So…switching gears…I’ve decided that this collection of writings really needs to be about something I have a deep well of passion for. The only thing I talk about more than my 1 year-old daughter – whom I hope shares my passion, hence merging the topics – is sports.

It’s midway through the NFL season. I love this time of year. As a Canadian we have a tradition of taking off the American Thanksgiving, filling ourselves with giant sandwiches and jalapeno poppers. We are only a few weeks away from Thursday games and Saturday games.

The second half of the NFL season is where my week gets completely hijacked by my love of the game.

So, in keeping with that, here are my thoughts on some things going on in the league.

First things first…Buffalo is overrated. I was reading Pete Prisco’s Power Rankings on cbssportline.com. I don’t mind his stuff. I’m mostly hurt because Pete never writes me back but, hey, he’s probably busy justifying new ways to make bad teams high on his chart.

Anyway, last week we saw Chad Pennington, Ted Ginn Jr., Joey Porter and the Miami Dolphins trounce the Bills with sound defense. WGR550 in Buffalo says “well, it wasn’t the Dolphins that beat the Bills, the Bills beat themselves with turnovers.” I have to laugh every time I hear that logic. Maybe, just maybe, if Trent Edwards was the only guy on the field and got sleepy in the endzone and took a knee, that might work. If Robert Royal had KFC for lunch and forgot to use a wet nap, then I’d understand it.

The fact is: the Dolphins defense turned a relatively mistake-free offense into a collective of Ricky Watters for a quarter, won the game and left a seemingly strong divisional opponent reeling.

So…what is my beef with Prisco? Buffalo is currently 9th in his power ranking. Ahead of two thirds of the league. The Dolphins are in 23rd. Now, Buffalo is 5-2 and the Fins are 3-4, but look back at the season.

Miami has played all three divisional apponents beating the heavily favoured Patriots handily. Buffalo struggled to beat pretty bad Jacksonville and Oakland teams. Were it not for the leg of their top tier kicker, Buffalo would be 3-4. Both teams were slaughtered by the Arizona Cardinals, so this is in no way a pitch for the Dolphins to be ranked higher. But, Miami is two fourth down desperation plays by their opponents away from 5-2.

Sure, you can argue that Buffalo was able to finish, and that makes them great, but explain the choke against the Dolphins away?

If the Favre magic is to really start, I hope it’s this week. If the Bills lose at home to Broadway Brett they will very quickly fall from the driver’s seat to under the tires.

I guess we were fortunate, in that I and my friend shared a well revered box within girl’s tidy and socially allegorical system of organization. Our box was no doubt of the finest cement she could find. The problem was that she never saw past the label on the box. She failed to grasp the subtleties of human nature and missed a huge chunk of the value of concepts like “diversity” and “equality” and “individuality”.

It is this kind of thinking, I conjecture, is prevalent in our society. I suffer from a series of short comings. The first is that I am male. The second that I am heterosexual. The third that I am “white”. The quotation marks around the latter are deliberate, but I won’t suffer you to read that dissertation today. The fourth, I am a man of Christian faith, another topic I will not spend time on here for want of space.

These shortcomings are the beginnings of what make me what I am. I am many other things: a sports enthusiast and somewhat of an athlete, a musician, an artist, a father, a husband, a child, a brother and several others. This begins to gnaw aggressively at the walls of my cement box. My friend who rooms with me in that little concrete cell, is neither athletic nor musically inclined. He is single, as far as we know, childless, and excels in many areas that I fall flat on. So, he is trying his best to climb into the cement box labeled “single, female, low standards”.

So what’s the point?

I tell people I’m a feminist. While some are indifferent, others, more often female than male, are enraged. “You can’t be a feminist. You’re a man! You don’t understand the first thing about the struggles of women and the oppression you put them through.” To this I say the following:

One. A feminist is about the equal identity, rights and opportunity of women within our patriarchally founded society. It is to allow a woman the right to vote, be a Member of Parliament, be Prime Minister or even be a house-wife. It is also to allow a woman the equal shot at being a firefighter as a man. That said, if the requirement for being a firefighter is to carry an 100-pound bag of sand up 11 stories, then she should need to fulfill that requirement. On average more men can accomplish this feat than women. That is NOT sexism, that is nature. Similarly, women have keen insights that men lack in abundance. Their mind for detail, organization and scheduling is superb. This is not the limit of their skills either, just as brute strength is not the limit of a male’s.

I was recently criticized for saying I would not confidently hire a male Executive Assistant. I may hire him ultimately, if his credentials were tops above the rest, but I would be hesitant. The reason: Women are better than men in this area. That our society does not reward them as well as the CEO is a tragedy of our society, and all the more reason that I adopt feminist views as they relate to responsibility and reward for the skills of women.

Two. I didn’t oppress them. I can’t say this enough. The future needs to be a consideration more than the past. Granted, my ancestoral history is not so bloodied around the throat as it is around the hands. I get that. Europe in general has done a great deal of atrocious things. I, however, have killed, enslaved and deliberately oppressed no one. So, while I may not be “able to understand” the pains of women in the past, I propose that neither can my opposition, who have likely never had to set a bra alight nor have they had the knowledge that our country was marching on without their input.

Three. The women who protest to my feminism are what I like to call “Female Chauvinists”. This delightful term is not received well, but the fact is that they are like soldiers left in a country already conquered. They are so used to war that they don’t know what else to do. They are feminism on steroids, viciously hunting for retribution for millenia of oppression.

This is the case with many issues of “equality”. It seems to be that we, in admitting the attrocities of the past, have decided that the future must be forfeit. Reparations can only be made by infusing blandness and political correctness that waters down the fruit of our identity