I think I'll NOT be selling my Super Bowl tickets.

You wouldn't think selling Super Bowl tickets would be such a big deal, would you?Well, you'd be wrong.

First I investigated the few thousand responses I got from Google for selling tickets. Then, narrowing down the sites, I tried to list my tickets, only to find that they either A) wanted to charge me some ridiculous fee (15% or more off the top!) to list my tickets on their site or B) told me that it was too close to the event to list my tickets. I suppose if you're going to sell Super Bowl tickets on those sites, you have to decide to so so more than a month before you know who's going to be in it.

So I turned to eBay. Only eBay won't let you list anything these days without allowing PayPal as a payment. (Funny. They own PayPal. So they are essentially requiring you to pay fees to them twice for every listing that is paid for through PayPal. And they wonder why their business is declining.) Since I know from personal experience that using PayPal to sell anything worth more than $100 is a mistake (goodbye, Masters of the Universe figures), eBay was no longer an option.

With the entire internet eliminated as a possibility for selling my tickets, I'm left with the outdated 20th-century methods of newspaper, co-workers, and friends. However, no one reads the newspaper anymore (unless they love government-mandated foreclosure notices), I don't have any co-workers, and none of my friends like football (which I suspect should make me wonder why they are my friends). On a lark, I even tried consulting a pawn-broker, who not surprisingly offered less than face value.

I guess I'm stuck with my tickets. That's right: I'm stuck with Super Bowl tickets. Life is really a bitch sometimes, you know.

Somehow this is your fault, Kurt Warner.

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I think I'll be selling my Super Bowl tickets.

When the post-season started, the Dolphins, Eagles, and Giants were all in the mix. That was 1/4 of all the teams! Then, in the Wildcard round, the Dolphins lost pitifully to the Ravens. But that's okay, as the next week, our chosen teams still made up 1/4 of the number remaining in the Divisional round. Unfortunately, they had to play each other, eliminating the Giants, who had been favored to go all the way as defending champs! But come the NFC Championship, the Eagles still counted as 1/4 of the 4 teams remaining in the playoffs! Until they lost to the Arizona Cardinals, a CInderella team that will watch woefully as the clock strikes midnight on them at some point during their Super Bowl confrontation with the Pittsburgh Steelers in two weeks.

I suppose that it was impossible to have 1/4 of our teams in the final game, but that's not a fun lesson in math by any account.

Anyway, I can't get up to watch an Arizona Cardnials game. While I'm quite fine with watching the Steelers, they happen to be playing the Cardinals. >ugh<. The Cardinals haven't played a game I've enjoyed watching all season, and I'm sure that the Super Bowl will be no exception.

I hate you, Kurt Warner.

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Today is Groundhog Day. World-famous Punxsutawney Phil (which is more a title, like "Pope," than an actual name: groundhogs only live about a decade) has seen his shadow more than 6 times as often than not in the past century. What does this mean? That it's generally sunny in Punxsutawney in February.

And if you live in an English-speaking country, you no doubt know that the Super Bowl featuring the New York Giants and the New England Patriots is tomorrow. While it remains to be seen if a groundhog can predict the winner as poorly as it can predict the winter, Scripps Howard News Service isn't waiting to find out. As usual, they asked a bunch of celebrities for their picks, trusting to the observed phenomena that famous actors are more important and more right about everything from medical practices to political theory than common slobs like me.

This year, Dolph Lundgren predicted a Giants win (21-13). On the other hand, Carl Weathers presumes a Patriots victory (31-17). Amusingly enough, the only time these two masters of modern cinema have ever appeared in the same film, Weathers played a patriot ("It's too bad we've got to get old.") who was beaten to death by the fists of the giant Lundgren ("If he dies, he dies."). What does this mean? That apparently Sylvester Stallone was too busy gleefully mainlining HGH for the already green-lit Rambo V to comment. ("[I'm] your worst nightmare.")

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I had the good fortune to obtain Super Bowl tickets this year. This time yesterday, I was sitting in the rain and gusting wind of the coldest, wettest Super Bowl in history. I tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when the contest was over, and it wasn't because the Bears were trampled by the Colts, giving Peyton Manning his first NFL Championship. No, it rained and rained and rained. And then it rained some more. Trey and I briefly lamented not wearing raincoats to the game, but then we realized that those people who were wearing raincoats were just as soaked-to-the-bone as we were. Yet I still saw dozens of people in the fourth quarter who were still wearing torn, useless plastic bags as though they were life preservers and holding seat cushions over their heads like umbrellas. Fortunately for us, there was a stadium employee kindly warning us of a large puddle on the way to our cars. Most of the crowd walked through it anyway, as our shoes and socks had been completely saturated hours earlier.

Trey and I arrived early in anticipation of the day's events. While that meant that we were parked close to the stadium, it also meant that we would have to wait for nearly an hour to leave once the game was over. There is much truth in the cliche, "First In, Last Out." To my disappointment, the $20.00 I spent on a corndog, pretzel, bottle of water, and a Pepsi didn't go towards paying for a quality parking staff. At least they were a very large corndog and bottle of water. Though I hate Pepsi, as the "Official Soft Drink of the NFL," it was the only caffeine that I could get before the game. I'd forgotten how awful it tastes! Thankfully, the rain quenched my remaining, unsatisfied thirst.

As my first visit to Dolphin Stadium (formerly Dolphins Stadium, formerly Pro Player Stadium, formerly Pro Player Park, formerly Joe Robbie Stadium), home of the Miami Dolphins, it was practically a trip to Mecca. We spotted fans wearing gear from 26 of the 32 NFL teams (Bills, Jaguars, Lions, Panthers, Texans, and my hometown Falcons were not seen), but after the Bears and Colts, the team far-and-away best represented was the Dolphins themselves. I even had the opportunity to watch Dan Marino, whom the locals all apparently simply call "Danny," working on the CBS pre-game show with James Brown and Shannon Sharpe. (It was kind of comforting to see how the town still fully embraces him: the stadium is on Dan Marino Boulevard, and the city is peppered with billboards on which he pitches everything from weight-loss systems to used cars.)

I cheered for the Bears, and Trey rooted for the Colts. I'm not much of a Colts fan for the very sound reasons that they have long been over-hyped, they used to be in the AFC East with the Dolphins, and they are quarterbacked by an ex-Tennessee Volunteer. (Sure, Grossman is an ex-Florida Gator, but at least he's incompetent.) By the second quarter, it became apparent that the Bears were horribly outclassed (as expected) and wouldn't be much of a challenge for the Colts. Trey and I had predicted at the start of the playoffs that any AFC team could take any NFC team in the playoffs this year, and after seeing the Bears' miserable performance in the Super Bowl, I still think that's true.

Watching the game with Trey proved insightful, if irritating. He made several excellent points about both teams' strategies and execution. After Devon Hester returned the opening kickoff for a Bears' touchdown, Trey pointed out that an opening return always boded bad things for the scoring team. He reminded me that the same thing happened in last month's NCAA BCS Championship game for Ohio State, who, like the Bears, tanked the rest of the game. Most amusingly, early in the 4th quarter, after Grossman completed 2 passes and was moving the Bears down field, Trey proclaimed, "if [the Bears' coaches] call another pass play here, they are complete idiots." When on the next play, Colt's cornerback Kevin Hayden returned a Grossman interception for a touchdown, icing the game, Trey got the meanest looks from some nearby soggy Bears fans, as though Trey himself had stuck the dagger in the Bears' heart. I laughed and laughed.

I'm resentful of the fact that Peyton Manning secured his Championship ring (and cemented his legacy as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history) in Marino's hometown, but at least it rained on that punk's parade. Now I'm home, and I'm almost dry. It's certainly something that I'll have to do again. Next time, I'll be prepared: I'll take a snorkel.

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