columbus needs a day off

happy columbus day, everyone.  kind of a weird holiday, in my opinion, but as i am home with my family today, i will not complain about it.  judging from the picture above, it appears that ol' chris himself could have used a day off or two, or even a whole vacation.  maybe a nice cruise. 

here in the new world, i am waking up slowly on this monday morning, having stayed up fairly late cherishing a wonderful sunday that started off with worship, continued with buffalo wings with the family, proceeded with a steelers victory, a short nap, and commenced with the yankees finishing an ALDS sweep of the twins to move to the ALCS.  oh, i forgot to mention the icing on the cake: the red sox got swept! 

i'm not going to give a full account of the steelers game here.  i'll leave that to behind the steel curtain, one for the other thumb, mondesi's house, steelers gab, steelers today, and many others.  instead, let me just say that while i agree with most of steeler nation that it would have been nice if we won this by 4 touchdowns, i do not think that the steelers are as bad as you think.  there are some obvious problems with keeping their foot on the accelerator, along with providing ample coverage in the secondary sans troy polamalu, but there are some distinct advantages in exposing these problems in early october and being able to 'get back in the lab' as tomlin likes to say.  troy will return.  the offense will continue to roll.  arians will fine tune his play calling.  and the steelers will make a legitimate run once again.  you heard it here.  flex.

after the steelers won, i discovered the red sox had lost, which really made my afternoon.  i was really happy for the angels really satisfied that papelbon failed in the playoffs.  he wants to be mariano, but he will never be.  which leads us to our final sports story of the day, to complete the trifecta:

thhhheeeeeeee yaaaaaankeeeeeees wiiiiiiiinnnnnn!!!!  (that's a john sterling reference, for you non-yankee people).  in a dominating series, particularly from the pitching perspective, the yankees took care of the surging twins in 3 straight games.  credit must also be given to the captain derek jeter, who continued to get on base and make smart plays, and to arod, who had some huge clutch hits in the series, possibly (and finally) getting him off the postseason schnide.  the yanks get the angels next, starting friday night, which means we have 4 nights in a row without yankee baseball.  blech. 

so there you have it.  a recap of my particularly awesome sports day.  sorry if you don't like sports.  i'll try not to write about it tomorrow.  any requests?  that's what i thought.