Super Bowl Sunday

I watched the Super Bowl today. I don't really watch football, but I like to keep my dad company for the Super Bowl. My dad will watch football during the season, but his true love is baseball. But we watched. It was two East Coast teams, so we had no emotional investment in the outcome. We rooted for the New England Patriots rather than the New York Giants because, in baseball we will always root for anyone other than the New York Yankees, so we just transferred that principle to another sport. The Patriots lost however, but in a close game that seriously could have gone either way until the last couple minutes.

Watching the Super Bowl is a cultural event in the U.S. "Cultural" in the sense that it's part of our general, popular culture, not high-brow culture. You're supposed to watch the Super Bowl on TV with friends, while eating junk food and drinking beer. My dad and I ate a modest helping of junk food (chips and dip) and my dad had a beer.

You're also supposed to watch and rate the commercials. Super Bowl advertising is the most expensive advertising on TV, so advertisers sink a lot of money into the ads and hope to be the one everyone talks about "around the water cooler"--i.e. at work--on Monday. I was hoping that this year the commercials wouldn't be too gross, in the sense of grossly suggestive and loaded with sexual innuendo. That's kind of disgusting to watch, especially with one's elderly parents. Most were not too bad, except those for some kind of web service called go daddy.

My dad said that much of the time he doesn't understand the commercials and sometimes he can't even figure out what they're advertising. Most of them seemed to be advertising either cars or beer. One Honda commercial had actor Matthew Broderick doing a parody of his movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." When some of my co-workers talked about this one last week, I didn't bring up the fact that I've never seen that movie. I do know the general storyline and some of the better-known scenes. But my dad has never heard of it, so when the commercial ended I told him, "That whole commercial was a satire of a movie that actor was in that you've never seen." Dad shrugged.

The half -time show was a performance by Madonna. Madonna has been around a long time. Some of her music I don't mind hearing, but seeing her perform is distasteful. She's pretty much always gross in the sense of lewdly suggestive in her onstage antics, or if not lewd then offensive. She didn't reach the heights, or rather plumb the depths, attained by Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson a few years back, but after watching this 53-year-old do a few squats in front of the TV camera, I opted to take my dog for a walk in the fresh air. I don't know why the Super Bowl gets these rock stars whose schtick is lasciviousness. Who do they think is watching? I wish they would get entertainers that you could watch in the company of your grandma and your first-grader without cringing. Of course, even if I were alone, I'd probably cringe to watch Madonna.

I'm sick of the coarsening of our culture. Let's re-refine it instead of coarsening it.

But it was a good game and overall it was a pleasant afternoon because I was hanging out with my dad.