The Stupor Bowl
Yesterday I eschewed the twelve hour pre-game marathons of coverage leading up to the championship game so I missed all the heart-warming rags-to-riches success stories, the riches-to-rags cautionary tales, and the miscellaneous blather used to pad out hour after hour of build-up towards the actual on-field portion of the program.
The first half commercials were almost universally awful. I shouldn’t have paid attention to the commercials yet it is now impossible not to. Somehow, the marketing around the game has snaked into the game itself like a case of ringworm- it’s now embedded too deeply, distending our bellies with talking horses, koalas being punched in the face, and a frightening digital Alec Baldwin demonstrating how TV melts our brains even as we are powerless to stop it. That last spot was too real to be unreal, George Orwell’s “1984″ become so manifest it was rendered unbelievable even as it was crushingly true.