That Sweet, Satisfying Crunch

Oh man oh man oh man, I saw the whole thing. Dorothy had gone into the kitchen to get me another Slim Jim, but I was watching. It was so bad, man---worse than the Joe Theismann leg break, if that’s even possible. And of course the network felt the need to show it over and over again, in slow motion, and every time they did they prefaced it by saying, “Oh, you don’t want to watch this,” which of course just guaranteed that I had to look. You just hate to see that kind of thing happen. I mean, football’s a violent sport and all, but still. Anyway, Marvin Harrison was lined up at wide receiver with Nathan Vasher covering him, and the play started, and the field started vibrating, and Harrison started to slowly cross to the center of the field, and Vasher bumped him---within five yards, so it was perfectly legal---and then just as Peyton Manning was going to pass the ball, Harrison got caught up in one of those little magnetic dead spots and he started rotating and rotating and not going anywhere, and then the little piece that was Brian Urlacher backed into him and their green plastic bases got locked up somehow, and Harrison got blindsided by some other Bears dude and his WHOLE BODY literally just snapped off the base and Urlacher fell backwards on top of him. As soon as it happened they pressed the Off switch on the field and stopped the play but it was too late, Harrison was toast. He just lay there, and I swear to God his green base was a full inch from his body. You won’t be seeing him on the field anytime soon, I bet. They say he has to be fused somehow back onto the base, maybe through some kind of melting process, because rubber cement won’t do a damn thing. Gack. Ew, if you watch the tape you can almost hear the snapping sound. You have to turn the volume way, way up and get your ear really close to the speaker, but I think it’s there. I’ve played it back about a dozen, maybe two dozen times and I’m pretty sure that’s what the sound is. I mean, I took the audio and I imported it into Sound Forge and I played with the equalizer for an hour or so, trying to reduce the excess noise, and it really does sound like you can hear the snapping. I know this guy out in Memphis who owns a recording studio, I might be able to send the file to him and he can maybe break it down even better---but it’ll cost us, I’m not going to lie to you. So if you’re in, just tell me now, because I don’t want to get stuck with a bill for six hundred bucks and then you listen to the tape and say to me, “Yeah, cool, I can really hear the snapping!” and then you don’t want to pay for half of the whole thing. That would just be, you know, sad.