Pete Rose gambled, he didn’t cheat, and this Superbowl ad was my favorite.
Pete Rose wins the Super Bowl! You thought it was only for cheaters.
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Tag Archives: Super Bowl
NE Patriots are serial cheaters, so are their namesakes. The unfair advantage is an essential of Capitalism.
First the New England Patriots got caught spying on their adversaries, now they’ve been tweaking the air-pressure of their game balls to sneak a ballistic handling advantage. Rules be damned, Patriot quarterback Tom Brady prefers his ordnance two pounds psi shy, hollow-points –if you will– which are also against regulation. For how long have the Patriots been manipulating advantages? And how else? They weren’t satisfied with the home field advantage on Sunday. Maybe officials should bring protractors to investigate the Boston gridiron. A level playing field doesn’t likely suit the Patriots either.
OF COURSE it doesn’t. Who expects sportsmanship from “patriots?!” Patriotism is the antisocial insistance on your own cultural superiority. American exceptionalism is an endorsement of tactical superiority, covert war, disproportionate force, drones, extrajudicial assassination, death squads, snipers, collateral damage, and torture. Formal US policy is to FLAUNT international law. American materialism profits from insider trading, extortion, usury, and corporate hegemony uber alles! Why would our surrogate Sunday warriors pretend there is honor among thieves?
Of course America underinflates footballs to best our opponents. We also diligently deploy inspectors to ensure our intended defeatees can’t recallibrate theirs. Meanwhile our leaders dissemble when plausible deniability stretches thin.
Of course NFL officials are not discussing a Super Bowl disqualification for the recidivist Patriots. Instead they’re weighing minor penalties, no doubt manageable, if not tax deductible. If America’s best cheaters don’t advance to the Super Bowl, the outcome would be hypocritical. Go Team! America Fuck Yeah!
I’m kidding of course. Sack the quarterback, disqualify the Patriots, send whoever else to the Super Bowl, then march the entire US defense and offense departments to the Hague.
UPDATE 1/23:
While fans and media try to belittle the scandal (ie. “Deflate-gate” and “Ballghazi”), statisticians have noted a damning anomaly relating to the advantage gained from underinflated footballs. After the rules were changed to allow offensive teams to use their own footballs –Brady was among the quarterbacks lobbying for the change– New England’s ball handling superiority grew beyond the realm of probability.
Probably all teams know that well-inflated footballs fly further but underinflated balls are easier to grab. Maybe the purpose of making a personalized array of game balls available is so offensive teams can exploit alternate characteristics as needed. Maybe the NFL understood this when they granted the rule change. Maybe the Patriots just couldn’t pass up every opportunity to cheat, until the statistics made plain their greed. Whether by hubris or head-injury numbskulledness, Tom Brady and his receivers thought they coud break PT Barnum’s rule too.
The American Dream hinges on equality of opportunity and fair play, but of course Capitalism idealizes the unfair advantage.
Btw I abhor the theatre of corporate sports, but when it exposes the reek of America’s national character, I like to make sure to smell it.
Super Bowl 2013 commemorates American warrior culture minus wounded vets
TV NATION- Can Americans no longer embarrass themselves? This year’s pregame holiday extended to Super Bowl Eve with an un-ironic commemoration ceremony, an all-star gala tribute to football, acclaiming it a venerated touchstone of the American character, the public mob like drunken monks feasting the humanitarian contributions of the Spanish Inquisition. Football celebrates America’s cultural blood lust, a surrogate for our preemptive senseless war making, whose shared cartoon violence is expunged of its real antisocial inhumanity. Probably owing to this season’s pre pregame homophobia scandal, where collegiate casualty Manti Teo showed signs of early onset Mohammed Ali’s disease, fans learned about the concealed football side effect of compounded concussions, akin to IED survivors’ collateral brain damage. Next we’ll probably hear that footballers’ home lives spread PTSD. As football injuries become more difficult to hide from battle-weary audiences, fans will be calling for more Kevlar and then of course commensurate armor piercing anti-Kevlar. I already think football offensive lines look spectacularly under equipped without drones. Or would that position be pretended to play defense?
Super Bowl ad winners: Tebow soft-sell PR campaign and screaming chickens
Hands-down the best Super Bowl commercial was the Tebow mother and son soft-sell, where the advance PR hullabaloo delivered the anti-abortion message, leaving the TV-spot, an advocacy theme flag-planting placed at a celebrated cost of three million dollars, to ice the cake. Only its detractors would find the final 30-second message anticlimactic. The “Tebow Ad” was a month long campaign. Count ABC and the NFL also big winners, whose commercial breaks were watched more closely because of the Tebow hoopla, especially lookouts anticipating a multiple Tebow spot. Sunday’s ads might have been scrutinized more than the game itself. Second place goes to the Denny’s Grand Slam screaming chicken spots, with another ad-world sophistication, piggybacking on the Tebow jitters with a spot that began with lighting a birthday cake, a Tebow feint, interrupted by the now-recurring alarmed chicken.
Focus on the Family’s brilliant move, orchestrated obviously by Madison Avenue talent and choreographed over the range of traditional advertising mediums –PR, editorials, activists– illustrates further what would-be social message advocates are up against when denied ad placement by the networks. Adbusters has sued the US networks for forbidding an anti-consumer spot. Could they have advanced an inoffensive and surrounded it with a meatier media debate? More and more it requires the collusion with the editorial bosses. Each successive Yes Men action has met with an ever tightening controlled response.
Media pundits are calling wins for the usual Budweiser and Dorito ads. Based on TiVo results. Bet you didn’t know those machines were returning the logs of your viewing habits in shorter than 30 second increments…
Is there a sumo in your future?
I used to avert my imagination on the subject of Sumo Wrestling. Probably I still do, visualization wise. But the bigger than grotesque spectacle has suddenly fascinated me, as a historic predecessor of the wide world of sport of our future.
How odd that a tiny bonsai-grown island people fixate on professional athletes multiple times a normal human size.
It seems so inorganic, to cheer for man-hippos, instead of competitors made from our own image. After all, we cheer for home teams, not cross town rivals.
But sports fans are coming round once again to see their hero athletes for the super humans they need to be, to impress us with their superhuman feats.
Might I suggest that for a brief democratic period, baseball offered more than an illusion, that a neighborhood hero could emerge from the most unassuming physique. Today Americans recognize that professional athletes are no longer improved versions of us. Real winners are crafted by genetics and unimaginable dedication, for their superhuman destinies.
Our insistence that athletes cannot use steroids therefore seems to me awkwardly unreasonable. Doping levels the playing field, for aspirants up against genetics.
That viewers recognize the well demarcated expectations of the differing athlete body types, became no more clear to me than in this year’s Super Bowl, when a Steelers linebacker carried the ball from end zone to end zone, dodging not only his pursuers, but the book maker’s handicap as well.
Even Saturday Night Live parodied the feat, although their urban comedy cannot be said to snub the NFL certainly. Weekend Update portrayed the beleaguered James Harrison as still out of breath, a full week after SB XLIII. It seems even SNL knows that non-sports watchers would recognize that Harrison’s 100 yard triumph was over and above what a non-running football position could be called upon to do.
It could almost have been an ordinary Japanese man facing a Sumo. That would be populist fantasy, but not sport.
God loses Super Bowl XVIII
(We should be able to express it here without causing offense–) Thank God Kurt Warner lost the Super Bowl, or we’d not be hearing the end of Warner’s praises to his god for the victory. Odd-makers since before the statistics were kept have recorded that God has proved powerless against flood, famine, and every permutation of human misery. Now we can add the Pittsburgh Steelers to the formidable list.
Veggie Love
“Veggie Love” Banned Super Bowl Ad …Do vegetarians have better sex as PETA alleges, or in fact do beer guzzling Super Bowl fans have it more and better? Carrots versus Beer? Which is it? And youtube and the National Football League both want to know if you are mature enough to deal with this issue?
Washington DC changing of the guard
It reminds me of the Rose Bowl, or the Super Bowl, or more specifically, WAITING for the Main Event. It seems to me that Obama has lost his first battle against entrenched power. We have to wait, to anticipate in spoon-fed loops of network hoopla, we have to watch dignitaries, supposed rivals, embrace each other, we have to fawn as our ruling elites are paraded on red carpets, in entirely different screen shots than the thronging millions. And Barack Obama has to wait too. The nation’s pressing challenges are going to take years to address, apparently, and I believe it if Obama puts himself at the disposal of the miscreants. I’ve watched a London changing of the guard, lots of pomp, but nothing happens.
Am I anticipating a memorable inauguration speech? If President Obama announces his intent, forthwith, to initiate judicial proceedings in The Hague against as many of the previous administration as are found culpable. I expect Obama to tell them he’ll give them a half minute head start. I want to hear Barack Obama put his head against a tree and count to thirty.
The Super Bowl Candy Bar Program
No popped out breast this year at the Super Bowl for fans. Instead, home viewers were entertained by 2 men kissing each other(BrokeBack Super Bowl) in a candy bar commercial.
Oh, eat them Snickers! Like the ‘accidental’ exposure of Ms. Jackson’s breast, the offensiveness of this ad to the gay community was said to come as a complete surprise, too, to the marketing outfit that popped their snickering homophobia out for all to see. Matthew Sheppard’s mom was not impressed at all. The Super Bowl and Mars Company ooze total insincerity, but after all this is the mindset of American professional football today in their pretend macho war games under corporate logo.
cruising yahoo…
Seems the top story for the day is the Super Duper Hyper-Bole.
Further down the reading list, McCain opposes the non-binding resolution because it is a slam against Our Troops, a vote of no-confidence in their ability to perform The Mission.
Says it would be bad for morale to, you know, offer them the hope that they won’t be trapped in the nightmare war forever….
340,000 people left homeless by flooding in Indonesia…
an ad (i made the mistake 8 years ago of searching Yahoo Jobs) for 30,000 openings paying more than a hundred grand a year, seems like people are falling from the penthouse, the Executive Joblessness rate is rising, folks who are accustomed to making that kind of bread are looking for work.
Off to the side is one of those flashing advertisements that eat way too much of my bandwidth for Pepsi looking to use Public Input to design their new ad on their Times Square electronic billboard…
Meaning they are trolling for suggestions they won’t have to actually PAY for.
All in all a wonderful day…
And a video link teasing with “$6M spent on Super Bowl security”
6 mil, i bet that would buy a lot of nachos and beer…. “hey, that’s nacho beer, get yer own dammit.”
Dept. of Homeland Stupidity to play again in Super Bowl this weekend
How many American clowns does it take to screw on a light bulb? Heck, I don’t know, but I do know part of the answer to how many police/military agencies it takes to play Homeland Stupidity at the Super Bowl this weekend!
I’ve been making up some stuff recently but this one is for real. According to the US Customs and Border Protection, they will be one of 30 federal agencies there, but they did not state the number of state and local uniformed clowns that will show up. We can only guess? No naked breasts this year though, so you might want to rent a tape in that Department, or you women/ your women will just be watching the tight ends.
Super bowl Janet Jackson and Republican morality.
This is something I published a couple of years ago. Every bit as relevant as today. And every bit today as then, some things are timeless.
This one contains a “dirty” word, so you might go ahead and set your browser Content Filter to profanity blocking. Better to censor yourself than try to censor me.
But now, once again, we are going to have the hyperbole and rampant commercialism pushed onto our senses, over and over and over and endlessly and I bet you thought I was going to say over again and again and again and repeatedly.
I don’t know the exact date of the Super Bowl. Just that it’s about a couple of weeks. I know the Chicago Bears are going to be one team, because of the hype I got as soon as I opened one of my email servers.
I am sure everybody is going to get lots and lots of Emails saying Bears or ? you choose… or New Poll: Who will it be Bears or ?
There will be jockeying to find out what the commercials are going to be for the half-time show, there will be much breathless wide-eyed awe and stories about what the commercials and so much (ok, I lied, there are more than one “dirty” word in this) all kinds of who-seriously-gives-a-fat-rat’s-ass-about-it bullshit, to lead us up to the Big Game.
A lot of the commercials are going to be for beer. And other drugs, especially alcoholic drugs.
You know the ones, they say at the end of it “(name of brewer/distiller) urges you to DRINK (notice they put this word last) responsibly”.
It is dope dealing at its finest. The crack house and the opium den and the weed corner are blown away (sick dope reference) by this magnum opus of Purveyance of Demon Rum.
And it is on a Sunday, a Pagan holy day, co-opted by Christianity, for worship of our respective God or gods. Pastors in Churches across the land are going to schedule their services, especially the evening services, around this latter-day Circus Maximus. And their morning services too, because the worshipers are going to have to rush to the store after services so they can score their dope and munchies for the BIGGGGG DEALLLLL…….
So I got the Super Bowl part embedded in our consciousness, right?
Now to the Republican Morality part, for a quick tease, then to Janet Jackson and the Infamous Titty Incident, then back to a slightly longer rant on Republican “Morality”.
The owners of the NFL teams, virtually all of them, are supporters of the Republican party. And the R’s pay it back in spades by supporting legislation that makes the PUBLIC TREASURY pay for the stadia, (yes, I spelled that last word right, I’m practicing my Latin, are you?) the security, the traffic control, and in-stadium dope I mean Beer Sales. That last because some stadia, like the ill-fated Cotton Bowl in Dallas, are in dry precincts. Which is the real reason the Cowboys don’t play in Dallas, for decades it has been in Irving, and next year it won’t be in Dallas County even.
The cities have to pay for the construction of the stadia out of bond money, and they are always told that it will boost the local economy.
Also here in Colorado, there was a guy running for Senator, you might recognize the name Pete COORS. And yes, he is heir to the beer fortune.
On to The Titty Incident.
Janet Jackson, during the half-time 3 years ago or was it 4, I lose count of things like football. Got her costume deliberately torn at the end of a song and exposed part of her (gasp! the HORROR!!) breast. Now, I didn’t get to see this. I don’t watch football. The homo-eroticism of 22 very large gentlemen throwing their bodies at each other doesn’t do it for me.
There was much scandal. Much public outcry. Much Breast Beating in the halls of Congress, (yeah, I know, that last joke was horrible but I had to get it off my chest) even the Commander in Chimp of the United States saying that he hadn’t watched the incident, but it was a lovely breast.
Ok so I might have taken a little liberty with that last statement, but I don’t keep abreast of the off the wall statements of Mr Bush, every time I try to watch one of his speeches my brain tries to escape by crawling out my left ear.
The Moral Outrage sweeping the country was amazing, especially in the R party.
Like Mr Coors.
During the 04 super bowl, and I know I know, the Super Bowl calendar starts from S.B. I and S.B.II and so forth, with the not-very-subtle Roman numerals numbering system. Instead of A.D. or C.E., measured from the birth of Christ or the birth of Christianity, depending on your faith viewpoint. But I don’t worship the oblong ball. So it matters naught to me how the Hell many S.B. there were.
Mr Coors was OUTRAGED about this public impropriety. How dare they interrupt his half time show where he had a commercial or two over the years, with scantily clad women whose costumes showed a substantially higher percentage of overall Breast Acreage than Ms Jackson did, telling the poor saps watching that somehow they would have a shot at touching these breasts if they only buy his brand of Dope. For people who keep up with such things, these are the modern version of the Vestal Virgins performing their religious duty at the modern Circus Maximus, the Cheerleaders, who get paid a paltry amount for their Services on the field, but get much more opportunity working in commercials. Like for Mr Coors.
Since this was an Election Year, when all the Noble Laws about the Half Time show being lagged 4 seconds or so just to protect America from such an awful sight ever again….
And the Republican NFL team owners who pimp out these Vestal Virgins as part of their Circus, were also outraged, that Ms Jackson would Dare To Expose America to a sight of substantially less breast-age than their own cheerleaders and even most of the Female fans and even some of the (ewwweewwww) male fans show during every game. I mean, one team has its fans wear cheese on their heads, and paint their naked upper torsi green and yellow, and show over and over again one in particular a set of udders that would make a topless dancer envious (or nauseous) and who happens to be a guy (I think)
So this year we will be (or you will be, I plan to be out riding my bicycle, while the streets are practically deserted for four or five hours) watching a heavily subsidized, heavily censored, erotic commercial enterprise, knowing that the GOP Big Brother apparatus will be protecting us from such unseemly behaviour ever again occurring.