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One sport I no longer pay attention to is American football.

Except the Super Bowl.

Named not after a flower (Rose Bowl), a dance (Hula Bowl), a sweetener (Sugar Bowl) but an adjective (short for “superlative”?), the Super Bowl is one of the world’s most watched events, where anything can happen, and rarely does.

So watching is waiting, enduring Christina Aguilera’s melismatic national anthem, new television commercials (my heart is not strong enough for McDonald’s latest fat and salt concoction, the Buttermilk Biscuit Sandwich), and that most militaristic of operations -- the half-time show.

This year’s halftime show will be the first to feature a woman since Janet Jackson's 2004 prime time celebration of the human form. Fortunately Fergie, who will be singing with her band the Black-Eyed Peas, has been known for “live” celebrations of her own, such as peeing her pants on stage. So I will be watching, waiting, hoping that whatever she attempts will be taken further, not backwards. A celebration as opposed to a “malfunction.”

Spent the morning designing a postcard for the Egyptian Tourist Authority. I am doing this on spec because I am tired of the usual postcards -- the pyramids, the temples, the statuary – and felt it was time to focus on the country’s modern accomplishments, such as the death threats to Sayyid al-Qimi, reconfigured into poems, one of which will form the content of my card.

At some point today U.S. president Barack Obama and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper will sign a deal aimed at shrinking what has been described in trade circles as our “thickening border.” Although designed to both encourage commerce and tighten security, this leaner (and meaner?) border will no doubt include a new set of controls governed more by its aspirations than the means by which those aspirations are achieved.

Not sure the last time I drove across the border into the U.S., but I have experienced the lineups and they are grueling. Still, I am intrigued by the concept of a “thickening border,” where that which meets up with something else allows for a third space, like the DMZ separating North and South Korea, or Checkpoint Charlie, back in the days when Berlin was divided into East and West.

A couple years ago I visited the former site of Checkpoint Charlie and recalled how that border space felt in the winter of 1980, surrounded by sand bags, razor wire and soldiers with bayonets, where I exchanged 50 West German marks for East Germany’s lighter, thinner equivalent. Thinking back on it now I can still smell the bratwurst in the Zollgebiet’s shed.

I remain haunted by a news story I heard last week of a Whistler tour operator who ordered the killing of a hundred underemployed sled dogs. The employee in charge of the cull, as it is being called, is now unemployed, or unemployable, the task having been too much for him. Why the SPCA did not investigate when concern was expressed (then rescinded) is beyond me. Why CKNW chose to broadcast the grisly details is beyond me as well. Why I listened, well, that is my fault too.

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POEM 348
(Emily Dickinson)

The robin is the one
That interrupts the morn
With hurried, few, express reports
When March is scarcely on.

The robin is the one
That overflows the noon
With her cherubic quantity,
An April but begun.

The robin is the one
That speechless from her nest
Submits that home and certainty
And sanctity are best.