It's the Testosterone Oscars®, or What Am I Going To Do With Five Pounds of Chicken Wings?

I'm so tired of hearing the Academy Awards show referred to as the "Gay Superbowl" or the "Chick Superbowl." Why should a mediocre football game played by two teams I don't care about (though Green Bay is my pick solely by virtue of being the only nonprofit, community-owned team in the NFL) get to be the point of reference? From now on, Superbowl Sunday is the Testosterone Oscar®s.

The best satire that I've seen on the Hype Machine that is Super Bowl Sunday comes from Wiley Miller of Non Sequitur fame. You'll have to click over to see it so that GoComics doesn't send its lawyers after me, but it's worth the click.

Now everyone knows that if you really don't have a team to root for in this game, there are only two reasons to watch: The commercials, and chicken wings.

Cookie Jill has a nice compendium of memorable Super Bowl ads, but you kind of have to wonder about a country in which millions of people who record programs on their DVRs so they don't have to watch commercials, tune in on this one day a year primarily to watch the commercials. This year, as in most years, car ads dominate, because despite $100 oil, Americans will still go broke to drive a cool car. And I'm sure we can expect the usual odious T&A ads from GoDaddy. And that annoying E-Trade baby, who if he were mine I would suffocate with a pillow to save the world from his future as a hedge fund manager, will also make an appearance.

I'm not sure what the obsession is with the Super Bowl. It can't just be football withdrawal, because fans of non-playoff teams gave up on football weeks ago, and even those of us whose teams fell just a wee bit short are now looking forward to spring and baseball.

Or maybe not.

Perhaps it's just an excuse to have what is essentially a national holiday smack dab in the dead of winter, and who could blame us, the way this winter has been. It's gotten so bad that yesterday we were cheering a cold, raw, rain that all froze up last night -- just because it wasn't snow. They're predicting a bit of snow and rain Monday night, and potentially another big one towards the end of next week. It's enough to make you want them to put Christmas back into March where it belongs, except for those pesky years when Easter is in March, which would just move the Holiday Chocolate Overload three months forward. Of course in March the weather is getting better and you can go outside and walk it off, but it doesn't change the fact that we have at least another month of this. So why not make today a holiday, especially when the Academy Awards are likely to be a snoozefest after the Weinstein Borg's frontal assault of the last few weeks. I enjoyed The King's Speech as much as the next girl, but Best Picture? Really? Doesn't that seem like a lot of trouble to go to in order to give Colin Firth the award he should have gotten last year for A Single Man? I mean, that would be like giving Shakespeare In Love Best Picture to justify giving Dame Judi Dench an award for a few minutes of screen time because you jobbed her on Mrs. Brown the year before.

Oh. Right.

But I digress.

So, since Super Bowl Sunday has become a national holiday to the point that not even the hungriest realtors dare to put on an open house today, it might as well have its own "official" food, and that food seems to be chicken wings.

There's something satisfying about chicken wings out of all proportion to what they are. Part of it is the primal thing about meat on the bone, though one would think that something as small and relatively dainty as chicken wings are hardly the stuff of which macho men are made. If it was only about primal carnivorousness, we would see a rush on turkey legs at the supermarkets this weekend, and you'd see on the news guys with foam rubber cheeses on their heads brandishing turkey legs like jousters and maidens at your local Renaissance Faire. But instead it's chicken wings.

Now, if you don't hold a Super Bowl party, but you feel obligated to participate in the bacchanalia of grease and bone and sauce that is any permutation of chicken wing you like, there is the question of where to find them. This year we haven't had a repeat of the Great Chicken Wing Shortage of 2009, but unless you are having 27 people over, you are stuck with mammoth ten-dollar packages of wings. And so it is here at Casa la Brilliant, where I'm planning to cook up some fake Buffalo wings (which are just going to be baked wings with some Frank's Hot Sauce slathered on at the end) and some teriyaki wings (because I don't much care for hot wings). And then I have to find room in the freezer for the rest.

So what kind of saturated fat-laden treats do YOU make for this dead-of-winter holiday?