Fall Day Afternoon

What started out as a relentlessly pleasant extended holiday weekend was dealt a devastating blow when The Home Office learned today’s football game between our beloved Pittsburgh Steelers and the Team Formerly Known as the Official Team of the Anti-Christ (now merely the Baltimore Ravens) will not be televised here.

It’s not like I was asking for some obscure and one-sided contest with no local interest, like 8–2 San Diego vs. 2–8 Oakland. I can watch that at 4:00. Nope, the Steelers play the Ravens not twenty-five miles from here, in a sold out stadium where tickets were going for over $300 apiece. Thousands of Steelers fans live in the area, as well as hundreds of thousands of otherwise honorable Ravens fans. How has this travesty been allowed to transpire?

Part of it has to do with the NFL’s doubleheader policy. This is Fox’s fair and balanced weekend to show two games. The 1:00 game, directly opposite the Baltimore Battle of the Titans, has the Washington Redskins (aka The Current Official Team of the Anti-Christ) receiving their weekly pummeling. Granted, the masochistic tendencies of Redskins fans mean that game will easily win the ratings timeslot, especially in the wilderness of Northern Virginia, where George Allen voters have been known to stop testing their nooses during close games.

Still, for WUSA to show paid programming (read: infomercials) instead of the Baltimore game is a perversion. Even worse, the second game on fair and balanced Fox is Chicago at New England, which will trounce the San Diego-Oakland game. The Steelers and Ravens would at least have done pretty well in the Maryland suburbs.

What could cause such short-sighted arrogance? Washington is the ancestral home of The Man, who recently took a pretty good election beating in Maryland. Could this be payback? I’d hate to think so, in light of the recent rhetoric promising bi-partisanship, but one has to wonder.

There’s only one solution. By the time you read this, The Home Office will be officially boycotting all programming from WUSA-TV9 in Washington, DC, with the exception of future Steelers’ games, playoff contests, and certain other key match-ups with playoff implications. We will also boycott all known sponsors of today’s invisible game, a prospect made considerably easier by our inability to see who they are. We will most certainly boycott the manufacturers of whatever Chinese-made piece of Wal-Mart reject junk is featured on the paid “programming.”

Who’s with me? Are you tired of The Man sticking it to you? Think it’s time for a new Man Law? Me, too. All together, now. Attica! Attica! Attica!