At this time of year, when bad news takes a holiday and we are forced by the season to take a break, it's nice to have time to engage in our favorite guilty pastimes.

Two of mine right now include literature and football. As the author who best combined both, Frederick Exley, once explained in his fabulous novel "A Fan's Notes," "Football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. ... it smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge."

Except, perhaps, when you get to Minnesota's own football philosopher, Brad Childress, who coincidentally is known for the odd literary reference himself, as well as strange allusions and metaphors. They are perhaps the most amusing thing about the team right now.

Just last week, when asked why tackle Bryant McKinnie was "pulled" from a game, Childress asked reporters to use a different word, as he didn't want to be reminded of pulled pork. Seriously.

That was on the heels of his description of his sideline argument with Favre as a "stream-of-consciousness" conversation. In doing so, Childress perhaps explained his fondness for his rambling monologues and arcs of syntax, common with stream-of-consciousness writing.

Childress' literary synergy caused me to turn to James Joyce, one of the practitioners of stream-of-consciousness writing, in an attempt to find Chilly's inner voice. Several Minnesota towns are looking for a poet laureate, including St. Louis Park. Perhaps Childress should apply. You decide.

File Photo, Star Tribune
James Joyce

Below, I've written down quotes from Childress, along with excerpts from Joyce's "Ulysses," the final chapter, Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Can you tell which is Childress?

No. 1:

"He's like a piece of gristle. He's got a great squirt in the hole."

Or,

"Well if his nose bleeds you'd think it was O tragic and that dying-looking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloaf mountain ..."

No. 2:

"If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, it would be Christmas all year 'round."

Or,

"I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter."

No. 3:

"He wasn't like, 'OK, let me get my hat on.' That wasn't in his makeup."

Or,

"Sometimes he used to go to bed with his muddy boots on."

No. 4:

"Yours legs are your legs."

Or,

"He looked more like a man with his beard a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I hate bandaging and dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his corns."

No. 5:

"I think we're just playing the ultimate team game and so everybody has to be on board. Specifically, the quarterback has to be on board because that's kind of the straw that stirs the drink, if you will. You have to feel that, it has to be ringing through. I didn't quite get it."

Or,

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower."

No. 6:

"Can you feel that? It's kind of palpable."

Or,

"When a man cries let alone them I'd like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope."

No. 7:

"This is kind of a touchy-feely business. Now, I don't touch you because you're a reporter, but I may grab a guy or a put a hand on him, that's just the way it is."

Or,

"He had a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldn't mind feeling it neither would he I'd say by the bullneck in his horsecollar."

Of course, the first quote in each example is the eloquent Mr. Childress. But I saved my favorite for the last, which he uttered some time ago:

"I read a great quote the other day. It was author unknown. It read like this -- that editorialists and columnists are like men that come down from the mountains after the battle and shoot the wounded. I thought, there is a certain something to that."

jtevlin@startribune.com • 612-673-1702