Like many of you, I was a little disappointed with yesterday’s Super Bowl. Not with the outcome, mind you, since I really don’t have an NFL favorite these days and really didn’t care who won. I do enjoy a good athletic contest, however, but unfortunately what was supposed to be pro football’s ultimate gridiron tussle turned into an anemic affair which neither team seemed to really want to win. The real news was Pittsburgh’s three road wins over the top three American Conference teams en route to the “big game.” Everything else seemed like anticlimax.<\/p>\n
The commercials, with a couple of notable exceptions, were a bust as well. Budweiser always does a good job with the Clydesdales (the “streaker” was funny and the “passing of the bridle” warm and moving). But the ones featuring contemporary twentysomethings portrayed as eternal, Peter Panish frat boys whose lives revolve around how much beer is on hand and whose idea of a higher diety is a “magic refrigerator” filled with Bud give me pause. A note to my Gen X and Y friends: do you find these at least mildly insulting?<\/p>\n
For me, the redeeming moments of last evening were our time spent with the small group of family and friends who came over (that Lawler’s Barbecue was great, eh?) and the fact that at the moment the Steelers were finally starting to assert themselves, I was standing in a house whose previous owner had been none other than Steeler Hall of Fame receiver John Stallworth (who still lives in Huntsville) picking up Number Three Son from a Super Bowl party. I did enjoy that little irony.<\/p>\n
But if you want to hear the “Super Bowl Blues” sung by a more accomplished artist than me, then you should travel on over to Contratimes<\/em> where the Granite State’s poet laureate and bard Bill Gnade unpacks yesterday’s failures and offers up some interesting and promising solutions in his posts, “Rejoice and Weep: A Mixed World in a Super Bowl”<\/a> <\/a>and “Left Cold in America: The Super Bowl.”<\/a><\/p>\n But Bill, I just have one question: If there’s no snow in New Hampshire and no snow in Huntsville, then where, pray tell, did all the snow go?\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like many of you, I was a little disappointed with yesterday’s Super Bowl. Not with the outcome, mind you, since I really don’t have an NFL favorite these days and really didn’t care who won. I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,48,45,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-family","category-media","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9763,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/9763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}