CSotD: Super Sunday w/ extra schadenfreude
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A little bit of politics before we dive into humor: The NFL has removed “End Racism” from the endzone, not starting next season when most changes happen, but starting right now for the Super Bowl, which, completely coincidentally, will have Dear Leader in attendance.
They’re replacing it with “Choose Love,” and just as taking “End Racism” off the field has nothing, they swear, to do with Trump’s presence, I’m going to assume that “Choose Love” has nothing to do with Taylor Swift being there, either.
Though if “Choose Love” is effective, I trust most viewers will wait until halftime. A little bit of bad love may or may not be better than no love at all but it sure beats watching the Super Bowl halftime show.
Sipress reverses the usual blasphemy we can expect to hear this evening, though I suppose presuming upon the Lord and praying on street corners is within the accepted bounds of some Christian sects.
As is ignoring Ezekiel: “Have ye not seen a vain vision, and have ye not spoken a lying divination, whereas ye say, The LORD saith it; albeit I have not spoken?”
Anyway, Sipress is right and the fact that your team won may not indicate his favor so much as his dislike of the other team, which is pretty much how most football fans feel about the Super Bowl, too, since their teams aren’t playing.
Jimmy Johnson notes the potential for a sting, given the lag in this case between radio and television. I’m not 100% sure of that, but I do know that if you get your TV signal through the Intertubes, you can pick up a substantial lag on two different sets in the same house.
There is to be an estimated $1.39 billion bet on the game, not including friendlies like Arlo & Janis. I heard on NPR that most sports betting is coming from Gen Z and scales down as people get older, though the report didn’t say “and wiser.”
There’s a casino opening here in December to help people flush their money down the toilet, and I predict it will be like the lottery in which everyone is convinced they either win or at worst break even, showing why casinos are so profitable.
The place is calling itself a “casino and social house” which seems surprising, since New Hampshire hasn’t even legalized marijuana yet, much less operating a social house.
Different kind of sports gambling here, because I have serious doubts about the odds of a Super Bowl ad paying off. It used to be that a good Super Bowl ad would smack everybody upside the head, but they’re not only fluffed up beyond their value, but then they are spoilered ahead of time so people have already seen them and don’t need to pay attention during the game.
It used to be that some clever company would blow everyone away with a surprise celebrity cameo, but since imitation is the sincerest form of advertising, last year’s trend was to jam as many celebrity cameos into 30 seconds as you could, which left no time to actually promote the product.
Cleverness is overrated anyway: Alka Seltzer had wonderful, memorable, clever ads that touched off catch-phrases like “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and “Atsa some spicey-a meataball.” Problem was, they didn’t touch off any sales of Alka Seltzer.
And then there was “Just For Feet,” and “was” is the correct tense, because this jaw-dropping Super Bowl ad put them out of business:
Here’s the short explanation of what is generally considered the worst advertising disaster in Super Bowl history and for those like myself who have been in advertising and enjoy schadenfreude, here’s the in-depth story.
And here’s a sketch of the meeting at Saatchi & Saatchi, after their commercial for “Just for Feet” ran in the Super Bowl.
Of course, I’m joking. They continued to think their ad was brilliant. That’s how Madison Avenue works.
Speaking of the joys of schadenfreude and how much I like seeing the mighty take a pratfall, today’s Adam@Home brings back the time when the Gray Lady herself got pranked by a young woman in Seattle.
Stories explaining teenage slang are a staple of stupid news coverage, usually handed out to rookie reporters because editors think all young people are hip, mostly because they’re hipper than their editors, which isn’t saying a lot. The stories they bring back are generally at least six months out of date, full of slang terms the kids have long since abandoned.
But not at the New York Times, who assigned a reporter to collect slang from Seattle’s grunge community. The resulting collection of terminology was not just abandoned but had never existed in the first place.
I’m currently re-reading All the President’s Men, which has great appeal to me as a former reporter, but this story is neck-and-neck with it on my list of favorites. Here it is, a gift from me to you and a pie in the face to the cob nobblers who fell for it.
Today’s Free Range brings up two things.
One is a memory of sitting in a hotel bar with a local musician while some guy played an electronic one-man-band machine, a variety of fake instruments queued up to simulate current pop songs.
When he launched into “Horse with No Name,” I thought my companion was going to burst. The only thing worse than semi-decent music extruded through that synthesizer was having been dragged through the desert by a song with two chords.
The other knee-jerk reaction is that when I am at the grocery store, I often hear Muzak consisting of young Autotuned women repeatedly singing a single catch phrase, accompanied by a drum machine and some artificial tones.
Stores once played pop tunes as interpreted by the Ray Goniff Singers or whoever, but also played actual MOR hits, which makes me wish I had one of my granddaughters with me so I could ask, “Is this a real song?”
I’d hate to have her say yes, but then again, there was some awful drek on the Top 40 when I was young.
Even Frank found it hard to top.
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