Football.

It's about this time each year that I start paying attention to the football season: days are shorter and colder. Baseball is really over. The Deer hunt is over. Now, I am not as big a football fan as I am a baseball fan (I'd prefer more punting and kicking), but I still have random thoughts about the sport:

1. I love Jake Plummer's beard. He reminds me of Matt Guerrier, with the Hockey/Voyageur beard. Neither look that good with bare chins. I can't think of any other pitchers or quarterbacks with that look, so I think it's a great combo of distinctive and best option.

2. Paul Edinger, Vikings Kicker, is like a baseball player. He can ground softly into a double play with a runner at third (miss a chip shot or extra point) or hit a walk off (long game-ending FGs). I love the fact that games played by big crushing men are decided by erratic feet of small men like Edinger.

3. I'm not a Vikings fan like I am a Twins fan. I want the Twins to win. I want the Vikes to entertain me. These last years have been dang entertaining for someone who doesn't necessarily hope for success. My favorite ever Vikings game is the last-game loss to Arizona that kept the vikings out of the playoffs in 2003. No way they don't win that game, until they lose it. If I knew German I'd give that game and season a name like Einsturzende Neubauten, but meaning "fantastic collapse." Second-favorite, giving up 4 touchdowns in 2 minutes to Seattle in 2003. 2004's backing into the playoffs at 8-8, and then winning the first game, in Lambeau was equally entertaining. Yesterday's no-offense win was great in the same vein. Thank you vikings for a lot of fun. I think, If the Gary Anderson missed FG against Atlanta, or the giving up the ghost to the Giants would happen now, I could get through it and smile.

Here are my non-football thoughts of the week:
4. My son, "PTBNL" better be named by Dec 8, because that's the day he's going to be born. C-section birth.

5. BatGirl has cancelled her Star-Tribune subscription due to the dumb writing of a columnist. And that columnist is not even Jim Souhan. Apparently, under her "Anne Ursu" daytime disguise, she reads Katherine Kersten's columns (although I may be slightly more favorable of Kersten's politics than Ursu*'s, I think she's a talk-radio writer, trying to get a reaction out of people more than to advance any opinion). The reader representative, Kate Parry, has the Story:

"I've decided I am going to cancel my subscription today. ... Essentially the newspaper has condoned discrimination and bigotry. While I recognize that a columnist's position is not the paper's, by publishing these views the newspaper is at least saying they are worthy of dissemination; I doubt the newspaper would publish a column suggesting something racially discriminatory," wrote Ann[sic] Ursu, an author living in Hopkins.

Yet somehow, this doesn't feel fair to LaVelle.

*Note, first that Parry seems to have mis-spelled "Anne," so it is possible that there is another author in the Twin Cities, "Ann Ursu," but I find that unlikely. Also, I have attributed this political opinion to Bat-Girl's daytime guise rather than her true personality, BatGirl, whose only political opinions can be boiled down to: "Build it."