As any wrestling fan knows, history is loaded with gimmicks that failed for any number of reasons. I could easily sit here writing about them until my fingers fall off, so I’ll just stick with some of my personal, uh . . . “favorites.”

As nerds, we tend to take things to excessive extremes. Be it memorizing Pi to as many places as we can, to being able to name all the James Bond films in order, or being able to name every Spider Man comic series ever published. Our heads are full of useless information. But I think the most pointless inane thing in my head is a knowledge of the full name of several acronyms. Why do I know that on Knight Rider the Knight Industries Two Thousand fought his evil enemy Knight Automated Roving Robot? I don’t know why. But I do. And that makes me a nerd. The same goes for knowing all the entries below.

So this week isn’t really going to be nerdy or funny, at least not the type of funny I try to be with these things. Content has been lighter than usual the last few weeks, and I wanted to explain why. I also hope that maybe this is a little bit informative. If not, whatever, laugh at my pain. But be warned, this is a pretty personal and disgusting entry, so of course I have to share it with the entire internet.

If there’s one thing everyone has in common, it’s the experience of going to school. We all have had a whole slew of teachers in our lives. Most of them were perfectly serviceable and followed their lesson plans just fine. Some of them sucked terribly and should never be allowed near children. But there were a few who excelled at the position, who went above and beyond, and whose wisdom will always stick with you. This list is dedicated to those teachers who never get the recognition they deserve.

When you hear the word “Captain”, what do you picture in your head? A sailor? A pirate? Maybe an airline pilot? All perfectly valid choices. But there are many types of captains, not all of them involved with ships. Well, OK, most of them are, but not always.

So the Superbowl was last weekend. Being from Philly, the land of the epic choke, I’ve never been a big football fan because we pretty much always sucked. But I’d jump on the bandwagon in a minute when we were winning. I used to be pretty big into fantasy football, but I had to take a step back, because it’s a lot of work to have a successful team, and I realized I was watching games for teams I don’t care about just to keep tabs on my players, and that’s not really fun. Plus even with all the work researching who to play and who to pull, I still sucked at it and always was last in my league. My mom thought football was too violent and I’d get hurt, so I never got to play as a kid. So how do you enjoy football when you don’t watch the games or actually play?

Movies. That’s how. There are a ton of great movies that feature football. Here’s a list of some of my favorites.

Continuing the pattern of shows that you had this issues with, this week we get to shows that you didn’t even get as far as watching. This list could basically just be called “I have no confidence that NBC or Fox knows how to make a decent show.” I mean, seriously, have you seen their track records for shows cancelled? Generally, I’m right in my initial impressions of a show being dumb, but sometimes, I get surprised.

So last week I went over the shows I tried to get through, but just couldn’t make it. So I thought this week I’d do the opposite: shows I persevered through and stuck around with even though it was painful and took a great deal of effort.