Your Official Drinking Game for the 2016 Super Bowl

Tags

beyonce, bud bowl, carolina panthers, coldplay, denver broncos, national football league, NFL, peyton manning, roger goodell, Super Bowl

• For each player who has been arrested on the night before the big game, take a drink.

• For each shot of a head coach pacing the sidelines in his officially licensed team gear, headphones and haircut, take a drink.

• For every mention of “The coveted Lombardi Trophy,” take a drink.

• Each time a beer commercial features an adult male getting hurt or humiliated, take a drink.

• When the camera pans in on a pale, grey-haired team owner and his trophy wife peering down at the game from their luxury box, take a drink.

• When the camera shows Roger Goodell in his luxury box, take a drink, take a knee and say a quick prayer thanking your Creator that you have year-round media coverage of the NFL to look forward to for the rest of your life.

• Each time the announcers speculate on whether or not this will be Peyton Manning’s final game, take a drink.

• Take a drink each time Peyton Manning cries out “Omaha!”

• Take a drink each time Peyton Manning throws an interception. Take two drinks if it is a “pick-six.”

• Whenever the color analyst mentions “good penetration,” “red zone,” or “taking it to the hole,” take a drink and exchange a knowing smirk with your significant other.

• For every commercial featuring horses, babies or puppy dogs, take a drink and keep a Kleenex handy to dab the grateful tears from your eyes.

• This year’s halftime entertainment will be Coldplay, Beyonce, and a “special guest.” If that secret performer turns out to be U2, slam the rest of your drink. If it turns out to be Taylor Swift, slam your drink and the drink of the person sitting next to you.

• For every commercial making a “statement” about a Serious National Concern like child obesity or rickets or binge drinking, take a drink and complain about how you don’t need to be reminded of this shit during the Super Bowl.

• Take a drink each time someone in the room reminisces fondly about the Bud Bowl.

• When the celebratory cooler of Gatorade is dumped on the winning head coach, take one drink if the liquid looks orange, and two drinks if it has more of a reddish tint.

• After the game and the locker room interviews and the post-game analysis, take two Advils and maybe take a walk around your neighborhood in the brisk night air. Tomorrow’s a working day, and you’ve got to be up by six in the morning.

A Few Words About Ice

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2002, atlanta, ice storm, kansas city, Super Bowl, winter

Fears of widespread power outages came to fruition as the ice and snow storm that forecasters have been warning about for days pounded metro Atlanta and the northern half of the state.

More than 168,000 Georgia Power customers had lost electricity by 1 p.m., with service already being restored to some 48,000 of those customers. At 4 p.m., Georgia Power reported about 131,000 customers currently without power.

– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (or AJC.com, or whatever else they’re calling it these days)

My home state of Georgia is getting slugged with its second winter storm in three weeks, and this one looks to be even worse than the last. Ice storms are unusual even in the frigid Midwest. I remember the last big ice storm we had in Kansas City, and I hope the one this week in Atlanta doesn’t have the same resounding effects as the one we endured.

It was late January 2002. My wife and I had been married for five months, and were still getting used to living together. Then, The Storm happened, starting innocently enough on a Tuesday morning with a little sleet and ice, nothing to get too excited about. Except that it kept coming down, all through the day and into the night, until the tree branches outside our home sagged painfully low, each limb perfectly encased in a full inch of crystal.

We woke up the next morning without power. The house was freezing, and the bathroom filled up with steam when we turned on the hot water. The streets were pretty slick, but my wife and I went to work. When we got home, there was still no power. It was still freezing, and the branches that sagged under the weight of all that accumulated ice were starting to snap. We huddled together under all the blankets we could pile on the bed that night, listening to the occasional cracks of branches collapsing all through our neighborhood. Then, a loud pop and a white flash right outside our window. A tree branch had hit a transformer, turning it into a sparkler from the Fourth of July. A few minutes later, we heard another blast. Then another one. The whole town was falling apart.

Long story short, we went without power for seven long days and nights. Our neighborhood looked like a war zone: power lines sagging almost to the ground, tree branches scattered everywhere. Utility workers and tree trimmers were disbursed throughout the city, and many workers came from out-of-town to help clean up and restore the power grid. When one of their trucks came through our area, my neighbors and I gathered around, peppering the poor workers with questions about when the streets would be cleared, when the power would be restored.

After three nights without light and heat, my wife and I stayed at a friend’s apartment across town. Then we got a nice, warm hotel room and watched Tom Brady and New England upset the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl (warning: beware of hotels that will price-gouge you during an ice storm). Then, we spent a night at a relative’s place. Finally, the power returned on a Tuesday. It was perhaps the happiest day for my wife and I since we came back from our honeymoon.

The storm lasted only 24 hours, but left its mark on our city for years to come. Thousands of trees collapsed or had to be cut down. Our leafy neighborhood looked almost bare the following spring, so many of its stately oaks were nothing more than foot-high stumps. It’s been 12 years since that ice storm. Unfortunately, it seems we are past due for another one.

Awww, Aren’t They Sweet?

Tags

advertising, budweiser, media, review, Super Bowl

The popularity of last night’s Budweiser commercial only proves what members of the media and advertisers have known for a long time: that cuddly puppies always sell. Team one up with Clydesdale horses, and you have what equates to marketing gold. Just forget the inconvenient fact that this ad has nothing at all to do with drinking beer.

God Made a Super Bowl

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ads, advertising, America, commercials, Dodge, Facebook, farmers, God, Paul Harvey, Ram, Super Bowl, Trucks

Without a doubt, the most polarizing TV commercial during this year’s Super Bowl was the Ram Truck ad in which the late Paul Harvey extols the virtues of the hard-working American farmer. I say this with great certainty because four of my Facebook friends deemed it post-able subject matter. Two of them liked the ad. Two of them didn’t. Therefore, I assume the entire country is at loggerheads about this, most likely along the usual red state/blue state dividing lines.

I have to say that I am a sucker for ads like this. And for the first time ever, I think I understand the appeal of Paul Harvey. His deliberate pauses and stoic delivery are perfectly matched with still shots of farmers tossing hay bales, walking through the wheat, looking at their gnarled hands or staring grimly at the camera (“So God made a farmer,” Harvey intones). Makes one proud to live in a country where a mere 2 percent of the population feeds the rest of us.

Still, the ad seems a little dated. Almost all the depicted farmers are weathered old white guys. There are a couple of women. One minority. No immigrant workers. No mention, either, of the corporations that own and operate many American farms. So the ad seemed incomplete. Also, it’s a little hard for me to imagine a farmer climbing down from his mammoth John Deere S-Series combine to mend a meadow lark’s broken leg, as Harvey describes. But I suppose it could have happened. It’s a nice bit of imagery, anyway.

What bugs me a little about the Farmer ad is what I also find disturbing about the Super Bowl: how the NFL and many of its sponsors wrap themselves in flag and country for much of the five-hour event. As if sports and patriotism are somehow irrevocably linked. As if the Super Bowl is this special holiday for us to take measure of ourselves as a nation. The NFL has exploited this connection since Whitney Houston sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl during the first Gulf War. Each year, it seems to get a little more heavy-handed. The Farmer ad is an artful continuation of that tradition – God, country, football and Ram Trucks.

Well, as long as GoDaddy.com doesn’t invoke the Creator, I guess we’ll be all right.