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Super Sunday -- 02/07/11 |
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Yesterday was Super Sunday -- Super Bowl XLV. And I really didn't care much at all. Okay, so the New England Patriots weren't in it so that took away the interest of having a "local" team in it (the Patriots' home stadium is just a few miles across the border in Massachusetts (about 53 miles via the most direct route from our house and just a touch over an hour, assuming traffic on route 95 is not bad, which is quite an unlikely assumption) -- but, frankly, I'm not all that interested in watching football on television in the first place. Although I must admit that that was a slick marketing move to rebrand the Boston Patriots as the New England Patriots. Much to her surprise, somehow during the recent years when the Patriots have been in the Super Bowl, Nancy has become interested in watching the playoff games (if the Patriots are in them) and in watching the Super Bowl (even if the Patriots are not in it). So I attempt to provide appropriate football watching snacks and appetizers to make it into a bit of a special occasion.
For example... a plate of Buffalo wings (served the proper way, with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing). And, of course, veggies and chips and dip. I will admit a certain amount of sentimental preference for the Green Bay Packers. They are one of the oldest professional football teams and the last of the teams from the era when many of the NFL teams were in smaller cities. Today Green Bay is the smallest city to have an NFL team. (An amusing note for non-US readers: their team name comes from the meat packing industry -- the team's founder got start-up money from his employer, the Indian Packing Company, a meat canning company, if he would name the team after them.) On the other hand, I have a number of friends and co-workers who live in Pittsburgh. I watched about half the game -- I missed some of the first quarter while in the kitchen and a few minutes into the third quarter I wandered off to surf the web until and only came back with less than two minutes of game time left. I thought it was a fairly interesting football game, for people who are interested in watching football games. It was certainly far more interesting than the dreadful halftime show with The Black-Eyed Peas. Isn't the very fact that you have to put hundreds of dancers (in costumes that light up) on the field along with fog machines and flashing graphics on giant video screens and strobe lights and pyrotechnics, etc., all sort of an admission that the stars of the show do not have what it takes to carry a performance by themselves? Okay, so in recent years the geriatric superstar groups may not have been capable of giving the kind of performance they once did, but at least they were superstar groups. The Black-Eyed Peas? Hey, Billboard picked them as the 12th best artists of the decade. Hmmm, yeah, sure... From what I saw last night, they wouldn't make it through the preliminary rounds of American Idol. (Well, I must admit that I have never actually watched American Idol, but I am taking it on faith that some minimal amount of talent and ability is required.) Just as I don't get worked up about the Super Bowl, I suppose if I lived outside the U.S. I wouldn't really be getting all excited about the World Cup (the championship for what we call soccer and everyone else calls football) or the Cricket championships (whatever they call them) or that Rugby championship they were playing in the Invictus movie.
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