Letterman Super Bowl Ad

[Barry]

YouTube - Late Show With David Letterman Oprah Winfreh and Jay Leno Superbowl XLIV 2010 Commercial

[LenInSebastopol]

Thanks. Saw but couldn't hear it; was with a bunch of talkers and.....tough going for the best parts.

["Mad" Miles]

Hey Barry,

I watched "the game", even though I'm not a sports fan by any stretch of the imagination. Mostly I watched for the commercials, but I enjoyed the play, a nice tight contest and rooting for the Saints felt good. New Orleans, post-Katrina and all that.

I put a black enamel fleur de lis pin on the back of my panama hat last spring, as an homage to my one quarter French ancestry, but guys on the yard at The Q, as well as some of the cops, interpreted it as an homage to NOLA's home team. I assured everyone that it wasn't.

But a come from behind victory by the underdogs from the party capital of the world? Pretty sweet.

As for the commercials, I laughed once or twice, but what I really marked, in my cultural anthropologist mode, was the consistent theme of modern men being crushed by the weight of adult responsibility as enforced by the power of The Female.

Whether a comment about our post-feminist times, or just stereotypical male whining and posturing girl bashing, whatever the source, I kept wondering if being subjected to womens power was a real problem for average guys? Or just a trick the Budweiser ad writers use to crack jokes and wheedle average joes to tip back more bottles and cans of tasteless chemical brew vat swill?

Because of an offhand comment by the Sunday afternoon twang fest DJ on KPFA, I discovered the PUPPY (& KITTEN) BOWL!!!!

Man, that's some cute, hot play if I've ever seen any! Now I know what has been missing from my Super Bowl Sunday annual ritual and I feel complete!

I love driving mid-afternoon on Super Bowl Sunday. The roads are relatively deserted, and if the weather is right, like it was yesterday, there's a peaceful calm about the land that's just, refreshing.

At 3:15 p.m. the only group in La Rosa Market, Forestville's taqueria and Mexican restaurant, was a group of women, who I suspect, were enjoying each other's company away from their men who were at home, or somewheres else, glued to the tube and its annual ritual of machismo. They, the women, seemed to be having a real good time.

I enjoyed The Who at halftime. Great light show, creepy tumescent belly views of Pete Townsend's abdomen (anybody else remember his pedophilia scandal in 2003?), and a nostalgic seventies rock review. And before anybody gets too huffy, I fully acknowledge Peter Townsend as the creative genius and rock guitar god behind the seminal success of The Who. They/he pretty much wrote and performed the soundtrack of my early adolescence, along with The Beatles, of course!

It's pretty creepy to see a couple of guys in their mid sixties singing "Teenage Wasteland" (or whatever the songs title is). And wasn't the drummer the same actor from, what's that movie satire about bloated seventies stadium rock? Can't recall at the moment, The Ruggles? I know, "This Is Spinal Tap"! Talk about intertextuality as meta-irony!

But the not so subtle political commentary of "Don't Get Fooled Again" (or whatever the songs title is) was very interesting. Oftentimes during the "who's at fault" (sic.) debates on this board, for or against President Obama or whoever (just can't help myself!), I think of the line, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"Who Dat?!"

(Just discovered this riff, like I said, I am in no way a sports fan.)

"Mad" Miles

[pbrinton]

Not to be picky, but it should be "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (roughly, the more things change, the more they remain the same.)

By the way, while we are on the subject of fractured French, is anyone else as offended as I am by Champs de Elysees as a street name in Forestville? First of all, it is just Champs Elysées (Elysian Fields) with no "de". But even if "de" were correct, it would be elided before the E (d'); except for the fact that Elysées, if it were a noun, would be plural, so it would be "des". In other words, they could not even get it wrong right. Sigh.

Patrick Brinton

Plus ca change, plus ca le meme choses

["Mad" Miles]

Patrick,

Pick away!

I've corrected my egregious error. My French sucks, I don't know the grammar, spelling or syntax. That's what you get with five months in a squat south of Paris and the first semester of beginning a couple of years before that in summer session. Oh yeah, five weeks traveling around Spain and Portugal with a couple of French anar-enviros in the back of a Volkswagon Bug a month or so before joining the Centre Autonome et Experiment Social in Ris-Orangis.

I live on "Shawmps" as we say here in F'Ville. Since I moved here in November of '04, I've wondered about the street names in this little riverside puppy pile of old vacation houses from the twenties and thirties. Chateau Thierry, Champs de Elysses (it was first testily pointed out to me that the Grande Boulevard in Paris has no "de" in its name, by a cashier in the Rincon Valley Oliver's, and yes, I knew Elysses should be spelled Elysées. Did you know that the spelling on the street signs doesn't match the spelling in the county property records?), Verdun, etc. I even asked a couple of years ago at the Youth Park BBQ Historical Society booth, but nobody seems to know how this came about.

My theory is that a bunch of WWI vets started building their summer vacation homes, and decided to pay homage to their glory days surviving trench warfare in the Big One. No doubt their French was as idiosyncratic as mine, hence the "miss"-spelling. Like I said, just a theory.

What any of this has to do with superbowl ads is ... nothing! I did just read a couple of entries in the XX Slate.com blog about how misogynistic many of the ads were, but I already mentioned that in my previous shotgun response.

I suppose there's some comfort in the fact they weren't French-bashing. That seems to be a stupid national pastime that is in abeyance, for the moment.

Zut!

"Mad" Miles