Letters

On a couple of occasions, "Only A Game" has featured a couple of guys who call themselves "The Two Chinese Characters." They've helped us with the pronunciation of words like "Beijing."

Alice Goldfarb e-mailed recently to say I should have consulted the Two Chinese Characters before I referred to Australian Open finalist Li Na as "Ms. Na." I guess I should have identified her as "Ms. Li."

Theresa Bowen, who hears the program courtesy of North Country Radio in New York, e-mailed to say she appreciates what she called "the light-hearted humor" of my conversations with Charlie Pierce, but Mark Illuminati wrote to correct rather than praise Charlie. In our pre-Super Bowl conversation, Charlie talked about how the Packers-Steelers match-up woke up the echoes of the NFL's earliest days. Mr. Illuminati illuminated us as follows: "The Steelers didn’t join the NFL until 1933, so they couldn't have been on the field with the founders of the NFL."

Edward Montano of Whittier, California, e-mailed to say "If you are tired of the Super Bowl hype, stop doing stories that hype the Super Bowl."

We have launched an investigation into the matter of Mr. Montano's loyalty to the nation. It certainly doesn't sound as if he's a real American.

The seventeenth edition of Super Bowl Haiku in last week's program called forth an unprecedented hail of haiku. You can read lots of them at our website, and I'll present just a few here. One that turned out to be something of a favorite around the office goes like this:

One question remains,
Of Super Bowl XLV,
Extra-large v-neck

Thant came from Valerie Bok.

Sarah Solnick tweeted us a haiku that I can't help but characterize as a sweet tweet:

I don't love football
Or hockey. Or NASCAR. But
I love OAG.

A tweet so sweet it bears a repeat…but I'll resist that temptation.

And finally there's what might be considered the first candidate for inclusion in the eighteenth edition of Super Bowl Haiku. The 2012 extravaganza will take place in Indianapolis, which inspired Doug Johnson, who hears the program on WFYI in Indianapolis, to write:

The Peyton guy says
Next year for XLVI
Y'all come to my house

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