Dull Football Games

Last night at, like, 1 am (while I was pissing my life away playing Myth: The Fallen Lords, an old and so-so computer strategy game which I suck at) it occurred to me that I haven't yet made my peanut butter bread for my friends out here. (It's not really "mine"; it's actually a recipe from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.) So I woke up this morning (late, around 10 am, having pissed my life away playing... aw, you know) and quickly got dressed and went to the grocery store to get fixings for the bread.

Aside: Why can't they keep half-dozen cartons of eggs in stock? I don't even eat eggs unless I'm baking something. I had to buy a fricking dozen of them, 7 or 8 of them will likely just get thrown out, unless I bake a lot of cookies in the next three weeks. Geez!

Anyway, by the time I got back I realized that I wouldn't have time to actually bake the bread, so I mixed up the batter (it's a quick bread, so it's really just a batter, not really a dough), poured it into the bread pan, and headed off to John's.

Despite my ongoing effort to be a Real Person and actually show up to parties Fashionably Late rather than Exactly On Time, I got to John's only ten minutes late and was easily the first person there. Grife.

Anyway, many people showed up, including Ben and his roommates, Subrata and his friend Lynn from out of town, a cow-orker of John's roommate Kim and her (the cow-orker's) SO, and Anders, so it was a pretty lively - and unusually not-as-geeky-as-expected - party. John cooked chili and made ice cream and brownies, and we watched the game.

There were two games today, actually. In the morning the Noo Yawk Giants hosted the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings are arguably the better team, but the Giants played the game of their life, and the Vikings lived up to their reputation as a team which regularly chokes to inferior teams in big games, and got humiliated 41-0. It was downright embarrassing.

The Raiders/Ravens game was even worse. Both the Giants and the Ravens are defense-heavy teams, while the Vikings and Raiders have potent offenses. The Ravens completely dismantled the Raiders, including injuring starting quarterback Rich Gannon, and won 16-3, playing in Oakland. Talk about demoralizing.

So it will be a battle of defenses in Tampa in two weeks. Quarterbacks Kerry Collins and Trent Dilfer are both second-rate players as far as the position goes, and I think John finds it painful that they're the quarterbacks for the Big Game this year. But, the traditional wisdom claims that defense wins playoff games, and that's been true this year in spades. I predict a final score of 5-2.

I guess I'll root for the Ravens because on principle one must root against Noo Yawk teams.

Anyway, both games today were pretty weak. This made me realize something else that baseball has over football: In baseball, both high-scoring and low-scoring games can be great. In football, extremely low-scoring games are considered lame. People want to see great offensive units doing their thing, they don't care as much about the defense. I wonder why this is? Maybe because it's hard to root for a defense because it rarely has a player so dominant that he's making exciting plays all the time, whereas in baseball all the defensive attention is focused on the pitcher? Strange.

After the game, John and Ben's roommate Lisa provided us with a blind taste test: John baked homemade brownies from scratch, and Lisa made Betty Crocker pre-fab brownies. Almost all of us (including myself) preferred the Betty Crocker brownies, which left John speechless. Lisa's argument is that what people want in brownies is that sense of nostalgia, a certain taste they remember from their childhood, not necessarily a more "authentic" brownies.

I couldn't figure out just what it was that I preferred about the pre-fab brownies. They were definitely sweeter, which was probably a factor. John thinks the specific chocolate he used could be improved on. I also wondered if it might benefit from more vanilla (I often double the amount of vanilla called for any in recipe because I love vanilla), or if I expected it to be less dense. I don't really know. That said, I did have about four of each kind of brownie - oink!

My peanut butter bread went over really well, too, and I gave John the recipe. It didn't quite have as strong a peanut butter taste as I prefer, but yes, it was tasty.

John's chili was also quite good, although several of us suggested that beans would have been a good addition (a notion that John completely rejects). And the ice cream was very yummy and went quickly.

Kim also got in the Dig of the Evening: For some reason we were talking about something having to do with counting, and Kim made some comment where she briefly counted something out, to indicate that she'd gotten what we were saying. John tried to get a dig in at her, saying, "Very good, you could be an engineer."

Kim came back with, "Yeah, at Apple."

You know, it's not often I see someone strike John speechless.

All-in-all it was a very fun party, and I even blew off the Keplers book discussion (Ken Grimwood's Replay) to stick around for it. (And I got mail from the group's moderator today asking where I'd been...)

By the way, John suggests that Grimwood should write a sequel to Replay entitled...

TiVo.