As the great Vince Lombardi once said: “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”
My fellow Fearless Forecasters seem destined to make a habit of losing, if the first two weeks of the season are any indication.
This week’s big loser — and thus the target of my diatribe — is none other than the great Jerome C. Pandell. If the use of a middle initial in his byline doesn’t tell you something about his personality, I don’t know what will.
Jerome embodies the old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”
He likes you to think he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to sports — and editing for that matter — but the reality is that he just picks the teams with the best mascots.
Despite his problem with scratching his nether regions, he’s no baseball player. He can’t catch footballs either — no, not even the mini ones.
Apparently, he played tee-ball and soccer as a child. But any skills he developed back then long ago wore off.
“He talked about the 49ers once,” offered Jerome’s girlfriend, Shira Toeplitz, The Daily’s special projects editor. (Where else is a guy who spends more than 40 hours a week in the newsroom going to find love?)
Jerome and Shira’s budding relationship has created quite a buzz among their co-workers. Mostly because Jerome seems to have ABSOLUTELY no shame when it comes to public displays of affection.
Suffice it to say that he could stand to spend a little more time hitting the weights rather than working on those cuddle muscles.
Even Shira agrees.
“I’ve never met a bigger snuggler in my whole life,” she said. “And I should have known just by looking at him.”
Over the summer, Jerome did spend some time bicycling — if you can call that a sport.
His favorite hobby, however, is ordering in. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen him move faster than when he gets that call from the delivery guy at Thai Sookdee.
Maybe he has a future in cruise directing. As one Daily staffer put it, “He’s like the social chair of the great Daily sorority.”
Give him credit for trying, though. Sometimes that’s all a girl can ask for.
