Nothing But Iron: Unplugged by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. November 30, 2008 I hate to brag, especially in a context that is completely random, but every now and then one realizes he has a skill that is worthy of sharing with friends, or in my case, readers, who may or may not be my friends after this. Saturday proved to be one of those now and thens. That was the moment I realized I am really good at unplugging toilets. I am talking Sam Bradford good here. You will appreciate that I have spared you the details, but I am confident that anyone who saw my work would consider me an expert plungerer, perhaps even a savant, to which some smart aces would probably add the term idiot. I do not suggest that you call me next time you have a plugged toilet, because I won’t help. If I were to help, I would take away critical experience that might someday make you as good a plungerer as I am, though that is not likely because much of my skill is a consequence of genetic endowment. Just know, while you are knee deep in unspeakable spattered particles, that I could probably get your toilet unplugged a lot easier than you can. Bet you didn’t see that topic coming, but that’s what distinguishes me from my peers in the literary arts. Speaking of unspeakable spattered particles, I have a BCS update: A lot of different crazy good college teams might be voted and computed into the national championship game owned by Fedex. Well, not a lot, really just two teams will get in. The rest will get so-called lesser bowls, but they and their fans and the guys on ESPN and a few lesser networks will tell themselves that these are excellent bowls, which they are not, because the only excellent bowl is one that holds cereal and milk or seafood pasta or tiramisu. You think I don’t give a schit about the college football post-season, but it’s not true. It’s just that other things are far more important, for example, the kumquat juice industry, 14th century European history, Swahili infinitives and common ingredients in popular cat shampoos. I have my priorities. It looks, unless all the rumors are wrong, as if the Badgers are going to the Insight Bowl. This excites me for four reasons: 1) It means they won’t go to the Motor City Bowl, renamed this year to the Government Bail Out Bowl, sponsored by Zoeller, a prominent manufacturer of sump pumps. In the four-star bowl rating system, The Motor City Bowl rates one-half a misshapen polygon. 2) It means my desert dwelling family will get to see the Badgers play in their own back yard, which is figurative, because their backyards are very small and the cactuses would be a problem, although the shorter field would surely help our punting game. 3) My cool brother Mike, who is an emerging professional photographer will get to shoot the game. He said he would start working on a second field pass for me, which would be about as much fun as I could legally have. The likelihood that I can get time off from work to get there is low, but if Mike can get the extra pass, I will be tempted like a spoiled 3-year-old in Toys R Us. 4) The extra weeks of practice will pay dividends for our young Badgers, so that next year they can help the team vie for a better lesser bowl game. Kudos to local sportswriters Tom Oates and Andy Baggot, who have not only climbed aboard the playoff bandwagon, but have learned to play the drums and trumpet respectively. In the larger scope of the world of sports media, their efforts constitute a grass roots movement on a miniature golf course, but the more scrutiny applied to the a-hole (a for arrogant) college presidents and s-for-brains (s for unspeakable spattered particles) conference commissioners for their opportunistic marriage with the BCS, the sooner they will realize that they are the common-sense equivalents of Sudokscrew, the first attempt at puzzle invention by the creators of Sudoku. Sudokscrew quickly failed because its grid was made of invisible haphazard lines into which unrelated combinations of numbers, letters and Greek symbols were placed for no apparent reason. This puzzle frustrated would-be puzzle solvers who, until the introduction of Sudoku, retreated back to the safe havens of crosswords and word find. Now if only the experts at ESPN, also known as a street corner in the red-light district of Sportstown–would change out of their high-heel boots, fishnet stockings and sleazy mini-skirts and do what is right for the sport of football, we might gain a little momentum. Not that I am accusing anybody being a horse, with a silent s. But wait! This just in: College presidents, conference commissioners and their sponsors don’t control the college post season. Know who does? Hint: gas prices. You got it. Morons control the fate of college football like the Saudis control gas prices. Consumers rule. And you can thank me later for riding my bike to work last week when it was 9-degrees (a personal best) at 6:33 a.m. Just like gas, if the demand for BCS falls, so will its value. But I am an addict, you say, hands trembling at the thought of a holiday season without 40 meaningless football games. Yeah. That’s what I thought. But we thought we were addicted to $4-per-gallon gas too, but were not. Trust me on these two things: 1) It won’t take much of a drop in ratings to kill the BCS. 2) There will never ever be a playoff as long as we fans feed the beast with our television remotes and our dollars. Did you notice I almost never talk about women’s sports? It is partly because I am not a women and partly because I am a male chauvinist pork substrate. O.K. not really the latter. I have great respect for female athletes, many of whom could kick my Y-chromosomed butt, especially in hockey, which requires ice running while wearing of high-top shoes with knife blades affixed to the soles. I don’t cover women’s sports for the same reason I don’t cover cricket and jai alai–time management. If I were anything more than a Holiday Inn Express-encouraged sportswriter imposter I would cover sports of all available genders on a regular basis. That said, it is impossible, even for me, to ignore the recent accomplishment of Lisa Stone’s Paradise Jam champion Badgers ballers, who knocked of 6th-ranked Baylor in the final of that tournament. Likewise, the dynastophilic (read: dynasty-loving) top-ranked UW women’s hockey team beat Minnesota State by a score of 8-0. I don’t know much about hockey, but I am pretty sure that 8-0 is like 80-0 in football scoring. UW Women’s Hockey is in the process of redefining dominance, with more hardware in the last two years than Home Depot and Lowes combined. As of halftime of the Carolina game things are not looking good for the Packers, but I have to keep telling myself these things: 1) I am still a Packers fan. 2) I am not a Bears fan, which means I do not want anybody to be fired or killed. 3) We are chasing Minnesota and Chicago, not the New York Giants or stable stock portfolios, for supremacy in the NFC-Mediocrity division, so until the math says otherwise, I am cautiously not that pessimistic. I watched the man Badgers beat the not-too-good UW-Milwaukee Panthers on Saturday. Ours is a seemingly low-potency team that will outwork almost every team on its schedule, even the ones it loses to. My early impression on just two game’s observation is that I cannot imagine this team winning the Big Ten or 30 games or making a deep run in the NCAA tournament, but I am confident that Wisconsin’s success is not dependent upon my imagination. I like the players on this team so much that I further imagine cheering for them no matter what record they compile. Lastly, I go on record as saying I will not be surprised if these Badgers, characteristic of many Bo Ryan teams, find a way to over achieve. As of the end of the Carolina game things are not looking good for the Packers. I now wonder: Is it possible to be marvelous and terrible at the same time? Yes, I think that is what the Packers are: marverribble. I still don’t want to fire or kill anybody, although I did regress into a string of bad words during Carolina’s long kick return and equally devastating pass completion that earned me a dirty look from my wife. By the time Aaron Rogers threw the game-ending interception, I had run out of bad words, so I didn’t say anything. I just turned off the television, shook my head and checked to see if the toilet was working. (Alas, it was.) As for blame, I blame Carolina for not giving up. Did they not know it was cold? Did they forget they were supposed to lose? The audacity. The weekend’s only saving grace, besides some really good stuff from A Rog, is that either Minnesota or Chicago is guaranteed a loss tonight. One last thing: My desire not to kill anybody could quickly change if I start hearing how Favre would have won this game for Packers. ____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column, at least most of the time. ©2008 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.