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SUPERBOWL NOTES OF THE DAY:
Guess the image above says all you need to know about what kind of a game Chicago Bear's Quarterback Rex Grossman had. (I received this lovely JPEG from a friend with the header "Grossman's Mounting Problems.")
Saw the game in high def on a plasma screen TV. Amazing. You could see all kinds of things you probably couldn't see on a regular TV. Like all those fumbles! A friend quipped that on a regular screen TV, there were no turnovers in the first half. Actually, the first half (mainly the first quarter) was great. Almost every other play was a T.O. or a T.D. Thanks to the rain and the pressure, it had the anything-can-happen feeling of a high school football game.
I thought the Coke ads were the best that fine purveyor of colored sugar water had done in ages. It was nice to see feel good ads that genuinely made you feel good. I also really liked the Snickers inadvertent man-on-man kissing ad, but thought it should have ended with that moment of homophobic awkwardness and not the blatant ripoff of the 40-Year-Old Virgin's chest hair waxing scene.
Was also struck by the coded African-American Tostitos ad. It shows a bunch of black people watching the football game with the double entendre broadcast commentary: "It's not just about getting here. But what getting here represents." Yes, black Americans, you've understood the coded message. You've arrived. After generations of struggle and strife, you have become an advertising demographic.
And speaking of coded racial communications: I was struck by how articulate both of the African-American coaches were--particularly the nice looking, lighter skined guy (Just kidding, Joe Biden)
As for that Prudential Financial commercial that kept asking "What can A rock do?" in a way that sounded exactly like "What can Iraq do?"--well, kill a lot of people and divide a country or two for starters.
As for the football game. Truly unsatisfying after the delightful amateur- hour first quarter.
FAQs of THE DAY
Could you pass the chips?
Is she pregnant?
Is Rex Grossman Jewish?
Do you have that in blue?
Has anyone seen my keys?
Have you been tested?
What ever happened to manners?
Do you know what the next stop is?
Would you like to supersize that?
LFAQs of the Day:
Could you do me a favor and die?
How do you tell a colleague who, in meetings with clients, frequently says "infer" when what she means is "imply" and commits the "between you and I" linguistic botchery that he/she is not only mangling the mother tongue but is doing grave perceptual harm to the integrity of our company--without coming off as an imperious prig, a patronizing asshole or a fussy little scold?
Is that an acorn in your pocket or are you just unhappy to see me?
ENCOUNTER OF THE DAY:
A little after noon, I went to my corner Starbucks and ordered my usual "small" regular coffee. There was a new "barista" in there. A young woman who, perhaps in response to my confounding nomenclature, said to me in all apparent seriousness and sincerity. "Enjoy the rest of your evening." Remember, it was about 1 p.m.
I said, "Wow, I must have slept later than I thought.l But I will enjoy the rest of my evening. And you enjoy the rest of your Super Bowl Sunday evening as well."
"Yeah, the Super Bowl," she responded, with more spacey sincerity. "Go Buffalo!"
I have no idea if she was crazy or drugged or trying to be funny. But I do know that she helped me out. I had been having the hardest time deciding whom to root for in the big Indianapolis-Chicago showdown. But she helped me make up my mind once and for all: I'm rooting for Buffalo!
I have never felt so good about Starbucks.
SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE DAY:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070202/pl_afp/unclimateusdeny_070202142458
Right Wing Think Tank Offers 10K For Scientists to Dispute Global Warming.
That's what the Right Wing calls the Scientific Method.
The Old Scientific Method:
1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and revise hypothesis accordingly if need be.
7. Publish results
The New Scientific Method:
1. Define the conclusion.
2. Bribe someone to twist the facts to support it.
ONIONESQUE (SHALLOT-LIKE) HEADLINE OF THE DAY:
Woman, 73, finally resolves her Brand Identity.
TRIBUTE OF THE DAY:
Tribute to Larry Porwick for his tireless and selfless service in the cause of providing inadvertent comedic inspiration that he insists on retroactively claiming was intentional.
MOVIE REVIEW OF THE DAY:
"Letters from Iwo Jima." Certainly a very good movie. Important for humanizing the enemy by telling the story from their perspective and for thus driving home the madness and futility of war. It was cool to see the Americans represented as the strange and menacing Other for a change. But still, watching it, I could not stop thinking how, for me, all war movies, even the most starkly and powerfully realized, feel fundamentally similar --with the glaring exception of Terrence Mallick's "Thin Red Line", a lyrical and powerful meditation on war, manhood, existence, love and death besides which the others seem somewhat prosaic and formulaic. Indeed movies like Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War and this fine effort by Clint Eastwood all have the expected range of archtypical male characters (the brutal authority figure, the sympathetic authority figure, the gung ho soldier, the reluctant sensitive conscript etc.) working in the same mercilessly adverse circumstances. But only "Thin Red Line", expands the narrative space beyond the present conflict in order to pose fundamental questions of existence itself and somehow transforms the experience of war in the process.
Oh and the movie featured a Japanese Richard Gere lookalike--which is nothing to sneeze at.
CONCEPT OF THE DAY:
23/6.
It's a new movement that actively embraces lower expectations. We're not gonna give you that 24/7 nonesense. 23/6 is plenty good enough. And in this new ideology, the number for the devil isn't 666, it's 555. Why go all the way to 666 when you can just as easily stop at 555? The name of the movement would be 23/6. Or perhaps The Almost Movement. It embraces a world vision wherein almost is good enough. I'd like to write up a Manifesto of the Almost movement. But maybe almost doing it is good enough.
SINGLE SENTENCE RANDOM PORTRAIT OF THE DAY:
Deep down, he was superficial.
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Posted on 2/5/2007
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