The season of NFL football is in the books. The games were good, the better teams won. The cheaters were not rewarded this time.

The super bowl had me cleaning my dog hair-ridden hovel and making pulled pork for an expected group of 10-12, half of whom ended up not coming or staying downstairs leaving me with a wildly over-stocked chair situation. At least the delightful halftime show (goddamn!) ensured a beautiful Colombian friend came over explicitly to watch it and it alone. Apparently having cable is a rare thing these days. And she brought pork rinds!

Please, dear organizers of halftime entertainment – never ever have Maroon Five or similar acts play another halftime show. Just give me Beyoncé, Shakira and Lopez (or their non-union Mexican equivalents) over and over again.

I’m honestly relieved that football season is over and I have my weekends back. The CFL season started in June and now it’s February. And that two week break between the last actual football games and the NFL final – who needs that? Like my latest post-audition audition I just wanted to get it over with so I could read a book about farming in 1864 and plan my garden. This exhaustion is why no spring football league will ever survive. We don’t need 10 months of football just like we don’t need a winter pro baseball league.

Baseball will, of course, have spring training games beginning in less than three weeks. News is that robot umps will be tested this year. I can say with certainty that if they start using a computer ump in real games I will disavow MLB baseball and only watch the local summer collegiate West Coast League and the few Vancouver Canadians games that are broadcast on television. As we’ve all discovered, adding computers and reviews to games does not seem to increase the accuracy of calls but does increase the length of games and the amount of rage-filled epithets I hurl at the television while waiting for all the eggheads in control rooms to decide which egregious mistake they will force on us this time.

I don’t care if the umps miss a few calls. So will the damn robots. And who will the players and managers yell at? Who will toss them from the field and get dirt kicked on their shins? Will Johnny Five pop out to get spittle blasted in his face and have a ludicrously dressed man shove a pot belly in his general direction? Even if they figure that out, it won’t be the same. I watch sporting events to be entertained, not to obsess over every little detail in the rulebook and pull out my magnifying glass whenever someone steps close to a sideline or a ball grazes the edge of an imaginary area. It is a game. The money involved does not change the triviality of what is occuring and if someone can’t handle the injustice of having a minor error go against them they should learn how to be an adult and get over it.

Clearly, I seem to be in the minority on this. As this may be my final year of watching the majors, I sure hope the Blue Jays can manage to fire their entire nerd-ridden front office, bring back John Gibbons, and ride a magical season of multiple careers years and an unexplainable outbreak of brain tonic poisoning among the rest of the AL East to their third World Series title so I can go out with a smile on my face. I’d say it has as good a chance of happening as Andy Reid turning down seconds at the White House fast food buffet.

I missed curling this past Friday due to illness but my team still emerged victorious. They won 6-4 to put our record at 4-0 for the year. Apparently one of the teams on the adjacent sheet was a group of 20-something guys who had stopwatches to time their throws. If you have stopwatches in the novice league you need to get your head out of your squeaky-clean rectum, relax, and drink some beer.

And now to remind us all why humans should officiate a game played by humans for the entertainment of humans, here is the late, great Ken Kaiser:

On Earl Weaver, Baltimore Orioles manager: I’ll never forget the time he came out there to argue, and he turned his hat around. I turned my hat around, too, and he said he wanted to punch me. I said, ‘Go ahead you midget, you’ll hit my knee.’

On life after baseball: Do I miss it? Absolutely. … Occasionally I’ll get to yell at one of my two kids, but it’s not the same thing. My kids have gone off on their own, so I can’t even eject them from the house.

On umpiring Nolan Ryan in the minors: Wild doesn’t even begin to describe him. When he pitched, people in the stands ducked. You could hear the fans screaming, ‘Women and children first!’

On the hazards of umpiring: I never minded people screaming insults at me – that just made me feel like I was home – but I did mind them throwing rocks, batteries, fruit and glass bottles. One of the greatest things that ever happened in the long history of umpiring was the invention of the plastic bottle.

On challenging Hall of Famer Eddie Murray to a fight in the parking lot: I said, ‘Eddie, you can even bring your bat with you, because the way you’re swinging this year, you couldn’t hit me with it anyway.’