Super Bowl XLVII: Lights Out for Today’s Nihilistic Pop Culture
Super Bowls are as much about what happens off the field as what happens on. In an era of media demassification, when everyone has his favorite blog or Internet chat forum, the Super Bowl is one of the last events that nearly everyone watches, at least on some level. And discusses the next day at work (or in their favorite Internet chat forum. Or on their blog, come to think of it…)
What happens off the field can tells us much about the state of our shared culture. You can call it “pop culture,” but today, all of American culture is pop culture. For a start, compare the most recent halftime performers — The Who, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and last night, Beyoncé, with some of the performers at the first Super Bowls: Carol Channing, Ella Fitzgerald, Woody Herman, Charley Pride, Mercer Ellington (Duke’s son), Pete Fountain, and Al Hirt. Those early performers were grown-ups; today’s are perpetual adolescents.
Back in the mid-1970s, when each Super Bowl seemed to alternate between low-scoring ball control snoozers and lopsided mismatched blowouts, someone once quipped something along the lines of, “Let’s finally have a Super Bowl the pre-game show would be proud of.”*
The competitive nature of most recent Super Bowls inverts that formula: given the quality of the play on the field last night, it would be nice to finally see a pop culture that lived up to game on the field.
Whatever caused the interminable half-hour power outage, it will serve as countless metaphors for writers looking to place yesterday’s game into perspective. My initial take, immediately after the game concluded, is how utterly exhausted today’s pop culture feels. The power’s out; the electrical bill has come due; nihilism’s dark shroud has descended upon America’s pop culture.
But cultural trends often marinate for a long period before bubbling to the top; much of what we saw last night was the result of decades of cultural stagnation or regression.
During the pregame show, I saw 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick’s adopted mother complaining about the recent Drudge-linked article by AOL sportswriter David Whitley on her son’s body of green ink. She complained about how unfair this sportswriter was, given what a nice young man her son is, and all that he’s accomplished. But I was reminded of Jonah Goldberg’s observation that while people always say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, until actually reading the book, the cover is the clearest indication of the author’s intent. If Kaepernick is attempting to push back against 500 years or so of conventional wisdom that tattoos are déclassé and reflect an obsession with nostalgie de la boue, that seems a rather curious decision for a player whose position as QB makes him the most visible member of his team.
Not to mention how worn-out the idea is. I remember when tattoos went from being the province of middle-aged men who had survived World War II and picked up a tat on the night before they hit the beach in Normandy, and began to be worn on the arms (or butts, in Cher’s case) of “transgressive” pop stars. That was in the late ’70s and early 1980s, thirty years ago.
Almost 50 years ago, when Henry Luce was phasing out his day-to-day involvement in Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, the magazine empire he founded, Time magazine decided to echo the words of Friedrich Nietzsche from 1882, and asked “Is God Dead?” Given that Luce’s parents were Christian missionaries to China at the start of the 20th century, this is a particularly rich question, one that would foreshadow both the American culture’s atomization at the close of the 1960s, and Time magazine’s increasing alienation from its subscriber base.
But if God still had a faint pulse left in 1966, Sports Illustrated seemed determined to finish Him off this past week, as Andrew Klavan wrote yesterday, linking to SI’s cover story — a cover that featured Ray Lewis arising from the sea, hands placed together in prayer, and the above-the-mast-headline, “Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?”
Organized prayer is made to sound like a conspiracy. Statements like “Football corrupts its fans” are thrown out without any proof whatsoever. And then there’s the fourth rate theology: “The Bible is clear that [God] preferred the loser.” Mr. Oppenheimer has a PHD in American religious history so really, he might want to read the Bible sometime.
Well, I could go on, but why bother? I’ve chronicled SI’s Lord-o-phobia before. And Oppenheimer is entitled to his shallow opinion. My point is only that it’s not journalism, or interesting, or even vaguely worth reading. I would love to read a well-reported, balanced article about the problems of mixing faith and sports as I would be interested in intelligent debate about Title IX and whether the damage it does to boys’ sports outweighs whatever good it does, if any, for girls. But you will never find that in SI today.
All you get here are leftists telling leftists how to think leftily about leftism. Which is a waste of everyone’s time. Especially when what you’re trying to do is find out about your favorite sport.
Screw em. Sports Illustrated officially stinks now. Cancel my subscription.
Of course, SI has been politicized for some years now, as every sportswriter seems determined to be a wannabe political pundit, determined to destroy any sense of what Jay Nordlinger of National Review calls “safe zones — i.e., spheres free of partisan politics.”
But SI’s railing against the heavens aside, perhaps God has quite a well-developed sense of humor, given the power outage in the Superdome last night immediately after halftime and brilliant 108 yard kickoff return for a TD by the Ravens’ Jacoby Jones. In the NFL, if a player spikes the ball before reaching the end zone, the ref will throw his yellow flag and punish his team with a five-yard penalty. Similarly, as the Weekly Standard noted last night, the Superdome blackout was preceded by more than a little premature gloating from the Obama Energy Department.
Last week, in a blog post titled, “Super Bowl City Leads on Energy Efficient Forefront,” the Energy Department touted the Superdome’s lights. The Superdome, in New Orleans, is hosting tonight’s Super Bowl, where a power outage stopped play for more than half an hour.
“While the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers compete to hoist the Vince Lombardi trophy this weekend, eco-friendly fans and city leaders in New Orleans are competing to maximize sustainability practices to the fullest,” wrote John Horst, a public affairs specialist with the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
To make this the greenest Super Bowl, the New Orleans Host Committee has partnered with fans and the community to offset energy use across the major Super Bowl venues. The exterior of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome features more than 26,000 LED lights on 96 full-color graphic display panels, designed to wash the building in a spectrum of animated colors, patterns and images. The system draws only 10 kilowatts of electricity — equivalent to the amount of energy used by a small home — and the lights are expected to last for many years before needing replacement.
The Energy Department bragged, “Embracing energy efficiency and renewable energy is having a profound impact on attracting developers and private industry in the New Orleans’ re-building efforts. The push to re-invent this destination city contributes to making Sunday’s game the greenest in Super Bowl history.”
As Jim Treacher writes today at the Daily Caller, “What’s more energy-efficient than darkness? Green is the new blackout.”
Well, it’s not all that new. Radical Environmentalism — to the point of turning the clock back on mankind’s technological progress — began around 1970. Thirty-seven years later, Bob Costas of NBC created what today seems like a miniature diorama version of last night’s stadium-wide blackout:
Yesterday morning, Costas, the man who brought you the NFL’s original lights out moment, threatened to permanently turn off the power on the entire NFL. Sunday’s Meet the Press featured videotape of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addressing concussions in the NFL. Costas retorted that in his own expert opinion as a professional newsreader with Very Serious Hair, “For all the drama, the excitement, the strategy, all the appealing things about football, the way football is currently played in the NFL is fundamentally unsustainable.”
For once in his life, Costas might actually be correct, if only because our current pop culture is itself unsustainable.
I doubt there will be any sort of large scale conservative revival in pop culture anytime soon, however. And I shudder to think what’s coming down the pike in a few years to make today look like Ye Ole Good Days when we look back in five or ten years.
So how do you see the current state of today’s pop culture playing itself out in the coming years? Let me know in the comments below.
Related: From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, a video from CBS sportscaster James Brown asking, “Did the Super Bowl hold back recovery in [New Orleans'] Lower Ninth Ward?” And as Twitchy notes, “Paul Harvey wins: Super Bowl ad tribute to farmers earns praise, nostalgia” It is indeed a power ad, though as with other recent Red State-themed commercials from Chrysler, keep in mind that it’s an ad created by one giant Blue company, a division of Government Motors.
And great catch by Ben Shapiro of Big Hollywood of yet another example of ’70s-era nostalgie de la boue last night: “Super Bowl Coke Ad Endorses Antiwar Graffiti.”
Curiously, as with the L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art freaking out when Heather Mac Donald of City Journal magazine attempted to spray on a few embellishments of her own to the museum’s pro-graffiti exhibition, I suspect Coke would likely call security or the police if someone took their own ad’s advice and added a Krylon-powered statement to the front of Coke’s corporate offices.
Update: After I published this post, I realized I had forgotten to mention the recurring “all men are dopes” theme that runs through so many of the ads; yet another trend in the corporate overculture that has been ongoing for at least a decade. Perhaps one reason why the stark Paul Harvey-narrated Chrysler ad resonated so powerfully is that it pushed back against that trend.
* I spent a fair amount of time searching for the source of this quote late Sunday night. I don’t think I’m imagining I read it. If you know who said it, let me know via email or the comments.
Late Update (2/5/13): Found — it was the headline on the cover of a January 1976 edition of Sport magazine, as found by one of the readers in the comments. Thank you!
And the best Superbowl ad featured a speech by a guy who’s been dead for four years. Don’t know how old the speech is.
You got THAT right.
It was the only good Super Bowl ad. The rest were tripe.
From the article:
“Those early performers were grown-ups; today’s are perpetual adolescents.”
When I was an adolescent, most of my fellow adolescents weren’t whores in any sense of the word, and did not aspire to be whores.
Paul Harvey, for all his faults, was a grown-up.
The Super Bowl is a lot like the movie Batman Returns ; a lot of hype and expectation but a total bore and letdown in reality.
You mean the Dark Knight Rises? A snooze fest that takes the fun out of comics as if embarrassed and tries to make Catwoman a sensible adult. Please give such material to people who understand it. A Batman movie that is a reflection of what made him popular in the first place has yet to be made. Oddly, the old TV show probably comes the closest to capturing that bizarre world. It’s not Les Miserable. So what? Stop turning it into that.
“So how do you see the current state of today’s pop culture playing itself out in the coming years?”
Nude same sex and transgender pole dancers singing America sucks songs while kissing GoDaddy’s Nerd-of-the-Year on top of a pink (made in China) Yamaha piano.
Limbaugh thought the half-time show was great…?
The kids from the Connecticut school were fabulous.
The Paul Harvey Dodge trucks commercial one of the best commercials ever made.
from National FFA’s Facebook Page:
Here’s a picture from our archives of Paul Harvey speaking a the 1978 National FFA Convention where he delivered a version of the poem “So God Made a Farmer.”
Watch (or re-watch) the amazing Super Bowl ad that featured “So God Made a Farmer” and help our friends at Ram Trucks raise $1 million for FFA.
Not complicated. It’s a football game, nothing more and nothing less. Football is a fine sport to watch. Loved it a since I was seven. But you have to laugh at the banalities from the ex-jocks and their fellow ex-jocks who try to tell you they have secret knowledge. It’s a football game, blocking , tackling etc. You don’t need to fill up on their pseudo-excitement unless you have nothing else to do. Enjoy the games, they are games.
As to the vapid entertainer, it’s all part of a throw away, shallow, and very fleeting garbage that is meant to anesthetize as opposed to elevate. Our culture has risen to its level of mediocrity, because we are all participants (text your opinion now at****).
“Our culture has risen to its level of mediocrity, because we are all participants (text your opinion now at****).”
But this wasn’t DIY culture — millions of dollars was spent by America’s largest corporations and ad agencies to produce this material.
But we buy it, maybe that ‘s the problem.
It’s the product of a feedback loop (perhaps one that reinforces idiocy): the ad agencies and entertainment honchos put it on because they perceive it’s what people want to see, and people watch because it’s on and because they perceive everyone else will do the same.
There’s no changing it, you just shrug and go do something you actually want to do.
I watch the Super Bowl to see FOOTBALL.
I’m old enough to remember when a marching band sufficed as half-time entertainment. I see no need to interrupt what might be a perfectly good football game with a “show” featuring half-dressed pop-culture banshees shrieking and wailing and performing strip-club routines. Any vocalist who can’t entertain without disrobing is no musician.
I also remember when commercials simply showed or told us why we should buy a particular product, and that was that. They didn’t cost a fortune to make, and they didn’t try to outdo obscure foreign art-house movies.
I find something else to do during the times when football is not actually being played.
DVR. No halftime show. I missed the Bebouncy show and I’m glad of it. Missed most commercials as well. Watched the Paul Harvey/Dodge commercial later. It was excellent!
who gets born? who is young? that’s pop culture.
that means in ten years- young, happily married mormons, fellowship of christian athletes praising god, and young, angry black men getting mentored into faith.
sportswriters jumped the shark when they got angry about tim tebow being virgin. and, they visibly edit interviews with players- the players mention prayer and quote verses, the national media edits it out. it’s about like a photo of trotsky in the soviet union. players are at the point of putting on shirts and writing on eyeblack and making youtube videos and writing books sold in christian bookstores.
the only interesting interviews I’ve seen recently are black sportscasters who are comfortable in their faith interviewing players. They don’t make a big circus out of it- it’s just part of who they are, and part of who the young player is.It’s not the whole interview, it’s just part. They go play by play, workout by workout. They aren’t recoiling from the player like that odd grey-haired guy. His days have to be numbered- you can’t physically recoil from an interviewee and keep rapport. It’s good that way- great interviews lead to promotions, right?
Solomon Wilcots of CBS is one example that comes to mind. I bet you he sees things closer to the norm here at PJM. Notice how a lot of the dark blacks end up conservatives – due to their complexions they often dont get the same access as high yellows and half breeds, even with AA greasing the path. The first Obama cabinet – Lisa Jackson, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice – demonstrate this theory.
Nihilism is, I think, a good description of what little of the half time show I saw. From the previews, I figured it wouldn’t really interest me, and I was right. The “dancing” and costumes, were straining to be worthy of a weekday morning shift stripper in Vegas. Pathetic. Overproduced. Lacking any sense of grace.
The Kia “Respect The Tech” commercial was funny, until you stop to think about it. It’s not even the man bashing that’s the worst of it, it’s that it utterly fails to invite you down to kick the tires and take the car for a test drive. After all, who wants to take the risk that they’re going to be assaulted by the beta version of the T-X? (Kristanna Loken, Terminator 3) Sorry, but MAYBE I’ll take that risk to check out a Aston Martin, Ferrari, Bugatti or McClaren, but a frickin’ Kia? Nope, no way, no how! And let’s not even discuss the soft gay porn of the Calvin Klein commercials…
Nihilism…exactly.
I’m one of those pathologically un-cool dudes that couldn’t give a rat’s ass over which team wins a f**king football game when I see my country collapsing in front of my eyes. The former event pales in comparison to the latter.
But I always did take the long view.
“So how do you see the current state of today’s pop culture playing itself out in the coming years?”
Well, draw an imaginary line from women daringly showing their ankles to Mae West to the Hayes Commission to Andy Hardy to the Comics Code Authority to close ups of hind ends shaking in beach movies to “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “The French Connection” through to whores/slash entertainers like Cher and Madonna up to Beyonce, Pink and buttock enhanced stalwarts like Trinidad born moron Niki Minaj and Brazilian singer Valesca Popozuda and continue through to hit songs titled “F-ck You” and other with lyrics that would shame a Thai prostitute, because Thai prostitutes have apparently devolved into a default elegance by U.S standards.
The pre-game concert was a snooze-fest with songs by Matchbox 20 and OneRepublic that sounded and looked like they were written and performed by robots who scrunched up their faces in almost human emotions. So alongside sociopathic vulgarity you have a vacuum of creativity in pop music with no precedent in American history.
Extrapolate that out into the future and it brings you back to science-fiction literature of the ’50s and ’60s which used to predict exact things like Niki Minaj and empty, faddist pop talent before reality caught up with science-fiction.
Then science-fiction, now in the hands of people the old writers used to make fun of, turned to using evil corporations, straight white male privilege and evil corporations and straight white male privilege and evil corporations and straight white male privilege as their diverse cast of villains.
The imaginary line on our imaginary graph is not hard to figure out. Orwell’s success is failure, creativity is conformity, normality is confusing and water is no longer wet are definitely on the menu.
America is a PC dystopian science-fiction soap opera that writes itself. It has to. The current crop of “speculative” writers won’t touch it because, generally speaking, they are all politically correct tattooed hillbillies or conservatives who imagine all conservative science-fiction consists of groups of mercenaries fighting in hyper-armored suits. When our intellectual visionaries have turned into Jethro and Uncle Jed, you know you’re in trouble.
Where’s a vintage R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson when you need them to deflate balloons? Their own.
My favorite example of a non-safe zone that should be safe is the California non-commercial FM station KCSM, out of San Mateo. You’ll find no finer jazz or commentary in the ethersphere, or on the web, but if your politics are conservative, you’ll get regular reminders of ’70s and ’80s Commie dogma. During the ’04 presidential campaign, one host told a “joke” on-air about burning GWB alive during the ’04 campaign. But they operate in one of the Blue Lagoons of California’s coastal elite, so it’s done with impunity, and under the auspices of the public community college that houses the station.
“So how do you see the current state of today’s pop culture playing itself out in the coming years?”
Well, it should go one of two ways.
either live sex acts (simulated by actors with no original parts), or Christians being fed to the lions.
Why can’t it be both?
The easing of restrictions on full frontal nudity and “live sex” is surely the next big “advance” in American pop culture — after all, the Europeans have it, so that leaves us as the only wealthy, industrialized nation not to have such “sophisticated” entertainment on the public airwaves (just like we were the last such nation to not have nationalized health care).
It’s realistic to expect fundamental transformation in that regard within the next few years.
Feeding Christians to the lions will take longer. And most likely, they’ll probably just be incarcerated, institutionalized or sent off to the gulags instead.
As for the Super Bowl halftime shows of 5-10 years in the future, don’t expect live sex acts on stage — expect simulated sex gay acts like the ones that go down on the floats at the Pride parades instead. At some point, Lady Gaga will be old enough and passe enough to get her own shot at doing the Super Bowl halftime show. She’ll, no doubt, have a stage show that will feature male dancers performing simulated gay sex acts on each other (maybe even including some of the lesser-known and potentially shocking-to-the-rubes-in-Jesusland ones).
It will be widely praised by everybody from Good Morning America and Today show airheads, to the clucking hens on The View, to Village Voice writers, to the aspiring sports writers who voluntarily pump out prolific blog posts for AOL/Huffington Post Sports, to respected Sports Illustrated columnists/bloggers, to highly respected ESPN writers/bloggers/talking heads (Bill Simmons), to middle-aged and late middle-aged white, politically conservative NFL fanboys (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity).
The Blackout was paradynamic of the Age of Obama. Dumbed down, affirmative action, green energy numbskulls who cant even keep the lights on.
It reminded me of the rolling blackouts that are not only common in South Africa, but are now institutionalized (the solution to the blackouts was orderly preplanned blackouts)….after much ink was spilled lauding the in the black profitable operation by the new Affirmative Action ANC management of the power generating utilities in the country. Of course they did so by neglecting expansion of generation capability to meet future needs. But alas…
I wasn’t surprised by the blackout. NO is the closest thing to a Third World city I’ve seen in America. Sidewalks askew with tree roots growing out of them, no bookstores or libraries. The population has all the energy, verve and panache of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu-ridden New England towns full of shambling fish-people. And like one of Lovecraft’s stories, the whole living anachronism is slowly sinking into the sea.
And their response to Katrina was similar to what you see in the Third World: Unpreparedness and failure. The reason they were so angry about the whole thing is that they couldn’t face the fact that the whole thing was their own fault. Success responds to crisis, failure blames.
To this day Katrina is an emblematic symbol of white racism in America among the black political Left. That doof Obama even invoked it in his 2007 anti-white racial hate speech at Hampton University in 2007.
“The population has all the energy, verve and panache of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu-ridden New England towns full of shambling fish-people.”
This has my vote for Blog Comment of the Week!
If a Super Bowl at the Rose Bowl or San Diego Stadium had the same thing happen, Victor Davis Hansen would still be laughing his a#$ off.
As a fan of human history, what I saw was the same old song and dance.
Chrysler did try to play both sides of the ideological street during the Super Bowl — they did the Paul Harvey ad for Dodge trucks after two years of trying to make the city of Detroit the star of their Super Bowl ads, but at the same time, they also did the Jeep commercial with Oprah (the message here is also patriotic, but it’s also delivered by one of Obama’s most high-profile supporters, as a way to make sure Democrats watching the game knew, hey! It’s OK to buy our vehicles. Chrysler wasn’t bringing Clint Eastwood back for another round of ads this year).
The tattoo was used by early Roman soldiers because when you had your head cut off in combat no one could/cared to recognize the bodies it had been attached to.
We wore tattoos in Vietnam for some of the same reasons,
explosions can really screw up your identity.
Many of these dickheads that wear tattoos today couldn’t fight their way out of a used prophylactic.
Sheesh. Is it time for Daytona yet?
Why, so that they can turn it into a Danica and her racer boy toy soap opera?
I sat through the 1/2 time show wondering when the music would start, then I realized that to be a pop sensation in this country, you needed to be cute, able to make faces at the appropriate time and wear as few clothes as possible. music didn’t matter. talent on an instrument, or voice was not required. Embarrass your mom and dad with naked antics and wow! you’ll make a fortune!
Yea;
In my teens, we knew that kids that shook and jerked like that had cerebral palsy.
Nowadays, you’re a rock star or rapper with a contingent of body guards and a Bentley. And actual musical talent is repulsive.
I don’t think entertainers have parents. They are created in test tubes by mad scientists.
“I doubt there will be any sort of large scale conservative revival in pop culture anytime soon…So how do you see the current state of today’s pop culture playing itself out in the coming years? Let me know in the comments below.”
Of course there won’t be any sort of conservative revival in pop culture. Conservatives, by their nature, don’t create the sort of thing that drives pop culture. They may watch it and even get enjoyment from it, but only because they can mock it (as many here are doing) while they go about their business.
I think pop culture will, as always, be a reflection of what sells to the masses. Sex sells, at the moment, but only because there’s still a structure to society and a safety net. Once those are gone, it’s anybody’s guess. Armageddon?
I think the reason the 49ers lost the Super Bowl is because San Francisco 49ers safety Chris Culliver said a gay teammate would not be welcomed in his team’s locker room.
You’re right. He was distracted by sucking-up and wimpering all week about how sorry he was for his un-PC comments and as a result was not mentally prepared to play. He made two big mistakes that directly led to two big plays and 14 points.
Meanwhile Ray Lewis learned a long time ago there is no such thing as bad publicity in the entertainment/pop culture industry. Just give them their money’s worth and they will worship you.
Me: So how was school today?
Son: Everyone was complaining that the Super Bowl Commercials were too long…
Me: Really? Which ones?
Son: The 34 minute one for back up generators!
(just 3 more months until that one graduates)
One throwback on the field I appreciated was the fact that the refs kept their hankies in their pockets and let the players play: big-boy football without the “Waaaah! He laid a pinkie on me!” pussification which has characterized the game for the last decade.
What comes out of hollywood these days is not entertaining. It wasn’t when it was dug up and re-run as a new show the first time and by the third installment it’s boring.
When the zombie movie genre came up with “ZOMBIE KING KONG” He died at the Empire state building but now he’s back and he’s a zombie who needs brains! It was time to rethink the entire industry.
I pay for satellite TV but fer Christ sakes it ain’t worth one penny of what I pay and if it was not for the cartoons for the grandchildren it would be off, permanently.
Dodge trucks and Jeeps are built in Blue states (Michigan and Ohio). The Jeeps are a Toledo trademark. Toledo is one of the leftiest cities you can live in.
Nihilistic Pop Culture is the natural consequence of demographic death-spiral in many western nations. If “society” has not the gumption to insure a perpuating 2.1 births per woman, and 2.1 births is said to constitute an irreversable decline toward zero popullation.
What in pop culture ENOBLES or INSPIRES? With the likes of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Andy Wharhol leading the way … what does one expect? Ads and half-time shows at super bowls are simply honest reflections of the depths to which we’ve fallen.
“Let’s finally have a Super Bowl the pre-game show would be proud of.”
Ed,
I’m late to the party, but I’m almost positive this is from the late (?), great SPORT magazine — and that quote was published sometime in the mid- to late-70s. (When, as you point out, Stupor Bowls were particularly bad.) I was a subscriber for years and remember the quote, if nothing else for the somewhat odd turn of phrase.
SPORT was terrific then for a sports-happy teenager — good photography and striking graphics — and occasionally published guys like Jimmy Breslin and even Woody Allen.
Ah, found it:
http://images.auctionhelper.com/images/9666//sports-11122012/scan0084.jpg
January 1976 apparently. Speak, memory …
Brilliant! Thank you!
Tell you something funny about Valjean’s picture, Ed. The picture is from the Super Bowl IX, Vikings Steelers ZZZ-rated snorefest so I’m going to assume this came out right before Super Bowl X between Dallas and Pittsburg which turned out to be perhaps the second Super Bowl to be close and well played
And hey there Valjean, where exactly did you steal that picture? I’ll be keeping my eye on you. (little Les Miserable humor there)
Yeah, I wasn’t sure if that cover preceded the Raiders-Vikings Super Bowl, or the first Cowboys-Steelers Super Bowl.
Got it from Google images, of course! (Actually, an auction listing methinks.) Thanks for posting, Ed.
It *was* published right before the most excellent SB10 — first of three between the Stillers and ‘Boys and, as you point out, ironically one of the best. (SPORT got its wish.) Raiders and Vikes was the next year (’77); another wipe-out and fourth SB loss for Minny (who haven’t been back since).
As for your eye, I didn’t know Javert’s authority extended to copyright!
But know that I always cover my tracks …
Didn’t the halftime show cause the blackout, by causing a power surge that the stadium system tried to compensate for a few minutes later?
Creed by Steve Turner (Can Man Live Without G-d by Ravi Zacharais)
We believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin: we believe everything is OK as long as you don’t hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage. We believe in the therapy of sin. We believe that adultery is fun. We believe that sodomy is OK.
We believe that taboos are taboo. We believe that everything is getting better despite evidence to the contrary; the evidence must be investigated, and you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe there’s something in horoscopes, UFO’s and bent spoons; Jesus was a good man, just like Buddha, Mohammed, and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think His good morals were bad.
We believe that all religions are basically the same; at least the one that we read was. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, G-d, and salvation.
We believe that after death comes the Nothing, because when you ask the dead what happens, they say nothing. If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then it’s compulsory heaven for all excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan.
We believe in Masters and Johnson. What’s selected is average, what’s average is normal, what’s normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament. We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed. Americans should beat their guns into tractors, and the Russians would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good. It’s only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society, society is the fault of conditions, conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him, and reality will adapt accordingly. The universe will readjust, history will alter. We believe that there is no absolute truth, excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth. We believe in the rejection of creeds, and the flowering of individual thought.
If “chance” be the Father of all flesh, then “disaster” is his rainbow in the sky, and when you hear: State Of Emergency!! Sniper Kills Ten!! Troops On Rampage!! Whites Go Looting!! Bomb Blasts School!!
It is but the sound of Man, worshiping His maker.