The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

At one point, the Na­tive American tribes of the Great Plains termed barbed wire "the Devil's rope." From this terminology, we can infer that at that point in time, no Plains Indian had attempted to make a bracelet of European 4-to-1 chainmaille.

As Super Bowl mania is currently seizing America, I figured I'd better get in on the act. I decided to do so subtly, with a handmade metal bracelet of interlock­ing rings of blue and green. I surfed the Web until I found a pattern I liked - simple, versatile, and vaguely remi­niscent of a football's laces.

As I type this, two pairs of jewelry pliers, two paper­clips bent into improvised transfer tongs, a roll of double-sided tape, and two ripped-open bags of alumi­num jump rings are scat­tered on the computer desk. I've been picking away at it all weekend, and so far I've completed roughly an inch of maillework. At this rate, I'll be done at approxi­mately the third quarter of the Bowl itself, but nobody can say I didn't try!

If you haven't recycled your Sunday paper yet, pick through the advertizing circulars. You may notice something peculiar: None of them refer to the Super Bowl by name. Some say "Score Big Savings Points" or "Game Day Values", but none of them dare reference the (evidently trademarked) official title. One ad even of­fers a chance to win tickets to "The Big Game 2015!," which one would certainly hope is the Super Bowl.

People have asked me if I'm hosting a Super Bowl party. I'll just save my breath and answer all of you folks right now: No. In order to do so, I would need:

A bigger living room,

Culinary skills,

A Russell Wilson jersey,

General knowledge offootball, and

Cable

Besides, I never could get into the whole spirit of peo­ple knocking other people over, as anyone who's ever sat next to me at a Waits­burg Prescott football game can attest to. I'll say stuff like "Go! Yeah! Run! Don't get tackled! Wait, you don't have the ball, that other guy does! C'mon, other guy! Oohhellip;why'd you have to go and get tac - wait, you just got tackled, why are we all cheeringhellip;ohhellip;Dayton, you really oughta change your colors to something that looks less like ours, y'know that?"

Yessir, I am as clueless as they come. I have no idea who this Richard Sherman dude that everyone seems to be talking about is. I've heard the name Peyton Manning enough that a man with that moniker had a bit role in my dream last night (just a small portion at the end - spaghetti, bluegrass, and google-eyed alien ro­bots were involved), but I couldn't put a face to that name in a million years.

In fact, I've never actu­ally watched an NFL game from beginning to end, although I've been known to relentlessly demand in­formation on the score of an ongoing game. I read Se­ahawks headlines religious­ly - the actual articles might as well be written in Greek. And I've stopped rolling my eyes when everything from food banks to insurance ads to English teachers sport the now-ubiquitous green and blue.

If I can just speed up my maillework, I may eventu­ally join their ranks.