This upcoming Super Bowl thing has raised some important questions. Why hasn't the above picture been an accurate representation of playoff Grossman? How many commercials will Peyton Manning star in, and, if the Colts lose, will he retire from football and pursue an Oscar? Will Prince reveal his nipples to 150 million television viewers worldwide in the middle of a twenty-minute version of Erotic City?

We don't have the answers. And neither do these people. Sorry.

• These guys have too much free time on their hands. And after watching these, we have much less. [Bear vs. Colt]
  
• Jesus had a shot at the Pros, but he got a 6 on his Wonderlic. True story. Read the Gospels. [The Nation]
• The only reason we'd actually go to a Super Bowl party. [Deadspin]
• No two Super Bowl posts on this blog are not fire. [Kissing Suzy Kolber]
• After last year's debacle, we vowed never to care about the outcome of a Super Bowl again. Here's why the only NFL team we've ever liked lost. [Seattle Times]

Being in close proximity to the overclass and their foie-gras-consuming offspring.

It looks like having kids with gourmet palates is the newest status symbol for the "urban sophisticate." They want their kids to appreciate the finer things in life as soon as possible, so members of this food-forward group of parents - foodies, chowhounds and gourmets all - try to expose their kids to as many different foods as they can. They enroll them in kids-only cooking classes so that they can get some hands-on experience and take them to fine dining restaurants - many of which now offer smaller kid-sized portions - as well as cooking dishes from around the world at home.

Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, Zagat's highest-rated restaurant in New York, thinks his dress code helps keep children in line. "They have a tie, so they are almost strangled already," he said. "They don't move much."

• My Kid Is a More Adventurous Eater than Your Kid [Slashfood]
• These Kids Never Say 'Yech!' [NY Times]
• These Kids Make Us Say 'Yech' [Gawker]

Late last week, we huddled in our homes, horrified, watching the news in silence. It was happening again, all too soon. America was under attack, and our cities were smack-dab in the middle of the crosshairs.

Except not. What appeared to the city of Boston (and no one else—congrats P-town) as a dire bomb threat was really just an unorthodox (read: retarded) advertising scheme. The "devices" were square-foot lite-brite Mooninite signs to pimp the upcoming movie from Aqua Teen Hunger Force (more like Aqua Terrorism Hunger—oh, never mind). It's really too bad for Boston; why do all those mean terrorists have to attack New York? We're important too.

But don't throw a pity party yet! Boston's getting a $2 million check from Ted Turner out of the whole mess. We're sure they'll put it to good use.

What really mystifies us: why does Adult Swim need to advertise at all? They've got all these marketing gimmicks (wtf was with that Dangerdoom album, anyway), but as far as we can tell, they have only two main demographics: stoners and teenagers. So, basically, one demographic. Who hasn't gotten the word yet?

Oh, yeah, and now there's a song. Great.

We'd really love to hate Apple. We really would. As we sit here, tapping away at the streamlined keyboard of our slim PowerBook G4, we think back to the days when we carried around a bulky Creative mp3 player and blogged read blogs on our desktop PC. And we miss 'em. We'd like to go back. Honestly, we would. But—dammit—we just can't. You can't beat the iPod's interface, you can't hate on Tiger, and Apple's design work is certainly handsome. But, you can rip on their musical taste.

It's hard not to enjoy the Fratellis' "Flathead." It's got handclaps, harmonized backgrounds, and a nifty meter-shifting singalong hook. It's not wonderful—it's lyrically weak and too studio-glossed shiny—but it's a harmless pop song. Or at least it was, until Steve Jobs got his hands on it.

Ever since "Flathead" popped up in an iPod/iTunes/iBuy (?) commercial, the Fratellis have been vilified as hack musicians, soulless corporate cogs, and pederasts. Pitchfork hates the song, and so does the Phoenix. Apparently, the second rule of music journalism (after maintaining a steady 4:1 ratio of "life-changing" or "Garden State" to "the Shins") is that a song blows if it's been featured in an Apple ad.

It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, Apple owns us. They effectively control the way we listen to music, and they've monopolized cool in an age when aesthetic pluralism reigns and our design choices effectively define our identities. So eschewing our technology overlords' conventional pop ear becomes the only way indie types can create distance between themselves and the brand that even their baby-boomer, commuter-train-riding parents use.

So if you happen to watch an Apple commercial, don't like the music. It's the only way to stay cool. If necessary, keep a pair of earplugs handy while you're watching "The Office." (You WOULD watch "The Office.") Because if you want to keep your Stella-drinking, cloves-smoking friends around, you'll do what's best and refuse to enjoy anything you can buy via the iTunes store. And remember: Razorlight was never a good band, even when it was.

ESPN's Chris Broussard is fine with gays, as long as they know he hates them. Well, maybe he doesn't "hate" them—they'll still get a hug—but he does expect them to burn in Hell. His new post on ESPN's Magazine blog has a number of gems to its credit.

I'm a born-again, Bible-believing Christian (no, I'm not a member of the Religious Right). And I'm against homosexuality (I believe it's a sin) and same-sex marriage.

But before you label me "homophobic," know that I'm against any type of sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. That includes heterosexual fornication (premarital sex).

Cool, Chris. We'll just label you batshit crazy. Still, though, his take on AmaechiGate (more like GAYte!) is relatively progressive: he thinks the NBA is ready for a gay player, as long as there's no hanky-panky in the locker room.

But if a gay player just goes about his business in the shower, showing that he has no sexual interest in his teammates and that he's not "checking them out," I think the awkwardness would wear off fairly quickly.

We're not even going to bother close reading that. Then there's the grand finale:

Believe me, when the ball goes up, his sexual preference isn't going to matter.

My take on John Amaechi [ESPN: The Magazine Blog] (via YAYSports!)

• So this Cam'ron and 50 Cent thing escalated quickly. We mean, that really got out of hand fast. We had the whole Hot 97 incident, where Fiddy attacked Koch records, and then Cam had that hilarious line where he asked how much Mobb Deep was selling. Next, there was Curtis (see above): a musical masterpiece, a cinematic chef-d'oeuvre. A hobo shouting "Cuuuurtttiiiisss!" Brilliant! Please tell us you've seen it. But did Killa Cam really send a hired killa after Curtis? Doubtful. In a recent interview, Cam'ron supposedly waved the suggestion off, saying, "This is just music." Oh, but Cam! It's so much more!
• Lil' Wayne: too hard for friends. But at least he's in the Times! Even if only peripherally, and portrayed as a little bitch. But after leaving DJ Drama in the lurch and acting hella cold after the ridiculous success of his Dedication 2 mixtape, maybe he deserves it. But this? If The Carter 3 isn't the best thing since Clipse, Weezy could be in trouble.
• Antarctica doesn't care about black people. Or at least rap. Okay, so this isn't beef (maybe cold vs. intonation?), but this is the best thing we've seen on ye olde Forkke in a good while now.

We're pretty sure this is actually a terrible idea, but we still love it. Plus he can do this:

We remember the very day: we were at a friend's house, after school, playing Super Mario on his newly-acquired Nintendo 64. Or rather, we were watching our friend play Super Mario -- we wanted to play Mario Kart, but our friend didn't want to, and, since it was his house, and since he was the only person we knew with a Nintendo 64, we had to be content with sitting around and being in charge of the stereo. Bored, we ran the dial to the local Top-40 station, which erupted in an alien blast of sound that was totally unlike anything we had ever heard before. It was as if the speakers were about to explode and set fire to the curtains and then burn our friend's house down to the ground. It was awesome.

It's called The Riches, and it premieres March 12, on FX. It stars Eddie Izzard as the patriarch of a family of con artists (Minnie Driver plays his wife) who discover the wealthy Riches killed in a car crash and settle down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana after assuming their identities. We chanced upon an advertisment for the show on Friday night at 1 o'clock in the morning, and we wondered why in the hell we hadn't heard anything about this before. Does FX not have any money to spend for promoting its shows? Apparently not, judging by The Riches' official website, which looks like it was cobbled together in fifteen minutes.

We're surprised: Eddie Izzard has been, since the beginning of his career in the early 90s, very reluctant about attaching himself to a television series; he's seemed to enjoy the freedom offered by his movie roles, which demand far less of his time. We would hope, then, that when Izzard -- the man John Cleese calls "the Lost Python" -- decides it's time to star in a television series, he would pick something worthwhile.

The Riches on FX [Cake Or Death, an Eddie Izzard site]

Sure, we've been reading blogs for half a decade, but it's hard when you're just starting to do one yourself. If you want to do it right (i.e. not on Blogger), you've got to be functioning at a basic level of technological proficiency, and until recently we were kind of like a remote-less Tracy Morgan shouting "Pornography!" at television sets. (Why don't they just show you porn when you want them to?) It's been an effing chore figuring out Movable Type, learning CSS, trying to design shit, etc. Anyways, we've spent so much time working out the technological kinks that we've hardly been able to figure out what the hell this blog is supposed to be about, and how we're supposed to write it. So we turn to sites like Gawker to understand just how we should be generating content. And guess what, it turns out we only have to write something once, and then we can use it again. How great is that!

But we were there. We were there in 2007 at one of the first Clipse shows of the Hell Hath No Fury tour. We were there.

...And so was everybody else. (Obviously, we've lost whatever edge we ever had). Tickets were hard to come by, and with good reason: everyone and their tagalong hipster girlfriend was drunkenly packed into the downstairs of the Middle East last night, hands in the air like they cared oh so much about the coke-powdered rhymes of brothers Malice and Pusha T. This was the place to be. Sort of.

Hell Hath No Fury was critically acclaimed for a reason. Marrying Pharrell's claustrophobic brainfuck beats with uncut lyrical perfection, it was one of those rare, perfect rap records: no skits, little ego, limited guest spots. And both the mainstream and the indie presses loved it and got the word out.

So while everyone knew the words to "Mama I'm Sorry," few could sing along to mixtape classic "Pussy." The pre-Clipse DJ warm-up had people yelling the rhymes to Kanye's remix of Rich Boy's "Throw Some Ds," but Biggie's "Kick In the Door" left the audience cold. Then there was the drunk white girl behind us (Mama we're so sorry—you're so obnoxious) who screamed "VA! They're from VA!" after Clipse finished "Virginia." This is the same audience member who caught a whiff of weed and immediately asked, "Where's that 'dro at?"

The set was unquestionably hot. There was a snarled intensity to Pusha T's verses that wasn't always apparent on headphones, and Malice's swagger was hard as hell. But on "Chinese New Year," when the MCs fired imaginary pistols into the audience, a forest of white fists raised and fired back. Could they even hear the lyrics: "Make nigga kick that can / Fall victim to the Klick Klack Klan?" Would they have come if Pitchfork hadn't given the album a 9.1?

And then came the finale. An oblivious crowd in polo shirts and BoSox caps (what's a 59-50?) looking Clipse in the eyes as they chanted, "Okay, we get it, yep, yeah you too." Okay, everybody: meet Mr. Us Too.