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30-Second Warnings
30-Second Warnings Chips, Beer, Voyeuristic Horndogs, Hot Babes, Flatulent Slackers, and God’s Quarterback Star in the Big Game
In 1987, an evangelical Christian missionary in the Philippines, Pam Tebow, sick and near term, ignored doctors' advice to abort her fifth child. How could they know he would grow up to win a Heisman Trophy and lead the University of Florida to two national titles?
Twenty-three years later, before he even turned pro, Tim Tebow made himself the player to beat in Sunday's Super Bowl XLIV by starring in a 30-second commercial for Focus on the Family, a Christian group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. That the ad would run represented a reversal of CBS's long-time policy against advocacy ads. At this late date, it is still not certain if Tim's creation myth will be included in the commercial, or even if the ad will be aired at all.
Whatever happens, the controversy put the game's spotlight back where it belongs -- on the advertising.Super Bowl Sunday is America's holiest day, our all-inclusive campfire, and with 100 million viewers, almost half of them women, about as close as we get, without a presidential election, to taking the national pulse. The ads tell us who we are and where we are going. They are also Madison Avenue's best chance -- at a reported $3 million or more a minute -- to create a buzz. In fact, in a world in which TiVo-ing is spreading like wildfire, they may be Madison Avenue's last chance to actually get watched on TV.
These days, when it comes to Super Bowl ads, the buzz never dies as YouTube, best/worst commercial contests, chat rooms, and vigorous follow-up ad campaigns carom around the precincts of popular culture. Sacred, profane, gross, on-the-mark or clueless, the ads are cultural signifiers. If Tebow gets to pitch on Sunday, his ad will share the air with the basic football consumer groups: cars, tech, beer, soda, and chips. And, of course, he'll be right there along with the stuff everyone is waiting to see -- like those three nerds leering at a naked Danica Patrick, the auto racer, for a website company, or that office jerk farting for an employment service.
I am a Super Bowl ad fan. I'd rather go to the bathroom during a third-down play than miss a commercial.
You'll want to know my all-time favorites.
"You Should Be So Lucky"
For sheer prescience when it came to American foreign policy, nothing has beaten "Kenyan Runner," a Super Bowl commercial that ran just before Team W led us to eight losing seasons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at home.
Imagine a black African runner in a singlet, loping barefoot across an arid plain. White men in a Humvee are hunting him down as if he were wild game. They drug him and, after he collapses, jam running shoes on his feet. When he wakes up, he lurches around screaming, trying to kick off the shoes.
This was 1999, two years before the 9/11 attacks and the invasions that followed. The sponsor was Just For Feet, a retailer with 140 shoe and sportswear super stores that blamed its advertising agency for the spot -- before it collapsed in an accounting fraud and disappeared.
Colonialism anyone? Racism? Forcing our values on developing countries? Mission accomplished.
Then there was prescience on the domestic front in another Super Bowl ad, "Money Out the Whazoo": imagine a middle-aged man wheeled into an emergency room. Doctors and nurses turn him over and someone says, "He has money coming out the whazoo." A hospital administrator officiously asks his distraught wife if they have insurance. A doctor calls out, "Money out the whazoo!" The administrator says, "Take him to a private room."
The tag line was: "You should be so lucky." This was 2000. The sponsor was E*Trade, the online stock gambling outfit. How did they know that the economy was going to tank just when the health-care system would go up for grabs?
If you'd been paying attention to the ads instead of the game, you, too, could have sold America short.
My Super Bowl favorites, you might have guessed by now, are not consensus picks. Most fans seem to prefer the 1979 Coke commercial in which Mean Joe Greene, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame defensive tackle, limps off the field past a young boy who offers him his Coke. Greene sucks it down and, as the kid turns away, says, "Hey, kid, catch," throwing him his jersey. While this ad is usually number one or two in best Super Bowls lists, it actually first aired several months before the game.
Oh, what a better time that was, when we truly loved our sports heroes and felt for them when they were beaten. The remake of that ad, in 2009, showed how much we've lost in 30 years. As Troy Polamalu, the Pittsburgh strong safety, limps off the field, a kid offers him his Coca-Cola Zero. Before he can take it, two Coke brand managers grab it and run off. Polamalu tackles them, grabs the bottle, drains it, then rips off one of the manager's shirts and tosses it to the kid.
That snarky (post-irony?) parody of the iconic Mean Joe Greene commercial may be obvious enough, but that's no reason not to pile on the subtexts: Labor and management in the National Football League are now gearing up for serious confrontations. The Supreme Court is hearing one of them -- a challenge to the league's anti-trust exemption which will have an impact on, among many other things, the sale of jerseys. No wonder Troy ripped the shirt off management's back.
Root for Big Easy
The other main candidate for top Super Bowl ad in most of those lists is the 1984 commercial in which a woman runner, pursued by Orwellian storm troopers, runs past hundreds of gray people listening to Big Brother to smash the establishment (read IBM) with her sledgehammer. That Apple Revolution really freed us, right? In the quarter-century to follow, thanks to iPod, iPhone, and iPad, a generation without empathy, head down, shuffles into textiness. And Apple still doesn't even have a majority market share.
(Non-Commercial interruption: Should you find yourself actually watching the game, root for New Orleans. Saints quarterback Drew Brees is a member of the executive committee of the NFL Players Association. In a recent Washington Post op-ed column he wrote: "[I]f the Supreme Court agrees with the NFL's argument that the teams act as a single entity rather than as 32 separate, vigorously competitive and extremely profitable entities, the absence of antitrust scrutiny would enable the owners to exert total control over this multibillion-dollar business." A final decision on what originally was a suit brought by a jilted gear supplier is expected this summer.)
The modern Mad Men and Women who call the signals for Super Bowl commercials are not always given as much credit as they deserve for grasping the American mood. Their most interesting ads can't be taken at face value. For example, who could forget -- although Holiday Inn seems to have tried -- the 1997 class-reunion ad in which a hot babe struts through the party, chest out, her blond hair swinging, as a voice-over ticks off the part-by-part cost of her cosmetic surgery make-over? The message: her make-over involves mere thousands of dollars, compared to the millions Holiday Inn has spent on renovations. You must remember the tagline: she's finally recognized by a former classmate who sputters, "Bob... Bob Johnson?"
So what were the Mads telling us here? If pricey renovations were acceptable for corporations, they were also acceptable for ordinary people? That Holiday Inn going upscale was no different from transitioning genders? Or, by extension, that anything a corporation can do, you can, too? In other words, corporate privilege equals personal agency.
And this was 13 years before the Supreme Court decided to extend individual freedom of expression to corporations. (Extraneous note: "freedom of expression" is now a tagline for a Botox treatment.)
The Snickers Smack
In 2007, when a General Motors ad showed a robot committing suicide after making an assembly-line mistake, the message seemed unclear (unless this was a Philip K. Dick dream). Shouldn't it be the car-maker, in traditional Japanese fashion, who commits hara-kiri after years of colossal mistakes? But now we understand: it was an early warning -- the American worker was at the end of the line; no handouts, pal, you're on your own.
That was the same year when two men, simultaneously eating a Snickers bar, first touched lips during a Super Bowl game. When I initially saw it, I thought: if anything can conquer homophobia, it's chocolate. But then they did the I'm-not-gay double take and began tearing off chest hair in a "manly" display.
The Mads had struck again, brilliantly reinforcing my own impression as a sportswriter that the NFL is the most homophobic, yet homoerotic, of team sports. With all that touching and hugging in public (and all that naked horseplay in the locker-room), no wonder some players have reacted with such hostility to the few who have come out after retirement. That Super Bowl ad will be at least an hour's lecture in someone's Queer Studies course.
Because of their insecure young male demographic, ads tend to be so aggressively and cartoonishly hetero that 1) there is no orientation issue, and 2) there is no threat of actually having to perform. You can watch sexy women the same way you watch football players -- from a superior remove.
For example, in last year's commercial for GoDaddy.com, the domain-name company, three nerds found they could control events from their laptop. Not only did they make Danica Patrick, an Indy driver, take a shower for them, but they added "that German woman from the dean's office."
This year, Danica gets to flashdance and dress up like Marilyn Monroe. GoDaddy is known for ads, run relentlessly on the Internet, that are too risqué and provocative for the networks.
In this Sunday's CareerBuilder spot, a cubicle clown ostentatiously farts, annoying a prim female co-worker. When the boss walks up, she thinks the jerk is cooked. But the boss lends the jerk his lighter to ignite the fumes. He wants the lighter back, he says; one imagines him farting, too.
Hey, boys will be boys. If she can't take the heat let her go back to the kitchen. After all, this is 2010!
If it wasn't in such company, I would be more concerned about Tim Tebow's Focus on the Family commercial. I'd angst away: What does it really mean? What are the Mads telling us about the future? That the country is turning back toward the right? That the networks, in their twilight, need every buck they can get and don't care where it comes from? That Tebow, who has always seen football as his pulpit to spread evangelical Christianity, is presaging a new era of star athletes standing for causes?
None of the above. It's a hopeful message. Obama centrism will prevail, stabilize the country, and prepare it for progressive reform, because even football fans will understand that Super Bowl sideshows -- be they about voyeuristic horndogs, flatulent slackers, star quarterbacks, or God knows how many holy day trippers jamming down food-like products and loser liquids -- can be taken seriously only on Sunday. (Now, that may be the Philip K. Dick dream.)
54 Comments so far
Show AllIt's simple. The right wants to keep it short and tasty. The left is divided on how to fight back. On the one hand, some prefer clunky explanations while the other hand wants to counter the right's short and tasty with their own. Obama is only doing what most people do which is to conform to what looks strong, tasty, and short. In short, united and wrong trumps divided but right.
How crass can American culture get. Watching a stupid football game is" "America's holiest day, our all-inclusive campfire, and with 100 million viewers, almost half of them women, about as close as we get, without a presidential election, to taking the national pulse."
But it is not AMERICA'S pulse that is being taken really, it's the ad agencies. They try to guess what will be remembered, not necessarily what will sell. It's for bragging rights, not polling the American temper.
Which is good, for Americans tend to be sentimental, racist, homophobic, dopes. Else why watch what is usually a lousy game of FOOTBALL when they could be doing something constructive, like catching up on all that sleep they are losing in the rat race they call their lives.
Gary
“The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements”
-- Thomas Jefferson
Robert,
Thanks for a wonderful stroll through our sick commercial culture, by way of those super bowl ads.
Never think for a second that the prurpose of a TV advertisement is simply to sell the promotes product.
I only recent read Salingers "Catcher in the Rye". I found his private school tormenter-classmates, and the Manhattan that Holden Caulfield wanders through to be so innocent and, well, non-commercialized that I ended up reading it as cultural anthropology book rather than a statement on youth aleination.
Where, among the corporate commercial bombarded, I=pod/Iphone addicted youth would this alieneation arise today?
I don't watch the Stupor-bowl.
I avoid team sports branding like, well, being branded with a hot cattle iron.
The commercials that are coming are utterly indicative of where the Corporate culture is taking you, as passive hostages, victims of your cultural Stockholm Syndrome. Your country is not only swinging to the far right (again), it is also dumping centuries of learning and enlightenment along the way, becoming more and more akin to the Muslim religious dictatorships you simultaneously support (Saudi Arabia) and vilify (Iran).
America doesn't have a culture, as someone one noted. It has an ad campaign.
Sioux Rose
GALEN: Your insights are all too true.
I thought this was a very well-written article, apart from its concluding sentence.
Wow! Brilliant. Scary.......but brilliant.
Totally agree.
It boggles my mind that people can watch 'football' and call it a sport. The teams line up, run around for thirty seconds, then take a minute or two to line up again and then run around for ten seconds. Repeat for an hour of stopwatched playtime.
That's not a sport, it's tedious. Worse than watching golf.
Hockey is a sport. Soccer or 'real football' is a sport. Then again, I don't watch those sports either. I'd rather do than watch others do...
Of course you could have mentioned the historic role 'sports' serve in an empire. They do distract the people wonderfully from what is actually important with something that has virtually no impact on their lives or happiness.
Hockey is a sport? In the same league as soccer? If you are talking of ice hockey, it looks like a sport - guys (and girls) skating around real fast, back and forth, looks all so exciting. And there's the occasional fist fight. But the goal post dimensions are so small (6 feet wide?), it's often possible for the goalie to block the puck with no trouble. If you watch closely - I mean, really, really closely, it would seem that goal scoring is as much a matter of chance as it's of skill. Of course, the puck is small too, but the hockey stick itself is huge in comparison. I'm comparing the skill levels required in soccer vs. ice hockey (even field hockey takes greater skill, and the goal has to be scored from within the 'D' area).
More than anything else, hockey is a wasteful sport - like golf. It takes enormous amounts of resources for a small number of people to play the game. Hockey rinks are like giant freezers - that are left open. Hardly anyone plays hockey in natural ice on the outdoors (where it originated, obviously). Having NHL teams in Florida, California and Arizona should tell you the contempt with which capitalism regards the environment. It's clearly about money - not about sports. Not anymore, anyway.
Hockey is a sport?
If you think scoring on a goal with a hockey puck is so easy while on skates, why aren't you earning millions in the NHL? (grin) The fights are far more entertaining than any boxing match, and the fighters actually have a reason to wail on each other. In the northern cities, at least before the effects of global warming kicked in (and when the season was during the winter months), the hockey rinks are warmer than the outside air; but you're right about it being a huge waste of energy anyhow...
I did point out that I'd rather do than watch. In Edmonton there are still kids skating around playing hockey on the outdoor rinks. Of course they're luckier than I was, when I was their age the winters actually got cold. These days we're lucky if we hit thirty below for a week, when I was a teenager the winter hit 40 below at the start of December and pretty much stayed there until the end of February. 'Professional' hockey, football, soccer and golf are not something I spend money on. I'm quite happy to ignore what the city's team did yesterday (they lost again, just looked up their last game. Actually the Oilers are doing quite horribly and that makes me very glad that I've not been a fan for years now...) And would be very happy if the damn city would stop subsidizing the damned teams as much as they do.
I agree that hockey should never have expanded into the southern usa, it was a stupid idea. But considering the 'talent' that the management class is demonstrating in other areas of the world economy, it's not surprising that they committed themselves to that boneheaded move.
No, I didn't say scoring a goal was easy - but saving it by the goalie seams easier in comparison with soccer and field hockey (which makes scoring actually harder in ice hockey). But again, looking closely at the game, the relative dimensions of the playing area, the goal post, the hockey stick and the puck, I don't see enough space to actually build a move, like in soccer and field hockey. Especially since skating is so much faster than running. So, some of the goals that get scored seem somewhat by chance, because the goalie can pretty much cover the goal entirely - something not possible in soccer or field hockey. Of course I know I'm simplifying, and of course there is skill involved - including fake moves and all that. Hey, we all have our biases, right? :)
Hey, we all have our biases, right? :)
Quite right. (grin)
I think the main point is that a goal in Hockey is often more a matter of luck than skill, and true sport should be contests of skill, or physical endurance, not luck.
I have been curious what the energy usage and carbon-footprint an ice rimk is? The refrigeration gear is pretty massive.
"I have been curious what the energy usage and carbon-footprint an ice rimk is?"
Don't ask, don't tell....
>>>Saturnalia: Of course you could have mentioned the historic role 'sports' serve in an empire. They do distract the people wonderfully from what is actually important with something that has virtually no impact on their lives or happiness.
Weren't the last BC elections held during prime hockey season, and half the people didn't show up to vote? Even though there was an important question on the ballot regarding proportional representation?
The elections in Canada have the polls open for 12 hours, anyone can get to them if they bother. The effect the weather has is if it snows hard some people who would have voted don't.
That being said, in the last provincial election in Alberta less than 40% of the population bothered. Unless the way elections are run in this province changes, I'm not likely to bother voting either the next time we have one...
genicon
Now I get it, Obama is PREPARING the country for Progressive reform, instad of bringing us progressive reform.
Gee I can't wait.
The Romans were hooked on games also, until they collapsed because playing games instead of working does not make a country great. Much of our country is falling into disrepair while the stadiums are the important thing. Too much of anything is usually not good, but we have to go to the limit to find that out.
No, the Roman Empire collapsed due to a mixture of plague and economics. The plague came from traders in Africa, and the gold all wound up in China paying for silk. With the remaining material wealth up for grabs, the 'barbarian' hordes from Asia (the Huns) and Europe (Goths, Visigoths, Norse and Celts) swooped in to finish the job.
Fundamentalists in two of Abraham's God's three religions (Christianity and Islam)would have their shira laws on sex and uppity females who try to make their own health decisions become public law. I imagine that the taliban would heartily endorse a Christian football star's thirty second sermon against homosexuals and abortions.
And yet so many members of the third (first?) Abrahamic text are in decision-making roles in advertising companies. And they were the first to "crack down" on things like uppity females and homosexuality.
The happiest day of my life was the day I got rid of my television and said good bye forever to the never ceasing bombardment of commercial ads. There's very little I need to buy and I already know what it is.
Yes I know, those ads aren't just on television. They're everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE!!! But, just as you can choose to see the beauty around you instead of the ugliness, you can choose to ignore the ever menacing presence of mindless chatter telling you that you need to buy yet one more piece of crap. Why don't Americans feel insulted by the constant dumbing down?
"Why don't Americans feel insulted by the constant dumbing down?" One thing is that watching banal programming is an oblique compliment. I once worked for two years among a group of about 50 people who would probably be classified as geniuses, or close to it. Let me tell you, I ended up in a depression. Ads work by making people feel good about themselves (and you don't do that by making a person feel stupid). Then, out in the real world, filled with different, less comforting messages, the person tries to get that 'feel good' experience back again by buying the product.
And we ought to be smart enough to know that's not reality. America's fairy tale is about to get ugly.......and real.
Asks bythespirit: "Why don't Americans feel insulted by the constant dumbing down?" Answer: They are already dumb. ("You can't cheat an honest man," in the formulation of W.C. Fields.)
Sports competitions are useful as a harmless way to release testosterone energy without bloody wars while providing public entertainment. It doesn't follow that athletes know best. In fact, schools promote underachieving athletes routinely.
The Wall Street Journal had a front page article recently about a study that they did where they calculated actual play time in an average pro football game - from the time the ball is snapped by the Center to the moment the refs blow the whistle to end that play, and adding up all these 4-second plays totals 11 minutes for an entire game. No wonder the advertisers need to get creative and hold the American audience glued to the boob tube. I've been to Super Bowl parties where the people actually made everyone stop talking at the commercial breaks just so they can watch the commercials and not miss anything. How backwards is that? I'm so glad I live in San Diego. I'm going bicycle riding with my wife and girls on Super Bowl Sunday and enjoy the empty boardwalk along the beach on what no doubt will be a lovely day.
I love football but rarely watch it. Sometimes I think thats because when I was 10 we used to sneak under the fence on Friday nights and watch our local high school team work its way to a state championship, FROM THE SIDELINES, next to the players. My friday nights are filled with images in yellow and black (yellow being the stadium lights), and the unique sounds and smells of athletes in battle.
Nothing on the boob tube has ever remotely come close.
In fact ubrew12 that's what TV has done to all sports. It has turned them all from athletic events into TV shows. I got the chance to actually watch two great baseball pitchers from different eras (Tom Seaver and Robin Roberts) pitch a game at the stadiums where they played the actual game.
I remember sitting in the upper deck behind third base for both games and hearing the pop of their fast balls in the catcher's mitt. Long about the 6th inning or so both pitchers would audibly groan and grunt from the strain of major league pitching for a couple or three hours as they served up their good stuff to the hitters.
Coaches would move fielders around depending on what pitch was next, who was on base, the count on the hitter, or the score of the game. I remember sitting there and trying to figure out the strategies of both managers and constantly looking around all over the field to see what was going on everywhere.
If you tune in a baseball game on TV and you see none of that which make up the more subtle nuances of the game. It is as boring as watching grass grow. All you see pretty much is the pitcher, the hitter, and ump. Every pitch is instantly replayed and all the camera does is follow the ball. No wonder most people find baseball boring when their only experience with it is watching it on TV. Football, hockey, and basketball, are the same way.
Poet
"Super Bowl Sunday is America's holiest day"
Oh, this is so true. It's bigger than Christmas, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Easter and your birthday all rolled into one. The streets are empty. While the pre-pregame show and the pregame show and then the game itself followed by the postgame and post-postgame shows are on, you can lie down on Main Street and not worry one bit about being run over. It all looks like the last scene from "On The Beach".
I'm TELLIN' my grandchildren!
Wow! I'm blown away by all this negative commentary.
I hate corporate america as much, maybe more, than the next guy. But you know what? The Super Bowl is an opportunity to watch a (usually) good football game and some very remarkable athletes. Get drunk! Laugh at stupid commercials.
Its a break from all the bullshit of the real world for me.
And for that reason, I do not want an anti-abortion commercial during the game.
This item reminded me of why I like the mute button and how long it's existed. The stat of 11 minutes of actual "play" is really great, which provides a lot of incentive to record the game and watch it later, as I just did with the figure skating championship, and will certainly do with the Olympics.
Read and weep dept. Says author Lipsyte: "Super Bowl Sunday is America's holiest day, our all-inclusive campfire, and with 100 million viewers, almost half of them women, about as close as we get, without a presidential election, to taking the national pulse. The ads tell us who we are and where we are going." --Add this to the obituary of the American small-"r" republic. Anybody who watches the Super Bowl is an idiot. Anybody defined by ads is entirely devoid of civic virtue. Author Lipsyte's narrative is positively emetic.
Perhaps we could unleash some of this creativity to counter corporate money/power relationships and militarism.
One site that attempts this is adbusters.org. Some of its adds for which they could pay were refused air time by the mainstream media.
"Mickey Mantle makes a hundred thousand dollars a year, how much does your father make? See if your father can't pay the rent, go ask Mickey Mantle and see what he tells you. Mickey Mantle don't care about you, so why should care about him?"
From A Bronx Tale
Yeah, and Al Kaline turned down a hundred thousand a year , because it was too much money for a baseball player!
I wish they would call this game by some other name since the foot is rarely used to kick the ball. Seriously, people, I understand how it's part of the culture and how it's the perfect setting to get drunk with the buddies and all that, but it's also the perfect example of a wasteful culture. Before a player can make it to an NFL team, he has to go through his high school and university teams. And for every player that makes it to NFL, there must be thousands that don't. When schools and colleges are so short of money for the real job of teaching and research, it's obvious that some of the resources spent on football could be useful for something else. Other students have to shell out extra in fees to pay for the football team. Football players are starting to be obese even at the high school level - at percentages much higher than the national average for that age group. There are claims and counter-claims regarding the health of football players post-retirement. I can't imagine all that bulking up is going to help, unless they make some serious turnaround.
I'm not against sports - that would be too stupid to take such a position. I'm just saying to stop for a moment and think what it takes to run a football team. All of these resources that go into football - all the way up to the Super Bowl - have to come from the same society that is struggling to meet more essential needs. If you think the top 1% of the population controls so much wealth, which way do you think the wealth is flowing during Super Bowl? And what exactly do you get in return?
Bull dookey, I dont believe for one minute doctors advised pam tebow to abort her baby just because she was sick.
I know plenty of doctors that would not recommend abortion unless the mothers life was in danger.
What Doctor, name him/her. This is a bunch of crap for Christians to proclaim that women should not play God with their body's, but Christians can tell you what they think is wrong or right for you, they can play God.
Until Christians start protesting these wars, in mass, they have no credibility on the abortion issue.
Thats my , un Christian opinion on their wanting to exercise their will on women.
I think this wins the thread.
Even if a doctor DID really "recommend" or "advise" termination, does that mean it was "doctor's orders" as it is being presented?
And even given THAT, was this an AMERICAN DOCTOR?
She was in the Phillipines right?
What the hell do we care what doctors in a FOREIGN COUNTRY do or don't advise their patients to do?
But I'm with you, I sure its straight B.S. and that these seperate questions don't even apply.
-matti.
Protest Christians!
This Stupor Bowl will be all about how we are going to PRETEND we aren't totally hosed economically, politically and environmentally for a few more years. Remember the fleets of black GM SUV's featured in past Super Bowl commercials? Who knew they were a funeral procession for that very company. Likewise anything you see advertised will be ringing the bell one last time before taking a dirt nap just like our national prospects.
There was a very old science fiction tale called "The Marching Morons" that cautions about what happens to people who believe advertising.
How in the hell is a TV show watched by only ONE THIRD of the population (100 mil out of a rough 300) "all-inclusive"?!?!?!?
By this standard ALL of the members of the Senate, and almost all of the members of the house belong to the GOP!!
Remember the last time that you were handed one taco when you ordered the three taco combo, and you couldn't complain because it was "all-inclusive"?
If we are going to pretend that everybody watches this silly sports show, maybe we shouldn't toss out a number that is 2/3rds short of "everybody" for its viewership, huh?
-matti.
Beer commercials are the worst. When I was a senior in high school I did a presentation on them and how ludicrous they were in presenting drunken fantasies come to life.
I'm so sick of Danica Patrick. I thought she was supposed to be about "girl power." Instead she teaches young women that manipulating the male libido is a key to prosperity.
As male, I find the commercials insulting, as if I'm supposed to be just like the slobbering idiots in the adverts.
I could go on and on about commercials and how they offend my sensibilities. They treat most of us, men and women, like children.
And some of them are so INANE! Someone who knew someone who grew up rich got a job where they write stupid ads all day, making shitloads of money!
I could write better ads than these people. I rewrite them in my head all the time.
Saturnalia-I just watch the Penguins. I think it's a legit sport, but the fights are a joke to me. Any amateur boxer or MMA fighter would knock any hockey goon out cold in a real fight.
What I enjoy about hockey is the finesse, speed, and accuracy of the players.
Activia and Detrol commercials drive me up the wall. Ugh. They treat women like little girls who are embarassed about everything.
"Aw poor girl. She's running to the bathroom again."
And of course, like men in Advert Land are supposed to be overgrown grade-schoolers who are fat, drool over every woman they see, and drink like fish, women are supposed to be cute in everything they do. They're all slim and mature also and talk like kindergarten teachers.
"I think the main point is that a goal in Hockey is often more a matter of luck than skill, and true sport should be contests of skill, or physical endurance, not luck."
You have to be pretty accurate to get it past a goalie. Watch a goal in slow motion sometime.
"I have been curious what the energy usage and carbon-footprint an ice rimk is? The refrigeration gear is pretty massive."
How about a stadium, a ball park, an arena?
Hockey's a legit, albeit unglamorous sport.
thegreatrockyhill, are you sure you want to compare the carbon footprint of hockey with that of other sports? I don't have the numbers, but I can get back to you in a few weeks.
You don't need a stadium to play soccer - that's for spectators. You just need a flat surface. Sure, it takes energy, water and resources to maintain the grass or astroturf. So let's include that too. For basketball, you just need the hoops on a board, and a flat surface. We are talking about *ordinary* people playing these sports. Even if you take indoor basketball, all you need is lighting, heating and ventilation. But these would be there for hockey too. PLUS the energy for the refrigeration. Unless you play ice hockey outdoors on natural ice. I am willing to bet that ice hockey is *ONE OF THE MOST* wasteful sports in terms of resources consumed per player per hour of play - if you are going to compare what it takes to maintain a playing area - for ordinary people. So don't tell me about indoor skiing in Dubai (everyone knows how "smart" that is) - we are talking about regular people playing sports.
Let me know if you are interested in taking up the challenge - because I have to set aside some time to collect the data :)
BTW, who's saying hockey is unglamorous? It is actually 'elitist' in a way - although you may not agree. Only somewhat rich countries have this game (ice hockey). Soccer, basketball, etc. can be played - and they *are* played - in any poor country. We are talking about hockey rinks - that require lots of energy to run. Like I said, playing hockey on natural ice in the outdoors is totally different and we are not talking about that. And the hotter the outdoor temperature, the more energy it would take - like in southern USA.
Alcyon-It's ALL consumptive. I understand what you're both saying though. It's not something most people think about when they watch hockey. NASCAR's even worse in that regard for obvious reasons I think. BUT, we could develop ways to power everything that aren't at all dirty and wasteful.
You can play hockey on roller blades on concrete.
I wish that soccer was more popular in The States. I always liked playing it as a kid. People don't seem to get it around here. It's too much activity and not enough scoring for a lot of people.
Haha, right. Too much activity and not enough scoring. Maybe they should change the rules, so every goal in soccer gets 7 points or something. I know what you mean. Some people obviously imagined bringing David Beckham could increase the popularity of the game. I don't know what they were thinking.
"Professional" sports is *ALL* about money - and sports is only incidental. I have read occasionally about the history of some sports promotions by businessmen, how they created the hype, etc. This is especially true for hockey - where I think just a handful of businessmen turned it into a business venture by building indoor rinks, forming a league, and so on. While I used to treat them as historical curiosities, recently I've been thinking that there's a clear pattern to it all.
The book "Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games" by Christopher Shaw goes into some detail about the big racket that is the "Olympic Movement" - especially the IOC, which doesn't even pay taxes anywhere. Reading this book has made me look at 'innocuous-sounding' news items with suspicion, which I might have missed otherwise. Essentially, such entities go where the money is. Or where the suckers are. It's Canada's turn this time to get stuck with the huge bill for hosting the Vancouver Olympics, while some developers obviously will make money. Americans should be glad that Chicago missed out on its bid for 2016. Now the IOC chief wants to promote a "junior olympics". They obviously want to milk newly developing countries with a bit of disposable income and that are desperate to do things that'll allow them to prove "they have arrived" - before they wake up to these scams. You mentioned Nascar. I've been watching Formula-1, too. I mean, the role that money plays there. So while some Canadians are upset that Formula-1 might drop Canada (I guess Montreal?), some Indians are excited that they may get to have their own race there - not realizing that it's their money that the organizers want. I think if the junior olympics thing goes ahead, China may be the first to host - I haven't been keeping up with it much. I remember when the restriction on professional athletes participating in the Olympics was removed. I was also one of those excited by that move by the IOC, and I remember watching the US "dream team" on TV for the first time. Great stuff - at that time, until I realized that it was all about money, and all about keeping the ratings high. And that Spanish man - the IOC chief at that time, Samaranch - is also mentioned in this book on Olympics, and there was some mention about his father's connection with the Franco regime. So, the more you learn about these things, the less "clean" they look, and the more you start noticing how it's all about money and power.
I've never been a huge fan of pro sports, which sometimes alienates me from other guys. It's not only the money, but pro sports are so racialized. You have some sports that are mostly white, others that are mostly black, and people use that to reinforce stereotypes. Then you have some people that will look down on certain sports because of their make-up. Some people think they're supposed to hate basketball, others think they're supposed to hate skateboarding, as if there can't be sports for everyone. Not everyone's huge, strong, or tall, or fast. Some people are small and light.
I mainly just watch for the local teams. I like to see them win since I think it's always good for my city. I also like to watch MMA and boxing here and there.
The Olympics SUCK. I refuse to watch the Empire Games.
I'll have to read A People's History of Sports. I've already read Zirin's Welcome To The Terrordome.
Here's a commercial for the 2011 Super Bowl. A despondent out of work young couple offering up their first born son/daughter to the US Military, Industrial Complex knowing that if their child survives eight years of combat in the war on whatever,(stop lossed of course) they might be allowed to go to college, and have a better life!