Monday, February 08, 2010
February may be the cruelest month
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays in the paper's Extra section, steady as she goes.
Recent columns
Here we are in February -- with nothing to look forward to but Valentine's Day, which has a tendency to make you sick.
Groundhog Day is gone, along with that weird thing the National Football League calls the Pro Bowl in which players are very careful about getting hurt.
You know, of course, what happened in the Super Bowl -- the game in which more attention is paid to the commercials than the action on the field.
I dozed off, and I don't know if there were any wardrobe malfunctions at halftime.
But it is Valentine's Day that still wounds my heart in sordid memories.
Dashed Valentines
You may recall how Valentine's Day went in the third grade when everybody bought a valentine and this misguided teacher put them all in a box and mixed them up.
Very democratic but hurtful to kids in long socks and corduroy knickers who whispered everywhere you went.
And everybody drew a valentine out of the box and got one, not from the cutie who went home at lunch and changed her dress, but from the class smarty who looked a little like Dame Mae Whitty.
(You don't know who Dame Mae Whitty was? Well get on the stick and look her up, for Pete's sake. They don't pay me for research around here.)
And the cousin who beat you up at recess got the card from the cutie and she got a card from this guy whose daddy owned Main Street.
Anyway, there's not much you can do about February except sleeping through it, which will just make you feel all funny.
More importantly ...
I suggest a painful way to get through February is to worry about:
(A) Are Angelina and Brad really calling it quits? And if so, what effect did this have on the Super Bowl and the state of the union?
(B) What is the state of the union and how many of us are in good enough voice to sing "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
(C) And what in the world is going to happen to Brett Favre after he doesn't hurt anymore? Will he play again and throw the ball across his body one or more times and have it intercepted in the final two minutes? Will he continue to be tearful at times? Will he ever get a good shave?
(D) And how many people watched the Pro Bowl?
(E) Regarding (D): We'll never know. Nobody is going to admit that.
Ben Beagle's column runs in Monday's Extra.
