Twenty years ago, Troy Aikman (remember him?) and his troupe of Cowboys ran roughshod over the Bills, 52 to 17, at the Rose Bowl. This year, MVP Joe Flaccid and his Ravens sent the whiney Niners home, but it was close, 34 to 31.
Today, 20 years after "Groundhog Day" (1993), they played SuperBowl XLVII, which is 1) a lot of Groundhogs and 2) a lot of Bloody Marys. Quick aside: Andie MacDowell's breakout "Green Card" was a year behind her; "Four Weddings" a year ahead. Rare indeed is the woman who, like Maggie Smith, resurfaces decades after her "Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" to become a dowager countess, let alone a Dame, like Judi Dench.
Professional football players, like actresses, have a limited life. (Just ask Reggie Lewis.) In the meantime, it looked like the Hairball brothers--did I get that right?--were trying to turn an episode of "Family Feud" into something more serious. (Perhaps they should have sought sponsorship from Bed Bath & Beyoncé?)
Where was I? Oh, yes. Stumbling around Belltown on a Sunday afternoon, when the streets were running red with tomato juice, or maybe yellow with beer. At Henry & Oscar's Social Club, they've installed three new 72-inch flatscreens and hand out Game Day food and cocktail menus. At the bar, the $5.50 Seattle Slaw dog hits the big time. Alicia Keys does not lip-sync the National Anthem. A lot of women in black sing and dance their way through the halftime show, and the Superdome's electrical system gives out. The Niners start to claw their way back. An eternity of commercials, some modestly funny, some inexplicably flat. GoDaddy (nerd necking with a supermodel), TacoBell (oldsters party late-night) and plain old milk (The Rock goes to work) come closest to the right tone of detached bemusement.
Then comes a familiar voice, literally out of the past. Paul Harvey, dead for four years, was America's leading conservative spokesman, decades before Rush, uttering proclamations from the mountaintop every weekday at noon. Back in 1978, he gave the keynote at the Future Farmers of America convention. It was titled "So God Made a Farmer," and it resonated with unimpeachable authority. The folks at farms.com used a 283-word excerpt in a two-minute video that went viral, a million views in less than a month. The Richards Group, a Dallas-based ad agency for Chrysler Group LLC , quickly whipped the video into shape for broadcast. The client's name and product weren't shown until the final frame: a truck, a Dodge Ram.
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