Random thoughts while freezing my backside off

It's amazing what kind of wisdom comes to mind when your butt is freezing to your seat during my rare opportunity to visit Cleveland Browns Stadium .. so here's a few notes that sprung into my head after I took a last-second ticket opportunity to head north and shiver as a fan in section 339 yesterday.

• Now I know why they call them "club" seats. Nowhere else would you pay $6.75 for a beer and $4 for a chocolate chip cookie unless someone hit you with a "club". What a rip off.


• When your teenage son runs outside with no shirt on in a blinding snowstorm, you call him crazy and immature. When the 40-year-old man two rows away does it at an NFL game, you call him passionate and fun!


• People love to take photos .. unless it's really cold and you ask them to take your photo using your cell phone camera. Then they suddenly won't put down their drink to help you make a digital memory. (This photo is one of the few that mother nature allowed my camera phone to actually take clearly)


• I really like the new Browns stadium. It's refreshing when your feet don't stick to the floor of the mens room and equally refreshing not to see a line two miles long of frustrated women waiting to use the ladies room.


• The "terrorist pat down" that security officers conduct at the gates is worthless. I could have smuggled in a tank under my jacket and those guys wouldn't have found it with a search warrant and a metal detector.


• It's not nice to take the Bills hat off the person's head in front of you and toss it off the second deck -- especially when the nice man from Buffalo who was wearing that hat is bald.


• The scanners used to validate your ticket at the turnstiles are really nice .. but the poor guy in front of me whose ticket was soaked from his fall in the slush should have been treated nicer and not accused of trying to push through a bogus ticket. A second scanner was used and the wet ticket came up "green" so he was allowed to enter .. but didn't get an apology from the first ticket taker who called him a thief.


• It's fun to watch garbage bags flying around in the swirling wind inside the stadium .. especially when they land on someone who never saw them coming.


• The Browns Dog mascot is pretty tough and lovable .. but I think Zippy could take him in a cage match.


• It's fun in the third quarter to send your one good cell phone photo of the game to your friend Tim in Rootstown ... and it's even more entertaining when he sends you one back of his big-screen TV set with a message that reads "I have a WARM seat."

I'm sure my butt will thaw eventually .. and considering that the Browns won, I'm sure the experience will forever be a great story to tell my grandkids about .. in front of a fire that is.