Chili Dog Blog

It was nice to have a Super Bowl in which I had no stake in the outcome save for a few squares on a grid.  Lately it seems I am more of a supporter of one team or the other because I despise the opponent.

This year was different.  I would be satisfied regardless of winner.  I just wanted a game.  We got one.

I have played fantasy football for a few years and Peyton has always been my starting quarterback.  Several years ago I picked up a youngster with a lot of potential just leaving San Diego to make room for Phillip Rivers.  Drew Brees starts occasionally for me, but Peyton is my go-to-guy.  Having Brees on my bench means he isn’t scoring or anyone else, know what I mean?

I have already discussed the halftime show.  I will kill two birds with this one post; the game and the commercials.

COMMERCIALS.

eh.  It seemed if Madison Avenue was having nightmares of men in underwear.

I liked two of the three Doritos commercials I saw.  Hated the one with the samurai dressed in Doritos.  Loved the one with the kid, “keep your hands off my Doritos and my mama.”

Bud Light was just ok.  If they throw enough crappy commercials out there, some are bound to hit.

The Google French girl ad was pretty good, but mostly the rest were either very boring or just recycled jokes and gimmicks. 

But there are some that just have to go, not unlike sexagenarians at halftime.

Go Daddy, seriously?  Like anyone is going to check out those ads on line any more.  There is a reason we don’t see “WASSUP!!?” or “Where’s the Beef?” anymore.  Move on, Go Daddy.

The eTrade babies were funny in the past.  The joke is played and this batch was not funny enough to sustain the notion.  Time for something new.

The McDonald’s Jordan vs. Bird game of H-O-R-S-E was a classic.  Some magic just can be re-created.  The LeBron-Dwight Howard(?) dunk contest was a big FAIL, at least until Bird showed up to steal the sack.

All in all, the Super Bowl commercial hype seems to be fading.  Either that or the dismal state of our nation has dampened our appreciation of crass commercialism.

THE GAME.

Compared to some of the playoff games, this one was well-played and, even better, well-officiated.  There were no BS pass interference, illegal contact, hands to the face calls.  The players got to play.  The game flowed like the Mississippi River.  It really was a pleasure to watch.

If you are like me and have been exposed (intentionally or otherwise) to sports talk for the past fortnight, you have heard it all.  I am going to dwell on but the three aspects of this game I believe made the game interesting.

1. 4th and Goal.

Hindsight is not relevant to this decision by the Saints.

It was a gutsy move and I wholeheartedly agreed with it at the time, make it or not.  The Saints had held the ball nearly the entire 2nd quarter up until then.  If they are successful the game is tied, if not the Colts take the ball near their own goal line with just a few minutes left before halftime.  They failed and the Colts, not wanting to do much to risk a late half turnover or give the Saints more than enough time by throwing an incomplete pass or two, ran three times and punted.  The Saints ended up with their field goal any way, and trailed 10 – 6 at the half.

Had they kicked the field goal, they would most likely have given the Colts the ball with more than two minutes and much better field position.  If they score a td, the game is now 17-6 at half and probably the Saints do not kick onsides to start the second half.  Colts get the ball to start the half and score again?  If the Saints would have kicked that field goal, there is a chance, and not a bad one at that, that the Colts would have been up 24 – 6 by the time the Saints got the ball back after that field goal.

I am not saying the Colts would have scored.  That part is not important.  What they did by pinning the Colts back was to force them to run three meaningless plays for a total of 6 offensive plays for the quarter.  Six plays.  No first downs.  Peyton Manning cannot beat you from the bench.

Make no mistake.  The Saints won this game in the second quarter by keeping the Colts defense on the field.  Most people will think that they won because of . . .

2.  The Interception.

Obviously the play of the game.  The interesting thing is that I have heard no one say anything disparaging of Peyton.  The most negative thing I heard was from Ron Jaworski who said in effect, Peyton no doubt wishes he had that one back.  Well, duh.

It decided the game, but it is not how they won.

3.  The Onsides Kick.

When scrutinizing this decision, hindsight means everything.

Call it the anti-Bellichik play.  Enough said.

I like it for one reason and one reason only.  The Halftime Show.  No, I am not going off on The half-Who again.  But this halftime is an eternity.  The Saints had scored on the last play of the half.  They remembered.  The Colts probably thought, they’d just get the ball, push it down the field and game over. 

The Saints came out to play.  The Colts came out as if they had taken a Red Bull-induced nap.

Even though the Colts came back to take the lead, the seed of a Saints victory was already germinating.

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At least they spared us the hypocrisy of actually playing My Generation last night. 

I grew up as a fan of The Who.  The live version of Magic Bus from Live at Leeds remains a classic heart-thumping, fist-pumping song.  The Who makes me recall my high school days with fondness.  That song, probably as much as any other, was the soundtrack of our lives then.  I recall one of us even had a car named the Magic Bus.

There were four original members of The Who.  Half of them got their hopes fulfilled.   The survivors linger on, 28 years after Who’s Last, a live album commemorating their final tour, which was widely ripped. 

In it’s review for Who’s Last linked above, All Music says:

It’s a damn long way from Live at Leeds to Who’s Last, and the distance between the two extremes is nothing short of stunning. Who’s Last is so lifeless and lackluster that it’s hard to believe the same band released both records. It may not be a graceful way to end the Who’s career, but it’s hard to imagine a better testament to why it was time for the band to come to an end.

Still, they play on.

I am sure some people are busy today downloading The Who records, which is probably 99% of their motivation to play last night.  After all, there aren’t any more CSI series coming along for them to sell songs.

Frankly, beyond the fact that they have had more farewells than Cher, I don’t blame The Who for last night.  I blame the NFL.  After the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, they have preferred stage performers who have more wrinkles than a Shar Pei.

McCartney, Stones, Petty, Bruce and now the half-Who.   I live in a classic rock town.  Born to Run.  Won’t Get Fooled Again.  Free Fallin’.  Jumping Jack Flash.  Hey Jude.  That’s what they play on the radio.  I guess it’s probably the same throughout middle America.  I don’t get excited seeing sexagenarians signing 30+ year old songs.  We watched more to see if one of them would have a cardiac arrest than for the music.  Actually I was watching to see if Pete would smash the guitar, but then I realized he probably has a bit of trouble getting it up.

As is often said, I prefer to remember them as they were….

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The powers that be in Toledo, City Council, newly inaugurated Mayor and others, appear to be on board to raise Toledo’s already oppressive 2.25% income tax another .25%.

The result of this is very simple to diagnose and very painful to imagine.

• No new business.
• A dramatic loss of current business to the townships.
• Negative population growth as current residents move to the townships and no one moves in to replace them.
• Drastically declining property values, even greater than the current rate of decline.
• A dramatic reduction in real estate investment.

There seems to be no way around it.  When you are competing against zero taxes, the one thing you cannot do is raise them.

There is pain ahead for Toledo.

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I share authoring duties, barely, with a few associates on this site.  Some of whom are averse to ABC’s LOST.  Some of whom are in LOST seclusion so they can watch the episodes at more convenient times.

In order to convenience them, I have started another blog that will be devoted entirely to my thoughts about LOST.

It is called Dog’s Notebook.

As I stated in the initial post on that site, I will post a brief announcement here each time a new post goes up over there. 

Please bookmark it anyway. 

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I first read your post yesterday.  I was going to sit down last night and respond to it, and now I am glad I have not.  It gave me time to think about it, and after a day, I believe I have my opinions set forth (as much as they will ever be).

If you are to respond to my response, please do so in a mindset prior to watching the shows this evening [LOST S06 E01-02].

No doubt you are a man who reads and watches for characters mostly; at least that’s my reasoning for your love of Stephen King, especially The Stand.

As you are well-aware, America is likes relationships and stories – proof is in the 20 seasons of Survivor.  Turning what America likes into a verb: Hollywooded.  The aspects of this show that are hollywooded are the love relationships between Kate and Jack/Sawyer, Sayid and Nadia(?), Charlie and Claire, and on and on and on.  Other hollywooded moments come in with some of the fighting and yelling, but I am too cautious to try to separate what is and what isn’t  In a sense, this is why so many people who don’t understand the show like it, and it is also why critics claim it is like a soap opera.

With that typed, the things you find important I believe are so.  The things you mentioned are not important I believe are important.  Your choosing to focus on the characters (though you intelligently put the island in your important category, because the island is the main character) I find as simply a matter of taste.  One may argue with you, claiming the events of the island are much more important than the characters.  Though I enjoy history, especially as it has unfolded with the DI stuff in this series, I too find the characters more important than the events and the history.  But I don’t believe the things we find more important need to be the things we need answered.

I mentioned America likes relationships.  It also likes answers.  Answers can come from anywhere, but they need answers.  Women, I find, enjoy answers more than men.  I would guess that some of the stupid questions (there are stupid questions) in that question list came from women.  Which is why, like many, many things in this world, Lost can be compared to The Road (here meant to be that book).

The Road

How many people wanted answers after reading The Road?  What caused this?  Why did his wife really kill herself?  Who was the man at the end of the story?  What did the wife look like?  If any one of those questions is answered, the book loses a few points.  I even think he went too far with the ending.  This doesn’t mean Lost should not answer any questions.  But so many people have different most important questions they need answered, so someone is always going to be unhappy.  What we need to do is what the last season with an open mind, thinking as we usually do about connections to previous and future shows.  Then, when it is all said and done, we can take each one of those questions from that list and decide whether it was answered or not.  Next, we decide whether the series was better or worse from it.

The endings you suggested are unacceptable I believe are as well, and there are many more.  But I have confidence in the writers; so much so that I believe there is a way they can land the plane in 2003 or 2004 or whatever it was and not become a post on failblog.com.

So let’s decide at the end whether they did a good job or not, not after the first few episodes.  I firmly believe that if most of America is upset at the ending and the insufficiency of the answers provided, you and I will love it even more.

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This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

via Bill Watterson, creator of beloved ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ comic strip looks back with no regrets | Living – cleveland.com – - cleveland.com.

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Doing some more examining prior to the beginning of the final season and two items come to mind.

A Gyro Wheel.

Jacob and He Who Shall Remain Nameless (HWSRN) speak on the beach.  HWSRN says it’s always ends the same.  They come, they corrupt and they destroy.  This indicates a cycle of behaviors that repeat themselves over and over, like a spinning wheel.  Jacob says it only ends one time.  Anything else that happens is just progress like the axis of this gyro wheel.

The wheel spins and progress down the length of the axis until it hits the end.

A Funnel.

I seriously have nothing to offer in terms of how this story will end.  To think of how far the story has come in five years is to know that we cannot possibly have any idea of what’s to come.

Out of the chaos comes order, however, much like this funnel.  Throw a couple marbles in this funnel and they will chaotically bounce all around the funnel until gravity begins to grab a hold and makes them move in an orderly fashion according to the Coriolos Effect, then ultimately in a straight line down the stem of the funnel.

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I recently boiled LOST down to a few questions.  Others have a zillion details they want covered.

This was given to me by Toledo Jim and it probably violates copyright by posting it here for download.  But here it is nonetheless.

Use as you see fit.

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ABC’s LOST is set to premiere its sixth and final season on the beach in Hawaii to a select group of fans, bloggers and media types.  The internets are soon to be awash in spoilers regarding the two hour premiere episode and so, before that happens, I am going to spell out a few things. A lot of fans are screaming for answers and are already anticipating disappointment.  Granted, there are some things that just will not be addressed before the season concludes in May.  I would prefer that we are given clues, not answers.  I would like to come to my own conclusions on some of the really important stuff.  I want to resolve the issues, and not be spoon-fed answers.  If two or more fans can differ on something with each being reasonable and comfortable with their own conclusion, then I will be satisfied. Couched against that background….

The Really, Really Important Stuff.

• What is up with this island and why is death so weird?
• What is up with Jacob, He Who Shall Remain Nameless / Smoke Monster (see below), Richard, Locke, Widmore, Hawking, Christian (by extension the entire Shepherd family), Ben, Desmond, Walt soon to be equally mysterious, Alana and any other creepy character we haven’t yet met?
• What happens to the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 including by extension Aaron and Ji Yeon?

Everything else pales by comparison and we better be able to answer with some degree of certainty each of these three questions.

The Stuff Some People Find Important That I Do Not.

• What’s up with the numbers?
• Who are Adam and Eve?
• What’s up with Vincent?
• What’s up with Dharma, their experiments, their work stations and why were there polar bears on the island and in the desert?
• What are those whispers?
• Why is the Black Rock in the middle of the island?

Phrase I Don’t Want to Hear But Am Almost Positive I Will.

• “Oceanic Flight 815 now arriving at Gate 23.”

Unacceptable Conclusions to the Series.

• It’s purgatory and they are all dead.
• Hurley wakes from a strange and wonderful dream.
• It has anything whatsoever to do with outer space, aliens, space ships, Star Trek, Star Wars or anything like that.

Smoke Monster.

It is apparently able to take the form of deceased.  Ben says they have no name for him.  Jacob’s nemesis is known on this space as He Who Shall Remain Nameless.  Logic dictates that they are one and the same.

Season Six Recaps.

I plan to recap every episode, but given the new air day of Tuesday, it is likely they will not be posted until Saturday afternoon, and sooner if I can.

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Image via Wikipedia

When I first saw a commercial for this Disney on Ice performance, I practically spit coffee on the cat.  If you don’t look too closely, it vaguely resembles a Las Vegas style show, topless dancers and all.

In order to view video from the show you must make a couple clicks because it is not directly linkable.

Shows -> Finding Nemo -> Video

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