However, the fine print is intriguing.

There’s some typical stuff – entry fee, contest dates and deadlines, a website to visit for all the official rules, yada yada yada – and then it states that residents of certain areas are prohibited from entering.  Those areas are, in a slightly rearranged order for dramatic effect:

Arizona

Cuba

New Jersey

Iran

North Korea

Quebec

Sudan

Syria

Vermont

I always knew Jersey was a hotbed of travel essay cheaters, but I never suspected Vermont.

The last time I blogged I was literally on the precipice of being laid off.  In fact, my last post before this one (…in March…of 2011…) was about how I was pathetically spending my weekday afternoons at my work computer obsessively refreshing espn.com to see if the NFL owners would indeed lock out the players.

Well they did.  And I lost my job.

And then, I dunno…I didn’t feel like writing about football for a while.

When 2011 kicked off I was in the same place I’d been the past 4 years – preparing to play nursemaid to future NFL players and to stalk party planners in the Super Bowl host city. Playoffs (and the end of the college football season) signalled that my life was about to hit total chaos mode, like I Love Lucy with that row of chocolates coming at her faster and faster.

But not this January.  This January I do things like watch the Today Show and go to the gym at noon.  I’m working, yes, but at a job with an ever-changing schedule, so more days than not I am free to pray and daydream and ponder what to do with the rest of my life.

It is exhausting work.

After 9 months of pondering, one of the only things I’m sure of is that I’d like to keep writing…and by keep writing I mean start writing again.  One reason it took me so long to get to this point is I kept trying to find a new theme for my writing.  All the most popular blog topics are out for me.  I can’t write about babies or dogs because I don’t have either.  I don’t make enough gourmet meals to write about food.  (I mean, I do sometimes switch out the cheddar in my omelettes to pepper jack, for a sassy kick.  I’m not bragging, but you might want to try it.)  I could write about dating in the city…but that blog’s been trumped for all time by Sex and the City, and while I find my dating exploits amusing, they in no way approach the sauciness of Carrie Bradshaw, i.e. you’ll probably be bored.  Maybe you’re bored already and you’re thinking “those are all stupid, write something smart and funny, be a political satirist!”  No.  I refuse.

Instead I’m forcing you, my readers (again, thanks mom), to meander with me like a lazy river.  My real plan is to have no plan.  I hate being put in a box.  So I’ll end here, at my new beginning, with one of my favorite Walt Whitman quotes, from “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Welcome back, me.

This is what it has come to.

30 minutes ago the banner ad on NFL.com read “Player Union tells NFL it plans to decertify.”  No sooner had I texted that to my boss than it changed –  I swear I saw it flip – and I caught the words “pulls back on decertification”…but when I refreshed, it was all gone.

At the moment the banner reads  ”Custom Gear: there is no one else like you.  NFLSHOP.com.”

What the heck is going on out there?!

It is fascinating to me that an industry the recession couldn’t do in, couldn’t topple, one that still thrived despite massive unemployment and changes in public spending habits, survived that only to potentially be undone by massive greed.

Similarly, it’s funny that a massive recession didn’t really threaten my job, but an NFL lockout might.  Not so much ha-ha funny though as morbidly ironic.

10 minutes and counting…

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones decided to add some 15,000 temporary seats to Cowboys Stadium in order to break the Super Bowl attendance mark of 103,667, set in 1980 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

And that idea turned out like this, and this, and this.

But…I’m confused.  Regular seating capacity in Cowboys Stadium is 80,000 with a maximum capacity (including standing-room-only seats) of 110,000.  Cowboys Stadium already holds the NFL attendance record for a regular season game at 105,121, when the Cowboys lost the opening game of the new stadium to the Giants in 2009.

So why, in this brand spanking new stadium designed to hold up to 110,000 in which they have already successfully seated 105,121 did the quest for 103,668 woefully fall more than 400 seats short?  What am I missing here?

It’s not like Roger Goodell woke up Christmas morning and said “By jove, let’s have the Super Bowl in Dallas this year!  Quick, get Jerry on the phone!” and then 1,000 little Texan elves ran around feverishly trying to get things set up in 6 weeks or less.

In addition, word on the street is the Cowboys’ organization knew there would be problems more than a week before the game, but let 1,250 people who had tickets that wouldn’t correspond to actual seats show up anyway.  Worse still…they accommodated about 800 of them and hung the other 400 out to dry.

To quote Tom Hanks in the fine documentary film Big, “I don’t get it.”

But I’ll tell you what…this is the kind of stuff that give me less and less sympathy for the owners in all this labor negotiation talk.

Silver lining:  time and money aside, at least only half of the 400 displaced people are really really furiously angry they missed the game.  The other half are Steelers fans.  And as a Bills fan I can testify:  sometimes it’s just better you don’t watch.

Super Bowl XLV Champs!

With a nod to the slight exaggeration, this is necessary because the actual words “Super Bowl” are copyrighted and cost a lot of money to use.  I consider this to be exceedingly bizarre and ridiculous.  For business to even refer to the name of the actual event, they must pay the NFL large copyright usage fees.

How is it that we call a tissue a “Kleenex” (brand name), a photocopy a “Xerox” (brand name), and have turned nouns like “Google” and “Facebook” into verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, AND tattoos…and yet to refer to the biggest event of what is arguably America’s favorite sport, companies are forced to use a patronizing euphemism?

I’ve had my fill of reading about the “Big Game,” the “Big Game Bash,” the “Championship Party,” the “Biggest Sunday in Sports, and “The Game.”  Apparently any reference to a  mysterious sporting event using capital letters means we’re talking about the “Game That Must Not Be Named.”

Can you imagine if this applied elsewhere in the NFL season?  ”This week, the ‘Ferocious Grizzly Species of the Windy City’ host the ‘Motor City Kings of the Jungle’ to determine who will claim the ‘Uno-Play-That-Allows-You-To-Choose-Any-Color-You-Like!’”*

But as the NFL continues negotiations with the Players Association, continuing toward (or away from) a new collective bargaining agreement, the “Game That Must Not Be Named” gives us a pretty good analogy of what we’re dealing with:  the NFL is all-powerful and, bottom line, it’s always about the money.  Let’s just call a spade a Black Skyward-pointing Upside Down Heart With A Trunk-Like Base.

But for right now, there’s still got one more game to be played, so GO PACKERS, and have a Superb Bowl on Sunday!

* That was ‘Chicago Bears’ host the ‘Detroit Lions’ to determine the ‘Wild Card.’  Was that not clear???