Sunday Books & Culture - It's Drew Time
Everyone loves the Super Bowl - except for Drew. He argued with his editor about Roman Numerals and lost. And his daughter's mad at him because he didn't get the last in Swiftie gear fast enough.
by Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
The 2024 Super Bowl LVIII (Editor’s note to Drew - Dude, you can’t use Roman Numerals here because AP Style Guide says both the NFL and Taylor Swift will sue us) will be played tonight, and not in 9th Century BC Rome when all the cool kids were wearing Air Jordan IV (Editor - see above) retros.
For those of you who did not have the benefit of three years of high school Latin or translating Cicero (who, I’m pretty certain, never said: “Live life brave men and if money is tight, blow men with brave hearts” based upon the C-minus I received on my translation) that means this will be the 58th Super Bowl.
This is a Super Bowl of many firsts including:
the first to be played in Las Vegas
the first where your teenage daughter is pissed that her Chiefs’ Travis Kelce jersey did not show up in time for the game because you don’t care about her and want her to have no friends and you’re too cheap to join Amazon Prime
and the first where the psychology major at your party, counting down the minutes until it is socially acceptable to leave because she has a real job and has to work in the morning, will be the resident expert on psychological operations and how the Democrats will be employing those ops at halftime through the soothing rhythm and blues stylings of Usher Raymond
IV(Editor - The Swifties have their fingers into everything, so just to be safe) who was apparently chosen because he too enjoys Roman numerals (which my risk-averse editor won’t let me use).
The Super Bowl is also the biggest gambling day of the year, and it is predicted that today there will be over $1.3 billion wagered. That may seem like a staggering sum until you consider it is only slightly more than the National Football League agreed to pay players who sustained life-altering injuries during their playing careers.
One of the reasons that the Super Bowl is so popular amongst the betting public is that it offers a variety of interesting proposition bets that include: how long it will take Reba McEntire to sing the national anthem, what color Gatorade will be poured over the winning head coach (which will be Kansas City’s Andy Reid because the game is rigged by Joe Biden), and whether or not April Gillespie will show up for the next Spotsylvania School Board meeting (Vegas has installed “No, she will not show up” as the 10-1 favorite so you would have to bet $10 to win $1).
As an aside, the Vegas sports books are not offering bets on how many times former President Donald Trump “propositioned” strippers and Playboy playmates because they cannot set the line high enough. You can, however, bet on Trump to win the Presidential election in November where he is now the betting favorite after guaranteeing that he can avert World War III but only if elected.
Since this is a Presidential election year, the Super Bowl has become a political hand grenade of sorts because some have theorized that Taylor Swift deciding to date the charismatic Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce is merely a clever ruse to derail Donald Trump’s gilded path to the presidency.
One Newsmax host noted that he saw photos from one of Swift’s shows during her wildly popular Eras tour and saw, in still photos, what he could only describe as idolatry taking place, which definitely means that those girls of non-voting age pose a threat to the democracy that Newsmax holds so tight to their swelling bosom. I’m not sure what photos he was looking at to get a sense of the fan frenzy, but my daughter has assured me that looking at Instagram photos taken by her friends was not the same as actually attending a show.
The Newsmax host further posited that the idolatry he witnessed (again, in still photographs) was a sin according to the Bible and was leading our youth into temptation which was proof that the Democrats were behind it because no Republican has ever worshiped a falsely tanned prophet who isn’t sure which way to hold the Bible during photo ops.
I am not a biblical scholar, but as one whose first concert was Julian Lennon at the Spectrum in Philadelphia the only sin in evidence that night was having a juggler as the opening act. At age 15, I would have welcomed the excitement of teenaged girls swooning and screaming for “Valotte” rather than listening to the middle-aged guy in sweatpants next to me bitching that they weren’t selling XXXXL extra-extra-extra-extra-large t-shirts (Editor’s note - AP says XXXL is ok, but given that it’s likely today’s merger of the NFL and Taylor Swift will produce Rosemay’s Baby, why risk it?) and complaining to his buddy that they skipped their weekly Dungeons and Dragons questing for this.
As conspiracy theories go, the Taylor Swift as AI-generated cyborg used to attract a future Hall of Famer as a mate so she could go to Vegas to attend the Super Bowl and influence the 2024 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden is far removed from reality. Super Bowl tickets are expensive, but I still think they are in Ms. Swift’s price range if she really wanted to go.
Conspiracy theories about Swift are patently absurd. She is a genius songwriter and one of the most talented musicians of her generation as evidenced by songs like “Teardrops on My Guitar” which starts: “Drew looks at me…” Which I’m convinced was written about a certain humorist.
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I have to say, Drew is getting funnier every time I read him. He’s approaching Dave Barry levels of humor. Keep going!