Been saving this, for those of us who aren’t particularly interested in the game today. David Roth, at SB Nation:
You don’t really make friends on the internet. We maintain friendships on the internet, just by communicating and helping out and exchanging jokes and Houston Astros GIFs as friends do. We can identify affinities with people on Twitter or message boards or (and I can’t imagine this, but sure) comment sections. The relationships we make in the online world’s semi-real space — instant and more distant than arm’s length; conversational and silent — are only as real as their environment.
So I can say that while I exchanged something like 65 emails with Jeff Cantrell over the course of writing several stories on his quest to get GWAR the halftime gig at the 2015 Super Bowl, and while I enjoyed every one of those exchanges, I didn’t really know the guy…
I could never quite figure out if he really thought GWAR might play the Super Bowl, although I suspect he knew it wasn’t going to happen. But he wasn’t trolling in a put-on character, either: he knew this was a great idea, and if he knew that it was impossible, he also knew that it was hilarious and so very much worth the doing. The NFL, being the NFL, gave him an email address and a name to which he was to address some questions, and never gave him anything else.
But he pushed on, and more and more people signed his Change.org petition and he planned some new ways to get the NFL to pay attention to his dream, even if it was just to issue a press release reading, “Dude, obviously not.”…
balconesfault
Does anyone remember when it was a minor scandal that an Irish reporter had the gall to interrupt President Bush a couple times during an interview?
Obama, meanwhile, needs to have ready the right answer to the question “if America is so great, why does it need to be fundamentally transformed?”
Answer: Because Reagan already fundamentally transformed it 30 years ago, and things have been headed downhill since. Maybe the problem is the “fix”?
Violet
@balconesfault: O’Reilly’s interview of President Obama was like the Wingnut Greatest Hits or something. Healthcare website, BENGHAZI!, IRS. I’m surprised he didn’t ask him about his birth certificate.
raven
Why is it so important for folks to declare they don’t care about the game? I loves you AL but what is the difference?
eta In an hour or so my house will be full of people and about half of them will not care one bit. They come to see each other, eat and have some fun.
Amir Khalid
This sounds like it would be a Super Bowl halftime show for the ages, if only the NFL would agree to it. By the way wasn’t there once a group that performed the SB halftime show called “Up Yours, People”? (Or something like that.)
max
You newbies, always with the needing the AOLHell (or equivalent) lest the scary protocol connection link you to some guy you don’t know.
All relationships are only as real as their environment. Because DUH.
Having GWAR at the Superbowl would be totally the greatest thing ever. It’s impossible because of the usual fuddy-duddies. Pity. (Also, we should totally get Joe Biden a mint ’81 white Camaro.)
“Joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck.”
max
[‘That man lacks slack.’]
ETA: Should’ve used blockquote. Clearly contaminated by the stupid now, so time to start avoiding all media until it’s over.
raven
Reports are that getting to the game is a disaster. All you loudmouths telling us how stupid we are in the south take note.
YellowJournalism
@Violet: If the President decides to never again sit down with him again, I’m fine with that, even though we know that mug whining and smug commentary would come of it.
Violet
@raven: And so much for security screening (from your link):
Edit: What’s really funny is that since Christie is now associated with traffic issues, he’ll be blamed for this mess even if he’s got nothing to do with it. Can’t wait for them to show him on the screens in the stadium.
opiejeanne
Maybe he doesn’t make friends on the Internet but I have quite a few good friends that I now know in Real Life.
MikeJ
I will be very upset if the RHCP are wearing more than one sock per person.
Helen
@raven: Good. Another Christie FAIL!!
raven
The princess has her drink and skittles setup and her beers were labeled “Seattle Seahawks” and “Colorado Broncos”. See was crushed when I told her but she just folded up the label to say “Broncos”.
WaterGirl
@raven: Did Christie close some lanes again?
Edit: I was just kidding, but then I went to the link and see that the trains are overwhelmed. Lots of reason to be cranky.
Edit 2: What did you tell your pride that she was crushed? I’m missing something.
raven
@Violet: Of course, unlike Atlanta, they have had, what, 10 years to plan this. Stupid fucking yankees.
Dolly Llama
OK, Netflix veterans, help a brother out. I subscribed to Netflix to watch Breaking Bad. I’m four episodes, I believe, from the end of the series. Had planned to watch those this afternoon/evening in lieu of a Super Bowl I could give a shit about. I go there today, and God damn me if it lets me watch anything past what I’ve already watched. I KNOW I did not reach the end. But I look on there today, and the episodes I saw remaining there a couple or three weeks ago no longer exist.
Without any spoilers, does anyone have any information about why I can no longer access these episodes? Can one of y’all on Netflix see if you can see those last episodes or whether I’m just special to Netflix?
Lee Rudolph
Well, that’s his mistake, right there: conflating “the internet” with instant.
I encountered (you might say, grew up with, except I was full-grown when it started) the internet at a time when it was (mostly) asynchronous communication; e-mail and USENET became my playgrounds, and I made at least dozens of friends there. Now USENET is essentially dead (and certainly unknown to most people who use the internet) and e-mail is comparatively old-fogeyish. But I’m on a cluster of largely overlapping mailing lists with about a hundred members, most of whom have been on them since the early or mid 1990s; we’ve met in meatspace in various combinations over the years, there have been several intragroup marriages (so far, no divorces), too many deaths (leading to a few inheritances [!] and a memorial trust [!]), etc., etc.
As to “comment sections” … I’ve only been reading/commenting on blogs for 2 going on 3 years, but the ones I see (rather, the ones I stick with) have much the same atmosphere (as I see it) as the old USENET newsgroups. It’s the asynchronicity again, I suppose.
raven
@WaterGirl: They are not the Colorado Broncos they are the Denver Broncos.
Cassidy
@raven: Oh? You mean all them smart northerners can’t transport themselves from point a to point b in cold weather? How unexpected.
Ash Can
@raven: Even though I like football, I do think the hoopla surrounding the Super Bowl is overdone. Nevertheless, when folks use it as an excuse to get together and have a good time on a wintry day, it’s all good. (Kind of like Christmas, now that I think of it…)
Schlemizel
@raven:
Lets start with: Why is it important for people to declare they care about the game?
My guess is that its a lot like many other things people can’t understand why people feel compelled to declare a lack of interest in. At some point some people get tired of having a given event beaten to death in every public forum. It could be as simple as just one persons desire to alert the world that not every soul on the planet cares about the thing.
@Ash Can: – yeah, this
Keith P
@Violet: Was he overbearing and rude to Obama? I distinctly remember when he interviewed W with a bunch of softball questions and later answered criticism about it on his show. He said that he played softball out of respect for the office of the presidency, and he would do the same if a Democratic president was on his show as well.
raven
@Dolly Llama: I finished season last night. When I go in on my computer I can go back. I just went in on my Apple TV and they are all there too.
JPL
@Keith P: yes and yes, We no longer have to respect the office of the Presidency..
Here’s a link http://www.mediaite.com/tv/obama-battles-oreilly-in-pre-super-bowl-interview-you-and-your-tv-station-push-benghazi-irs/
raven
@Schlemizel: It’s like the “I don’t watch TV” people. It’s like some red badge of courage.
Betty Cracker
@Dolly Llama: Netflix isn’t releasing the final episodes until Feb. 24. Sorry, dude. You can buy it on Amazon, I think…
Villago Delenda Est
@Keith P:
He’s not going to play softball with a ni*CLANG*. No way, no how.
scav
@raven: Well, lets see:
So, Another failure of planning. But just who elected the planners instead of having them imposed by the glory of the ovoid deity and the holy wealth squad?
raven
Have fun ya’ll, the unfootball people are here.
Schlemizel
@JPL:
Don’t worry, that attitude will change once a gooper is back in the office and deference will be demanded
Schlemizel
@raven:
but why is it important to declare one cares about the game? Would that be a blue badge of courage?
Violet
@raven: Well, to be fair, it is a thread for people who “aren’t particularly interested in the game today.” I’m sure there will be a Super Bowl thread at some point.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav:
This failure of planning was foreseen months ago.
It’s not like they didn’t have any warning or anything. They simply wished away the logical consequences of their planning.
Schlemizel
@raven:
My guess is there will be one or more threads dedicated to the big game (there has already been a pre-game one), let them have their fun in the late afternoon.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
A lot of people were predicting that. IIRC, there are only about a third as many parking spaces as there are seats, and no public transit to get people there.
Still enjoying the Kitten Bowl. The second game had two kittens with a strong resemblance to cats we either currently own or have owned in the past. But, as with most of these shows, all of the ones shown on-air were adopted right after the taping.
MikeJ
@Schlemizel:
It’s not important that anyone be interested in the game, but there’s nothing more tiresome than “you proles do things that bore me.”
You know what people who don’t own TVs do instead of watching TV? Make sure that everyone on earth knows, “I don’t even own a TV.”
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: There is a certain rhyme scheme working its inevitable way through so much anymore.
Cassidy
@MikeJ: Don’t get me started on music threads.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav:
Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance?
kindness
Can’t say I was familiar with GWAR. Don’t really get where he’s coming from as to why he needs them to do the 1/2 time gig so bad. Odd really.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: Possibly. Perhaps.
@MikeJ: Well, insisting everyone in this particular thread shut up and pretend they give a shit about a sport we’ve ignored all year is a bit War on Whatever. Happy Holidays!
Schlemizel
@MikeJ:
I own & watch TV but tire greatly of people who seem to only talk about certain shows. I will probably watch some of the game but the endless hype is tiresome. I have not heard anyone say “you proles do things that bore me.” but rather that they are not exited by the talk. Thats fair. Just because one is excited about event X does not mean everyone must be. I do not understand taking offense, people have no heartburn about people letting us know they are going to watch the game/own a TV
EDIT: Now, if they stomped on a game thread to say they refuse to watch that would be different. Just like it would be wrong to stomp around in this thread to talk about watching the game. Its off topic in a rude way
Villago Delenda Est
@scav:
I’m reporting you to Billo for that last phrase.
Dolly Llama
@Betty Cracker: Are you fucking shitting me? God damn it. So much for my “one-month-trial-period-and-I’m-out” strategy. Nothing but pushers, the lot of them. I watched up that far and just stopped to take a rest. Just couldn’t countenance just powering on after that last turn in the series, the one where Hank discovers the book. Had to just take a rest. Now that I’ve steeled myself for it, I gotta wait three more weeks? That shit just ain’t right.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Villago Delenda Est:
He does have people that will stalk you. They stalked KO and Amanda Terkel, she looked quite scared by being followed by one of his goons(i don’t blame her).
jenn
@raven: I don’t get it. It’s great that they’re trying to get folks to take transit, but why on earth would they ban walking?? Crowds like that sound like my version of hell.
TerryC
@Amir Khalid: Up With People was the name and, yes, they were that bad. Kind of like 1950s Lawrence Welk versions of popular songs.
Dolly Llama
@MikeJ:
It’s hard not to do when it seems like every fucker you meet says “Hey, did you see so-and-so/watch so-and-so on TV?” If you don’t, you know, own a TV, how the hell else can one truly respond?
Villago Delenda Est
@TerryC:
Think “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” awful.
PsiFighter37
Why the hell are they reading the Declaration of Independence? I hate all this jingoistic crap that comes around from the Super Bowl (says the guy staying up in the middle of the night in Switzerland watching it in his room).
Ultraviolet Thunder
I would enjoy watching a football game if they would just play the damn thing instead of staging 8 minutes of repetitive discussion of minutia for every minute of play. I like sports but I will not sit still for sports commentary. Rather stand outdoors and watch 2 AA baseball teams play for low stakes than sit in front of the set for the world’s most fascinating foodball fest. My problem with the SB isn’t the sport, it’s the spectacle.
Bah. I’m going to play records and shake my walking stick at the kids on my lawn.
ETA: I would tune in for GWAR though. They’re awesome.
Anne Laurie
@PsiFighter37:
Hateful non-sports-fan quip: Because the TruMerkun fans need help reading words of more than two syllables?
JPL
@PsiFighter37: O’Reilly probably is jealous that he was allowed to read it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
The Superbowl is perhaps the acme of “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!”
The problem is that the sizzle isn’t nourishing. It’s bullshit.
The Superbowl is about bullshit.
PsiFighter37
@Ultraviolet Thunder: I think the Slate article that discussed football from a foreign perspective noted that the actual length of the plays ends up being something like 11 minutes (even though there are 60 minutes on the clock). When you think of it, football and baseball are by far the biggest time-wasters in terms of actual sporting action. And yet that are America’s most popular sports.
I wonder why that is.
Ash Can
Kickoff’s at 6:30 EST, so I’m not turning the TV on till then.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@PsiFighter37:
The difference for me is I like occasionally wasting an afternoon at a baseball game. It seems like less of a waste and more of a pleasant pastime. Lack of the sports gene may be why I’ve watched so little TV over the last 35 years. Nothing brings you back to the ‘tube like keeping track of your team.
And speaking of foreigners and their sports, until they start being rational about soccer they can lay off mocking America.
BillinGlendaleCA
@PsiFighter37: More time for drink’n in between the action, bathroom breaks as well.
p.a.
@TerryC: remember SCTV and the Five Neat Guys?
gene108
@raven:
Who could’ve predicted you’d have this problem, when the NFL decided to limit the ways in which people could travel to the stadium?
I’ve heard about this for weeks and was surprised no one seemed to realize the problems they were setting motion.
PsiFighter37
@Ultraviolet Thunder: For clarity, it was written by an American writer, just in the tone of European journalism.
gene108
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
Americans like sports, not only with a lot of down time, but with a lot of intervention from the coach/manager. There are no other sports that have reached the level of in-game substitution that you see in American (and Canadian) Football and Baseball.
The play doesn’t stop for line shifts in hockey.
Players only enter and exit games in basketball, when there’s an actual stoppage in play.
I think this is one reason soccer will never catch on in America. There are no real stoppages in play and the coach does very little in-game management from the sidelines, especially regards to situational substitutions.
Helen
@gene108:
Local NBC news reporting 27,000 fans took the train to the stadium. It was just mostly real crowded. Everyone got to the stadium on time. The problem is going to be after the game. Everyone will leave at once and a lot of them will be drunk.
Amir Khalid
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
How, exactly, would you like us to be more rational about soccer? As far as I can tell, we are neither more nor less rational about it than Americans are about the gridiron sport.
Baud
Holy shit. They’re going with Bittersweet Symphony again?!
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Amir Khalid:
Not meant as an insult. Only pointing out that from a foreign perspective any sport looks odd. For instance Americans don’t like the low scoring of soccer (though that’s tolerated in hockey because the play is up-close exciting).
Another reason soccer isn’t a large scale commercial success in the US is that success requires TV, TV requires commercials and commercials require stopping play. They can’t make any money while the match keeps going on an on without room for pickup truck advertising.
Another Botsplainer
Well, rooting for Seahawks. Elway against safety nets, that’s why he’s a Republican. Millionaire dick.
PsiFighter37
So who do people think is going to win? A lot of the specialists on Fox and NFL Network have been picking Seattle, surprisingly.
Anne Laurie
@jenn:
Terrorists, with backpack bombs.
You wish I was kidding.
PsiFighter37
@Another Botsplainer: Someone should’ve asked him if he thought unions were a good guy. I hate all these rich athletes coming out as Republicans; if they weren’t in a union, they’d have been told to play for pennies (relative to the millions they get) and to take it or get bent.
Baud
Haha. The untold story of Noah.
PsiFighter37
Will be interesting to see if Manning can move the ball no-huddle to start.
PsiFighter37
That has to be the first Super Bowl to start with a safety…
BillinGlendaleCA
@PsiFighter37: The ball moved, but the wrong way. Opps.
Ultraviolet Thunder
“OMAHA!”. I was in Omaha last week and heard all about that on the radio.
JPL
@Anne Laurie: Would you mind putting up a clean super bowl thread. It just seems odd not having one.
nevermind.. john has one
PurpleGirl
Who or what is GWAR?
Phrase of the day — Unnecessary cuteness.
scav
@Anne Laurie: Well, they should talk to London about the treaded Ts w/ Bs on mass transit.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@PurpleGirl:
GWAR is a staged theatrical entertainment that simulates the most extreme heavy metal performance in this universe or any other. With alien monsters. It is awesome.
Like so:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NzA4XLjRaM
IowaOldLady
I’ve made friends on the internet and flown across the country (and oceans) to see them in person. I’ve even stayed with one on a trip to New Zealand.
PurpleGirl
@Helen: I once went with a friend to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium (1988 or so). I met the friend there, he drove down from Westchester. I went home with him to Peekskill instead of going home to Queens. Oh my, was it difficult to get to the road, to get on the road and drive north. It seemed like everyone was heading in the same direction.
Amir Khalid
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
I don’t buy that. Football (as most of the planet calls it) has not needed matches consisting more of stoppages than playing time to succeed on TV. The commercials are on for a few minutes, before the match, at halftime, and right after the final whistle. It works on most of Earth, and it’s helped make football the biggest sport there is; why not in America? I can’t imagine that American fans actually want to spend more time watching commercials and listening to pundits than watching the match itself. It must be broadcasters’ greed that has distorted the NFL experience on TV.
PurpleGirl
@Ultraviolet Thunder: TY. I’ll look at the YouTube.
Anne Laurie
@JPL: I’ll save my backup post for later on in the game, then, once Cole’s thread gets near the break-the-RSS feed limit.
Anne Laurie
@scav:
Yeah, but the Marathon Bombing happened five hours’ drive from Meadowlands, less than a year ago.
JoyfulA
@opiejeanne: Somebody I got to know in a blog’s comments has been my husband for almost 10 years.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
Actually, Americans are used to constant interruption of all of their TV shows, not just sports. IIRC, in the UK and other places, they only show commercials in between shows, but here every show builds up to a commercial break — most dramas are in four “acts” (so there are three breaks during the show) and some are in five (four breaks during the show).
If American TV shows ever look oddly paced to you, that’s why. The only exceptions are TV shows on pay cable channels like HBO (“The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” etc.) which are shown uninterrupted.
So, yes, it would be very weird to Americans to have a game go on until a natural break like halftime, because all the rest of our TV is broken up into 10 or 15 minute chunks.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid:
DING DING DING we has a winner!
And, believe me, sadly, there is nothing more “all-American” than ruining a perfectly good pastime in the name of maximizing commercial profit.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Amir Khalid:
I can’t disprove that so let’s go with it as a working hypothesis. Someone who knows more than I about the economics of sport may be able to clarify. There is colossal money in the NFL and it’s my understanding that most of it comes from large-market TV. NFL fans probably really don’t mind the commercials or consider them part of the entertainment. But that’s me guessing.
PurpleGirl
@Ultraviolet Thunder: They are really into cosplay aren’t they? They would have been a hit at one or two costume calls at science fiction conventions. (I bookmarked it to go back later to look closer at the costumes.)
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Mnemosyne:
For reference, a conventional scripted half-hour of broadcast commercial TV has 19 minutes of content and 11 minutes of commercial material. If you get the shows on DVD you can watch 3 half-hours in an hour and still have time left over to fix a coffee.
SiubhanDuinne
@IowaOldLady:
Yup, me too. Well, not the New Zealand part, but the flying across the country and oceans part. I haven’t counted, but I’ll bet at least a third of my FB friends (many of whom I know IRL) are people I met originally in chat rooms or blogs.
Mnemosyne
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
@efgoldman:
Exactly. If they showed a soccer game uninterrupted until halftime, Americans wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@efgoldman:
Exactly. If you’re not the consumer, you’re the product. You can learn a lot about a show’s intended audience by the advertising.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
Malaysia’s first commercial broadcaster, TV3, went on the air in 1983, after nearly 20 years of the state-owned TV Malaysia’s Channels One and Two (since renamed TV1 and TV2.) That was Malaysian viewers’ first introduction to commercial breaks (unless they lived in Johor and had been watching Singaporean TV). It was jarring at first, having shows interrupted by commercials, but we got used to it.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Gotta check out for the night. My commute starts at 5:00 am and ends 1200 miles away. Thanks for the entertainments, BJers. Stay warm and be good to your people.
Cheers
Paul in KY
@kindness: Because GWAR is about opposite to the general vibe the NFL wants to portrey at halftime.
Sorta like having Marilyn Manson or the ICP doing it.
Paul in KY
@PurpleGirl: One of them wears a prosthetic penis. They also like to spray fake blood on audience members.