The word "nikhedonia" is defined as the pleasure of the anticipation of victory. Now that the Miami Dolphins have extended their season losing streak to 7 games, the worst start in franchise history (>sigh<), my pleasure at watching the Fins play decreases as I anticipate very few victories. Next week we will be traveling very far from home to play the New York Giants in London. Where we, currently tied for the title of Worst Team in the NFL, will no doubt shock and awe the Brits into never watching American football again. Sorry, gov.

In case you're wondering, I discovered the word "nikhedonia" while reading the book There's a Word For It, in which I discovered that the particular disorder of my friend, who I will call Jason in the interest of maintaining his anonymity (he knows who he is), is called "haptodysphoria." Essentially, that means that Jason can't touch raw cotton because it feels icky to him. Other than that, Jason happens to be a pretty normal guy. For a haptodysphoriac, that is. You the man, Jason!

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It was just brought to my attention that the Miami Dolphins, the NFL team with the best overall record since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger, is on pace to lose that distinction by the end of this year. After being barely .500 since the loss of Marino (the Greatest Quarterback to Ever Live), the Dolphins will be supplanted in the record books by the Pittsburgh Steelers should they win 9 games more than us from this point forward. Though that seems unlikely, with the Steelers sitting at 3-0, and the Dolphins starting an abysmal 0-3, it could happen in week 12, when the two teams play one another.

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Think about this: today, most coffins are made in an assembly line fashion by robots. Robots weld the lining, paint the exterior, and embroider the interior. That's right, your eternal resting place will in all likelihood be created for you by an inanimate object that will never need to use the same product.

The phrase "robots making coffins" is about the scariest indicator of the future of the human race that I have yet encountered. (Just like in The Matrix!) Yet there is one ray of hope: since they don't use the products themselves, at least those robots need humans for long-term job security. (Just like in The Matrix!)

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Today is Talk Like Bob Dylan Day. So I suppose that everybody must get stoned.

These sorts of days seem to be happening more and more frequently, so I've compiled a little calendar to help us all out.

• May 19: Talk Like a Pilot Day. Roger.
• May 22: Yoda Talk This Way Day, yes?
• July 1: Talk Like a Canadian Day, eh.
• July 27: Bwah-Ha-Ha! Talk Like a Mad Scientist Day.
• September 19: Arrrr! Talk Like a Pirate Day.
• September 28: Have you heard of Ask a Stupid Question Day?
• October 17: Bad German Accent Day. (As if there was a good German accent.)
• April 25: A much needed Day of Silence

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Today's medical fact: "Internal Decapitation" is the condition in which the skull becomes separated from the spine but remains attached to the undamaged muscle and skin. It's a FACT!

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Today is the 138th birthday of Lenin. In his honor, we should promote everlasting world peace through cooperation and rejection of capitalist desires in favor of reactionary environmentalism. I think we'll call it... Earth Day.

Bah. I left my car running all day in celebration.

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Yesterday morning, three schools in Cave Creek, Arizona were locked-down when a student reported seeing Batman rush across the school's lawn and leap over a fence. The eyewitness described Batman as 6' 3" tall and probably male. I wonder if that height description included the bat-ears?

I'm sure that the lock-down was an appropriate response, because Batman has some terribly psychotic and lethal foes that could do some real harm to children. Though, to be fair, I think the Joker would probably take a lock-down situation as a challenge rather than a deterrent.

This situation was reported by the Associated Press and was spread widely throughout international news media, especially on the internet, which is populated 24 hours a day by the sort of geeks who think that is a great story. (AZfamily.com used the headline "Joker Pulls Batman Stunt," by far the most clever of all competition.) Now people who have no idea where Cave Creek is know that Batman was nearby on Valentine's Day. And where there's a Batman sighting, there's a mystery to be solved!

Cave Creek, by the way, is just north of Scottsdale/Phoenix and immediately west of Carefree, home of both the world's largest sundial and the world's largest kachina doll. (Calendar Man or Maxie Zeus on the loose, perhaps?) Giant props? Those are right up Batman's alley. Dick Sprang, legendary artist on the Batman comics in the 1940s and 1950s whose trademark illustrations commonly included giant props, retired to Prescott, Arizona in the 1970s. Prescott is less than two hours north of Carefree. Coincidence? Batman doesn't believe in them.

I hope that the Metropolitan Phoenix area police appreciated the help that they received from the Dark Knight Detective in whatever crime he was in town to prevent or solve. Clearly they are towing the same official line as the Gotham police, denying that Batman was even present. According to the AP, Scottsdale Police Sergeant Mark Clark (if that is his real name!) said, "it's just one of those interesting little stories that we looked into, but we couldn't find anyone." Of course they couldn't find anyone: it's the Batman!

It is worth noting that the school district involved has issued a statement in which they proclaim that the sighting was "the result of a false reporting by a student." The student remains unnamed, and the police decline to comment on whether the student will be disciplined. The perfect cover for a stray Batman sighting!

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The past week has seen three of the most interesting news stories I've ever read.

1. Guerilla advertising in 10 major US cities generated a bomb scare after they had been in place for several days. Did no one notice them before, or did that one person, out of touch with the product advertised, manage to mobilize the entire country against one innocuous advertiser? The ensuing hoopla is the best thing that could have happened for the advertised product, and it only costs Turner Broadcasting $2 million to the involved city governments, less than the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad. Is there any chance that the person who started the bomb scare was a Turner employee?
2. A NASA astronaut attempted to torture another woman in order to scare her away from the male astronaut with whom both women were romantically involved. Mind you, she passed NASA screening and qualified to fly in space. Space Cowboys plus Fatal Attraction: someone call Warner Brothers and tell them to get their lawyers working on readying this story for the big screen!
3. An Italian police officer was killed in a riot outside a soccer game, resulting in Italy's decision to close a majority of its premier league soccer games to the public while stadia security is improved. Note that the spectator sport for mass entertainment will continue to be played, but spectators will be prohibited. Italy's solution to rioting after games is to remove the fans from the game, but hold the game anyway. At least they won't need police officers at the stadia anymore. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: stay away from Italy.

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You know that I'm a fan of the Miami Dolphins. I have been since I first took an interest in the game of football back in the late 1980s. My favorite wide receiver of all time is a relative unknown named Orande Gadsden who played only 4 years exclusively for the Dolphins (and who, by the way, was the last man to catch a pass in the NFL by Dan Marino). I can tell you every quarterback who has started for the team since Marino retired. (Hmm, let's see; there's Huard, Fiedler, Griese, Lucas, Rosenfels, Feeley, Frerotte, Culpepper, Harrington, and now Lemon. Get ready, Packers fans, it will be worse than you think, trust me.) And we've been slightly above mediocre for most of that time. Hell, we've only had 4 losing seasons since joining the NFL! But if there's one aspect of the game that we've totally failed to grasp in the past two decades, it's coaching.

When current owner Wayne Huizenga bought the team in the early 90s, Don Shula was our coach. Shula was, in all regards, a great coach, one of the best in history. However, when Shula decided to retire 10 years ago, Huizenga chose to go with a proven wash-out at couch, replaced Shula with Jimmy Johnson, a Floridian who had great success with the Dallas Cowboys. Expectations were high. I thought we'd be great again, perhaps even Super Bowl bound. But the team went nowhere. This was likely because of a conflict between Marino, our aging superstar who naturally preferred the passing game, and Johnson, who would have preferred to restart the team from scratch with a focus on the run. In any event, after 3 years of exhausting turmoil, both Johnson and Marino were out.

In comes Dave Wannstedt, Johnson's protege who is fresh off several mediocre seasons with the Bears. Again I had high hopes. Wannstedt looked pretty good at times with the Bears, getting by with a team with less-than-stellar talent. Turns out that the talent problems were probably Wannstedt's fault. In Miami, he always looked lost, like a babysitter who doesn't know what to do when the tweens he's supervising get into the coffee ice cream and start bouncing off the walls. Wannstedt championed an ivy league quarterback with extremely limited passing skills, and he brought in Ricky Williams, who was the player voted "Most Likely To Destroy His Own Team" before the rise of Terrell Owens. We tanked. Wannstedt was fired in the middle of his fourth season, less than a year after receiving a contract extension from Huizenga as a reward for consistent under-performance.

Though I pulled for Wannstedt's temporary replacement, Jim Bates, to be the new coach, no one listened to me. Wannstedt's players had come together for Jim Bates, winning out at the end of the season. Instead of rewarding Bates, Huizenga traded competency for a "name" coach, LSU's head coach Nick Saban. Like a fool, I jumped on the bandwagon and agreed that he'd take us to the heights of the NFL again. But like Wannstedt, Saban soon proved that he couldn't control professional athletes or evaluate talent. Sure, he ditched Fiedler, but he replaced him with Culpepper. (True story: at Dan Marino's Hall of Fame induction ceremony, my brother and I noticed that Culpepper's numbers were comparable to some of the all-time greats. I remember my brother commenting that someone was going to look at those numbers and mistakenly think that he was actually good. Apparently, that someone was Nick Saban.) At least Saban fooled more than just me. He tricked professional sportswriters into thinking we'd reach the Super Bowl in 2007. Instead we had a 6-10 record, the third worst in the AFC. And then, like a kick in the crotch after a punch in the gut, Saban jumped ship earlier this week to head back to the relative safety (and economic goldmine) of college coaching.

Now it's back to the drawing board to select a new coach. I've lost my faith. I'd hope that Huizenga could find someone qualified, but I know now that he's just going to grab a big name. In fact, I heard today that he's already planning to interview other washed-out ex-NFL coaches, including Dom Capers (a confused mess who couldn't manage a winning season in 5 years with the Houston Texans), Mike Mularkey (purportedly an "offensive genius," though he couldn't settle a quarterback controversy between the clueless J.P. Losman and mediocre Kelly Holcolmb for two years with the Buffalo Bills), Chan Gailey (an Dallas Cowboys head coach who fled criticism to Georgia Tech, where he can't get his students to play a complete 4 quarters or manage a game clock), and Jim Mora, Jr. (known to Atlanta Falcons' fans as "the man who ruined Michael Vick," he's every bit as bad as his father but without the entertaining press conferences).

So now the Dolphins have 2 or 3 more rebuilding years ahead, where the sputtering offense will have an ineffective overhaul as the aging defense falls apart under it's own weight. I'm starting to understand how Raiders fans feel.

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So this is Christmas? I must say that this Christmas was probably more enjoyable than recent years past. No one argued. No one threw punches or food. No one stormed out and drove home. (Though my father is sleeping in his car tonight. But it's just out of appreciation for tradition.)

The lack of friction around the table this year made me realize that I often hear people talk about their dysfunctional families' holidays, but I never hear anyone talk about their functional families' holidays. I think it's about time that the June Cleavers and Donna Reeds of the world speak up. Is Nixon's "silent majority" too busy enjoying the holiday season with their sweater vests and sober relatives to tell the rest of us that we're screwed up? Or are they just smart enough to lay low, lest they find themselves co-starring on a very special holiday edition of Cops with my father?

I even enjoyed a better than average gifting this year. The only thing I asked for was socks, but in addition to the socks, I also received 12 pairs of underwear and a fog machine. Wowee! I'd say it was "like Christmas," except for the fact that it actually was Christmas. In this case, my extensive mental inventory of useful sarcastic cliches has let me down, leaving me grasping for words with which to describe the event. (Sarcasm just can't be used to describe satisfaction.)

The 12 pairs of underwear made me wonder about why we call them "pairs" of underwear. A quick internet search reveals that back in the day, only nobility wore anything over the coverings of their genitals, so there was technically no such thing as "underwear" until the last few centuries. (Unless, of course, you were hanging out in a royal court wearing a codpiece or tunic.) Modern legged outerwear evolved from two, unattached leggings (a pair of hose, to be precise) to become the single garment that we now call "a pair of pants." As I understand it, the word "pants" evolved from the word "pantaloons," a type of legged, female underskirt garment designed to cover their highly coveted naughty bits. This would make "pairs of underwear" a vestigial etymological remnant of a bygone wardrobe in our lexicon.

Note that since "pants" originated as a type of underwear, modern outerwear "pants" should properly be referred to as "trousers" since "pants" is specifically derivative of a type of undergarment and "trousers" are outerwear for the legs. This appears to be yet another difference in American and British English languages. They get it right, whereas we American's don't care what you call it so long as you can't see our legs.

It turns out that "men's cotton briefs," such as I received for Christmas, weren't even invented until the 1930s in Chicago, Illinois. Named for the 20th century male undergarment called a "jockstrap," they were designed and sold by a company which would later adopt their brand name as the company name: Jockey.

Now, all this thinking of underwear has reminded me of an editorial that I once wrote to the University of Georgia's student newspaper, The Red and Black. I took the opportunity to satirize the University community's overreaction to one editorial cartoon by criticizing another by my classmate Mack Williams (now an accomplished animator for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program Frisky Dingo). What does this have to do with underwear, you ask? Simple: "culottes," a French underwear that appears to be a cross between a skirt and shorts. I quote from one of the many, many responses to my letter:

First we had someone decrying Williams' Feb. 26 cartoon as an insult to the soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima, when it should have been plainly obvious such an insult was not the cartoonist's intent. Now we've got someone with his culottes in a bunch over Williams' portrayal of poodles in a subsequent cartoon ("Poodles not often angry or mean dogs," Feb. 28). Poodles! Come down off the ledge, Stephens, and understand that the poodle in that cartoon was a symbol for something else -- the cartoon was not about poodles any more than it was about bulldogs or people with facial hair.

The full text can be read from the archives of The Red and Black online. The event played out in the editorial pages' "Mailbox" from February 28 through March 3, 2003. The highlight of the affair for me was this dialogue exchanged in the online feedback section:

I am stunned at how many people have been writing in about the initial poodle letter. I know Americans are supposed to be irony-free, but this is ridiculous. The letter was satirizing the Iwo Jima complaints. Come on, people, show that you deserve to be at college.

Which received the following response:

He wasn't satirizing anything, it was written by a mixed up old secretary who has his priorities all mixed up. Not everyone is as clever as you think they are.

Now THAT is satisfying journalism.

Hmm. I seem to be rambling. It must be the effects of too much cranberry sauce, Hershey's Christmas Kisses, sweet tea, pound cake, Coca-Cola, and Klondike Bars. I suppose the point of all of this rambling is that I associate 17th century women's underwear with poodles. (But I don't endorse putting poodles into women's underwear. That's just weird.)

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