All posts by Matthew Callan

Football

NFL Offers Preemptive Apology for Halftime Show

Thumbnail image for sbxlv.pngDALLAS–NFL commissioner Roger Goodell offered an apology for the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show. His comments acknowledged that the show, which will feature a performance by the Black Eyed Peas, will be “totally unacceptable in every possible way.”

“We’re not 100 percent sure exactly what’s going to happen on Sunday, but we do know it’s going to be unwatchable,” Goodell said at press conference at Cowboy Stadium. “So I want to apologize in advance for foisting this on the American public.”

“I know that, generally speaking, people don’t expect all that much from our halftime show. Even so, I think this sets the bar almost unspeakably low.”

The commissioner leaned over to place his hand extremely close to the ground, then reconsidered. “Actually, I think you’d have to dig a trench to put the bar as low as we’ve set it.”

“I know this will be especially tough to deal with, since in recent years we’ve had a few artists whose performances didn’t made viewers want to kick in their TVs, such as Prince and Bruce Springsteen. If those entertaining displays got anyone’s hopes up for this year, I sincerely apologize.”

Goodell explained that the NFL was forced to take on the Black Eyed Peas because the chart-busting group’s appearances had been shared among other major sports leagues for the past few years. “We dodged a bullet for a while. I thought the NBA would be stuck with them for a few more seasons, but now it’s time for us to take one for the team,” he said with a shrug.

The Black Eyed Peas attended the press conference and were mere feet away from Goodell as he made these remarks, but the band seemed oblivious to them, spending the majority of the press conference making inscrutable arm movements and hand gestures.

“If we bear down and sit tight, I think we can all make it through this,” Goodell said. “Switch over the Puppy Bowl, go on a beer run, start a second half box pool among your guests, whatever it takes. I know we can do this, people.”

When asked if the Black Eyed Peas would play “My Humps,” Goodell sighed deeply and ran his hands through his hair nervously. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do,” he said, before trailing off mumbling.

Goodell then ceded the podium to Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, who screamed “LOUDER!” into the microphone, while his bandmate, Fergie, writhed in an unappealing, grotesque parody of feminine sexuality, until all reporters fled from the room, blood pouring from their ears and eyes.

Football

Blue-Collar Super Bowl Threatened by Strict Shift Supervisors

sbxlv.pngDALLAS–This year’s Super Bowl, already billed as the most blue-collar Big Game ever, may be jeopardized by supervisors at some of the players’ day jobs. Members of both the Steelers and Packers may miss the game due to employment obligations.

“I wanna get to Dallas ASAP, but my manager’s been riding my ass for months,” said Pittsburgh running back Rashard Mendenhall in a phone interview from a Firestone plant in Beaver Falls, PA. “He’s saying I might have to cover some shifts that weekend, since Charlie in receiving broke his leg and Tony’s on Guard duty this month, and we got this huge shipment of whitewalls coming in. I’d just call in but I used my last sick day the Monday after we beat the Ravens.”

Mendenhall could not address any follow-up questions because his 15-minute smoke break had ended. “You ain’t gettin’ paid to goldbrick,” said Mendenhall’s supervisor, Frank Lichtman, before hanging up the phone.

In total, the Steelers have six players who can’t commit to making a trip to the Super Bowl “until I can swap some shifts,” three who are “just hopin’ my boss don’t pull a fast one,” and two more who say, “it depends on if I can get some overtime this week, man.” This puts a serious damper on the championship hopes of a team already dealing with injuries. Three-fifths of Pittsburgh’s offensive line was lost for the season by a tragic heat-tapping accident down at The Mill.

Green Bay has fewer issues with securing time off, since most of their players work at the team’s eponymous meat packing business. However, an outbreak of e. coli at the facility last month caused several players to lose significant muscle mass. Others have had to play through an as-yet unidentified neurological disease that may be cause by incidental ingestion of porcine spinal fluid when operating the assembly line’s “brain hose.”

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers, now 30 pounds lighter than he was at the beginning of the season, has called on the plant to provide workers with face masks, which could cut down on such outbreaks. Such a move angrily dismissed by his shift supervisor, Chuck Nelson. “You think we’re made a money over here, mister?”

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has asked managers to “take it easy” on Super Bowl-bound employees this week, though he added, “We all know how important it is to get the JL-157 line out the door this week.”

Pointless Nostalgia

Challenged

challenger.gifA teacher was going into space and I’m in fourth grade so that was a big deal. We did lots of assignments and activities about the whole thing. Like, we had to write a page on why our teacher should be going into space and why. I finished early and drew a picture of my teacher in a lunar module. A lot of kids stopped drawing stuff on their assignments in like second grade but I’m a good drawer and they never say I shouldn’t draw on my assignments so I do.

A teacher going into space was such a big deal that they let us watch the launch on TV. They wheeled a huge cart into our classroom, with big ikd black-and-white set sitting on top of it. The picture came in bad sometimes but you could mostly see everything. Other classes came into ours to watch it too. There were kids in there I’d never seen before, not even on the playground.

The footage was boring for a real long time. Shots of the spaceship from real far away and lots of newspeople talking. I hated newspeople, with their big heads and weird hair. The News was something my dad watched so I couldn’t watch any more cartoons.

We saw the astronauts including the teacher walk into the spaceship and wave, and the it took forever for anything else to happen. And then there was a countdown and all the kids counted down from 10 to 0, and then the spaceship took off. It looked weird in black and white. The edges of the smoke blurred and almost burned the screen.

And after the spaceship was in the air for a while, it just of disappeared. At first I couldn’t tell if something weird happened or if it was just the crappy reception on the TV. But it looked like the fire took over the whole ship, and then it all turned to smoke, and then the smoke divided and split off into different directions. It kind of looked like a Y.

My teacher turned off the TV and told us we all had to go back to our desks and classes. So we did and we were all really quiet. I thought to myself, “That couldn’t be real, right? That was a show or something. Because if it was real, then all those astronauts are dead and the teacher too. So of course that wasn’t real.”

I think everyone else thought the same thing, because nobody said anything and nobody talked about. Not any kids and not my teacher. And not the next day or the day after that.

The next morning, the newspaper had a picture of that Y-shaped smoke thing on the cover, in color. The newspaper never had color pictures. I guess that meant it really happened. But the color looked weird. It was too pink and orangey and the sky was more green than blue. It all looked so unreal to me.

I kept thinking, are they gonna find the teacher and the other astronauts? Like they had ejector seats or something? Because otherwise, they would’ve died and that couldn’t have happened. That’s just too…it’s too something. I don’t know.

I keep all my homework because sometimes I like to go back and read the stuff I wrote and look at old drawings, and sometimes I’ll get stickers from them too. But I don’t think I have those assignments I did where I wrote about my teacher going into space and drew her in a lunar module. Maybe I lost them. Maybe she lost them. I was gonna ask about them but I feel like I shouldn’t. Like, we should keep not talking about it for a really long time.