"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

1.) Why has no one updated the design of the umbrella? For the record, I'd like to establish myself firmly in opposition to the umbrella, as I patently refuse to use one. There should really be some kind of guidelines put forth that dictates when an umbrella is permitted to be use in public. Because sometimes it's not even raining that hard, and people are walking around the streets of NYC with this ocular death traps.

Even better, the people who use beach umbrellas, so they end up taking up half the sidewalk. Anyways, not to get all Seinfeld, but I'm just saying, since every other creation known to man is updated and evolved faster than we can even keep up with, how come the umbrella is the same design as it was 40 years ago.

2.) I'm not on board with airing commercials with athletes during games in which said athlete is playing. I can't find any conclusive research done on the subject, but off the top of my head, it seems to be a rather ominous harbringer for the fate of the game. Mr. Favre, for example, returned to the NFL for a last hurrah, and instead has one of the worst passes of his career to end on. Prior to this course of events that effected the NOLA Super Bowl ticket, we see an equally uncomfortable episode starring Brett.

Similarly, during Game 3 of the World Series, I first noticed this particularly aggravating commercial with Cole Hamels, which pretty much drove me bananas every time I watched it because I kept thinking it was the actual game. No matter how many times it came on, it confused me. Which either says something about the effect of the commercial or my powers of progressive reasoning.

In both cases, the player screwed everything up for his respective team. Hence, commercials with athletes during playoffs= jinx. Done.

3.) Short of the Giants making the Super Bowl, the Indy-NOLA Super Bowl match-up is ideal. This is exactly the type of playoff situation I love, like when the NCAA showcased 4 one-seeds in the Final 4 a few years ago. I don't believe in rooting for the underdog:

America as a rule rallies around the Underdog, so powerfully that at the end of the day, they're not even the underdog anymore. But why? What is it about the underdog that makes them so much more worthy of support than the favorite?

How did the favorite get to be the favorite in the first place? You don't get to be #1 by slipping through the cracks. You gotta have talent. You get there because you're good. (Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but theoretically and most often, the favorite is the best team or they wouldn't be in the position they're in.)

So why don't we celebrate that? Why isn't our instinct to champion the talent and skill that put that team at the top, instead of dismissin their triumphs as automatically sinister when juxtaposed next to the noble efforts of the struggling underdogs?

To me, it's no different than communism.

That said, I'm with Peyton. I love that guy. Which, I guess, completely derails my aforementioned rant on athletes in commercials. Semantics.

22 more days til P&C Day. As my buddy Brian astutely notes today during our mid-day coffee break, during this bleakish Monday, as we're staring at the overcast skies:

"This is baseball weather. I feel like I should be wondering if the game's gonna be called or not."

Man, I miss that.