Mahomes told reporters this week. "I mean, yeah, there's going to be a lot of distractions this year, but I just want to remind everyone that there actually is a game going on in the middle of all this glitz and glamour."

It might be hard to tell. If it's not Chiefs fans on the one hand, it's debates about Eagles fans on the other. Late in the season, one longtime fan was banned from Eagles games after saying horrid things to a fan of another team. An Eagles player, speaking on condition of anonymity, told this reporter, "that was way over the line. Unacceptable.  And from what I've heard, that guy's life has been destroyed. Look, I know our fans have a bad reputation. I mean, they're assholes, but they're our assholes, and we love them."

Also around this week has been the former Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who instead of just retiring already is spending time coaching at the college level and looking for a way to get back to the NFL level. He has been seen wandering about, looking as haggard as ever, asking team owners if they'd be interested in making him their new head coach.

Reached for comment, the owner of Belichick's soul had this to say. "That particular soul had lost nearly all of its value," Satan said from his domain of Hell. "But time runs short, and he'll be down here soon enough, I assure you. In the meantime, since it is Super Bowl time, I thought you might like to know about a former player who took up permanent residence in these parts. He's very unhappy these days, what with all the torture and the agony. But I'm sure you'll agree that if anyone deserves it,  it's O.J."

The halftime show promises to be as bloated and pointless as ever. Rapper Kendrick Lamar is headlining the event. "It's gonna be big, so ****ing big," he told reporters. "We got guest appearances, deafening speakers, pyrotechnics, a three hour set to do, and no ****in' Drake. **** that ****er."

"You said three hours?" This reporter asked.

It's going to be a long night. Filled with overblown hype and endless tedium. This reporter has already prepared the Tylenol supply for the cluster headache sure to come (editor: yeah, sorry about all that, but think of it this way. At least your former editor is still locked in that lunatic asylum after the multiple death threats.)

That isn't a comfort. In closing, maybe we'll get lucky and both teams come down with food poisoning.

Changing Leaves And Pumpkin Spice

 The first day of fall comes this week. Of course I'd have to put in an image blog to mark the occasion.

A Snowstorm Heralds Spring

It's that time of year. Spring arrives today. Supposedly. The time of flowers and new growth is also the time of allergies and mosquitoes. And spring snow storms. 

Master Thieves And Witchcraft

The following is a follow up to something I wrote awhile back. Should I happen to meet a bad and mysterious end, it'll probably be the ghost of P.L. Travers strangling me in my sleep.

Freak Accident Provides Closure On Century Old Case

London (Reuters) Over a century ago, strange things were seen in the fog around London. Chimney sweeps dancing on rooftops. Senile admirals firing off cannons from the top of his manor. A street entertainer and jack of all trades with a secret. A bank chairman who died laughing- while floating in the air. And a peculiar woman who spoke to animals, flew through the air by umbrella, and described herself as “practically perfect in every way.”

In the fall of 1910, these events came together on one tragic night when eight year old Michael Banks plunged to his death from a staircase of smoke that hung suspended over the London skyline. The son of a banker, Michael was in the company of his sister Jane and two adults- a nanny by the name of Mary Poppins and a street busker and chimney sweep named Bert- though his working identity turned out to be a façade.

Years later witnesses described the vision of a staircase made of smoke, ascending from the area around Cherry Tree Lane, a quiet, affluent neighbourhood at the time, and seeing a woman, a man, and two children walking up it- until one of the children fell through, falling over a hundred feet to the pavement below. Michael’s funeral was a sad and somber affair, with his parents, George and Winifred, seeming shell shocked, while ten year old Jane Banks was in hysterics.

“Gran never got over it,” Felicia Warwick, granddaughter of Jane Banks-Warwick, told reporters this week. “She would tell stories of Mary Poppins, the strange nanny who would take her and her brother on adventures in sidewalk drawings and tea on the ceiling and cleaning up a room with magic. You know, it might be tempting to have wondered if it was dementia, but in every single other way, she was perfectly rational to the end of her life, and she was telling stories like that long before she got old. So it wasn’t dementia.”

Miss Warwick shook her head before continuing. “One moment she had Michael’s hand in hers, the next she felt it slip away and heard him scream. She heard the sound of his impact. Can you imagine the effect that would have on a girl? It always stayed with her. She spent the rest of her life blaming herself, wondering if she had done something wrong, if she could have saved him. Her parents both drank their way into the grave by the time she was finished at Oxford. The family never got over it.”

Poppins, a tall and distinctive looking woman by any description, vanished in the aftermath, sought by police for questioning, but never found. For years afterwards there were occasional sightings and rumours of a Poppins incident, as they were called, but nothing positive. As for her chimney sweep consort, he was detained at the scene, but more strange events kept him from justice. Bert, as he was known to local residents, was more than he seemed. Albert Geoffrey Wentworth III, the heir to the Wentworth shipping fortune, had been long absent from the world of high society, adopting a Cockney accent and friendly demeanour- while carrying out a life of crime. His arrest that night revealed him to be the mastermind cat burglar behind the Autolycus robberies, and yet he escaped from holding the following day- and vanished into history, the only trace of him being the occasional heist of jewels and art across Europe for years after, bearing his signature.

Authorities for years sought both suspects- Poppins for her strange, unexplained abilities and role in the death of Michael Banks, Wentworth for his master skills as the world’s greatest cat burglar. Time faded for the families around Cherry Tree Lane. Admiral Thaddeus Boom was committed to a nursing home two months after the incident. George Banks lost interest in the world of banking and became a committed drinker. Winifred Banks turned her back on suffrage for women and joined her husband in an up close and personal examination of the drinking life. Jane Banks would go off to college, get married, and not pick up her family drinking habits, but something about her would always be marked by the absence of her brother. And Michael Banks would lie in his grave, joined in the years that followed by father, mother, and finally sister.

Experts had their own theories, some out there, others seemingly less so. Some suggested Poppins was an expert in sleight of hand and stage magic, making it appear as if she was doing something extraordinary while in fact she was doing things that could be explained. Others put forth the idea, strange in the early twentieth century, that Poppins was a practicing witch in the very real sense of the word.

“Not one of those current day Wiccans who hold hands and chant around Stonehenge, mind you,” Genevieve Richardson, a professor on the occult at Oxford told reporters. “The concept was that Poppins had to be the real thing- spell casting, communing with the forces of real magic. Some scholars wondered if she spent her time as a nanny to gather the spirit energy of young children for her spells. Others looked to unexplained incidents going back hundreds of years, and pored over old paintings and etchings of women who looked just like her. If you subscribe to the theory, Mary Poppins, or whatever her real name is, could have been hundreds of years old. I don’t subscribe to it myself, I mean come on, flying with umbrellas?”

And yet this week saw a shocking mid-air event that may well have brought closure to the strange case. A passenger jet flying from London to New York had a collision in flight just out over the Irish Sea. Initially the thought of the flight crew suggested birdstrike that damaged one of the engines. Turning back, the pilots safely landed their aircraft on English soil. Ground crews discovered something very different upon beginning to examine the engine, and called in government investigators. Civil Aviation Authority investigators are just beginning to investigate the case.

Sources close to the case, however, suggest that blood samples found in the engine wreckage are human- and match DNA samples going back to 1910- and belonging to Mary Poppins. Shredded remnants of what are described as an umbrella and black women’s clothing have also been found. If this was indeed Mary Poppins, the peculiar nanny met a fast but horrible end… with a spoonful of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious terror.