Free Republic

California's state highway markers -- those green, numbered signs placed along local freeways and rural routes across the Golden State -- are so familiar a feature of the automotive landscape that it's easy to overlook their symbolism. But the shield accomplishes a neat trick. At once it points ahead and back -- forward toward some spatial destination, but also back toward a temporal point of origin. Its shape mimics the spade carried by Forty-Niners into the foothills and sold by the opportunistic merchants who made the real fortunes of the California Gold Rush.

Super Bowl XLVII, February 3rd, 2013 New Orleans Mercedes Benz Dome, CBS-TV, Westwood One radio, 630pm EST Baltimore Ravens v San Francisco 49ers (-4.5, O/U 47.5)

Modern football, we tend to forget, was born in a funeral parlor. The carnage was so great in the early 20th century -- 18 deaths in the 1905 college season alone -- that Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban the sport if it didn't clean up its act. Indeed, TR probably deserved a second Nobel Peace Prize for summoning athletic bigwigs from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House that year in an attempt to stop the slaughter. On their way home on the train, the dignitaries drew up an agreement in which they acknowledged that "an honorable obligation exists...