Superbowl Sunday

OK, seriously, what the hell is American football all about?

I watch the Superbowl pretty much ever year, usually because of it's laboured hype as some kind of must-see sporting spectacular, but my understanding of its various complexities hasn't ever increased. I grasp the basic premise of trying to get the ball to one end of the field or the other, but past that I get well and truly lost.

I tried to play Madden, the American football equivalent of the Fifa or Pro Evolution Soccer computer games, once when I was in America, thinking that the game would become clearer to me when it was in my natural setting, the PlayStation. However, I struggled to work out which side I was meant to be playing, let alone the intricacies of it's tactics and rules.

To be honest, even if I did understand the game, I could never really imagine myself being much of a fan. American football is singular in the professional sporting world in that it is the only sport in which television advertising is built into the games rules. Only the Americans could dream up such a perversion. Any kind of excitement built up in the short bursts of play is completely drained by the frequent and over-long breaks. For anyone not reared to love the game from an early age, it is virtually unwatchable - despite annual predictions by sporting talking heads, an interest in either the American Super Bowl or any type of home grown aspect of the sport has failed to materialise in the UK.

Anyway, we already have our own equivalent. Protective headgear? Lots of standing around? Shorts bursts of semi-interesting action? Popular with the yokels? It's called cricket.

[It wont take too much research to work out how long ago I actually wrote this, I don't know why I never posted it]

Procrastination.

Procrastination is a nice long word that lazy students aged around fifteen and above use in order to make themselves feel slightly better about not doing whatever homework, study or revision they are meant to be. It's usually misused by most of these lazy lazy students; it doesn't actually mean to distract yourself with things other than what you're meant to be doing, it means to put something off to a later date.

Regardless, most of its users seem to think of it as some kind of alternative study method instead of admitting to what it is; idleness. It must be have reached some kind of all time record for appearances on Facebook status updates, but you can't imagine "Joe Smith is just sitting on his arse wasting his life" coming up quite so often...

Anyone who knows me will confirm I am probably one of the laziest people on the planet. I am unashamed in my quest for energy efficiency, and rarely do anything that has a less energetic alternative. (Yesterday I broke my all time sleeping-in record: 6PM, ohgodyes.) That being said, I feel at least that I am honest in my sloth. I just don't like doing work.

But I also realise it's unavoidable, and for pretty much the first time in my life I've started to actually put some effort into doing some work outside of school/college. With my final set of A-levels approaching complete with an assortment of re-sit accessories, I guess it is finally time to take my education seriously.

EDIT: I downloaded Rome: Total War the other day. This has had a serious detrimental effect on my coursework and revision activities. Although I'm a History student, my time period of study is around 2000 year post the fall of the Roman Empire. Oh well, at least I'm not just sat on Facebook updating my status at regular, pointless two minute intervals.