I sit here…..
No, that’s not right.
I stand here at the kitchen counter consuming an Everything Bagel. A near empty bottle of Palmolive supervises the process in desperate hopes of capturing a discarded morsel of cream cheese slathered goodness. One of the dogs is here too, and knows she has a better shot consuming the garlic infused nirvana that will generate creative and challenging odors for both ends of her alimentary canal for hours to come.
In all honesty, neither the dog or the bottle of soap have a shot of disproving my selfishness this morning.
This thing is delicious. I ain’t sharin’.
It should also be stated in full disclosure that I’m listening to Def Leppard right now. They just released a live concert video from their 2016 tour this last week. I’ve obtained a digital copy of it and am running it through my phone while I offer up a dazzling line of bull to you about how a bottle of dish soap is begging for a piece of my bagel.
There are a couple of reasons I’m standing at the kitchen counter this morning as I prepare yet another dispatch to the masses via a vast network of computers and servers designed by Al Gore with the intent of sharing news, thoughts, ideas, strategies, information, and pictures of nekid ladies.
Editor’s note: The word “nekid” does not generate a red squiggly line admonishing the author that he’s committed a spelling error.
The reasons I’m standing here are not only moot, but they are really none of your damned bidness beyond the fact that an Everything Bagel has the propensity to lose its toppings and dump liberated particulate composed of poppy seeds, onion, and maybe some of that blue meth from Breaking Bad onto any nearby surface you happen to orbit while consuming one of those bad boys.
Again, they’re delicious.
So let’s get down to what I’m actually here to talk about this morning. None of what you’ve read so far is intended to be part of today’s subject matter. I will however, reserve the right to callback to those items later on in this piece in some witty manner to make you believe that it was planned along. Nothing’s on the board yet, but I do have a knack for making that stuff happen.
Stay tuned.
Introductions aside, let’s talk about the Super Bowl.
Man alive, was that a game or was that a game? I haven’t yelled at a Super Bowl that much since last year when my Broncos won it.
All things being equal, I didn’t watch a whole lot of football this last season. I had a few reasons for passing on this year’s games:
Lack of emotional investment – Both of my teams were in rebuilding years. At the same time, the one team I hate started winning some games and had a shot of going further into the playoffs than they had in years. Certainly I was fine with that, given the outcome of the election, but I wasn’t interested in watching it. I’m subjected to the audibly flatulent orgasms of their gnathonic fans on a daily basis. I know how the team is doing without watching them play.
Editor’s note: The word “gnathonic” generates a red squiggly line admonishing the author that he’s committed a spelling error, even though he hasn’t. When the word is selected, right clicked, and looked up, Bing, Microsoft’s default search engine within MS OneNote successfully locates and defines the word, and confirms the spelling of the word is correct. How messed up is that?
Whoah stand by.
Bringin’ On The Heartbreak with the classic transition into Switch 625 is up. Gotta pump my fist a little.
Speaking of which, here’s a useless little tidbit.
I recorded the same song when I saw them this last August, and put it out on YouTube. During that transition, there was guy in front of us grunting rhythmically and dancing around as if he was trying to start some elaborate Generation X circle jerk on the lawn. Pretty sure he tripped over the lady who was napping on the lawn in front of us after partaking in too much liquid thunder while REO Speedwagon was on the stage. 
Ok, back to the football talk.
Not happy with the product – I haven’t been the biggest fan of some of the things the NFL has done in recent years. Whether it was a combination of the shenanigans with Deflate-gate, the statist Nazism over celebratory behavior and safety protocols, or their protest of the National Anthem, I found my time on Sunday afternoons this last season better served binge watching Longmire on Netflix while waxing rhapsodic over the wonders I could do in my garage if I would just get up off my ass.
Editor’s note: No grammar comments here folks, just a statement about Deflate-gate. The premise that deflating a football to make it easier to catch strikes the author as pure bullshit. This is evidenced by an independent test he saw on Mythbusters, and an examination of Tom Brady’s passing statistics. Said statistics were better this year when there was a sharper eye on him than for several years in the past, so suck it NFL.
Okay, as if this posting wasn’t littered with enough non-sequiturs which purposely serve to disrupt the flow of my ideas and generally tickle the fancy of anyone harboring an attention deficit with the ferocity of a sanctuary city mayor, a new phenomenon has presented itself and is now creating new ways to tie the lower third of my gastrointestinal track into some nasty, bitchin’ knots known only by the flora and fauna indigenous to said locale.
Namely, there’s a notification noise my laptop keeps making to advise me of something. The problem is that I don’t know what in tarnation the notification is.
Regardless, the periodic “goinka choink” uttered with the frequency of what one can only characterize as Digital Tourette’s provides just enough motivation to go purchase a bathtub drain plug and a toaster just to see what happens.
“Wow”, you say. “That sounds upsetting. Are you looking for advice from me or are you just venting?”
Okay, there it goes again.
“So do you want to work to solve the problem, or do you want to work to learn how to deal with it?”
I’m going to go pee and move the laundry around.
I’ll be right back.
Pause for effect.
Okay I’m back. The laptop is still making that noise. I suspect it’s iTunes making that infernal racket, however I don’t want to shut that one down. TharpSter needs his tunes when he’s ranting on the internet. Instead of trying to figure out just what the laptop is trying tell me, I’ve opted to instruct it to shut its yap.
The mute button is a wonderful thing and should be used more.
Problem solved. Let’s move on.
Well ladies and gentlemen, we’re now at the point where I let you in on the fact that I haven’t really discussed the intended subject of this post, save for one particular statement. Now that the prequel of this masterpiece has been offered, let’s talk about the Super Bowl.
The last half was a hell of a game, and I was pretty happy about the outcome.
That’s all I’m going to say about the football portion of the game though. Instead, I’m going to bitch, gripe, and moan about all of the peripheral bullshit that comes with the Super Bowl, namely the half time show.
Or am I?
In all honesty, I was going to do exactly that. I was going to lay down a verbally brilliant assault on the league’s continued insistence to subject its audience to the worst of the worst in the world of entertainment.
I’m talking about pop music.
Today the lives of pop stars are chronicled ad nauseam not only by the entertainment oriented new shows, tabloid journalists, and click bait links on otherwise respectable news sites, but they’re also captured by the stars themselves using smart phones and social networking.
Oh, and their music sucks too.
But I ain’t gonna talk about that crap and dedicate my precious web space to a medium so undeserving of my attention, even if they’re ruining my enjoyment of the game.
I was going to, however I changed my mind when the term “Super Bowl” came up in 19 different entries within the vast and insightful catalogue of verbal brilliance found here at TharpSter.Org. The one entry in those 19 I read talked about a Hail Mary that Tom Brady threw and a half-time show that sucked.
I would bet I railed against half-time shows in at least half of those entries, so why bother doing it again?
In pondering the vast superiority of suckitude which this year’s show offered up, it occurred to me I was missing the point by trying to tie the show to the game.
Editor’s note: “Suckitude”. Red squiggly line. Just sayin’.
Newsflash: The quality of the half time show has nothing to do with the game.
Additional newsflash: The quality of the commercials have nothing to do with the game.
Here’s the deal, ladies and gentlemen.
The Super Bowl is probably the highest rated television event of the year.
Baseball, basketball, hockey, and the college sports can’t beat it.
Awards shows like the Oscars, Global Globes, and Emmy’s come nowhere close.
Among the top twenty broadcasts in American history, there is only one event in that list which is not occupied by a Super Bowl. Coming in a number 9 is the MASH finale.
The top 8 slots are filled out by Super Bowls played in 2010 thru 2017.
There’s a tie in the number 4 slot.
But let’s go a little deeper.
Of those 8 games, only one halftime show did not feature a pop star. That particular game resides in the number 8 slot.
So what does that tell you?
It tells you that the Super Bowl is a three legged stool designed to generate high viewership and ad revenue. The NFL wants us to tune into the big game every year, and they give us a list of three possible choices as to why we should watch:
- Watch the championship game to see who’s going to win it all.
- Watch the commercials in which advertisers have spent obscene amounts of money to get your attention in hopes of liberating obscene amounts of money from you on their product.
- Watch the half time show.
The NFL could give a fat rat’s ass on whether I get irritated by today’s attention whoring flash in the pan littering the big game with their crappy music and goofy-ass choreography.
The advertisers don’t really care who wins the game, who loses it, and who throws a cry-baby fit in the post-game press conference.
The half-time show producers don’t care about whether a properly inflated football is more difficult to catch than one which has had some of its captive air released.
What they all care about is getting asses in front of the TV so as to make some money.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Nothing else.
