Tag Archives: Football

My favorite Super Bowl commercial

Super Bowl commercials tend to scream at you, both literally and metaphorically. So a quiet, subtle commercial like the one Google aired is easy to miss. (The Focus on the Family commercial, for all the fervor preceding it, was also easy to miss.)

Luckily I didn’t miss the Google commercial. It was simple, and simply brilliant. Maybe it’s because I have a life-changing event in my own past that is at least partially traceable to a Google search, but I think the message here is powerful and moving: in the Internet age, profound events in your life can stem from things you find online. And what better way to find things online than Google?

My favorite moments are “What are truffles?” followed by “Who is Truffaut?” and when the user changes “Long distance relationship advice” to “Jobs in Paris.” It’s silly, I know, but I start to tear up at that one.

What other crazy stuff has been happening in professional sports while I wasn’t looking?

It’s true: I pay very little attention to professional sports of any kind. It’s not that I don’t like them, I’m just usually not that interested. I used to be; I collected baseball cards in middle school, and my peak of interest in pro sports conveniently coincided with “my” Minnesota Twins winning the World Series for the first time ever, in 1987.

Since then, it’s been all downhill. I was excited about the Vikings in 1998, only to be let down by Gary Anderson’s only missed field goal of the year, in the NFC Championship game. I watched the Twins’ tiebreaker game against the White Sox this year, only to be let down yet again by a team that has an incredible knack for falling ever-so-slightly short, again and again. Perhaps this “always the bridesmaid” trait common amongst the Minnesota pro teams is what makes it hard for me to be a sports fan. But more likely, I’m just not that interested, and that’s all there is to it. These days the only professional sports I actually get excited about watching are Wimbledon and the Olympics, and their relative infrequency probably contributes to my enthusiasm.

Yet, I am still drawn in by unexpected developments, like the Steelers’ 11-10 win this week. I knew that was a weird score, and I thought it was cool when I learned that out of the over 12,000 NFL games played in the league’s history to date, this was the first ever to end with that score.

But this fact still caught me totally off guard. I was reading kottke.org this morning and he just casually mentioned that the Seattle Supersonics had moved to Oklahoma City. To quote Dave McFly, “When the hell did this happen?” This year, apparently, and I had no clue.

Oh well.