I stormed down to Elephant & Castle today to try and find the witchdoctor I had paid £20 to put a hex on Tom Brady and Randy Moss that would cause them to come down with a severe case of whooping cough Saturday morning, rendering them useless and diseased, unable to play that night against Jacksonville. I was furious- clearly they had shown up to play, all right- but a thought kept nagging at me. jesus christ, I thought, what if that was how they played with whooping cough?

The witchdoctor was still in her office, a tastefully neutral single room with a desk and a closet where she kept some freaky shit to shock the yokels into believing that sorcery required shrunken heads and candelabras. I knocked once and entered before she said anything- the door was unlocked.

you owe me £20, I said calmly. did you see the game on saturday?

She eyed me cautiously. i have no idea what you’re talking about, she explained.

the football- the american football match saturday night in foxborough, massachussetts. i was here last week to hire you to put a hex on the star quarterback and wide receiver the morning of the game so i could win my bets and make men with fierce boston accents weep, and you failed. i’m not asking you to cover the bets, I said, feeling as though I was being exceptionally fair, just to refund the money i paid you to enact the curse.

She eyed me cautiously, then nodded in recognition. oh, i remember you now, she said. the american. you won’t see a dime from me. i’ve been looking for you, in fact- i was going to insist on another £20. i was up all night trying to make the hex stick, and i wasted hours that i could have spent on more productive tasks.

i’m not to blame if you can’t even successfully hex a simple quarterback / wide receiver tandem, I said, my voice growing tense.

She laughed. you have no idea what you asked of me, she replied. i am but a poor witchdoctor with a closet full of chalk, ornamental knives, and candles. do you have any idea what those two men had on their side?

And that was that. I apologized for barging in on her, and she wished me well, no hard feelings. I walked away feeling lucky in spite of myself- the last thing I needed was to make an enemy of a South London witchdoctor.

I will admit it- Tom Brady is a samurai. He is protected by powerful wizards. The New England Patriots are master assassins, and I am terrified of them. I sleep with a nightlight on for fear that Junior Seau will creep into my room at night and defenstrate me. They are monsters, and everyone who told me it would be a wasted bet was, of course, correct.

If I could do it again, I would, though. How was I to know that it wasn’t a fluke? 16-0 is impressive, sure, but anyone could do it, practically every year someone comes close. Just because they were the one that made it didn’t mean that they were invincible. They did not appear to be much less vulnerable than the 2006 Chargers or the 2005 Colts, and those teams had to give up a loss eventually. Even the ‘85 Bears had a fluke defeat, after all. No, they could have been defeated, except that they don’t play football the way other teams do.

Even a blowout like the Packers / Seahawks game observed a fairly standard principle- that the winning team succeeds by capitalizing on the other team’s mistakes, and the game is decided by who makes the fewest and makes their opportunities count for the most. This is how the game is usually played, and it has worked for a very long time. The Patriots don’t play the game that way- they generally just score every possession, and dare the other team to try to keep up. When they inevitably don’t, New England pulls ahead slightly, or dramatically, until the game’s over and they’ve won. San Diego is a much better team right now than they were when the two teams first met, but I still think the 11/2 odds being offered right now on the Chargers walking away with it is too generous, and most likely just done to salve Norv Turner’s feelings. They will be annihilated. You would have to triple those odds before I would even touch a bet on the matter.

The Giants, on the other hand, didn’t let me down. Did my boy Eli deliver or what? I’m a little sad to see the Cowboys’ promising season go down like this, but the outcome was never in doubt, and I am richer for it. Eli Manning is a Winner and Tony Romo is a Loser; it is written and proven. In a clutch situation, Eli will find a way to win and Romo will find a way to lose, and there is little else to say on the matter. I’m not at all sure about the Giants against the Packers, and I will probably not gamble on it- unless the Giants are given ridiculously long odds in an outright bet, in which case, what the hell? You gotta be in it to win it. Nonetheless, the writing is on the wall- Tony Romo is a very good quarterback for the majority of the season, but come the playoffs he is dangerous and mediocre, no more reliable than Rex Grossman on half a bottle of pain pills. Even Billy Volek laughs at Romo- usually privately, because no one is paying attention, but he’s suddenly on the news, and you can see the grin behind his mirthful eyes.

How awesome must you feel if you had taken a single-play proposition on the Colts/Chargers game in which you took the 800/1 odds before the game began that Chargers backup quarterback Billy Volek would be the first player to score a rushing touchdown in the playoffs against the defending champions, in a game that featured LaDanian Tomlinson and Joseph Addai as starting tailbacks? It is an interesting game, football is… and gambling, too. They have different rules, but intersect frequently.

But there isn’t much time left to talk about these things. I am not about to start betting on the Premier League or to enter the stock market. Football season has two more weeks, three more games. The Giants are 12/1 right now to win the playoffs, which means that my standard low-stakes bet of £5 will pay off nicely… not as nicely as it would have if I had taken the single-play prop on the Volek score, but what would I have done with £4,000 anyway? I am a small fish, on these matters, and it is for the best. I follow the game too closely as it is, without much money on the line. I would be no fun at all if I took that aspect of it seriously. Kat would be miserable for four and a half months of the year, instead of just mildly annoyed for a few hours on Sundays…

But now she has nothing to complain about, at least not as far as that’s concerned. The season will be over come early February, and we have decided that this year we will celebrate Valentine’s Day. I will be undistracted, and we will enjoy it in Paris.

Yeah, it’s a little cliche, sort of a Tom Cruise / Katie Holmes thing to do, but what the hell? We are three hours from Paris, and we have booked tickets on the Eurostar for February 12th, and two nights in a hotel on Montmarte. I’m excited- it will be my first trip to continental Europe, and I am a huge fan of both of North America’s French cities. I expect we’ll do all the touristy stuff, and maybe see what surprises the city has in store. If you have recommendations, please feel free to share them. We rarely travel together with much agenda, and we are both open-minded. We may try to eat at Dans Le Noir, but it could well be too late for that now, especially given the date we would be seeking a reservation.

Dans Le Noir is a restaurant in Paris, London, and Moscow that is entirely in the dark, staffed by blind waiters. Ordering is done by telling them the things that you are unable or unwilling to eat, and the chefs prepare you a meal based around those criteria. I am trying to be open-minded, despite the fact that I’m a notoriously picky eater, and limit my exclusions to mushrooms and nothing else. The concept is that eating without seeing your food requires you to perceive it differently, and I am game. It sounds like fun, and we are much more interested at eating at the location in Paris than London (or Moscow) for reasons that should be obvious- food in London is kind of yucky, and the French certainly know their way around a kitchen. Did you see ratatoullie? They are gourmands, and we would be lucky to dine blindly in one of their restaurants.

One of the goals for this phase of living in London is to be a bit smarter about money. We still need to spend it, obviously, but hopefully we are on a new trend of maximizing our fun while limiting non-fun expenditures. We are not booking tickets for every mediocre play or show that piques our interest right now, because seeing uninspiring things in great quantities was never the point. We have tickets for a production of the metamorphosis on Thursday, and ten days later to see Henry Rollins at the Hammersmith Apollo. Kat will be booking a handful of shows as part of the London Mime Festival, and we have already booked Okkervil River and Explosions in the Sky tickets, because Austin is never far from my heart. That’s a fun lineup, chosen carefully, and if we maintain a better average on fun-to-mediocre, we should be able to enjoy the next several months more frugally.

The next month should be a good one- it certainly looks that way on paper, and that is enough for me. There is a lot to look forward to as winter begins its major assault, and I don’t expect that I’ll feel the need to spend the whole thing hunkered down and waiting for it to warm up. At least not tonight, I don’t. Tonight I feel good.