Super Dud.

Everybody's in a frenzy over the Super Bowl here in Indy, streets are being closed, traffic patterns altered with new one-way streets downtown. (There will be two circular patterns of one-way streets: The "Super Route" and the "Bowl Route". I can't believe someone was paid to name those.) The party zone downtown will include what I was assured by the anchorperson on the TeeWee will be the "world's highest and longest temporary zipline." That oughtta be fun in a Hoosier February. Broad Ripple will, of course, be an alternate Party Zone, but since Broad Ripple Avenue is already thronged with vomiting drunks of a weekend eve, who'd notice?

Chambers of Commerce are gleefully dumping money into local "Super Celebration Sites" in places like the twee bedroom hamlet of Zionsville and West Lafayette, home of Purdue University. Never mind that these municipalities are, respectively, sixteen and sixty miles from the location where the game is being played, hopeful boosters are sure some lost Super Bowl attendee will drop some magic beans in their community's chest: "We went to go see the Super Bowl, but had so much fun ice skating in the Zionsville town park that we just skipped it!"

Meanwhile, the town's Debbie Downers are predicting fiasco: The city just can't handle a big event like the Super Bowl! We'll fail miserably! Some Lear-jetting attendee will wind up having to sleep under a bridge due to hotel overbooking while 38th street thugs boost the hubcaps from his Gulfstream at Eagle Crick airport...

To everybody getting all bizarrely hyped over the implications, pro and con, of ¡SUPER BOWL XLVI! for our fair city, may I remind y'all of one thing: Lucas Oil Stadium seats 70,000 people, max, while the little car race that happens out on the west side of town was all glum because they had barely over 300,000 souls in the stands last year. A sense of proportion please?