Somebody bless my throat, I'm getting all choked up!

Today is the Feast of Saint Blase (pronounced BLAZE). He was bishop of Sebaste in Armenia in the 4th century. They tried all kinds of ways to kill him, and all but one of them didn't work. Guess which one did. So his cult spread throughout the Church in the Middle Ages, and he is invoked against diseases of the throat. Candles blessed the day before (on Candlemas Day, remember?) are used for blessings after Mass today.

And speaking of getting choked up, by now everyone has read about the Super Bowl. Personally I was rooting for Carolina -- not because I follow pro football very closely, but because they were the underdog, a team that rose from the gutter in two years to be a contender. All by being a team, without prima donnas by today's standards. They came real close to the brass ring in any case.

Unfortunately, the real story has been the halftime show, where Janet Jackson couldn't resist the urge to push the envelope -- again. I saw her on Oprah once. She admitted to having pierced her -- well, you know -- so she could always have "the sensation." Ouch! I guess that sensation was shared with the world, when the leather portion of her jacket "accidentally" took the underlying undergarment with it. Not supposed to happen, huh?

Maybe not. But years from now, the pundits will praise this as another moment of "progress" in breaking down the walls of oppression against those brave underdogs of Hollywood. Viewers with TiVo will never have to buy the commemorative edition; they can relive history again and again.

Besides, even if the "accident" didn't happen, and it only showed her undergarment, the point still would have been made, that women get turned on by being treated savagely in public. And all those parents with TiVo can watch their third-grade daughters go off to public school dressed like Brittney Spears (or whoever pre-adolescent girls are emulating these days). People wonder why violence against women is still with us. It's because we promote it. Even when we teach girls to tell people "it's MY body." I'll bet those were Janet Jackson's famous last words too.

There are already complaints that sports and entertainment are mixed too much, and halftime should be reserved for marching bands and the like. But hey, how else are those of us who aren't couch potato jocks ever supposed to develop a taste for the game? Comic relief in between plays has brought a whole new audience to professional sporting events. Otherwise, I would have been less likely last summer, to take my son to a Seattle Mariners game, so he could yell at Ichiro Suzuki in Japanese.

That kid still cracks me up.