My 700th entry comes on Super Bowl Sunday. Too bad it couldn't be a better matchup. I mean, the game itself has the promise to be very exciting, which is good, but my interest in seeing either of these teams win is pretty low. As a Seahawks fan, I naturally root against the 49ers, so I'm pulling for the Chiefs, but it's not like I have any great affinity for them. I've only known one Chiefs fan in my life, and he wasn't exactly my favorite person in the world. So, I'm kinda like, meh, whatever.
We are going to some friends' house for a party tonight, which should be fun. We've gone in the past, and we usually leave at halftime. The problem with the Super Bowl on the East Coast is that it starts too late. Kickoff isn't until after 6:30, which means the game isn't over until around 10:00 or 10:30. That's way past the bedtime of most children (and many adults!) on a school night, and that's assuming you hop under the covers the moment the game ends, which nobody actually does. Lil' S2 loves football now, and he's really pumped about this party, and he's already asking if we can stay until the end of the game, but then he wouldn't be going to bed until around 11:00 or 11:30, which means he will be super tired tomorrow morning to start the week, and he gets cranky when he's tired. So, I dunno, we have balance that with the potential of making memorable childhood moments. Remember when your parents let you stay up to watch something special? Nothing was better than that.
It's super annoying that the NFL does it this way. I'm sure they've done the market research on the optimal start time, given who watches in what time zone, but it just seems like you could start the game at 5:00 or even 4:30 eastern time and nobody but children on the East Coast would be affected, and they would be affected positively. Also, maybe I'm giving the Shield too much credit, assuming they've correctly optimized things. This is the same organization that for years thought it was a good idea to black out home games on TV in the local market if they didn't sell out. As it turns out, punishing your fans for not wanting to attend your games doesn't make them want to attend your games. It just makes them follow other teams instead, which is what happened. A game on TV isn't just a game, it's also the best three and a half hour commercial for your product you could possibly get. More exposure means more interest, which means more consumers and more money. How the NFL failed to see that for so long is beyond me. Then again, they've basically minted money in profits the past quarter century, so maybe I should defer more to their judgement. Then again again, maybe they just won the lottery, with football being so popular at this moment in history for some reason, and now they think they have a unique skill in guessing random numbers. I'm never sure how that all shakes out.
Anyway, back to this particular Super Bowl, Lil' S1, who has no interest in football whatsoever, is pulling for the 49ers tonight because he doesn't like Taylor Swift. This makes me a bit uneasy, being that he is unwittingly aligning himself with the incel wing of MAGA world,* but whatever. He doesn't know anything about the culture wars (lucky him). He's just being different because all his little girl friends love Taylor Swift, and he thinks it's annoying, which it almost certainly is, because just about all kids that age are annoying with their interests, very much including Lil' S1. I can't tell you how many times I've tuned him out, as he explains in excruciating detail the plot of The Evers or whatever is the latest book he's read.
*This is another weird way in which the politics have almost completely inverted from when I was a youngster. Back in the day, the jocks and popular chicks were mostly right-coded, and now they're mostly left-coded. I remember a funny tweet from back when Colin Kaepernick kneeling was a hot-button issue, something like: In America's divorce, who would have thought the liberals would get football?
Also, it's fine, healthy even, to occasionally agree with people whose views you otherwise deplore. If you don't do this, you end up taking positions that are contrary to your values and making decisions that only hurt yourself. One of my favorite quotes is by The Cure frontman Robert Smith about the singer Morrissey, who is notoriously difficult to get along with: "If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I'll eat meat...that's how much I hate Morrissey." I like it because it's funny, but it illustrates a terrible principle to actually live by. And yet that's what I see going on so much in culture and politics these days, on both sides of the coin. Vegetarians eating meat because people they don't like said not to. I mean, look no further than the Super Bowl itself, in which all the right-wing agitators are pulling for... San Francisco?
It's all so stupid. So, I'm not going to try to talk Lil' S1 out of his anti-Swiftie position. As for me, I really admire Taylor Swift and like everything about her... except her music.
Until next time...
PS -- If you want to listen to good music, hit up the Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs duet at the Grammys. There was a bit of (very stupid) culture-war controversy over this also, but it's instantly put out of mind when you hear the song. It's such a beautiful composition, it transcends all the bullshit.
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