I was watching the Iowa-Penn state game Saturday night when the trivia question crossed the screen. It was, paraphrasing here, “Which coach has the most victories against Joe Paterno?”

I didn’t know, so I guessed Moses.

A few minutes later, two things suddenly occurred to me.

One was that I had watched parts of six or seven games to this point, which brought to mind something Erma Bombeck once said about football. She said, “anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.”

The second thing that suddenly occurred to me was expressed in the form of a question (by the way, the answer to the trivia question was some guy from Michigan who beat Joe Paterno-coached teams nine times; I think it was Lloyd Carr, but I’m not rightly 100 percent sure) and I think I might have said it aloud – “Why is it so cold in here?”

I glanced at the digital thermometer sitting on the mantle over the fireplace. As you get older, you will become increasingly more interested in things that you swore you would never be much interested in when you were younger, like, for example, the weather, and particularly the temperature both inside and outside. We have one of those electronic thermometer things with a remote sensor outside that relays the temperature to the aforementioned digital readout station on the mantle. But it wasn’t the outside temperature I was interested in at this moment, it was the inside temperature, which, according to the thermometer, was a comfortable 72 degrees.

Then I realized why it SEEMED colder.

It was wearing the “backup T-shirt.”

What? You don’t have a backup T-shirt? Come on man, this is 2009; it’s time to better plan your undergarment necessities.

Having “backups” of things will also become more important to you as you grow older. Oh, you might not realize it now, but one of these days you’re going to step out of the shower and go to your underwear drawer and notice that the only Fruit of the Looms available are the ones with some of the elastic missing in the back and one or more tiny “cotton fatigue” holes, some of which might or might not be located in strategic places. This is when you will realize that you’re on the cusp of a new wash cycle.

Well, now you have two options. You can either:

A.) Don’t wear any underwear, a notion that brings to mind a scene in a Seinfeld episode when Elaine Benes and Jerry realized Kramer was sans-undergarments. This frightening realization prompted Jerry to say, “The only thing between him and us is a thin layer of gabardine.”

Or;

B.) You can pull on that pair of skin-tight European-style leopard-skin underwear-in-a-tube that you bought, oh, 30 years ago when you were still single because you actually believed you would look good in them but you never got around to wearing them but you couldn’t bring yourself to toss them out. So you can put those on — and if you thought they were tight 30 years ago, wait until you put them on now — and then run down to the Walmart and buy yourself a nice 3-pack of comfortable underwear.

Oh wait, there is a third option. You can wash and dry some underwear but tell me one man who can stand to sit around and WAIT for underwear to wash and dry. To men, time stands still when the washer is running and as for the dryer, well, we’d rather wear wet underwear than to wait for cotton to spin dry in a machine.

So, see, you don’t want to be caught in this predicament.

Same holds true for T-shirts. You don’t want to get out of the shower and find you don’t have any clean T-shirts.

So what you will learn to do is reserve one corner of your underwear drawer for a “backup pair of underwear” and a “backup T-shirt” and if worst comes to worst, they will — like a best friend or wing man — be there to have your back – or backside, as the case may be.

My “backup T-shirt” is getting a little thin, but it’s been there for me through numerous instances and it’s gotten to the point where it’s almost transparent. But still, it’s better than nothing.

One of these days, my wife is going to take that T-shirt out of the dryer and try to fold it and it’s going to disintegrate like a thousand-year-old mummy whose air-tight sarcophagus has been pried open.

I just hope that doesn’t happen to my “backup” underwear – especially while I’m wearing it.

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com) is executive editor

of The Gaffney Ledger.