Boiled Alive

The Big Book of Martyrs: written by John Wagner; illustrated by Colleen Doran, Frank Quitely, Win Mortimer, Dan Burr, Gahan Wilson, Rick Geary, Joe Staton, and others (1997): Slightly less irreverent than the other entries in Paradox/DC's "Big Book of..." series of comics anthologies from the 1990's, The Big Book of Martyrs is nonetheless a lot of fun even if you're just there for the pictures of terrible things being done to martyrs of the Roman Catholic Church.

John Wagner generally keeps his tongue out of his cheek, instead staying serious, at least when the various gruesome deaths are a matter of historical record. Of course, a lot of Roman Catholic saints are very close to being fictional characters (actually, some, like the much-beloved St. Christopher, are fictional characters; others, such as St. George, might as well be). 

As a compendium of 'terrible things people do to other people,' The Big Book of Martyrs offers a pretty wide range of awfulness. People get thrown out of boats with anchors around their necks, get riddled with arrows, beaten to death with truncheons, immolated in a variety of ways, eaten by bears, eaten by lions, stabbed, poisoned, blown up, beheaded, drowned, immersed in boiling lead, slow-roasted over a fire, thrown down wells, and so on, and so forth.

Indeed, due to the on-again, off-again invulnerability exhibited by some saints like St. Sebastian or St. George, many of them have more than one of these usually fatal things done to them. A decent amount of relevant information comes along with the mayhem, as more than fifty different artists illustrate more than 50 different tales of martyrs singular and plural (though the story of the Mongols and the 11,000 virgins is almost certainly apocryphal).

You even find out which martyrs saw themselves purged from the liturgical calendar for being a little too fictional, along with the feast days of various saints and situations in which one invokes a patron saint. One of the bizarrely, blackly comic facts one starts to realize is that an awful lot of saints were made the patron saints of the things that killed them, including a patron saint of tanning who was himself skinned alive. 

How are the saints supposed to feel about this sort of thing? Because based on this book, there are an awful lot of patron saints of arrows, including St. Sebastian, who you'd think would have dibs on that position. Recommended.

These Roman Numerals Are Making Me Thirsty

Yay! I'm 6-4 straight up this playoffs, not bad after my hideous 1-3 start in the Wild Card round.

I like this Super Bowl primarily because I don't care all that much who wins. I'd like to see the Saints win, but if they don't, well, so it goes. I am amazed at how favoured the Colts are, not so much by Vegas (5 points as I'm writing this) as by every pigskin prognosticator on the planet. So far as I can tell, only Ron Jaworski is picking New Orleans, and that by only one point. The Legend of Peyton Manning, and the probable weakness of the NFC vs. the AFC, have more than cancelled out the Saints' statistical superiority in roughly 90% of simple (say, points differential) and complex (say, Defensive Hog Index or Passer Rating Differential) statistical categories. The Colts did win more games and allow fewer points, though.

In honour of multiple universes, herewith three different picks, to be averaged at the end.

1. The Stat Wonky Pick

This season, the Colts and Saints shared five common opponents when one or both were actually trying to win a game (I threw out the results from the first Colts/Jets matchup and the Colts season-ender against the Bills, allowing me to keep the other Jets games but forcing me to discard the Saints' 27-7 win over Buffalo).

In those remaining five games each (including the Jets/Colts playoff matchup), the teams were the Rams, the Cardinals, the Patriots, the Dolphins and the Jets. Both the Colts and Saints went 5-0 in these five games.

Indianapolis Colts: 165 points for, 90 points against, average score of 33-18.
New Orleans Saints: 181 points for, 98 points against, average score of 36.2-19.6.

So the wonky head-to-head comparison suggests that the Saints will win by...1.6 points.

One article in Sports Illustrated Online noted that in the last three games against a Gregg Williams defense (ie. the Saints' defensive coordinator), the Colts are 2-1 and average 27.333 points per game. Combining these two dynamic stats, I come up with the faintly bizarre

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS 29, INDIANAPOLIS COLTS 27.


2. The Peyton Will Not Be Denied Pick

In this scenario, Peyton Manning's accuracy, football IQ and ability to appear in every ad on television will completely overwhelm the Saints' defense, and the Saints' offense will be unable to keep up for long as Drew Brees plays even more nervously than he appeared at times during the NFC championship.

INDIANAPOLIS COLTS 45, NEW ORLEANS SAINTS 17.


3. The Crazy Defense Pick

It wasn't the ability of the Saints' defense to sack or not sack the quarterbacks in the two playoff wins it took to get them to the Super Bowl that surprised me. What surprised me was the willingness to court (and sometimes take) 15 yard penalties for late or illegal hits on the quarterback. This could run them into trouble (by my count, two of the Vikings' four successful scoring drives in the NFC championship game were prolonged by Saints' penalties) or it could result in a completely discombobulated Colts' offense (as the Cardinals were screwed up coming out of halftime).

While other teams with dominating defenses across the board have won Super Bowls, it's not often that one sees a defense that doesn't seem all that great except in its ability to harass the other team and create turnovers. The throwback meanness of the Saints reminds me of the 1984 Los Angeles Raiders, who humiliated a Washington Redskins team with a better record, a previous Super Bowl win, and what seemed to be an unstoppable offensive package. Those Raiders even had a quarterback who'd been abandoned by his previous team (Jim Plunkett) and a running back who could sometimes drive an opposing defense crazy by forcing them to miss (Marcus Allen).

Now, Reggie Bush is no Marcus Allen. But he is capable of really screwing up teams on broken plays and what-have-you. And Drew Brees is a better quarterback than Jim Plunkett, with just as much if not more to prove (Plunkett had already won a Super Bowl with the Raiders by this time). I'll call this my Super Bowl XVIII pick, with Darren Sharper in the role of Lester Hayes (yes, I know they didn't play the same position).

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS 38, INDIANAPOLIS COLTS 9.


THE CUMULATIVE:

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS 84, INDIANAPOLIS COLTS 81

or, averaged out,

SUPER BOWL 44 FINAL SCORE:

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS 28, INDIANAPOLIS COLTS 27.