Every Minute Of Every Super Bowl There Ever Was

I've seen it. I have never missed one minute of any Super Bowl, even from before it was ever called a "Super Bowl".

When Vince Lombardi's Packers played the Chiefs in the first "AFL-NFL Championship Game" on January 15, 1967 things were slightly... different. Besides me being 14, that is. (EDIT TO ADD: Yes I know that's a picture of George Halas not Vince Lombardi, Mr. smartass with the email. It's a picture on a blog, not an article in an encylopedia.)

• Coaches wore a tie with their sport coat or suit. Some came in three-piece suits. Most wore hats, not caps. The coaching staff was 1/4 the size it is now and they did not all wear matching team shirts or sweaters as if they were from some Christian men's bowling league from Rancho Cucamonga. Team logos and "team wear" existed on jackets - maybe - and you mostly had to be on the team to get one. There were no stores dedicated to silly knock-offs of team colored shit you could waste your money on. Once in a while you could find a sweatshirt at a store somewhere. Mostly you had to be at the game to find them.
  
• Things were just different. Coaches swore at everybody and did not much care if they were "relating" to their players. They were not your Mommy. It's an order, not a suggestion.
  
• It wasn't over-analyzed by 47 guys back at the station and down the sidelines shoving microphones in the faces of guys who are exhausted, pissed off and probably have bad breath because they've been running around sweating and drinking that putrid gatorade garbage. It's football, dumbass, not rocket surgery.
  
• There were no End Zone Dances, and there was no Jumping Up In Front Of The Camera after you made a routine tackle. There was celebration, and guys had their fun. But it didn't go to chest-thumping, head-wagging apeman walks so the camera follows you after you make a play. It wasn't that people were more polite to one another back then. This kind of thing didn't happen because if you did them, the next time you were under a pile three guys from the other team would stick their fists up your ass, pull your colon out, and feed it to you when the refs weren't looking. You'd be the recipient of every kind of cut block imaginable (aimed at your knees) and nobody would hide the fact that they were trying to end your career so you could go sell shoes instead. If you were a "Showboat" you were a dead man. It was "self-policed".
  
• The commercials were when you got up for a beer or to take a leak. Commercials, no matter how creative, were always best when they were avoided. Strictly because they were commercials. And watching commercials is actually pretty stupid because all it is is somebody trying to get you to buy something. They are still what they were, but people like them now - which is stupid. So much has the culture changed that there are people now watching the Super Bowl strictly because of the commercials; where that would have been a laughable thing to be doing in the past. Because they're trying to sell you something. And we didn't want to listen to some crap about shaving cream or beer. We wanted to see the game. Hurry up and get that shit off my TV.
  
• The only women who watched the game were the cool ones. Women who understood and watched the game for the game were always somehow cool and even a little mysterious. This was, remember, still the age of the Friday Night Fights brought to you by Gillette from Madison Square Garden where you sat next to your Dad at the neighborhood tavern and watched "the boys" beat each other senseless. So your Mom and your sister were off somewhere else and they didn't bother anybody with stupid questions or root for the commercials. It was a guy thing, with a handful of very cool women on the periphery, and it was about football. Not mercantilism.
  
• There was a rarefied aspect to the match-up. This is a concept not many people get anymore. Because everybody can play anybody during the "regular season" there isn't the same kind of uniqueness as there was when two teams who represent completely separate leagues squared off in a final championship. Inter-league play is novel and fun in baseball, for example, but it tends to reduce the weight of the World Series just a little. There isn't any "our league and their league" schoolyard mentality as much as there was. Same thing in football. It used to be the American League against the National League, and the American League was a bunch of upstart young owners who stole these players from the National League who always considered themselves better and more established and it was a whole paradigm. Now it's all one big league and it's just two teams with different schedules.
  
• The half time shows were marching bands that made stupid shapes on the field. Which was an extended opportunity to make a sandwich or boil up some hot dogs. It didn't consist of has-beens like The Who or over-rated posers like Bruce Springsteen punctuated by retired football players with their what it is you were just watching the previous two quarters crap and "what. they. must. do. to. win" in the next two quarters nonsense.
  
• "And the home of the brave" had six syllables, not 127.

Don't get me wrong. I like buying the squares to try and win some money, and being with a crowd of people having a good time, and plowing into virtual mountains of beer-and-finger-food all day long. It's just that more and more I hear less and less about football, which is a guilty pleasure of mine, and have to wade through an ocean of bullshit with stuff that has nothing to do with the game.

Now get me a beer and shut the hell up.

Do You Want It Long And Slow Or Short And Furious?

Saying the subject or genre was something you liked...

What are the chances you would ever read a book that had traditional chapters and went on for over 1200 pages? Saying the writing was good but it just went on forever. Or maybe a better question is would you even start something like that?

Do you find yourself reading in smaller "bites"? What do you think multi-tasking across a range of technology has done to our attention spans? Would you have an easier time convincing yourself to start a book that was ponderously large like that but presented in one and two paragraph "hits" or contained sparse lines of dialog? Does it matter if you open a book and see blocks of dense text looking back at you - and would that dissuade you from reading or even starting it? Saying you'd read it if it was an author you liked, would you try it from an author you hadn't ever heard of?

Do you find yourself saying you don't have "time" to read?

When you read, if you read, do you have the television on? Is your laptop nearby and turned on? Phone handy? Do you accept interruptions from these devices and then head right back into the book or do you find yourself distracted, having lost your place?

How do you read? Is it only something you do in bed now? Did you ever sit under a lamp, not in the bedroom, and purposefully read just to read, say with a cocktail handy but nothing else?

If books were well written in short "bites" and still progressed a story in an engaging way would you be more likely to read it? To pick it up at the bookstore or online after previewing it?

Are you willing to pick up a book where the author doesn't always follow the rules or makes her/his own? Especially if that would force you to pay more attention to what they're doing with the artform? Or would you simply not even start something that might present that kind of thing? Would you continue if a book of 5 or 600 pages started like this...

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

Would you keep reading? Would you feel you could devote the time to get into that? Even if it gets still more of the same later? Reading that just now - do you see something like that as overwhelmingly, impossibly obscure or as something that looks humorous?

How do we read? What do we read? Are we shortening our attention spans? Have we convinced ourselves we can concentrate on three things at once and get something of quality out of them all?

Will John return to Mary? Will Tannenbaum find the bomb in time? Will Spikey find his dog, or Olivia her groove?

It's Snowing And I Need To Harvest My Crops

• I know someone who lost at Farmville.
  
• Speaking of Facebook, I'm amazed at how many people I've cut the feeds off from. Some people aren't as interesting in one place as they are in another.
  
• I got sucked into once again working on our reunion committee. This is two high school reunions in a row. I'm not sure how this happened. Again. I spent the last two years of high school tripping my brains out with people who didn't even live in my town, seriously avoiding school functions, and when I graduated I skipped the commencement ceremony altogether and spent the day doing something I can't even recall. The lettermen and jocks thought I was a commie scumbag (we're talking Viet Nam era, folks), the car mechanic muscle heads bought dope from me, and not a small number of parents of girls my age lived in open fear that their daughter would show up with me. I actually knew two young women whose parents ordered them to never have anything to do with me. I was alternately just stupid, seen to be mean, a closet gay, a raging deviant, a pot-head, a "nigger-lover", or just another dippie-hippie on any given day - depending on whatever fear my critic was vocalizing about themselves at the time. I'd blame Facebook for this reunion thing except the last reunion found me helping as well and ten years ago I wasn't on Facebook. So I dunno wtf.
  
• I got MacSpeech Dictate a couple of weeks ago and I think I'll do a product review of it. Period. I use it for my writing and it's a lot of fun. Period. New Paragraph. It takes a while to learn the commands. Period. And it doesn't swear very well. Period. But from what I understand the more you use it the more you "train" it to understand you. Period. Well maybe not the swears. Period. And yes that link takes you to the product that, if you buy it, I get a cut of. What?
  
• Yesterday I made a dinner I invented. Some orange bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, some sliced mushrooms, a bit of red onion, chopped garlic, a can of stewed tomatoes (with the juice), oregano, and broccoli florets all warmed up in some olive oil in a pan poured over some whole wheat spaghetti and sprinkled with Romano cheese. I'm sure that has a name and I didn't really "invent" it, per se, except that I just did it as an ad lib instead of reading a recipe. It was good. Gaining confidence in the cooking area I guess.
  
• It's snowing. It'll be pretty for the next two hours. Then we'll drive on it and ruin it. I think when it snows there ought to be a law that says you can't drive cars on it. Everybody just stay home and let the kids make snowmen out back while you and the wife/husband/mate/friend with benefits sit around and drink all day. Then I'll make that pasta thing.
  
• I think about the people who will be on earth when the sun blows up. They say that's millions of years from now and so what do we care. I don't actually care and I'm not losing any sleep. But - what about the folks that are here then? What do they do? Yeah hopefully technology saves them and they migrate and terraform - or have already done that. But, geez, what about those folks? Poor fuckers.
  
• The stuff on my iPod is not making any sense lately. Lately I've been on a Motown kick (yes, again) and added some Smokey Robinson. But then I went and got some English Beat. But I couldn't stop with that, and pulled in some Lenny too. Yeah, I know, wtf once again, right?
  
• Yeah that's all I got.