superbowl

I’m so over Superbowl Commercials

/ Shane / Leave a comment

We’re all done with Superbowl commercials, right?

It seems like every year they just get lamer and lamer. At this point, they’re just primarily regular commercials, the same as we’d see on any regular day. Even the “highlight” commercials really aren’t that fantastic, and they certainly aren’t worth watching, much less rehashing in the morning.

I watch football after the kids have gone to bed, which means I’m usually sacrificing sleep to watch it. I normally fast-forward as much as possible. For the Superbowl, however, I don’t want to fast-forward through any of the commercials, so I’m stuck with the whole 4 hours.

Was it worth it? For what? Aside from seeing a lot of ads, what did I gain? Were any of the commercials worth losing sleep over?

The smart thing to do would be just to watch the rehash of the “best” commercials in the morning. I saw a list of the “best” ones from this year…even the rehash is stupid. There simply wasn’t anything worth watching.

Maybe the commercials got worse, and maybe regular commercials got better, so the “special” ones don’t stand out anymore. Maybe in a post-wardrobe-malfunction world, it’s just too risky for the companies to do anything too crazy, and risk reprisal. Maybe in this economy people can’t afford to be frivolous with their ridiculously expensive air time. Maybe the companies figured out that a regular commercial gets about the same amount of publicity/revenue as a clever one, so it’s not worth the effort. Maybe the tolerance for commercials is lower, now that we generally fast-forward through them.

At least in the past, people would be buzzing about them the next morning. As far as I can tell, nobody is really talking about them anymore.

In retrospect, the whole thing was stupid anyway – were we really that amazed that commercials were entertaining? How did this get started in the first place? The first time I really remember it being a thing was during the dotcom boom. But I wonder if I went back and watched those commercials now, if they would still seem interesting.

Anyway, it’s done now. I’m declaring it over. Next year, feel free to skip them. Once we stop paying attention, the media will stop too.

Superbowl Champions

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Superbowl XLV is in the books, and the Green Bay Packers are officially the world champions!

The sun is brighter, the air is sweeter, traffic was lighter, and there were even Bears fans complaining on the radio. Life is good!

What a game it was. I don’t even know if I could say that I enjoyed the game, because it was so nerve wracking. In retrospect, now that everything is said and done and the Packers won it all, I can say that the last 6 weeks or so were about as fun of a ride to the Superbowl as anybody could ever want.

Having to beat the Giants and then the Bears the last two weeks of the season to squeak into the playoffs. Coming in as a 6th seed and beating both Philly and Atlanta on the road. Beating the Bears AGAIN in the NFC championship game. And finally winning the whole shebang, and putting up awesome numbers against a very good Steelers team.

The game itself was a nail-bitter for me. After all the injuries this season (15 guys on IR! Many of them starters!), then to see Woodson and Driver leave the game, along with Shields and Collins (who both ended upcoming back), was almost too much to bear. I told Sara, “Thank god this is the last game of the season…I couldn’t take another one.” Watching the Packers jump out to a 21-3 lead and then slowly squander it away through dropped pass after dropped pass. Just writing this paragraph is raising my blood pressure.

Evie caught my excitement and was pretty excited:

Evie: “Go Packers! I’m so excited I let some drool out of my mouth!”

I might have been a little overly enthusiastic myself, especially in terms of high-fiving:

Evie: “Ow, you  hurt my hands!”

Overall, what a good year for football! I won my survival league, I finished the regular season in 1st place in my fantasy league, and even though I only ended up in 3rd after the playoffs, it still payed out. And now, the Superbowl of course. You cannot beat the trifecta of football wins!

In fact, I can only thing of two football related things to complain about:

  1. Due to some setting on either my Tivo or my digital converter box, the score board is off the side of my tv, making it impossible to see the score or the game clock. The score isn’t a big deal, but not knowing how much time is on the clock at the end of the game is a very bad thing!
  2. The Packers have a sore lack of a theme song of some sort. There are plenty of songs out there, generally of the one off, super-cheesy (no pun intended) variety. But I’m talking an official, Packers’ authorized chant or song, similar to Fly Eagles Fly, Bear Down Chicago Bears, or even J-E-T-S-Jets-Jets-Jets. Preferably something old and classic. Some kind of rallying cry that every Packers fan everywhere would know. The closest we come are the ultra-generic, “du-duh-duh-ch du-duh-duh-ch GO PACK GO” and playing “I want to bang on the drum all day“, which is used by several other football teams. You’d think a team with this much history and tradition would have picked up some sort of unique fight song somewhere along the way!

One more funny quote during the game:

Sara: “Don’t have another [diet caffeine free] pop. You’ll be up peeing all night.”

Am I really that old?

Superbowl Tweets

/ Shane / 3 Comments

For those of you not familiar with the world of Twitter, be happy.  It is kind of a cross between old school away messages and new school facebook status updates.  Basically, on your twitter, you put up little one word sentences or pictures (called “tweets”) that describe what you are doing at any given moment. “Hey, I had eggs for breakfast this morning” or “The guy in front of me in Starbucks right now is annoying” or “here is a picture to demonstrate the color of my toe fungus” or “right now, as you are reading this, I’m dropping a massive deuce”.  As you can see, there’s virtually no reason for this technology to exist! But, then again, since you are reading my blog right now and it is essentially the same thing just in long form; I don’t have much room to complain.

Okay, now that the explanations are out of the way, check this out.  Basically they monitored all superbowl related messages on twitter.  The more a word was mentioned, the larger the word appears on the map. The words also appear on the map geographically where they were sent.  So, for example, you see a lot of “Steelers” up by Pennsylvania and a lot of “Cardinals” down by Arizona. You can hit “play” and walk through time as the game progresses.  Important events of the game are marked on the timeline.  So, for example, right after the Cardinals score, you will see all of a sudden everybody uses the word “Cardinals”.  Boy, as I write that it doesn’t sound that interesting, but I swear it is!  I guess you have to see it.  Also, the words are color coded red or black for the Cardinals or Steelers respectively, where applicable.

You can also mess around with the filters on the left hand side.  My favorite is filtering on player names.  Larry Fitzgerald didn’t do much at the beginning of the game, but then blew up at the end.  So you see his name showing up more and more until it just *explodes* at the end.  A scary one is to do the commercials filter and see what effect the commercials had on the minds of America. And the commercials weren’t even that good this year!

Link courtesy InteractiveReader.

Papa John’s Countdown

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Hey everybody!

Papa Johns has a thing going where if the opening kickoff of the Superbowl is returned for a touchdown, you can get a pizza for a quarter.  The catch is you have to sign up here before the game.

Sure this is unlikely to happen and sure they are going to take your email address and send you crap, but are you telling me you don’t have an email address you use to sign up for this kind of stuff?

Well fine, don’t do it then, but I just thought I’d let you know as a reward for being such a loyal reader.