Infinitive Splitter

At 4:14 p.m. on the last day of the year, which also happened to be the last Sunday of the 2006 NFL season, which may be the last in Bill Cowher’s tenure as the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals were tied, 17-17, at the end of regulation time.

After the Steelers called and won the overtime coin toss, CBS’ cameras switched to a view of their sideline, where Cowher stood at the center of a huddle to rally his team into the fifth quarter. With that sight on the screen, a CBS announcer cut in to announce that due to contractual obligations, the broadcast would soon switch to another game.

Shouting at the television had no effect, since my voice was no match for the “secondary markets” rule, which requires that Baltimore Ravens games be shown in the Washington broadcast market. As Gregg Easterbrook (who, despite his other failings, is a voice of reason on the NFL’s outrageous broadcast contracts) explained in November:

Dan Masonson of NFL headquarters told TMQ, “A secondary market is a TV market in the team’s home territory with stations having signal penetration back to within 75 miles of that team’s stadium.” Since Fed Ex Field and M&T Bank Stadium are within 75 miles of each other, the cities must see each other’s road games.

I was watching the game in Arlington, Va., so the NFL and CBS figured I would be more interested in the beginning of a mostly meaningless game between Baltimore and Buffalo than in the sure-to-be-exciting, overtime ending of the Steelers-Bengals game. Here’s what I saw as waited impatiently (and fruitlessly) for Yahoo’s Gametracker to load on my computer:

• Commercials.
• Idle, pre-kickoff chatter in Baltimore.
• Kickoff, which the Ravens received and returned to their own 31-yard line.
• Rush for 1-yard loss.
• Rush for 6-yard gain.
• Pass for 5-yard gain.
• Timeout. (!!)
• Pass for 10-yard gain.

At 4:21 p.m., the announcers of the Ravens-Bills game announced that the Steelers had defeated the Bengals.

Several minutes after that, the broadcast cut to a highlight clip of Ben Roethlisberger’s 67-yard, game-ending touchdown to Santonio Holmes. The play ended the Bengals’ playoff hopes and prevented the Steelers from finishing the season with a losing record (the win gave them an 8-8 finish). It sure would have been nice to see, if only as consolation for such a disappointing year.

Instead, the season ended with characteristic frustration. Double yoi.

In a seven-day trip to Western Pennsylvania, which included Christmas morning and many visits with friends and family, these are the two sights that prompted me to take photos (with the VGA camera on my phone):

Fallingwater

A life-sized Ben Roethlisberger bobblehead (on sale for $10,000 at the official Pittsburgh Steelers store)

Here’s what I remember reading this year, in approximate order of enjoyability (I recommend all of them):

Fiction

• Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
• A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby
• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

Nonfiction

• Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
• A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
• The Assassins’ Gate, by George Packer
• The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by Frank Rich
• Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile
• The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson
• Made in America, by Bill Bryson
• What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?, by Michael Bérubé
• Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman

That’s all. The list of books I didn’t finish includes John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise, which was hilarious, but whose almanac-esque structure didn’t really compel me to continue reading beyond the first hundred pages; Cobra II, by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, which did not turn out to be as good for summertime, pool-side reading as I had hoped; and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, which I brought on my trip to Philadelphia — along with the ridiculous notion that I might have the time or energy to read for pleasure in the final week before Election Day. I may or may not revisit those latter two before New Year’s.

Any suggestions for 2007? I hope next year’s list is at least twice as long.

Bill Simmons’ review of Rocky Balboa — whose five predecessors, like most James Bond movies, I have never seen — includes this paragraph:

The plot hinges on a simulated boxing match on ESPN between Rocky and current champ Mason “The Line” Dixon (played half-decently by Antonio Tarver). When Rocky “wins” the match, the ensuing hullabaloo leads Dixon’s promoters to think, “Wow, if people care about the computer fight, why don’t we get them in the ring?” I’d be fine with this angle except for one little problem: Who the heck would watch a simulated boxing match?

I would! I have!

I suspect that my roommates and I are not the only owners of “Fight Night Round 2” to have watched a computer-simulated match between two characters modeled after our real selves. We can’t be the only people to have investigated who would win in a fight between George Bush and John Kerry (Kerry has superior reach but Bush is a stubborn bastard who never goes down when he’s been beaten).

I had never heard of Bebo until I read in this morning’s Washington Post that it was the most popularly googled word or phrase of the year, beating MySpace and World Cup.

When I went to see it for myself, I didn’t do what (apparently) millions of other curious internetters did; I didn’t google it. Why would I? I already knew it was the name of a website, which meant that I could just type bebo.com into my browser and go directly there.

Surely, anyone who had heard enough about Bebo (or second-place MySpace or fourth-place Metacafe) to investigate would at least know where to find it, right? Prominent web companies aren’t using members.aol.com pages anymore.

To be fair, a lot of these people probably have Google set as their home page, which makes it easier to type a four-letter word than an eight-character URL, but the vast majority are clearly just idiots.

To wit: Google also announced that Paris Hilton was the most popular News-search topic, heading a top ten that also included “Celebrity Big Brother.”