With the Seahawks’ season over, I imagine only the hard-core sports junkies will want to read any slog items about the upcoming Bears-Colts game, but I cannot help myself. Plus, sports teaches us a lot about America. Really.

Of all the cases of cultural gigantism which afflict our great nation, few compete with the relentless hype of Super Bowl week. As we drive to giant outlet stores in gas-guzzling hummers, drinking super-sized beverages—hey Seattle, thanks for inflicting on the rest of the world coffee joint where even a small is “tall”— the radio airwaves will be full of what you get when you unleash a nation’s entire body of sports journalists on a single game, and give them six days to fill yards of newsprint and days worth of dead air… lots of information, lots of bullshit.

But is that necessarily a bad thing? If I may briefly channel our former Defense Secretary, too much information at least allows you to ignore things you don’t care about rather than not knowing things you might care about if you knew about them. I’d actually argue that the rest of the Fourth Estate could learn a thing or two from the media pack that will be gnawing on every dry bone it can find in Miami. If the White House Press Corps took on Bush the way that sportswriters take on the Super Bowl teams, we’d not only know what W was doing during his national guard stint, we’d have the life stories of every bartender, coke dealer and cocktail waitress who kept him amused during Viet Nam.

Plus, without the Super Bowl, how would Americans, deprived of classical educational standards, ever learn their Roman Numerals?

From the great Zay Smith

QT Super Bowl XLI Countdown Update:

• A survey has found that XIX percent of Americans who plan to watch the Super Bowl are more interested in the TV commercials than the game and V percent are more interested in the snacks.

• The snacks will include XI million pounds of potato chips containing XXVII billion calories and II billion grams of fat — not counting the XLIV million pounds of guacamole the chips will be dipped into.

• There is a XX percent increase in antacid sales the day after a Super Bowl, by the way.