We Interrupt These Commercials to Bring You Football

The Black Eyed Peas are in the middle of an incomprehensible musical performance at half-time, so crankyjewishguy (CJG) has a few minutes to start this blog post about last night's Super Bowl commercials. Apologies to readers outside of North America, most of whom don't really care about the Super Bowl. Here in the USA, Super Bowl Sunday is second only to Groundhog Day as a day of national importance and in recent years it's become popular to handicap the television commercials shown during the game, most of which are prepared specifically for the Super Bowl, because the game itself often isn't interesting enough on its own.

So far, CJG is completely underwhelmed with the commercials, though he thought the little kid in the Darth Vader costume who thinks he started his father's Volkswagen with his special powers was really cute, and careerbuilder.com got a chuckle out of CJG, but only because the chimps in the commercial are funny the way chimps always are when they're dressed up in business clothes and driving cars. If Christine O'Donnell doesn't think humans and chimps share a common ancestor, she obviously hasn't seen a chimp in a jacket and tie trying to park a car.

The cost to all these advertisers to run these commercials is astronomical so you'd think Pepsi Max could do better than insipid slapstick in which people get hit in the head or the gut by flying soda cans. And CJG still doesn't know, after all these years, what GoDaddy.com does except make commercials with women with large...you know. If CJG had to guess he'd say Go Daddy is a restaurant chain that competes with Hooters. Sealy tried a little sexual innuendo, far more subtle than Go Daddy, with their "It's Better on Springs" ads, but CJG already has a mattress so he didn't care, and the ad where some guy sucks another guy's finger because he has Doritos residue on it ensured that CJG will never, ever eat Doritos again unless offered some by this Go Daddy girl:

Just what business is Go Daddy in anyway?

Car ads were big; Acura, Audi, BMW, Chevy, Chrysler, Toyota, Kia, Mini Cooper, Mercedes and Hyundai all tried to get CJG to buy a car, but to no avail, and what was Chevy thinking with its ad for the Cruise Eco which made fun of old, hard of hearing people? CJG is no expert in advertising, but this is supposed to motivate car buyers to choose an Eco?

CJG has always loved the eTrade talking baby, but the new ad with the baby and his Italian tailor wasn't nearly as funny as previous eTrade commercials. The baby didn't look like the same baby to CJG, either -- not nearly as cute as this guy:

An eTrade classic: shankapotomous.

Anyway, the Super Bowl is America's annual celebration of its real national pastime, overconsumption, and somewhere during the day-long saturation media coverage a football game was played and one team won and one team lost and now that we have that out of the way will pitchers and catchers please report to spring training so we can start thinking about green grass and blue skies? Thank you.

Two Suns Coming to a Planet Near You!

Every once in a while, crankyjewishguy (CJG) stumbles upon a headline and says to himself, because no one else ever listens to him, "that simply can't be true." For example, the other day he came upon a story that said the Earth could one day have two suns. OK, CJG buys that. Maybe in the year 58,675, when everyone now on Earth will long since be dead (with the possible exception of Joan Rivers), there will be some cataclysmic astronomical event, and whatever life forms survived the epoch when all the water boiled away because of global warming will gaze into the sky and see two suns. That strikes CJG as eminently plausible. But this news story said that the Earth could have two suns as soon as 2012. CJG checked his calendar and suddenly realized, that's next year! Holy shit! Really? CJG would like to see that!

CJG knows an opportunity when he sees one and he immediately got on eTrade and bought a ton of Coppertone stock. Then he traded in his old Volvo and bought a little convertible. Then he came home and read the article and discovered that the story was hyped a little bit. CJG is no Stephen Hawking, so his summary may be a little rough, but here it is.

One of the brightest stars in the night sky is called Betelgeuse and it's collapsing. When it does, one of two things will happen. It will become a black hole and suck the Earth and maybe the entire solar system into it in which case CJG hopes everyone is wearing a seat belt, or, it will explode and become a super-nova in which case it would be bright enough to appear, for a few weeks, as a second sun. A few weeks? So, back to eTrade to sell all the Coppertone stock and back to the car dealer to try and return the convertible.

Betelgeuse, the ninth brightest star in the galaxy.

But all this begs an interesting theological question. Since the Jewish sabbath begins at sundown on Friday, would both suns have to set? Or just the real one? CJG thought maybe we could look to Jewish communities north of the Arctic Circle for the answer since there's no sunset at all up there for good parts of the year. Then he remembered -- Jews can't survive north of the Arctic Circle. In fact, few can survive north of Boca.

CJG thinks headline writers are like salesman. They draw you in with a promise too good to be true and then disappoint you. But here's the real mystery, if this isn't going to happen until at least 2012, how did they get this picture?