From out of the blizzard of promotional hype surrounding this weekend’s Super Bowl, one curious flake drifted down onto my desk that you might want to know about.
The Super Bowl can kill you.
Or so says a Florida heart disease expert and author who claims to have plenty of evidence to support his party-pooper prognosis, as well as a new book to pitch. According to experts, the doctor’s press release states, of the more than 900,000 Americans expected to die this year from heart-related diseases, many will die from heart attacks while experiencing the sudden rise in excitement and tension caused by watching dramatic sporting events such as the Super Bowl.
And you thought Sunday was supposed to be all fun and games?
Dr. Al Sears, who presumably doesn’t get many invitations to Super Bowl parties, says doctors in Switzerland discovered that deaths from heart attacks outside the hospital were 60 percent higher during the 2002 World Cup in soccer than they were for the same period the year before. And research in the British Medical Journal found that heart attacks increased by 25 percent when England lost to Argentina in a penalty shoot-out during the 1998 World Cup.
So if a soccer match can knock off that many Europeans, the doctor cautions, the biggest single game on the American sports calendar is for many a death sentence in the making. And fans of the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, he suggests, are especially at risk this Sunday.
But the good doctor’s mission is not to spread doom and gloom. It is, he insists, to provide a few “key strategies that will ensure you’re still alive when the final whistle blows.” He advises, for instance, that we fans exercise before the game and again during halftime to relax our frenzied minds and bodies. Don’t drink or smoke too much, try to eat in moderation, don’t binge on chips and pizza, and, if you intend to gamble on the game, reduce your heart-threatening adrenaline level by wagering only an amount you can afford to lose. Most of all, the doctor says, do not allow yourself to become so emotionally wrapped up in the game that you wind up screaming at the screen like a red-faced lunatic and cause your overwrought ticker to suddenly call a permanent timeout.
“Focus on having fun and realize that the Super Bowl is not a life-or-death situation,” he suggests.
As an avid football fan, you’ve probably already decided that the doctor’s Super Bowl prescription is a tough pill to swallow. I’d tend to agree with you. On Super Bowl Sunday, excess in everything is the name of the game. But since I can’t to afford to lose any readers, I’ve come up with a little diversion that might help to keep your blood pressure down, during the commercials at least.
If you’re a Patriots fan, why not take a minute to learn something of the unique language spoken in Philadelphia, where the common dialect is as richly textured as anything heard on the streets of Boston or Bangor?
First of all, you should know that the natives refer to their City of Brotherly Love as Fluffya, and they regard it as a bee-yoo-dee-full place to live. Residents of the south side of town are called Sow Fluffyans, and many of them are descendants of a place in Europe called It Lee.
Their beloved football team is called the Fluffya Iggles, which is covered extensively by a newspaper called the Fluffya InkWire.
On Christmas Eve, Fluffyan children dream about Santa coming down the chimaney. In nice weather, a Fluffyan might enjoy a stroll in the pork, which is an expanse of trees and grass, and then meet up later with other Fluffyans to talk about the Iggles over a cuppa cawfee. A Fluffyan who doesn’t drink cawfee might order a glass of wooder instead.
In summer, Fluffyans who like salt wooder are known to leave their steamy city and go downashore, which refers to the beaches of South Jersey, where people tend to be fans of a baseball team called Duh Fills. Downashore should never be confused with Dinah Shore, who, unlike Grace Kelly and Rocky Balboa, was not a native Fluffyan. Yo.
The Fluffyan lexicon contains many exotic words that are heard in no other city. Widges is one, as in “Can I go widges downashore?” The word youse is another, as in “Youse guys went downashore widout me? Danks a lot.”
A conversation between two hungry Fluffyans might go like this:
“Jeet?”
“Nah. Joo?”
“Nah. Skweet.”
Such a suggestion might lead the Fluffyans to feast on the city’s signature sandwich, the famous jeez take, which is made by placing thinly sliced steak on a long roll and covering it with Cheez Whiz. If you want onions on it, you order a “jeez take wid.” If not, it’s a “jeez take widout.” This tasty though sloppy concoction is often eaten out on the street, where the Cheez Whiz drips onto the payment and must later be hosed down with wooder.
Not all residents speak Fluffyan, of course. Those from the Main Line area tend to use the more patrician dialect spoken by Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story,” a Fluffyan classic.
So there you have it, a primer on the strange sounds that will emanate from the enemy camp on Sunday. By the way, Philadelphians think New Englanders speak funny, too, which may be small consolation when their poor Iggles get beat. I just hope they remember that it’s just a game, after all, and nothing to have a heart attack over.
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