I actually watched the Super Bowl game

Not just the commercials, which I traditionally try to catch.  No, this time I sat in my hotel room and stared at the football game, because a local team, the Carolina Panthers, were playing.  I felt I should root for them.

Mistake.

The game was ugly, mostly because the defense of the Denver Broncos was simply better than the offense of the Carolina Panthers.  Poor Cam Newton, the Panthers' quarterback, spent a lot of time either being tackled by the defense or trying to avoid that happening.

The Broncos clearly were the better team, though, so I certainly don't begrudge them winning.  I also have no real room to complain, seeing as how I'm about as fair weather a fan as one could be; after all, this is the only football game I've watched all year.

Next year, regardless of which teams are playing, I'm returning to my practice of watching the commercials.  I find them often more entertaining than the game itself, and I'm certainly more interested in effective advertising than in football.

Oh, yeah:  I'm in Portland now for a couple of days.  Due to early meetings and some junk food I ate during the game--continuing a longstanding tradition--I ate a room-service salad for dinner, so I have no great food news to report.

Tomorrow, though, will be different.

On the road again: Silicon Valley, day 2

I spent most of today either sleeping, working, or changing locations.  I have to confess, though, to watching the Super Bowl commercials--well, all but the first hour of them--as I worked.  From what I saw, this year's crop was not one of the better ones, though of course the spots I missed might have been the true stars.  I unavoidably caught some of the game, which seemed to be a good one, despite the long power outage just after the second half began.  I've never been a football fan, though, so I could not get but so involved. 

Tomorrow, I begin my second week visiting clients on the road, and the second week in a row away from home.  It's not my favorite way to live, but it's hard to complain about getting to stay in a nice hotel in a (comparatively) warm and sunny place.

So I won't.

Our group's take on the Super Bowl commercials

Yesterday, a group of us gathered, as we have for several years, to watch the Super Bowl commercials. We fast-forward through the game, eat junk food, and stop to check out all the commercials.

Our collective number one pick for this year was this science-fictional Chevy ad.



Aside from that one, consensus was hard to achieve. We all agreed, however, that this Teleflora ad placed high for both its sexiness and its directness.



Most of us also agreed that the world is never that simple, but still, Adriana Lima made at least the men believe it could be.

Pretty much everyone also enjoyed this Audi offering, which I rank as one of the top three.



I wonder how a group that didn't read science fiction and fantasy would rank the commercials.

Yes, we ate it

[I'll resume The Animal House Life tomorrow.]

Earlier tonight, we gathered for our annual Super Bowl commercials party, in which we fast-forward through the game but watch the ads. We also eat massive quantities of junk food of all sorts.

Enter the bacon explosion, about which you've probably read in a variety of places online, including in this New York Times article. This first photo shows the loaf of baconly love early in its sojourn in Jennie's oven; she was the one willing to work the over three pounds of meat into the delectable goodie you see here.

Yes, we are indeed talking over three pounds of pork, folks, more than half of that bacon, some in a lattice and some crumbled inside the loaf itself.

We're talking a heart attack in a tube of ex-pig parts.

As Kyle said when I emailed him this photo, "I want!"


As you can see in this second picture, the creation browned up nicely and left us all (well, all of us except the vegetarians) feeling exactly as Kyle did.

Sure, you may be saying, it looks like porkly love on a pan, but how did it taste?

In a word, awesome.

As the third photo shows, the roll is solid with grease-dripping bacon and sausage. You can eat it on its own, as I did, or put it in a buttery roll, as I also did, and chow down on a delicious all-fat-wich.

Yum.

Surely, you say, you can do better than that. Of course I can! After my first fat-wich smacked my arteries, I created a second, but this time with two thick slices of cheese roll on top of the pork.

OMG! If I hadn't been sitting in my chair, I would have fallen over from the sheer impact of the fat on my system. It was amazing--and delicious. Add a few (six is a few, right?) deviled eggs, some chips, a couple (or maybe that's a few, too) wings, a few (couldn't have been more than three, maybe four) pigs in blankets, and top it off with a little (really, the piece barely counted) cheesecake, and you have a meal sure to put a cardiac ward somewhere in my future.

In case you're wondering, the best commercial was the Doritos ad with the crystal ball, though several were quite funny.

The bacon explosion in particular and this meal in general hit me so hard that I reclined in my chair in a stupor and actually watched the entire Super Bowl. It's a good thing the game was exciting, because there was no way I was getting up even if it was a blow-out.

I won't eat a bacon explosion again soon--I couldn't handle it--but someday, it will return to our house.

Let's pray nanomachine artery cleaners arrive before it does.