You may have seen the news recently how I, the Fat Kid, was recently named the MVP of Super Bowl 44. Not 43, the one just played in Tampa (in which the hated Pittsburgh Steelers managed to beat my beloved Arizona Cardinals on an amazing throw and catch in the final minute of the game) but the one coming up next year in Miami.
How did I do it, you ask? Simple. I was inspired.
But before I get to the inspiration part, let me tell you what I did to get the award. I went to the NFL offices in New York and told them a whole bunch of bad things about Arizona quarterback, Kurt Warner. "I'm sure he's a fine man. But he failed to lead his team properly and lost focus. It's time for new leadership." Then I pulled out replays of every incompletion and bad throw that he made in the Super Bowl. "I wouldn't have made that throw" I told them. "Look here, at that interception just before the end of the half. Clearly he did not make the right call. Everybody knew that Harrison was ready to jump the route on Boldin. I would not have thrown that pass." "What call would you have made?" they asked me, but I was too clever for them. "I don't want to get pinned down on specifics and theoreticals, not when there's this much at stake. Just know that I would not have thrown that interception." That seemed to impress them.
They tried to throw some technicalities at me, like "You don't even play football, let alone start for a Super Bowl-calibre NFL team." Clearly they did not recognize the gravity of my argument. So, I pointed to the television and shared with them the story that lit the fuse, inspiring me to seek out this lofty prize.
See, you don't get to become The Fat Kid without watching a ton of television and eating lots of snack food (they don't give this job to just anyone - you have to earn it!) and in between reruns of "I Love Lucy" (it was the episode in which Lucy concocts some crazy scheme and it goes totally awry and Ricky comes home, sees the mayhem, gets angry, and starts shouting in Spanish, and Lucy ends up wailing. You know the one I am talking about, right?) and "Sponge Bob Squarepants", I managed to catch part of a news story. Apparently, our esteemed President Obama has won some sort of award.
The Nobel Peace Prize, to be exact.
I have heard of this award, but I wasn't quite sure, so I did a little research. I thought maybe I had learned about it when they awarded it to Mahatma Gandhi. Oops. My bad. He never won it. "Too much of a political figure" the Nobel Committee claimed. I discovered that in order to be considered for the 2009 award, one must have been nominated no later than February 1. That was less than two weeks into the Obama Administration, hardly enough time to unpack the moving boxes and pick out drapes, let alone win a Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel people claimed that they were awarding the honor not based upon Obama's past accomplishments, but rather on his future potential to do good.
I figured that if the Nobel Committee can award the Peace Prize to a guy who had done nothing in his life to deserve the honor (and, to his credit, the President stated in his acceptance speech that he had not yet earned the Peace Prize) and had simply won an election, why couldn't I follow suit? I stated my case and seemed to be getting nothing but resistance from those pinheads at the NFL offices (all they cared about was "stats" and "accomplishments" and I was all, like, "whatever, dudes") when I whipped out the old "potential" argument that worked for Obama. "Compare Kurt Warner and me," I told them. "Kurt has won a Super Bowl and two league MVP trophies. He has thrown for 300 yards or more in nearly half his starts, which is most in the league, while the next closest guy has only done it in one quarter of all his games. I, on the other hand, have done jack diddly squat in my life, unless you count playing video games and making rude noises. Kurt's already played his hand. What else can he accomplish? How much better can he possibly get? What potential does he still have? None. Nada. Zero. While I have nothing but potential. Lots and lots of potential."
Yes, lots of potential. And that, as we all know, is waaaaaay better than accomplishments. Just ask the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.
Yes, apparently the Nobel Prize is now comparable to the old S&H Green Stamps. Remember those. You got them when you made purchases at member merchants that participated in their saving stamps program, and after you saved about 5000 of them you could redeem them for something valuable, like a china poodle.
I remember John getting his first baseball mitt with those green stamps. We had a jillion of them in a big box and you had to paste them all onto the S and H pages, and you needed like 200 pages to get the mitt.