best $95 I ever spent

Not!

Yes, I was at the Giants game yesterday. Yes, they lost. Badly. Yes, I was there with Kris, Spector and Lady Spector... and sort of there with Man-Chris and Friend of Man-Chris, who were seated at the other side of Giants Stadium.

No, I don't have any pictures from the game, despite the fact that Kris brought her digital camera. There were no pictures taken, and even if there were, I wouldn't post them. I would transfer them to a hard drive, then take a cartoonishly large magnet and Degauss the hell out of it. Like Leon Trotsky, the Giants' loss would thus be erased from the history books, then assassinated in Mexico decades later (which is kind of where the Stalin-era Soviet Russia analogy breaks down... and in Soviet Russia, analogy breaks you!).

I really, really don't want to think about the loss anymore, but as bad as he played, I think it's ridiculous to say that Eli Manning is the main reason the Giants lost. And I think Steve Politi of the Star-Ledger and Keith "Ladies Man" Idec of the Bergen Record both know that and don't care, or have myopic understandings of the game. Either way, it's pretty inexcusable to downplay the culpability of the Giants' porous defense and the team's outschemed coaching staff in order to get in one's licks on a high-profile, second-year quarterback in a near-impossible situation. Put it this way - if the Giants had Jake Delhomme at quarterback for the entire game and the Panthers had Eli, would New York have won?

Fuck no.

No matter. The Giants stunk just fine without Delhomme under center, and the Panthers played so well they probably would have won even if Big Blue played to its maximum potential. All we can hope is that this latest playoff disaster doesn't set the franchise back two years or so (like the last one did). I guess we'll see in eight months.

In the meantime, I'm sure the resurgent Rangers and the potentially special Mets will come to the precipice of greatness before shitting the bed in the most painful fashion imaginable. I figure it's only a few more decades before the New York sports karma for my particular teams reverses itself; all I have to do is hang on, and hope the sun doesn't explode just before one of my teams finally seals a championship (though thanks to the limitations of the speed of light, it will be 8.3 minutes before we know what has happened - and perhaps the championship can be sealed as we all wait for the shockwave to rip the flesh from our bones!).