Super Bowl

Sunday night while watching the Super Bowl did you see the commercial for the Census? Did you notice the tag at the end, "Paid for by the U.S. Census Bureau?" The ad was paid for by all working people in the counrty, not some federal agency! Where does the department think they get their budget from? It comes from the tax payers. How dare they spend $3 million for an ad doing the Super Bowl? With a federal budget over $1 trillion in the red, some idiot spent $3 million on air time, plus the cost of making the ad. This is a total waste of our money.

Thousands of people have joined a campaign to get one Ravens cheerleader -- apparently left out of the Super Bowl festivities -- down to New Orleans for the big game. More than 3,000 people signed an online petition begging Ravens management to reconsider and a few thousand more are supporting the " Help us get Courtney to Superbowl" Facebook page. According to the petition, cheerleader Courtney Lenz, who's 23 and has been with the squad five years, was told she wouldn't be performing at the Super Bowl even though the squad was told 32 cheerleaders would make the trip and everyone with at least three years would go. She's apparently the only veteran who didn't make the cut. Lenz tells ABC News that she's devastated.

“Hey, remember that time we took an RV to watch the Ravens win the Super Bowl … and didn't go IN to the Super Bowl?” As a young girl from Baltimore, I've always dreamt of saying those words, some might say destined to utter them. Orrrrr maybe that wish really began two weeks ago, with four minutes left in the AFC Championship Game. Either way, by the time the game ended, and before I found myself screaming victory for 10 straight minutes, my buddy Steve had already booked a seven-passenger RV from the fleet at Cruise America in Towson, and, in the coming days, reserved us two different spaces at trailer parks around the French Quarter.

S omething about Super Bowl brings out our national craving for wings and fire. During the course of this weekend, hungry Americans will polish off more than 100 million pounds of chicken wings, many drenched in hot sauce. The stats of this big wing weekend are staggering. According to the National Chicken Council - the group that is to chickens what the NFL is to football - about 1.25 billion wing portions will be consumed during Super Bowl weekend. The demand for wings has grown so fast that wings now cost more per pound than chicken breasts.

Sunday's AFC championship game between the Baltimore Ravens and New England Patriots was the most watched TV program since last year's Super Bowl. A national audience of 47.7 million watched the Ravens beat the Patriots 28-13 to advance to the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, according to Nielsen's Fast National ratings. The San Francisco 49ers victory over the Atlanta Falcons was seen by 42 million viewers Sunday on Fox. The Ravens game was carried on CBS, which will also telecast the Super Bowl.

I wasn't there for the 7 a.m. start, but I've seen almost all of the NFL Network's Super Bowl Sunday pre-game coverage. And as of 1 p.m. (EST), I am here to tell you it is outstanding. Warren Sapp, elected into the Hall of Fame Saturday, brought even more energy and joy than usual to the telecast. He was inspired. Michael Irvin was stoked to Super Bowl level, and Steve Mariucci was better than he has ever been. Deion Sanders: superb. Melissa Stark: through the roof in poise, knowledge and the 10,000 skills a show host needs to make a TV conversation seem like the easiest and most natural thing in the world.

It still rankles me to think that I could have been that guy dressed as a woman trying to interview Kurt Warner. But no, I'm sitting here wearing a T-shirt that says, "All my friends went to cover the Super Bowl and all I got was this lousy ice storm." ( For more, go to baltimoresun.com/schmuckblog)

For some area residents - including students at the John Carroll School, a Catholic high school in Bel Air - the day after the Super Bowl will be observed with a moment of rest. A handful of schools and businesses around the region will close or open later than usual on Monday after the Baltimore Ravens play in the Super Bowl in New Orleans Sunday evening. The reasons range from a desire to build morale - at John Carroll, students got a reprieve from the archbishop of Baltimore - to predictions that no one will really want to work on Monday, anyway.

The Super Bowl chowdown will soon be upon us, and many a sports fan will be munching pizza during the big game. With that in mind, we're interested in hearing about favorite pizza places in and around Baltimore, a subject that's already been a hot topic on Elizabeth Large's dining@large blog. Send an e-mail telling us about the local pizza places you love - and why you love them - to food@baltsun.com. We'll publish a sampling at baltimoresun.com the week before the game.