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   I am neither a big football fan nor an aficionado of most types of music. I lost interest in football when a bunch of overpaid footballers decided to protest their plight in life by kneeling for the national anthem before their games. It was then I decided that if they could not support our country, I could not support them by watching their games and supporting the advertisers that made their salaries possible. I do not go out of my way to listen to most musicians as I find modern music to be either boring or just plain bad. That is one of the problems with getting old. We get set in our ways and opinionated.

   I do make an exception to watching football and music for the Super Bowl. I must admit, I usually do not care about the outcome of the game as I know few of the players, but the commercials are usually entertaining and I have seen some halftime shows that were good. Companies generally put forth their best efforts to impress the huge audience they have watching the Super Bowl with commercials that draw attention to their products and remain memorable in the minds of viewers.

   This year, I found a couple of commercials memorable in the fact they were just weird. One had a talking seal with a human head that just looked freaky. I have no clue what they were advertising or what the talking seal was supposed to represent. A Nike commercial repeated such profound words as “you can’t win, so win.” I can just imagine a group of advertising executives sitting around a table with the boss coming up with this saying. Everyone else in the room is afraid to say it is just stupid, so this becomes the deeply meaningful saying for an expensive ad campaign. Budweiser usually has some entertaining or at least thought provoking ads. The only Budweiser I saw this year showed a young Clydesdale colt rolling a keg of beer from St. Louis to Topeka, Kansas or somewhere. Even the Bud commercial seemed rather lame. I will admit I did not see every commercial as I was busy at times cooking the traditional snack of chicken wings  and going outside to play ball with the dog at times.

   The half time show was no better than the commercials. It is not the performer’s fault that I had no idea who he is, but I immediately got the impression he thought he was very important. He apparently could not sing as he talked his way through the songs, and I could not understand a word he said. He spent a lot of time prancing around the stage talking to himself. I will admit to having a short attention span on things that do not interest me, and this performance did not interest me at all. The dog and I went outside and played ball again.

   I admit, I may be getting old and cynical, but the event seemed to be a flop. Eventually, everyone lost interest in the game, commercials, and performances. We resorted to playing cards and eating. The general consensus was that we would have had more fun cutting and splitting firewood. We would have at least had something to show for our time spent rather than wasting time watching the overly hyped Super Bowl. A bit of fresh air and exercise in the outdoors is always better than watching television, especially something as bad as this.

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