paying-attention

I had a great Super Bowl Sunday. First I went out to lunch with my husband, and we ignored the annoying pre-game show that was playing above the bar in favor of conversing with each other. Topics: our old neighborhoods, winter in Chicago, and what ingredients make the best casseroles. Then we went home and I watched a couple of old TV programs on DVD. In between episodes, I checked NBC but never caught any football action, just a lot of boring talk and a couple of good commercials (as well as some lame promos for NBC shows.) When I finished the Torchwood disc, I watched a profile of Obama on CBS. Sometime before or after the profile, I switched to the game and watched the Cardinals thrillingly pull ahead in the last few minutes of play, then saw the Steelers win. Also thrilling, but disappointing.

This morning I watched the rest of the Super Bowl commercials on the Advertising Age online newsletter.

Now that's the way to watch football. My biggest problem with televised sports (and with baseball in general) is that they spend so much time not playing. Old-fashioned commentators complain that ice hockey and soccer are ill-suited to television viewing because they don't pause often enough for commercials. That's a bad thing? I watch Mexican soccer on Univision and Telemundo, and it is both exciting and heavily sponsored. They've figured out how to run commercials at the bottom and sides of the screen while the game is going on. I'm sure it is also an advantage that my Spanish is not good enough to understand the -- probably vapid -- announcers' comments.

Labels: soccer, Spanish, sports on TV, super bowl