Mustard soy chicken wings.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
For an over-hyped championship game that will probably attract more than 100-million television viewers worldwide, nothing generates more storylines than the Super Bowl.
Perhaps it is a natural by-product of having a two-week hiatus between the conference finals and the big game itself, which will – thankfully – be contested this Sunday between the New England Patriots and New York Giants in Indianapolis.
No story line, no matter how incredulous, or just plain silly, goes unreported.
Did you know that a psychic camel with the name of Princess is picking the Giants to win on Sunday?
Apparently, Princess went 14-6 over the course of the season and playoffs choosing the correct winners this year and has successfully picked five of the last six Super Bowl champions.
Of course, her choosing the Giants to win on Sunday has to be taken with a grain of sand.
Princess, is, after all, a proud resident of New Jersey, that well-know haven for camels and where the Giants play their home games.
And here's more news that is sure to send a shiver up the tail feathers of chickens everywhere.
According to the U.S.-based National Chicken Council, chicken wings will be the food of choice for many viewers of the game.
Super Bowl Sunday is the second biggest eating day of the year after U.S. Thanksgiving and the council suggests that over the weekend more than 1.25-billion cholesterol-friendly wing portions will be scoffed down.
According to the council – and we'll have to take them on their word on this one – if the wings were laid end-to-end they would circle the circumference of the Earth more than twice.
That's a lot of fowl walking around without important parts, but not to worry.
According to Bill Roenigk, the council's senior vice-president and chief economist, he said chances are "very good that some other part of the bird is on their plates, too."
Media day, which took place at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on Tuesday, is another example of how out of control things have progressed.
It is a mostly useless exercise where the players are trotted out onto the field for an hour or so where they are subjected to repetitive and mostly senseless questions by a bloated media contingent, many of whom have no business being there.
Rarely does a player say anything that is remotely newsworthy – but it all gets duly reported.
And, of course, the National Football League is doing its best to cash in on the madness.
This year for the first time the NFL opened up the event to the fans, charging them $25 a piece to get into the stadium and sit in the stands and watch the proceedings.
Some 7,300 tickets were offered for sale and they were all quickly snapped up and scalpers were said to be doing a brisk sale outside the stadium in re-sales.
For that the ticket holders were given radio receiver headphones that allowed them to sit in their seats and listen in on any of the player interviews that were taking place on the field.
It certainly isn't like the old days as noted by Gil Brandt in the Indianapolis Star, who was one of the main architects of the Dallas Cowboys' franchise when it came into being in 1960. Brandt recalled his first media day back in 1971 at Super Bowl V in Miami between the Baltimore Colts and Cowboys.
"We did it outside the hotel pool area," Brandt said. "We had a reporter show up; he asked to speak to [Dallas linebacker]Chuck Howley. He talked to our PR guy, who told him, 'Yeah, Chuck is up in room 706. You can talk to him there.'"