I am still in shock that the Patriots who managed to survive so many negative stories and stave off a few big upsets in the making this season haven't found a way to reverse the outcome of Super Bowl XLII. I am also in shock that I managed to walk the tightrope between implying that the Giants could actually win the game without harnessing the awesome power of this blog's jinx.

I can't remember the last time I actually called something before hand and had it come to pass. It may never have happened, I just don't feel like going back and looking through my posts to find it, on the off chance that I was ever right. I get the feeling that I was right in picking Dallas to beat Indianapolis in Dallas last year the week before Thanksgiving. And I think I picked the Bears to win against Seattle and New Orleans last year in the playoffs. But since then, it's been a bad, bad, bad run.

Unfortunately, I think that the NFL will be forced to find a way to have this game replayed until the Patriots can find a way to win. If not, then so many of our most respected sports journalists will continue to look even more foolish than they ordinarily do. For instance, Bill Simmons compared these Giants to the 1985 Pats. The podcast is still up on his site at ESPN, in case you don't believe me. If Roger Goodell and the league office allow this to stand, it might bring down the sports media as we know it.

Meanwhile, I got an email on Saturday from the guy I go to for my Red Sox info. He was out in Arizona for the game. And he had his picture taken with Jim McMahon. It seems very funny in retrospect, to have him out there with the QB whose team devastated, humiliated and set the Patriots back ten years with the savage beating the Bears inflicted that day. And all the while, Simmons is out there comparing the Pats opponent to the Pats of yesteryear. Although, I have to say Tom Coughlin is a lot like the evolutionary Ray Berry in the sense that he's kind of a tool.

This retrospect on what it felt like to see the undefeated Patriots fall apart in Arizona has to be my favorite Simmons column of all time now. One thing I'm not entirely sure of, as I talk about this loss with my friends who root for the Patriots, is whose fingerprints are on this spectacularly offensive offensive collapse. It's easy to blame McDaniel, but didn't Belichick promote him because he was an unknown and could serve as a strawman enabling Belichick to have even more control over the team? It seems like the arrogant game plan that seemed to be governed by the premise that all the Pats had to do was show up would bear this out, but then I might just be blinded by my hatred for Belichick.

It wouldn't be a normal day for Sedition in Red Sox Nation if Jay Mariotti hadn't found his own way to taint what should otherwise be as nearly perfect as a moment can be in sports fandom. The notion that the Patriots should be further punished for the report that came out of Saturday's Boston Herald claiming that the Pats cheated by videotaping the Rams pregame walkthrough before the 2002 Super Bowl is absurd. If they did cheat, it was dirty, shameless and beat. But it's also fairly unprofessional to punish a team now for what they did six years ago.

Professional sports aren't the real world. In a sense, it's not that different from punishing baseball players who took performance enhancers that were banned by other sports but not banned by baseball at the time the players took them. The NFL came down hard on the Patriots when they were caught red handed this year. If it happens again, they ought to come down harder on them. But if six years intervene between that incident and when the story came out, then it's St. Louis' tough luck. Maybe they should have had a guy make sure the stadium was empty if they didn't want people checking out their walkthrough.

The one good thing about this whole episode is that it reminded all of us that Arlen Specter is still alive and kicking in the US Senate. But as for this silly little story, I have a pretty solid record for disliking and ripping the Patriots, their coach and their owner. That said, I have no empathy or sympathy for Kurt Warner and the 2001 Rams. They had every chance to beat a team that was markedly inferior on paper. Knowing the Dick Vermeil/Mike Martz offense, I'm sure they had practiced other plays enough over the season that they could have made adjustments.

The real story is that those Rams didn't treat the game as seriously as they ought to have. They came in as a big favorite, having beaten the Pats on the road earlier in the year and playing in a dome against an outdoor team. They were the greatest show on turf and they failed to show up. It's not Roger Goodell's problem. Nor is it the problem of Congress. Taping other teams' signals isn't right, but neither is a retroactive investigation that really can't culminate in an appropriate or effective punishment.

In general, I try to avoid commenting on specific political candidates in this space, mostly because I realize that none of you give a damn what I think about a particular candidate. But I think we need to throw a tool of note award in Mitt Romney's direction. Romeny's campaign came out today and claimed that John McCain and Mike Huckabee made some sort of illicit "backroom" deal to deny Romney the delegates from W Va. To me, it seemed like more than a little sour grapes from Romney. Or perhaps a sense of frustration because he didn't think of it first, if in fact anything untoward was done.

In case you care, in the interest of equal time, Sedition in Red Sox Nation is forced into an anti-McCain stance because he is supported by Curt Schilling. Mike Huckabee is out because he reminds me of the Homer Stokes character from O Brother Where Art Thou. Fred Thompson is out because he was in Die Hard 2. And Rudy was out because he has a bad comb-over, although I defy anyone to show me a good comb-over, and he did a terrible cameo in Anger Management. Kind of funny, isn't it, the thought process through which we here approach the democratic process.

Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight saw two unpleasant events unfold. First, the Red Sox beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which sadly was not entirely unexpected. The next... there was a meet and greet for the losers running for president of Red Sox Nation. My shadow candidacy was not acknowledged, even though I am a much better candidate than any of the tools who showed up tonight.

I hate to be the one to break this story, but the whole event is a farce. Hazel Mae was the host of the event, and she's one of the candidates. Can you imagine the furor if Mitt Romney hosted a forum for the candidates running for President during the three year ordeal that is the campaign for the Oval office? We all know he couldn't under the law stipulating equal time for each candidate, and we all know that this campaign for president of Red Sox Nation is a lark as opposed to a serious undertaking. But the illusion of propriety would be nice.

Of course, none of this really matters, as this election is already over. No matter who gets the most votes, the Remdawg will be inaugurated. It's not outside the realm of probability that he could win this thing anyway, what with the people being mesmerized by his unique charm, which calls to mind some sort of hideous cross between Lennie Small and George Milton from Of Mice and Men.

With the increasingly disturbing rhetoric coming from the booth during NESN telecasts, I get the sense that Remy is preparing to step in and put an end to this farce saying that he has to become the Remdicator for the good of the Nation. He was complaining the other day that these candidates have their forum while he's on the road with the team. He keeps bringing up his own laundry list of what the new president of Red Sox Nation should do. And I get the feeling that no one among them, not even a man of Peter Gammons' eminence could do any of the duties of RSN president anywhere near as well as Remy, just ask him.

I have a big problem with this. Not just because I don't like Remy, I prefer him to the arrogant sycophant, Bill Simmons, and some of the other celebrity candidates. I would like to see RSN elect a loser like Rob Crawford whose smash hit I'm a Member of Red Sox Nation could very well make him the biggest tool of all time. I mean really, just because he likes the Sox and you like the Sox doesn't mean you won't regret the hell out of blaring the song when the novelty fades. I never thought I'd say this, but he makes Terry Cashman's song about the Cardinals sound like Tchaikovsky. Rob Crawford could probably do more damage to the image of Red Sox Nation across the country than I could, and that's one of my chief hobbies.

Then there's Dennis Drinkwater. Not being a fan of WEEI and the damn Whiner Line, I'd never heard of him until a friend did a Google search to see who the tool behind home plate during every home game was. Obviously he deserves to be president of RSN. I would be interested to know how many votes he gets and where the votes come from. It would be quite a laugh if he got fewer votes than he has employees.

Of course, as I've mentioned, I don't trust this process. Who is responsible for vote counting? If they're going to conduct this farce, then they owe it to us who must suffer through it to do it with a tiny bit of decorum. They ought to have an impartial outside arbitrator count up the votes so that we all know that this giant waste of time was a professionally conducted giant waste of time. After all, we don't want any situation wherein the newly inaugurated president of Red Sox Nation could suffer from a perceived lack of mandate.

Anyway, tonight, I eased the pain of being ignored in the candidates' forum by going to see Superbad. It was shockingly funny. I expected some lowbrow humor, and I wasn't disappointed. There isn't much in this world funnier than seeing a fat kid get a baseball bat whipped off his back while he runs away from the police and an angry old man. But I have come to expect long stretches where the lowbrow humor gets old and there isn't much for the movie to go on (like Talladega Nights, or Borat, or Dodge Ball), but Superbad didn't have any low points. I highly recommend it.

GREAT MOMENTS IN RED SOX HISTORY #5 - 4/16/07

Ladies and Gentlemen, I realize that it's been a long, long time since I last posted one of these Great Moments in Red Sox History. But there really wasn't a lot I could do with the events that unfolded at the end of last season. The moments were either too insignificant or too catastrophic for me to mock. But that all changed on Patriots Day.

For the past year, I have portrayed Red Sox fans as a tribe of slackjawed morons, hypocrites and tools. And two fans sitting in the grandstand on the left field foul line decided they had to live up to all of the negative characteristics of Red Sox fandom in one shining moment of childish behavior. I'm sure you've seen this highlight a thousand times by now, but it's still worth watching again and again and again and maybe a fourth time.



So here it is, the triumph of Red Sox fan sophistication with the added benefit of Jerry Remy's keen analytical mind. One grown man took issue with another grown man eating a full pizza at a baseball game. In a free country. So the other grown man looked deep within his soul and summoned up every ounce of maturity he possessed. He took that maturity compressed it into a ball of fury, waited until his adversary was distracted by a foul ball and the opposing left fielder and lobbed a slice of the aforementioned pizza at the back of his antagonist's head.

It was a proud moment for Red Sox Nation. I have seen monkeys at the zoo comport themselves with a higher standard of decorum than these men exhibited. Of course when the monkeys are riled up what they tend to throw is a bit more unpleasant than cold pizza, but on the whole they're still better behaved than their less advanced cousins at Fenway.

I wonder what business is it of any fan's if a paying customer wants to eat pizza at a game. When a person goes to a game he or she tends to overindulge in unhealthy food and adult beverages. If the unhealthy food of choice happens to be pizza as opposed to the more traditional hot dogs or peanuts, so what? It's the same problem I have with people who decide that they and they alone are the arbiter of what potable can and cannot be consumed with a given food.

If I order a steak at a restaurant and I choose to have a Miller High Life with it, it isn't because I'm blundering along in the metaphorical darkness just waiting for some superior being to enlighten me as though I were one of the damn apemen from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's because I like steak and I like High Life. I am what Charles Barkley would call a grown-ass man. I can make my own decisions. People should leave each other the hell alone, that way they wouldn't get a piece of pizza whipped off the back of their domes.

That said, people really hadn't ought to settle their differences by throwing pizza off the back of people's domes either. But what can you do if you happen to be a Red Sox fan and as such only discover your courage when an adversary is outnumbered or has his/her back turned?

To give credit where credit is due, I have to thank the man I go to for my Red Sox info and the man I go to for my Chicago (the sports scene, the city and the band of the same name) information, both of whom sent me the youtube clip first thing this morning. Keep up the good work.

And if that's not enough, Mitt Romney wants you to be his friend. On myspace, if not in real life. If only he'd explain what Elvis ever did to deserve such shabby treatment.