Nigel Pearson's side had endured low points and weird sideshows but they ended up as the feelgood story of the season.
There has likely never been a game in the N.F.L.'s history that will feel more like a weird, dutiful sideshow — in which the old sportscaster's reminder, "there's also a football game to be played," might not even make it onto the air.
When Harvard University social neuroscientist Jason Mitchell was starting out, he says that "there was all sorts of anxiety about whether what we were doing was even going to gain any kind of toehold in the field, or whether it was some weird, freakish sideshow".
The small startup has been creating smartwatch hardware for years now, first as the Allerta inPulse smartwatch for BlackBerry devices, and then reinvented as the Pebble, the Kickstarter success that proved to the world smartwatches could be more than just a weird gadget sideshow.
And he acknowledges that "Jimmy Kimmel, the narcoleptic late-night host" has a certain weird, circus-sideshow ring to it.
In addition to his books about weird things on eBay, sideshow performers, Cromwell's embalmed head, and unorthodox messages from God, Hartzman was a frequent contributor to Bizarre magazine and currently runs WeirdHistorian.com.
La Clique, The Spiegel Gardens, to 30 August (0131-667 8940) Sideshow: The Weirdest Show on Earth "Sideshow is the freakshow side of circus", explains ringmaster and promoter Paul L Martin, "a touch of Coney Island, a touch of the bizarre.
BLOOD AND VENGEANCE: ONE FAMILY'S STORY OF THE WAR IN BOSNIA.By Chuck Sudetic. Norton 400 pages; $29.95 and £19.95ONE of the weirder spectacles during the war in the former Yugoslavia was the "ancient-hatreds" sideshow.
Ron Ramsey suggested that Muslims may not be entitled to first-amendment protections: he finished third in one of the weirdest primaries of the season, behind Bill Haslam and Zach Wamp (but comfortably ahead of everyone's favourite gold-fringe-hating sideshow).
Each of 2 dozen historic buildings (one, the still-operating 1847 Boothbay Town Hall) holds weird treasures, such as 1920 "Mechanical Parables" - tiny sanctimonious automated tin dioramas that traveled with carnival sideshows, or the Salt Shaker Collection that includes a few naughty-nudie souvenir shakers.
