snichael.com

No doubt about it: Michael Jackson will be sorely missed — ESPECIALLY by those of us in the Comedy & Humor Business, including MAD Magazine. I can’t think of another public figure who provided such a strong & steady stream of “comic fodder” over such a long time — more than a quarter of a century! I’ll bet that if you did a text search of the entire contents of MAD since 1980, his name would be the most frequently mentioned, in articles about him but also liberally sprinkled all over other articles & satires as a comic reference. (”…as [blank] as Michael Jackson!” or “…makes Michael Jackson look like [blank]!”)

A few Michael Jackson notes:

• Of all the MJ gags/articles I wrote, my personal favorite was the Michael Jackson/Lisa-Marie Presley Pre-Nuptual Agreement (MAD #333. Jan/Feb 1995) — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only recycle old unused MJ material, but also unused Elvis material, AND newly generated Elvis-&-Michael material! (Forget Lisa-Marie herself! She’s merely a plot device in this whole premise, as she was for the actual marriage!) About a week after the script was bought, I called one of the MAD Editors with an idea to use this piece as a publicity teaser. Have someone issue a fictitious (but real-looking) “Press Release” about the “discovery” of the Michael/Lisa-Marie Pre-Nup, listing some of the gags as if they were actual terms of a legal agreement…and then, in the 4th or 5th paragraph, casually drop in the attribution “MAD Magazine.” Just the sort of jokey celebrity crap/filler that local TV newscasts love. But when I explained the idea to my Editor, all I got was a long, discouraged sigh (the “DC COMICS sigh,” we’d call it) and a flat “they’d never go for it upstairs.” End of story. (Or: Beginning of Story, if the “story” is “How DC COMICS ground MAD down.”)
• My fellow MAD Writer Desmond Devlin told me this little Michael Jackson gem, from his days as a writer at MTV during the 90s (on “Rumor Control” and other game shows; and probably writing 90% of the “ad libs” for Bill Bellamy, Carson Daly, etc.): See, whatever legal/financial arrangements were made between MTV and MJ included the stipulation that the network would ALWAYS refer to Michael as “the King of Pop.” Always. Always. Always. And Jackson’s camp was deadly serious: Whenever some on-air personality would slip up and say “Michael Jackson” WITHOUT adding the mandatory phrase “King of Pop,” the network would actually get stern phone calls and letters from his lawyers and publicity people. Not just once or twice…but EVERY time it happened! (Because: hey, you don’t mess with a KING!)
• Once I heard that Michael Jackson had died, I thought I had finally scored my first actual “hit” from all the “Celebrity Death Odds“-pieces I wrote…but, alas, my Old-Timer’s Disease must be acting up again: it turns out I never did a Michael Jackson Death Odds! (I vaguely recall having written one years ago, but apparently it was never bought or run.) Which means I still have a perfect record: NONE of the nearly 100 celebrities I’ve hypothetically “killed off” over the past couple decades has actually died! What are the odds?! [This death-immunity only applies to the Celebrity Death Odds that I myself wrote, up to MAD #458 (Oct. 2005) -- and NOT the just-for-spite Celeb Death Odds that the MAD Editors have been churning out since their Nixonian reaction to my starting this blog a year ago. All of their Celebrities are going to die before next Christmas.]

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Hey, I just found something interesting on YouTube (that doesn’t involve a singing cat or a dramatic rodent): it’s the piece on MAD Magazine that 60 Minutes did, way back in 1987 (hat-tip to Dick DeBartolo for having re-posted it on his own site…hopefully it’ll stay up on YouTube for awhile before the Corporate Video Yankers find it!)

This story aired the night before we all gathered at Kennedy Airport in NYC for the 1987 MAD Trip (Paris & Zermatt, Switzerland), which happened to be my very first MAD Trip. It also lead to getting my very first belly laugh out of Bill Gaines, about an hour after meeting him. See, once this 60 Minutes piece aired, Bill suddenly started getting recognized by probably 100 times the usual number of strangers, coming up to him and saying “Hey, aren’t you that MAD guy?” or “Weren’t you on 60 Minutes last night?” After a non-stop parade of maybe a dozen people accosting Bill in the airline ticket-counter line, I tugged on his rumpled white shirt sleeve, pretending to be another of them, and breathlessly said to him, “Hey, I know you: aren’t you that guy who testified at the Kefauver Crime Committee hearings back in 1954?” [Check out the brief clip of actual footage from Bill's infamous appearance at that hearing, toward the end of this video.]

BTW: Note Morley Safer’s first line of questioning, essentially taking MY side about MAD being “outdated” — 22 years ago!

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If there’s one thing readers of this blog are guaranteed to take away from it (Hell, I won’t shut up about it!), it’s my belief that MAD needed to Change, far more than it actually has, to survive.

However, in the interests of fairness and equal time (not to mention mock humility), I have to admit it’s entirely possible that I and everyone else who feels the same are full of shit; that making dramatic and wholesale changes to MAD could’ve driven it faster and deeper into the Magazine Death Pool than it’s already headed.

What brought this up again to me was the story of the recent re-branding of Tropicana Orange Juice. See, late last year, executives there decided it was time for change, specifically, a total package re-design. So, they went to the (formerly) most respected design firm in New York, threw millions of dollars at them, and got an entirely new package…which then proceeded to lose them 20% of their sales in less than 2 months! Think about that: a 20% drop in under 2 months! Usually all it takes is a single-digit YEARLY sales decline to put a company into panic mode!

Why did 20% of presumably satisfied Tropicana customers suddenly stop buying the exact same orange juice in a different package (at right in photo)? No one’s exactly sure, but the theories run from absence of the familiar Tropicana “straw-in-the-orange” on the label…to the new package looking like a generic or house-brand orange juice. Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that this well-intentioned move to modernize and “refresh” the branding backfired on Tropicana, big time. (If you’re interested, read about it in this article; it also links to a longer original article in Advertising Age - which is behind a Registration wall, sorry!)

What does this have to do with MAD? Hold your horses, I’m getting to it: About 3 or 4 years ago, I had a conversation with one of the MAD editors right after I’d read a startling newspaper report that fully 1/3 of all U.S. households have NEVER owned a computer (!!!) and therefore were extremely unlikely to be regular Internet users, or even that familiar with the Internet at all. I asked the editor if maybe the universe of Remaining MAD Readers included a disproportionately large number of this non-Internet-using demographic. He said they had no idea. Seriously.

The $64,000 Questions: What if it does turn out that, say, 50%, 60%, 70% of MAD Readers are NON-internet users? If you suddenly change MAD to appeal more to Internet users, you could be screwing yourself royally. Or, worse, what if MAD had successfully transitioned to a full Web presence (not the POS bare-bones site they have now!)? That 50%, 60%, 70% would never even be in a position to find it!

Once you commit to Change, you never know for sure how it’ll turn out. (No doubt that uncertainty has fed the inertia in the editorial offices!) But - when you’re talking about a magazine that’s plummeted from a peak circulation of 2.1 million all the way down to 170,000 now…if it were me, I still think I would’ve taken the gamble on Change rather than Standing Pat.

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

Sure, I’m an old crank and a cynic…but I’m not completely immune to sentimentality. I just got my hands on MAD Classics #25, containing 3 pieces I wrote for MAD years ago, and I suddenly realized: this is almost certainly the FINAL appearance of my byline in anything-”MAD” on the newsstands after 30 years (since both MAD Classics and MAD Kids are now ceasing publication, and the last new writing I did for MAD or MAD Kids was the end of 2006). So, hoist up whatever beverage you have handy right now, and join me in a toast to the Official Death of the “Writer: Mike Snider” MAD-Byline! Ziggy-ziggy, ziggy-ziggy, oy, oy, oy! (Urp!)

Now, as far as the active part of my MAD-writing career (as opposed to the “Reprint part”), it had no such neat & tidy “end-point.” It was just an uneventful, slow-motion petering-out. No, I take that back: there was ONE “event” - the most bizarre phone call I’ve ever been subjected to in my life! - that, while it didn’t directly lead to the end of my writing for MAD, did sort of “upset the apple cart” of an otherwise smooth 2-decade-long working relationship I had with the Editor who placed the “offending” phone call (about which: the less said, the better!). So, for anyone curious about why I stopped writing for MAD:

See, early in this decade, my ‘acceptance percentage’ [the % of submitted-premises that are ultimately bought & published] dropped from the 20-30% range to around 10%. For whatever reason, my writing wasn’t “connecting” with the MAD Editors as frequently as before. (Which I don’t “blame” anyone for; MAD has no obligation to any of its freelance contributors, we all know that. And, “what’s funny” is one of the most subjective things in life — its all personal opinion.)

But, anyway, the drop to around 10% wasn’t, by itself, too alarming - you could live with it, just means cranking out more premises. Except for two things that were happening around this time, one affecting every MAD Writer, and the other, probably (I hope!) just me: First, the Editorial response times to writers in general were getting longer and longer (which I attribute to all the extra workload DC Comics started piling on to them: going from 8 to 12 issues a year; adding more Specials & books; starting MAD Kids; color; advertising; etc.). But the second thing — the bizarre 2002 phone call about which the less I say, the better — was apparently so difficult for the “offending” Editor to reconcile having made to me, that he just DIDN’T. His “solution” to his self-created professional speed-bump was…to totally move me over to being handled by a different Editor, and to avoid talking to me altogether (except briefly in passing at a MAD Xmas party).

This second Editor I was passed along to - he’s a good guy, but he had “his own” stable of freelancers he was already too busy with and, well…I guess I just fell between the cracks. What had become simply “bad” response times for everyone else (I’m assuming), became “glacial” in my case. It was typical, from, say, 2002 onward for me to have to wait 6 months, a year, even 14 months to hear back from Editors on a single draft (I’ve got my meticulously kept Logbook to prove it). The previous norm had been 1 or 2 months, 3 at the absolute most! (And, as I keep pointing out to no avail, there are two pieces from over 5 years ago that I STILL haven’t heard back about!)

Along about 2003/2004, it became apparent to me that, even if I were able to get my ‘acceptance percentage’ back up to where it was (OR crank out a lot more premises)…I would probably never return to the MAD-income I’d enjoyed in the 80s & 90s because of the RIDICULOUS length of time it was now taking to get ANYTHING of mine through the editorial process (much less to the check-writing phase)!

Therefore, I proceeded to do what 99.9% of freelance writers have to do (which I had been spared during the umpteen years I wrote for MAD and MAD alone): I found other work. In 2004, MAD accounted for just half of my total income; for the next couple years, it was 10% or less; by the end of 2006, my attitude (and theirs?) was “eh, why bother?”

So, there’s the story.“Sour grapes?” Decide for yourself. (I’d say more like “Petrified raisins,” the length of time they left me to stew on the back burner.)

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized // 3 Comments »

Well, well, well…
I was digging through my cardboard boxes of old MAD papers for stuff to write about…and lookee what I re-discovered: it’s the actual letter — signed by the former, and the current, president of DC COMICS — sent out to all of us MAD folks after they took over following the death of Bill Gaines in 1992. As I’ve helpfully highlighted, you can see where they promise, in writing, NOT to move the MAD offices from 485 Madison Ave. and NOT to discontinue the MAD Trips — both of which they subsequently did within a couple years of this letter!

Too bad they didn’t have time to write a longer  letter…or they might have provided a more comprehensive list of “promises” they would later go on to break, such as:
-Not to make MAD start taking advertising
-Not to move the MAD offices for a second  time in less than 15 years
-Not to discontinue MAD Xmas parties
-Not to interfere in editorial decisions
-Not to “kill” articles after they’ve been written & bought simply because someone “could possibly” sue over them
-Not to more than DOUBLE the workload while slashing the staff
-Not to sell off the last of MAD’s original cover art that’s been hanging on the office walls for decades

Keep this history of mendacity in mind whenever you read or hear something coming out of DC COMICS –or MAD itself, for that matter, since the current guys in charge seem more interested in indulging their “inner quisling” than, say, being honest and straightforward with readers and contributors about what’s really happening to the magazine. (See this very interesting post at madmumblings.com from John Hett of “The Journal of MADness” if you haven’t already.)

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Mar. 3, 2009 - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and members of the group U2 pretend to be looking up at “U2″-streetsign while, in fact, peering through 4th floor windows of 1700 Broadway building across the street at the MAD Magazine Editors inside, busy writing cheerful press releases about what “good news” it is that parent company DC Comics is cutting them back to quarterly publication and slashing their staff to the bone.

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If you’re a longtime MAD reader who’s been wondering, “What’s the deal with all these ‘Foto-Funnies’ pieces they keep running the last decade or so?” — then this is the blog post for you.

“Foto-Funnies” [Official Comedy-Writer Terminology] — the adding of new captions/titles to existing photographs or images — is probably the world’s oldest form of humor. Archeologists have actually found 2,000-year-old Roman frescoes with 1,900-year-old gag-captions scribbled on them. I think I speak for most modern comedy writers when I say we have a Love/Hate relationship with “Foto-Funnies”: they’re quick and easy and kind of fun to do…but afterwards, there’s the hangover of guilt and shame over the utter non-creativity and unoriginality of the whole enterprise. Yet, still: we happily cash the checks.

For their first 3 decades or so, MAD did a few infrequent Foto-Funnies pieces using photographs (for which they usually had to pay photographers or wire services like AP or World Wide Photo). But it wasn’t until around 1990 that they started doing them more often — some would say “overdoing” them, but not ME, speaking as monetary beneficiary of a few dozen pages worth of them, at 150% normal page-rate (see below)! As I see it, there were 3 interrelated reasons for the increase in “Foto-Funnies” pieces: technological, legal, and budgetary. With the advent of video (by which I mean, CHEAP home-VCR type video), suddenly any would-be Foto-Funnies-publishing magazine could not only get still-captures from movies & TV shows, but…you didn’t have to PAY for the stills. Or, to put it in strictly legal terms: “You could probably get away with not paying for them under the theory that still-captures from video are analogous to excerpts from books or magazines and are therefore “Fair Use” of copyrighted material…at least until someone successfully sues you!”

My most memorable (for lots of reasons) Foto-Funnies piece was the one on Arnold Schwarzenegger after he was elected governor of California (MAD #438, Feb. 2004). The first noteworthy thing was how quickly it went from idea into print: about a month before the election, when it looked like he had a shot of winning, I sent the MAD editors a batch of gag-captions tied to descriptions of Arnold-scenes from my own memory. They put me “on hold” until he actually won, then gave me a go-ahead and it was “off to the races.” Over the next 2 weeks I rented 20+ of Arnold’s movies (quick: name them all!) and spent hours upon hours with a VCR-remote in hand, hitting the pause-button and triggering my video-capture device until I’d accumulated…are you ready?…2,300 still-capture images! (BTW: I still have them. If anyone’s in the market…I am the #1 Repository of still-captures from ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER-movies in the World!) Next came the Writing of the Gag-Captions, the easiest, fastest, and most fun part of the job, by far. And then, finally, the Pretending-I’m-A-Graphic-Artist phase of producing a mock-up layout in Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign (see graphic). Finally, double the time for the last 2 steps because I had to do a second batch — owing to the Editors’ usual habit of rejecting the best gags in every first batch! — and what I wound up earning for all my work on this particular piece was…just over minimum wage! (Only a slight exaggeration!) I hope that future Historians of California Political Humor appreciate me for that!

During the 90s, MAD had to go “outside” to procure video still-captures - to “some lab,” or “some tech guy” they knew with expensive equipment capable of doing it. (This was the case with Desmond Devlin’s series of “Pop-Up Video” take-offs and MTV Music Video foto-funnies) But then, the March of Inexpensive Technology continued on, and it was actually I myself who chanced upon a new, cheap video capture device called the “Snappy” which cost @$150; was the size of a pack of cigarettes; and plugged into any PC’s parallel port (Ha! Remember “parallel ports?!”) The quality-level on the Snappy’s still-captures was pretty erratic but if you kept “snapping” different video frames, you could usually come up with something reasonably good. Or at least “usable.” The first foto-funnies piece where I both wrote the gags and provided the “Snappy”-generated video-stills was “Girls Gone Wild” (MAD #422, Oct. 2002 - look back at it now and you’ll see what I mean by “erratic quality!”). This piece presented the Editors with a dilemma: I provided all the visuals, but obviously, they couldn’t pay me the same “Art” fee that they paid to Mort Drucker, Bob Clarke, George Woodbridge, et al. So in a 1-minute masterpiece of negotiation over the phone, I struck a deal with them: “Look, it’s definitely not the same class of work as regular MAD Art…but it’s also not worth NOTHING, right? I’ll tell you what, let’s split the difference between 100% and 0%, okay?” Thereafter, I got 100% of my usual Writer’s fee plus 50% of the Artist fee, for every Foto-Funnies piece like this I did.

I don’t know this for a certainty, but I’d bet the ranch that word of this “deal” quickly got back to some of the DC Comics overlords in charge of MAD and, as a result, their eyes lit up like cartoon characters with dollar-signs flashing and 2 signs-on-springs sproinged out of their skull saying “25% OFF!’ “Savings Per Page!” And they “encouraged” the Editors to have me do nothing but these foto-funnies pieces. Because for the next couple years, that’s ALL they had me doing!

Unfortunately, I found out that, technologically speaking, I was only about 1.7 years ahead of the MAD Offices, because they discovered that some new software media players like WinDVD also had video still-capture capability. My jig was up! And, to the immense pleasure of DC Executives, MAD could now do Foto-Funnies pieces themselves — staff-written AND staff-video-captured…at a 100% Discount, in other words, $0.00 over and above regular staff salaries! Which is why you’ve been seeing more and more Foto-Funnies pieces. (Along with “The Darker Side of The Lighter Side,” “What’s the Difference? (between 2 old MAD covers),” and whatever other crap they can dream up to avoid paying freelancers for new material!)

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I hope everybody caught the inimitable Frank Jacobs last week on the PBS multi-part series on the history of American Comedy, “Make’em Laugh.”  They allotted him a minute or so of air-time, squeezed in between Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman. He gave Sinatra a run for his money, crooning some of his own parody lyrics from “Sing Along with MAD” (1961). Pretty good singing…for a MAD Writer.

As a kid in the 1960s, Frank was my favorite MAD writer. I bought every MAD paperback they put out, but I distinctly remember Frank’s book “For Better or Verse” as something extra special. And I still think it is.

I first met Frank around 1986, while living in Southern California, at my first of the periodic West Coast MAD get-togethers for the freelancers who lived out there (Frank, Sergio, Dave Berg, Arnie Kogen, Tom Koch, Dennis Snee, me).

(It was at this dinner I found out that, for the previous 5 years, I’d been unwittingly living less than 3 miles from Frank - which, in L.A. is like being next-door neighbors!)

Frank and I had lunch or dinner every so often (until a few years later, when I moved out of California), either at my favorite restaurant in the hills above Burbank (which burned down in the 90s); or Frank’s regular joint across from Warner Bros. Studios (which was torn down about the same time, to make way for – more Warner Bros. movie-poster displays!). In spite of the bad luck we seem to have passed on to those particular eateries, these long chats with Frank are some of the fondest memories of my life. (I don’t know how Frank feels about my end of the conversation, but…)

It was Frank who got me perhaps the strangest writing credit on my resume: “Lawrence Welk Entertainment Group.” No, it wasn’t writing one-liners for the Lennon Sisters or snappy put-downs for accordionist Myron Floren — it was a game-show pilot that never made it on the air (But I’ll always have that “Lawrence Welk” check stub!)

The best Frank story I can tell concerns the 1989 MAD Trip, and serves more to illustrate the relationship between Bill Gaines and the “original” Usual Gang of Idiots, like Frank. See, we were among the few smokers left, and this particular trip Frank (a light sleeper) had the misfortune to be assigned to room with me (a heavy snorer)…with predictable, and not-so-zany, results. (I’ve long since stopped even trying to deny the awfulness of my snoring — from the time I was camping in Northern Arizona, and woke MYSELF up, thinking I was the sound of a bear growling outside my tent!)

Anyway, the next morning, a more-bleary-eyed-than-usual Frank explained to Bill, and asked if he couldn’t switch roommates (”No offense, Mike, but…Geez!!!“). When Bill couldn’t work out anything, roommate-switching-wise, he promised Frank that he or his wife Annie (the Logistics Wizard, for MAD Trips, and everything else!) would “arrange something” before nightfall. And they did: despite there being “No Occupancy” signs all over this German tourist town, they somehow booked both of us into a huge 2-bedroom condo/apartment down the street from the hotel — at considerable extra expense, I’m sure, not to mention added time & trouble to find it. That’s what being a Friend of Bill meant!

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Quarterly?! They’re turning MAD Magazine into a Quarterly? I confess that I didn’t see this coming myself — but I should have; it’s exactly the sort of middle-of-the-road “weasel out” that executives in soulless media behemoth corporations specialize in! It’s like declaring a “trial separation” instead of a divorce. It’s like saying “Let’s date other people” when you really just want to break it off.

They’re also ceasing publication entirely of MAD Kids and MAD Classics; and permanently laying off “several” MAD staff. (And probably losing the interest of many of the remaining Usual Gang of Idiots; with 66.6 percent fewer Art or Script pages to sell?!! Hey, everybody’s got to make a living!)

Quarterly publication is going to be a disaster for a humor magazine like MAD! Just when they’ve been getting pretty good at shrinking their “topicality lead-time” (did you see how much Pres. Obama material was in the current issue, #498; that went to press a little over a month after the election!). From now on, with 3 months between issues, even the biggest and most satire-worthy news events are likely to get ignored. (“Will readers even remember this 3 months from now?” “Will it be totally irrelevant by then?”). I’m guessing that this will lead to even more “old, familiar MAD-style” pieces than ever. (“You KNOW you’re HAMSTRUNG as Humor-Magazine Editors WHEN…”) And, thus, making MAD even more of a “museum piece,” appealing mainly to those who LIKE it “1965-style!” But, new & younger readers they need to survive? Eh…not so much.

(BTW: Does anyone even know of a Quarterly magazine that’s successful? Are there ANY Quarterly magazines on the newsstands?)

Here’s my prediction: a year or two from now, after having done everything in its power NOT to give it a chance to survive, DC COMICS will announce that, “having given it every chance to survive,” we are ceasing publication of MAD Magazine.

Tags: MAD topics // 6 Comments »

Yes, it’s official: Hell has frozen over, and my Arizona Cardinals are actually going to the Superbowl! (Did you hear me at the NFC Championship Game in Phoenix last Sunday? I was the guy in Section 241 going “Woooo!” really loud.)

For all of you OUTSIDE the state who are surprised that the Cardinals won the NFC Championship…just imagine how shocked & stunned those of us INSIDE the state are!

Up until 3 weeks ago when they began their string of playoff wins, being a Cardinals fan was an exercise in Humility…Futility…and the Cruel Practical-Jokes that Fate and the Football Gods sometimes play on mortals. (Exhibit A: the infamous 2006 Monday Night game in which the Cardinals went 57 minutes of the way toward pulling the upset of the century against the Chicago Bears…then suddenly turned into a last-place Pop Warner team the final 3 minutes and gave back a 20-point lead!)

Up until 3 weeks ago, rooting for the Cardinals was like rooting for the Washington Generals over the Harlem Globetrotters; the Coyote over the Roadrunner; like always voting for the Libertarian presidential candidate, or worse, Ralph Nader!

Their last NFL Championship, as the Chicago Cardinals way back in 1947, leaves them with the 2nd longest drought in all of Pro Sports, behind only the (far more respected) Chicago Cubs. And the only other Cardinals title, in 1925, is still shrouded in controversy, with many believing that year’s crown rightfully belongs to a long-defunct team with the cartoonish name, “the Pottsville Maroons“ (?!!).

After they moved to St. Louis in 1960, they became “the football Cardinals,” so as to differentiate them as the ugly hidden-in-the-attic stepsister to the REAL Cardinals of baseball legend & lore. Such was the impression the team left on that city that, a few decades later, when they sprung the customary NFL-Owner’s Ultimatum (”New Stadium, or we’re Leaving”), the predominant response was…”Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!”

So, in 1988, the team snuck out of St. Louis in broad daylight and moved to Phoenix, its 3rd city (or is it 4th? 5th? Who knows for sure, when they attract such little attention). For years, The chief preoccupation of local fans & sports media was coming up with exactly the right medical term to pair them up with, to describe their sickliness: “Cardiac Cardinals”? “Comatose Cardinals”? For their entire time playing at Sun Devil Stadium, Cardinals fans were routinely outnumbered by those cheering on the visiting team; in fact, some teams - most notably, the Dallas Cowboys - considered the trip to Tempe their (all-but-technically) “9th Home Game” of the year! Before this season’s success, the primary function of the Arizona Cardinals had become: “Team of Last Resort for Future Hall-of-Fame Players & Coaches Too Proud to Admit When their Active Careers are Over!”

But that’s all forgotten now: we’re going to the Superbowl! Just in time to see the face value on Superbowl tickets go over $1,000 for the first time. Lucky us.

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