It seems we have some unfinished Super Bowl business to attend to.

Seattle still in denial

From the minute Super Bowl XL was history, Seahawks fans, led by coach and whine steward Mike Holmgren, began crying that the refs beat them. The Morning File was willing to allow them a day or so to work through their grief and rage, but almost two weeks later, they're still at it! At least, the T-Man is. He is a KUBE-FM jock, and he seems beyond help. So incensed is T-Man that he spent $6,000 on a billboard that carries his cri de coeur with some unprintable sexual innuendo. (You'd think he'd be more incensed with Mom and Dad for sticking him with "T-Man." But he has only himself to blame, because he was born Rob Tepper.)

"I feel bad for the Seahawks, the people of the city, and I almost feel bad for Steeler fans because their Super Bowl win was tainted," he told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. "The people in Pittsburgh must know they didn't win this game. I hope they feel hollow about this victory."

Speaking for all of us, we don't, Mr. T-Man. Parade video available on request.

'Butt-ugly' columnist nailed

From the AP
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Remember our pal from Denver, the columnist of "Pittsburgh is one butt-ugly town" infamy? I refer, of course, to the unforgettable Bill Johnson of the Rocky Mountain News. Steeler Nation showed the man no mercy. But he gets a going-over at home in the current issue of Westword, the Denver alternative weekly (westword.com). Press critic Michael Roberts says colorfully what we already know: There were so many things wrong with the offending column "that counting them all would require a calculator with the power of a nuclear reactor."

Roberts cites two previous incidents where the columnist blurred fact and fantasy. One came last July, when Johnson wrote of an abortion protester who'd threatened his life for two years after he'd written about her in the Orange County Register, his employer at the time. A reader claimed the story was made up, and the California newspaper had no evidence of it in its files. Johnson "apologized, sort of," in a column six weeks later, Roberts says.

But he had nothing to say to Westword of his Pittsburgh atrocities. His boss, John Temple, characterized Johnson's inaccuracies as "sloppy" rather than devious. But Roberts wonders why the man is still employed. "With journalism's reputation reaching subterranean depths, it's likely that many news organizations would have disappeared Johnson by now. But at the Rocky, three strikes doesn't always mean you're out."

Another poor(er) loser

You may have heard that a Wyoming man staged his disappearance after losing a $40,000 Super Bowl bet. Well, as the famous hymn goes, "Marvin Hackworth ooooooooonccce wa-a-as lost, but now he's found." His home town paper, the News-Record of Gillette, reported that Hackworth, 46, didn't sit around moping after he lost, like some Seattle fans we know. Instead, he told his wife he was headed into the rugged Big Horn Mountains to "clear his head," not to mention save his kneecaps.

Rescue teams spent two days searching. Last Friday, Hackworth's daughter told police she'd received a voice mail message from dad. Police traced the call to Chadron, Neb., and picked up Hackworth. It turns out he had stashed a pickup truck in the mountains before the Super Bowl so he could "disappear for a while" in case he lost the bet, police said. Hackworth is seeking counseling for "a gambling problem," not to mention a bone-headed decision to bet on Seattle.

Cricket isn't boring, you cheeky bloke?

Steve Tucker of the Western Mail and Echo in Wales offered this account of the Super Bowl as it transpired on the telly "in roughly the same amount of time it took Tolstoy to write 'War and Peace.'"

"First thing we notice is the Yanks can give their sports teams cool names and get away with it. But when we try it over here it looks stupid, the Leeds Rhinos being a case in point. . . Sadly the pre-show entertainment was supplied by Stevie Wonder and seemingly anyone else who wanted to clamber on stage and belt out a few numbers. Then the players introduced themselves with a formality not seen since the court of Louis XIV. Amazingly they'd all been to university, but you got the feeling they hadn't majored in applied astrophysics. And then the action began and then stopped three seconds later and on we went.

"It was gratifying to know that in a country so technologically advanced George Bush can be made to look almost human, a middle-aged bloke still couldn't tell if a ball had crossed a line despite watching it about 10 times. . . Just as we viewers were entering the early stages of a coma it was half-time and the Rolling Stones were being thawed out of the cryogenic chambers they are stored in nowadays. And then we were back to the (in)action, at least some of us were. For myself, I'd seen enough and headed to bed."

More proof Brits can be nasty

Jim White in The Daily Telegraph of London on the half-time show:

"It was midway through the Rolling Stones' performance that it occurred to me that Mick Jagger now walks as if he had just been sat on by the entire defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The peacock strut that once defined him has, over the decades, turned into a cramped totter, in which huge amounts of concentration are needed just to keep that oversized head upright on top of those reed-thin legs. Also why is it that Keith Richards goes on stage with a lengthy chain hanging from his belt? Surely he has earned enough to employ people to look after his keys while he works.

"If it seemed odd that a British presence was required at this most self-congratulatory of American events, it was because after the indiscretions of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake a couple of years back, the Super Bowl's organizers thought that a knight of the realm and his crinkly colleagues would be a less risky choice. Which made it not so much Super Bowl as super-annuated. But let's not succumb to ageism here: it was great to see Britain's most energetic over-sixties let their hair down. Even if, these days, much of it is not strictly speaking their own hair, but that of a housewife in Belarus shipped across Europe and sewn into place to help pad out fading mullets."