I thought it would be nice to have the superbowl playing in the background while I was working this evening — I have good memories of my father and uncles enjoying the game when I was young, even if I never got into it myself. But I turned it on 15 minutes ago, and it was actually rather intolerable: the self-importance, the hyperbole, Bob Costas (that was Costas, right?) fellating the players and telling them how important their ball-catching and people-hitting abilities are, and going on and on about trivial statistics from past games. It’s all kind of icky.
It’s a game. The outcome is not going to elevate anyone to the “pantheon of greatness.” It might be fun if there weren’t all these loud people standing around trying to puff it up.
I talked to my family in the Pacific Northwest this afternoon. They’re OK with the hoopla, but they aren’t inflating it into cosmic importance like the loons on NBC — and they’re not looking forward to the fireworks that will be going off all around the neighborhood at the end of the game. I’m kind of sympathizing with Ophelia here — I wouldn’t want to live in a place saturated with the attendant narcissism.
Mucho sympathy.
I just got invited to a Super Bowl party by an upstairs neighbor. We have a previous engagement later, but we kind of have to go b/c they’re nice & we don’t want to say no.
So I’ll go for 45min/1 hour. Fortunately it will be low-key, with no one really caring about the outcome. My neighbor calls it the “International Chip Festival”.
The sheer amount of american exceptionalism and overweaning jingoism that also follows these events is kinda gross
Though its nice the anouncer could pronounce menzel’s name
You just hate the Superbowl because JESUS IS THERE!!
He’s just hiding because he doesn’t want the losers to know they’re losing. It makes the game kind of boring if they don’t at least try.
Plus He doesn’t want you to see what He does when He watches Katy Perry at the half time.
PZ Meyers is an unamerican poopeyhead!!!!
(Says the guy who doesnt watch football; we are so dead at work that I may just watch the game out of sheer boredom).
And may the odds be evah in your favor!
My TV had a mute button, when I lived in the US. It made the commentary bearable.
nos morituri te salutamus!
let the hunger games begin!
Roll on the Tour de France, (& the Giro & Vuelta).
Arghhhh, the fireworks. You had to remind me.
That’s how I knew the local team had won the fucking playoffs two weeks ago – the sudden loud bangs. OH how my heart sank – I had so wanted them to lose.
Games are srs bzns. Down to the ethics in the journalism about them.
Is the halftime show on yet?
Who is Katie Perry insulting this time?
Bob Costas should really be more objective in his Super Bowl game reviews. /snicker
Halftime looks like Soji olympics opening
48% of the U.S. watch the SuperBowl. I get that this is a *huge* deal and a lot of people. But it means 52% *don’t*. This means all the talk of “America’s third holiday” and the vast stretches of vacant shopping malls and nobady in the parks and no lines at disneyland is just hype. More (slightly) people do *not* do anything at all for the superbowl than do. All this “well, what are *your* superbowl plans” and “well, you got to do something even if you just watch for the ads” simply isn’t true. You don’t have to, and *most* people don’t do anything.
And, no, I’m not missing out on an communal cultural event.
I watch the Super Bowl the same way some people only go to church on Christmas Eve.
That niceman-nicehorse-niceeternalpuppy thing should be a movie, or TV series.
I’d watch.
I don’t understand people who claim they’re “just watching it for the ads.” An advertisement has negative value; we put up with them so that we can get free stuff (such as football games, if that’s your thing).
Saying: “I just watch it for the ads,” is like saying: “I just showed up for the entry fee.”
It really is narcissism. The whole 12 flag thing is celebrating the fucking fans.
Jake Harban #17
So. First day here on Earth, then?
Send me money and I’ll tell you how it works.
My mother lives right next door to the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation, where they sell all the fireworks that are otherwise illegal in the state of Washington. There will be noise. Much noise.
We watched the puppy bowl instead. My daughter has been begging for a dog for days now so she got some vicarious dog time this way.
We made a quick trip to the mall, which was kind of quiet, so that was nice. We then stopped at the grocery store for milk and we were surprised to see a frantic crowd still there after 6 pm, most buying cartloads of chips and soda. We had expected them to all be settled in front of their TVs by then.
Woohoo, we lost!
So this was all straight-up game-play.
No fixing or collusion.
All good, then.
yup
LOL @ calling the Patriots “world champions.” (The place I went for dinner had the post-game trophy acceptance and molestation ritual blaring at top volume.)
A. Noyd
The USA is the only place on Earth that plays this particular variation of “Football”.
So, yeah, they is the champeeens.
Baseball is somewhat similar.
Many years ago, George Will said the following about football:
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_will.html
chigau (#26)
“The World Series is a best-of-seven tournament between the greatest baseball teams in the entire world of the continental United States and one city in Canada.” —TL;DR Wikipedia
How long ’til the white people start rioting?
Because we all know it’s going to happen.
When the vast majority of people watch the StupidBowl for the COMMERCIALS, you have a real problem. That, or they are lying, like those who look at playboy for the articles.
wcorvi,
Hey, I really DO read Playboy for the articles. I can’t say that for my hubby, but I usually get it out of the mailbox before he gets home and I read it cover-to-cover. There are some very progressive opinion pieces in there.
#14
I went to Disneyland on Superhype Sunday when I lived in the area. Probably less people than a normal Sunday, but still lots of people. Not empty, not no lines.
I watched the game alone and ate sliders made with Kings Hawaiian rolls and olive loaf. Yum. Good times.
What I did *not* do was watch any of the three (!) hours of pregame shows. There weren’t any other games on so what could they possibly talk about for three whole hours? And it was NBC so yeah it was probably Costa.
Also, today I learned that there is going to be an NFL awards show. I also won’t be watching that.
I slept through most of the game, and ignored the last 45 minutes.
I can always watch the ads on the internet.
This Super Bowl was unique. Thanks to a certain manufactured controversy over the air pressure inside the balls, the media coverage these past two weeks included some fairly extensive discussions of ideal gas laws.
The scientific outreach this engendered has made this game, probably, the most practically useful and beneficial to the betterment of society Super Bowl game ever played….
Hey, at least we enlightened moderns no longer kill our entertainers, like Romans did.
Or, at least, we kill them more slowly….
I don’t understand how you put up with it…As much as i’m irritated by the ridiculous amount of fanfare that football (or soccer, you know, the one with the round big ball you have to kick around) causes here in Spain, i genuinely get the feeling that it’s not even half of what goes on with the superbowl. Or maybe i’m just lucky to be insulated from the worst of it and there’s nobody putting references about it in cartoons, movies and tv-series…
Mind you, we also get showered in jingoism, toxic masculinity and violence, because everybody knows that you can’t posibly enjoy anything without turning into an adolescent baboon with a stubborn and painful erection.
@18
Worse with the Seahawks: it’s celebrating fans being so loud that they interfere with the visiting team’s offense. It’s disgusting and in bad sport.
Here is a comment from satire site the Daily Mash:
“Super Bowl is incredibly depressing vision of Britain’s future” http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/sport/sport-headlines/super-bowl-is-incredibly-depressing-vision-of-britains-future-2015020294959
-Also from the daily Mash: ”GOD has responded to Stephen Fry’s criticism by claiming that Lord Melchett was the worst thing in Blackadder.”
There are exceptions.
I do not consider that link to be an exception.
I want my minute back.
Not entirely true. Try watching an olympics baseball final between Cuba and the USA. In Cuba. That’s fun!
How much hype there is depends greatly on where in the US you are. When I lived in WI, the Packers were front page news year round. Now that I live in Central NY, you really don’t hear much about football. We’re too far from both Buffalo and New York City for anyone to really consider the Bills/Jets/Giants their home team. Far more attention gets paid to Syracuse University sports.
#26 / Chigau:
Well, until 2007 there was the NFL Europe, and there are informal American football leagues here in Europe. But it’s fair enough to call them (and the World Series winners) ‘world champions,’ in that I seriously doubt there’s a team outside the NFL that could beat New England, or that a Japanese team could beat the World Series winners. As long as whoever wins the US soccer league or the NHL doesn’t call themselves world champions.
Personally, I think xkcd has the right approach with an attitude about this (http://xkcd.com/1480/). I’m not a sports guy (well, not a watching games guy) but I’ve had some great times in pubs in India having cricket explained to me by enthusiastic locals.
I am chagrined that I didn’t go to the annual Stupor Bowl party where the enormous TV is showing the game but the sound is off so that a bunch of musicians can jam and ignore these overpaid boys and juvenile bravado. But the 5:00am wake up to catch the 6:30 bus to work this morning…where I’m writing this right now… was just too early. Next year, I vote for Super Bowl Sunday to be on Saturday. Or perhaps the government should make it really important and declare the Monday following the SB a national holiday.
It made all the right heads explode.
Whoopie – not for the superbowl but it means the six nations rugby will be starting soon. Rugby is a bit like American Football but inverted so that there is playing in rugby when AF is in shutdown and vice versa. It is 45 minutes a side with about 10 minutes for half time so we get 1.5hrs of action in 1.6hrs!
And no adverts! And only a few deaths….
I was in the garage refinishing furniture while the spousal unit watched “The Walking Dead” marathon…priceless. I usually enjoy american football, just not this year.
Of course, Patriots winning the SuperBowl made the Seahawks whip out their
magicweather machine to dump tons of snow on New England. (the Chicago Snowpocolypse was just a practice run)./
magicwooKraft (owner of Patriots), in his post game interview alluded to the over-inflated news response to deflategate). [see what I did there?] He said, “We won the AFC, 75-23, and then this game, with definitely untouched balls (properly inflated, et al), we still won 28-24. *wink*”. Meaning, that they won the AFC with such a huge margin that even without the advantage of underinflated balls, they still would have won, maybe with a smaller margin, but still…
PZ wrote: ” the self-importance, the hyperbole, Bob Costas (that was Costas, right?) fellating the players and telling them how important their ball-catching and people-hitting abilities are ….”
That’s called hype. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous, it makes no sense, and the Super Bowl wouldn’t be the Super Bowl without it
In my composition class, I always start a unit on advertising analysis at this time of year — gearing up to writing a paper where students have to look at a magazine ad and try to figure out what buttons it’s trying to push.
So I’ll be spending a class period tomorrow reviewing the ads with my class. But you don’t have to watch the game to see the ads — it’s easy enough to find them online. And it’s a pretty interesting cultural examination of what these companies believe we want.
IIRC, it was named the World Series because it was originally sponsored by a newspaper called The World. Wait, which sport were we talking about, again?
—
Re: Superbowl Commercials: For those who don’t understand the appeal, commercial time slots during the Superbowl (on the same channel(s), at least) are very expensive and presumably that much more influential because of the high ratings. Consequently, advertisers tend to put their best writers on making new commercials that people will pay attention to. As a result, some people watch the commercials because sometimes they actually are clever and entertaining.
Some Superbowl anti-fans do it because they enjoy the irony of the commercials being more entertaining than the main attraction. I suspect some people say it as a rationalization to capitulate to social pressure and go to a Superbowl party despite not being fans. Others might claim to watch for the commercials because they don’t want to admit an interest in the Superbowl itself. (A la the old joke about people who claim to read Playboy ‘for the articles.’)
Others do it because analyzing the commercials can presumably provide insights into America’s culture or economy. I recall Jon Stewart once cracked a joke about how bad the economy must be because that year’s Superbowl featured Cash For Gold commercials.
I’d rather throw cards into a hat!
Was that an intentional reference to Groundhog’s Day (RIP Harold Ramis)?
I loved the Locktite ad.
http://bringmethenews.com/2015/02/01/loctite-super-bowl-ad-from-local-agency-fallon/
http://www.wsj.com/video/super-bowl-2015-loctite-ad/5799FD70-B835-45FB-A4CE-F8D3292D33C6.html
http://www.fastcocreate.com/3041757/super-bowl-xlix/why-those-people-in-that-freaky-loctite-super-bowl-ad-are-wearing-fanny-pack
As for the football game, I watched it and now I think I will go back to my usual mode of not watching football. My son and his wife enjoy it. To each his own.
I actually thought the game was better than the ads. The ads totally failed to live up to the hype about them. The most entertaining one was the one with the possum. The last minute of the game, on the other hand, may have been the wildest minute of play I’ve ever seen in a Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl is an opportunity for a super bowl of sex trafficking.
http://thinkprogress.org/sports/2013/12/12/3050121/combating-human-trafficking-arizona/
@56 Georgia Sam
I agree with you. The game was very good, especially the ending — shocking even.
The ads were pretty much all a snooze-fest. I had heard all of the “ooing and ahing” over the Budweiser “puppy” ad — and frankly, it almost made me barf. The worst kind of treacle.
Possible Moment of Mormon Madness?
The Seattle Seahawks Offensive Coordinator, Darrell Bevell, is a mormon. Maybe the LDS church should excommunicate him for making mormons look bad.
On ex-mormon forums, jokes are being made at Darrell Bevell’s expense. For example, they postulate that he may not have been observing Fast Sunday properly. Without the fasting he was not open to the promptings of the Holy Ghost, those promptings being, “Marshawn Lynch up the middle!.”
Ah, welcome to the annual Pharyngula Contrarian Festival, where the minions compete for who can pretend to know/care least about the most popular sport in the country. I must say, as a football lover who understands both the game, and the social criticisms of it, I still find this the most consistently ignorant topic on this blog year after year. Just to pick one of what could be dozens of examples:
Of course it will…within the context of the game. No one pretends otherwise, certainly not Bob Costas, who is pretty socially astute. This criticism is about at the level of those creationists bring to us from those handy dandy pamphlets they get at church. If you hate football, whatever, different strokes and all that. But prattling on ignorantly about it as you all do year after year? It’s unbecoming of this blog, which on seemingly all other subjects, holds itself to a much higher standard.
Which country? A pretty darn good chunk of the “minions” come from countries where the most popular sport probably isn’t AMERICAN football? But please, do feel free to counter-program with the MURICA FUCK YEAH Festival!
My ironical meter just explodified. Hey there, Canadians. Did you know your most popular sport is now Murican Football? And fuck what is called football by the rest of the world. SOCCER LOL amiright!!!!!!! A big thanks for doing your part to paint people here in the United States as self centered ignoramuses for one more year. I do enjoy the reputation foisted on us around late January because American Football fans can’t seem to get that 90 percent of the world doesn’t give more than a fuck or two about the goddamn Super Bowl and sees it only as a mildly amusing curiosity.
People sure do get defensive and pissy about other people loudly not liking football. It’s a fucking game.
But it’s our game, damnit! It’s as American as… as… as apple pie! As… as… as NASCAR! As… as… as the straight white cis-gendered abled male gaze!
It’s about the WORLD!
Of America!
Um… of the United States of America!
Um…
Of…
Uh…
Of 48% of the United States of America…
LEAVE MY FOOSBALL ALONE!
‘MURIKA!
scienceavenger
You need another hobby.
Their ball catching and people-hitting abilities are very important. They obviously entertain millions and are worth millions of dollars. You wouldn’t say Hendrix’s finger wiggling was unimportant, for the same reason.
Also, on superbowl hookers
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-01-27/news/the-super-bowl-prostitute-myth-100-000-hookers-won-t-be-showing-up-in-dallas/
The hype is how you ensure the crowd leaves satisfied. I’ve watched pro wrestling with family before; similar hype. I’ve been to a live rock concert: the opening bands job is to build up expectation and suspense. I wasn’t even a fan, but when the band finally came on stage I cried with relief.
When my wife and I wanted to sleep in our hotel room, I got my son and his friend watching curling on TV. I acted excited as the sweepers scrubbed the ice, and I cheered for Germany and explained that they were the underdogs. The boys watched two hours of curling, excitedly, while we slept.
Imagine paying however many hundreds for a ticket, in order to hear Bob Costas say, “Well, it’s only a game, dude–if you play your best, there will still be starving children in Mississippi and the Central African Republic.”
I hate football (or fooo-baaaw, as PZ likes to call it), along with NASCAR, baseball, monster trucks, ballet, orchestra, and quite a bit else. There are few things I’d pay to sit and watch. I also agree with Ophelia that football is objectionable for its violence, etc.–though I’m not sure how different it is from Hollywood when it comes to hushing up crimes by elites. And I UTTERLY DETEST the jingoism inculcated in sports fans; I believe that the reason it receives fat government subsidies is that it teaches millions to love Big Brother.
…all that said to say this. It still seems to me that the scorn flying around is largely composed of elitism. If Costas were fellating college students in the annual Quiz Kids championship of the world, say, you’d probably see a lot of role reversal. Folks here would equate fandom with supporting education, and non fandom loving ignorance. Many salt of the earth types would conversely wonder aloud whether they too can have a blowjob for knowing the second prime minister of India, and wondering aloud why such bright kids aren’t using their brains instead to end hunger in Mississippi.
These types of threads remind me uncomfortably of a visit to People of Walmart.
scienceavenger #60:
I love the way sports-fans always assume that everyone who neither knows anything of, or cares about, their chosen sport must really, secretly, deep-down, have the knowledge and interest they disavow. Really, I do. It’s kinda cute, in a fundamentalist ‘You atheists are just pretending not to believe’ way.