Fri, February 4, 2005

The frenzy that's enveloping my dopey hometown as it prepares to host the Super Bowl this weekend is intensifying on an hourly basis, and it's almost as weird to me as it is to people who still actually live there. I wasn't used to seeing this much of Jacksonville on TV when I lived there, for crying out loud!

One delightful fringe benefit of this is that ESPN.com's Bill Simmons is writing a Super Bowl blog from Jacksonville all this week, and it's excellent stuff. To paraphrase Arksie, Bill is the second-funniest Simmons writing on the Internet today, and his column is more enjoyable than you'd think, even for a non-sports fan. In the way I sometimes succeed at loading the Survivor columns up with enough fun stuff that you can enjoy them without having watched the (awful, awful) show, Simmons does with his sports columns so you don't have to follow sports too closely. It's definitely a recommended read.

(And yes I realize that I'm paraphrasing Arksie in a way that misrepresents what he actually said. But – come on – if you're going to have a problem with wild self-aggrandizement, you've really picked the wrong website to read.)

Anyway, amongst the non-football content of the Super Blog is Simmons's take on the tribute to Johnny Carson that Letterman aired. Simmons, like me, like smart people everywhere, is a huge fan of Letterman and (by extension) Carson – and understands that Jay Leno is a giant ass.

I thought the past eight days illustrated the difference between Leno and Letterman better than any show ever could. It's not that Leno is a bad person – obviously he isn't – but that it's physically impossible to feel any semblance of a connection to him.

Superbly put. Read all of Simmons's entry – it's great stuff. I haven't seen the Letterman episode yet, but I look forward to it (thanks, TiVo!). I agree that Dave's been going through the motions for the past few years – I'm sure Dave would agree, too – and it's a testament to how amazing he is as a comedian that that's still enough to keep me watching. And it shows how compelling and familiar he is to those of us who love him: we require so few glimpses of who he really is, and cherish each such instance like gold-plated gold when we get it.

And, Simmons is really entertaining – it's fun to see Jacksonville through the eyes of someone who thinks like me and is seeing it for really the first time. He's a little more generous than I'd be, but otherwise right on the money.

I look forward to watching the city and the Super Bowl over the rest of this weekend to see if it just splits wide open. (The city rustled up all the homeless and shoved them into an empty high school for the week to make things look nice, but they're so low on hotel rooms that plenty of Super Bowl ticket holders will probably be homeless this weekend, too – so, look forward to that.)