Tag: Television

Ignore the title and pretend the game hasn’t happened yet, so you can enjoy my Super Bowl Running Diary; a post idea blatantly stolen from ESPN.com writer Bill Simmons (who thought the Pats would blow the Giants out in this game)! All times are Eastern, as this site fully endorses the East Coast Bias™ inherent in all professional sports coverage.

Continue reading “WOW”

Well, Super Bowl XL turned out to be a real bomb. Thinking back to last night, and I’d be hard-pressed to come up with more than one or two postives about the whole broadcast. The pizza I ate was pretty good, though.

I didn’t catch too much of the pregame, but what I saw of the ceremony honoring all of the past Super Bowl MVP’s was pretty cool. Conspicuously absent were Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana, the MVP quarterbacks of the Steelers and 49ers, respectively. I come to find out, today, that they both declined to be part of the ceremony because they wouldn’t be paid enough. Montana wanted at least $100,000. What a joke. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bad thing about Montana, so this is stunning to me. It’s further evidence of the old adage that all athletes care about is money. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what status you hold in the sporting landscape, money is the primary motivator.

Regardless of that, the ceremony was nice. That was then followed by a Dr. Seuss introduction, featuring Harrison Ford, clearly in the middle of an acid trip. Who thinks of this stuff? How did the meeting where this was formulated go? Was everyone actually on drugs, and thought it was a good idea to have a commercial with Harrison Ford on drugs, introducing the Super Bowl? Come to think of it, maybe that guy with the goatee, wild eyes, and earring wasn’t Ford at all; maybe it was Timothy Leary.

The National Anthem was a little iffy as well. All I could think of while Aaron Neville was moaning was Horatio Sanz’ portrayal of him during Saturday Night Live, and his obsession with cocoa butter. Aretha Franklin is fat.

On to the game itself, then. Finally, something to cut through all the endless hype and interminable build-up and rampant commercialism (I like adjectives). And the game sucked. Both teams were basically begging for the other to go ahead and take charge, and neither did until Pittsburgh pulled out a trick play in which their quarterback-turned-wide receiver Antwaan Randle El threw a bomb to WR Hines Ward for the touchdown. It’s probably a bad sign when a wide receiver has a better night at QB than your starting QB (Ben Roethlisberger), who had a 22.9 QB rating. But despite his horrid performance, he got plenty of help from the refs and a bumbling Seahawks team (see the end of the first half for the height of time-management incompetency), and now has a Super Bowl ring.

Big Ben shares his underarm odor in an effort
to describe his Super Bowl performance

The other highlight of any Super Bowl broadcast is usually the commercials, though I think they’ve been pretty lame the past several years. This year was no exception. How do these ad execs have jobs? These companies spend over $2 million dollars so we can watch a bunch of idiots dressed up like lettuce and tomatoes jump on each other? Other high/lowlights:

• The Magic Fridge: probably the best commercial of the night.
• FedEx Caveman: another good one; violence and irrational behavior are always good for some yuks. Yuks…ha.
• Pepsi Can: Jay Mohr as an agent for a Pepsi can: this was the worst of the night; seriously, Ad Execs, even after you guys filmed this–you watched it and thought it was worth putting on the air? “Brown and bubbly?” Really?
• Careerbuilder.com: if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: chimps=comedy gold.

  

• Movie Trailers: There are usually a few good movie trailers during the Super Bowl, but not this year. The only one worth mentioning is V for Vendetta, which looks like it has the potential to be a really unique and interesting hit later this year. Other than that, nothing worth mentioning.
• Gillette Fusion: we need FIVE blades now? I can feel my jugular quivering in fear already.
• Pretentious Car Ads: has a $2 million Super Bowl car ad ever made someone actually want to buy a car? Nothing says “buy me” like a bunch of supermodels being lifted out of a mercury-filled vat, followed by an Escalade. Hunh? Who’s watching these that can afford a brand new Escalade anyway? The only people who can afford them are actually at the Super Bowl, so they can’t see the damn commercials!

The rest of my night was spent playing some darts and watching some TV doctors talk very seriously about a “code black” on Grey’s Anatomy. I’m still not sure what a “code black” is, but I think it had something to do with bad, melodramatic overacting, as that seemed to be prevalent in the situation.

All in all, a Super night.

Okay, that last line was really lame, but I was attempting to tie it into the whole Super Bowl theme. Wait a minute, I just called the last line “lame.” The title of this post is “Xtra LAME!” YEAH! I’M AWESOME!!