The downside to having good, bottom-level seats at a football game is that when the bottles start flying, you're in the line of fire.

We went to the Saints game today (and yes, I'm posting this somewhat after midnight, but the only thing I had to say prior to the game was to share with everyone that I cleaned my ceiling fan. Woo.) It was completely sold out--and they'd even sold a number of standing-room only tickets. Needless to say, the noise level was unbelievable. Saints fans are known for being incredibly loud when their defense is on the field--the Twelfth Man. When it's a full house, the fans are often loud enough to throw off the timing of the opposing quarterback, causing penalties for false starts and various other missed calls.

And even though the Saints lost the game, I don't think they played badly. After all, the Rams are a good team. The Saints got kinda killed with penalties, and then, of course, there was the lousy pass-interference call that started the bottle-throwing.

Very unpleasant. Our seats are on row 17 from the field and so a large number of bottles thrown from the upper sections fell into our area, spraying all of us with beer, and dinging a few people with the plastic bottles. The guy sitting next to me commented, "They pay $5 for a beer, and then they throw it??" Go figure. As a Saints fan, I was embarrassed.

But the exceedingly unpleasant part came a short while later--long after there had been any questionable referee calls. We're watching the last ten minutes of the game, when all of a sudden there's a whiz smash and a Heineken bottle explodes onto the floor of the row in front of us. The thank-god-the-two-teenage-girls-had-just-left-so-it-was-empty row. Miraculously, no one was hurt by it. If the guy next to me had been standing up, he'd have been brained by it, or if those girls had still been in their seats, they would have been hurt badly.

What the fuck posesses someone to throw a glass bottle from the upper level??! They don't sell glass bottles, so someone had to have snuck it in. You have to know that it's going to hit someone, and since the terrace level is a couple of hundred feet up, that bottle had some serious velocity by the time it hit. Fucking idiots. The sad thing was that everyone in the section who had kids with them either left immediately with their kids, or, if the kids were old enough, sent them up to watch the rest of the game from under the covered area. The rest of us stayed for the rest of the game, but we sat with our shoulders hunched up around our necks, and with many nervous glances over our shoulders, waiting for the next missile to strike.

Next game we're wearing helmets.