The PreGame

Hey guys, there's a football game this weekend. It's the biggest game of the year.

Something interesting about said game: The coaches of the opposing teams are siblings! Crazy, right? Man, it's such a good thing nobody's said anything about it. Or made jokes about nobody saying anything about it.

While I had originally planned this Super Bowl column to be a resentful bit of dreck about how the Harbaugh boys have ruined it for everybody who has parents who expect things out of them, I did a little bit of digging and have uncovered an even greater Super Bowl injustice.

When it comes to soup, the crusty bread garnish is impossible to deny, no matter how it crumbles.

For the umpteenth consecutive week, the leavened leviathan remains atop the PreGame’s Soup Garnish Power Rankings. In the last PreGame poll before the Lowcountry Soup Challenge — which is Sunday at The Westin Hilton Head Island Resort & Spa — there was some shakeup in the lower ranks, but nothing to dislodge the crusty bread out of the top spot.

The soup garnishes playing the best this week, as usual, in mostly particular order:

Taking part in this activity practically issues a license to dream, ensuring the participants project themselves into unlikely, lavish scenarios forecasting how they would choose to handle fame and fortune.

What is the lottery?

“No.”

What is “American Idol”?

(Softer, more judgmental) “Noo.”

What is, my friends, the “Jeopardy!” online qualification test?

Trebek: “Correct. Also acceptable: What am I doing here?”

I like to play along.

For many, the days following New Year’s Eve mean hangovers, nicotine gum and finding a way to ignore yet still somehow misuse the treadmill.

The image burned into my brain, however, is one of thank-you notes.

While my siblings and I were afforded a post-Christmas grace period to enjoy and proceed to break our gifts, said grace period ended when the confetti was swept up and the tree came down. Mom would nag and nag as we came up with increasingly ridiculous excuses not to be grateful people. (Note:

Remember when the iPad was first announced, and all anybody could focus on was making jokes about its name and the fact that it kind of sounded like it would be some sort of digital sanitary napkin?

Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?

Since the iPad hit shelves — and its competition sprinted to follow suit — the tablet has become a nearly ubiquitous part of everyday life.

With the impending Maya-predicted* apocalypse, this could be the last column of mine that you read. (There will be one more before Dec. 21, but at that point, who will have time for newspapers?) Really, though, it’s much more likely that the world continues, you read many more, and this whole mess will be remembered as nothing more than the excuse you gave yourself when you had a second dessert.

“They just don’t make ’em like they used to.”

It’s a common gripe — often met with an eye roll, a solemn nod or a “You’re right, and it’s a damn shame.”

I, for one, am not the biggest fan of this particular complaint. I find its speaker uses it (and I include myself in this) many times out of a reluctance to adapt to the new than as a comment on the quality of the old. It’s an excuse to be negative because if nobody is making ’em like they once did, then what can you really do about it, aside from learning the “’em” trade yourself and creating an “’em” renaissance?

"Deer Santa,

Puppy.

From,
Andy"

This is — give or take a Nerf gun or Nintendo 64 — how my annual, cutely misspelled letter to Santa looked as a kid. I’d envision Christmas mornings of bounding down the stairs to a lovable ball of fur with a bow on its head and I’d name it something dumb like “Spot” or “Michael” and he might even lead my basketball team to the state title.

But the jolly man never came through.

“YOU … SHALL … NOT … PASS!”
— The door at GameStop, December 2006 (Well … figuratively. It was locked.)

During the holiday season of 2006, there was no more popular play thing than the Nintendo Wii. A video game console with broad appeal and an original spin on gaming, it was fun and fresh and, of course, in extremely sparse quantity. Crowds gathered and lines formed just as they did for the Furby and the Cabbage Patch Kid or whatever this year’s excuse will be to forget the Reason for the Season.