As rewarding as it is for a journalist to be at the big event, whateever that might be there are a few things about the Super Bowl that makes missing it all right with me.

It would have been exciting if the Eagles had made it, and there would have been the occasional grouperburger to take away the pain, but the SB is not only the most orchestrated event in sports, it attracts all manner of strangeness to its periphery.

At some point of the week, you have to deal with dumb, outside stories. It just happens. There is some soup commercial that has to be covered, or some tug-of-war between Iraq veterans from the competing cities, or something.

This came to mind when I saw the story about the Lingerie Football League and how their plan to broadcast a pay-for-view game at halftime of the Super Bowl fell through because the facility they chose is populated by nudists who didn't want to put on clothes. I think I have that right. The story is from the St. Pete Times and, I swear, I had nothing to do with the byline on the story.

Guarantee you, there are people in Tampa, real journalists or sort of, whose offices want them to do a LFL story. Perhaps some of them volunteered. I don't know. But that is the kind of relentlessly stupid outside story that makes staying home all right. If it would just stop snowing.

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Loved the New York Post story in which Larry Bowa said that, well yes, Alex Rodriguez was sometimes called "A-Fraud" by his teammates, but, according to Bowa, it wasn't "malicious."

Oh, no. Of course not. And you can take Larry at his word on this thing. Not a malicious bone in his body.

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Peeping Tom. That's what the Boston Herald is doing, publishing photos of Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady on vacation without a care in the world and without a whole lot of clothes, either. This economic downturn is transforming U.S. newspapers into London tabloids. Imagine how agrieved Donovan McNabb would be if the Philadelphia papers tailed him around like that. Maybe we should find out.