But What About the Commercials? 573
So the Big Game is over: I actually watched the whole thing this year. Had a cool time with a bunch of the guys (If you're reading: Thanks, Jon! Great shindig). But of course the real story each year isn't who won and who lost, but the ridiculously expensive lavish commercials. At $2M a spot, its gotta be crazy... huge numbers of
the ads were for dotcoms and soda. What were your favorites? The E*Trade Monkey ad was my favorite, followed by the Mountain Dew leopard ad and the 7up ad where the truck hit the machine.
Re:Microstrategy? The "credit fraud" commercial? (Score:1)
Re:The Ads are worth the investment! (Score:1)
Missed the Super Bowl?! (Score:1)
My favorites (Score:1)
My favorite Ads
Least Favorite
The game was okay, too.
Re:Reeves Walking (Score:2)
Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation [apacure.org]
Re:How should I know :-) (Score:1)
Herding Penguins (Score:1)
"anyone can herd cats, but I can herd penguins"
--nick
RE: Commercials (Score:1)
Re:kforce.com (Score:1)
As someone who's gone job hunting on kforce, I can assure you that nothing is remotely clever about it. Javascript and disorganized tables as far as the eye can see ... ugh.
Re:Insanity? (Score:1)
Egypt
South Africa
Zaire
Somalia
Ethiopia
There you go.
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HUH? (Score:1)
Commercials (Score:1)
The 7-UP Show Us Your Can commerical was #2.
The Sodas win the day.
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COKE VS. PEPSI 1 (Score:1)
e*jobs (Score:1)
Re:ok (Score:1)
Oh please (Score:1)
I didn't see any of the ads. I was skiing, and boy am I glad I was.
Re:Insanity? (Score:1)
But what was that for? (Score:1)
My favorite was one that tried to pull (Score:1)
They are a firm here in Reston, VA that did not have a commercial ready and wanted to drop out, but waited too long, so they just slapped that commercial together.
Much like this post, but much more pricey.
BTW, as I write this all of the DC area is playing bumper cars because nobody here knows how to drive on dry pavement, much less the several inches of snow and sleet we have now.
Super Bowl? (Score:2)
...
I was going to watch -- "for the ads", like the people who read playboy "for the articles" -- but I can't stand football. A big ceremony to toss a coin? Blech. Anyway, I hope some of the companies that made good ads put them up on their websites for download. If anybody has links, post 'em here!
___________________
I didn't watch it (Score:2)
And I don't want to know, so don't tell me.
Seriously, though, did anyone else deliberately not watch the game? For me, this was a protest against television, commercials and hype. What about you?
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
Re:Cat Herders! (Score:2)
Still interesting.
Re:Commercials are great (Score:5)
Everybody in no pants GAP spoof (Score:3)
For those of you that missed it, it was a spoof of the GAP "Just can't get enough" leather ad. A bunch of toons are singing the song, with the same weird cuts and shots as the GAP ad. There's Yogi Bear, Booboo, Cow, Chicken, The Red Guy, I.R. Baboon, and a bunch of old Hanna Barbera toons. When the song's over, the following flashes on the screen:
Everybody in no pants.
And then it cuts to I.R. Baboon and Cow mooning the camera. Basically, all the toons in the commercial were those that regularly appear without pants.
Cartoon Network always has the best promo commercials, IMHO. ^_^
QNX isn't Linux (Score:2)
Since the i-Opener uses QNX, what does this have to do with Linux®?
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Re: I didn't watch it (Score:2)
I could rant about carpetbagging and commercialism (Score:2)
I'll just list my take on the best ads:
3: The Budweiser ad featuring the upset dog. Very funny, though they already used the running into a truck idea with the "I have to run" ad they've been using for a month or so.
2: E-Trade and the monkey. It's right up there with the ad that ran a while back saying "If your broker's so good, why does he still work?" Sponsoring the lame-ass halftime show was dumb, though. The WWF halftime show on USA was better.
1: EDS, "Herding Cats". Need I say more? I suspect all tech people (and especially their bosses) "got" that one instantly. A lot more people, though, were probably scratching their heads. I loved it.
That was also the concensus at the engineer-heavy party I just was at.
- -Josh Turiel
Subjective definition of "fun". (Score:2)
Uh. Only if you LIKE football. I'm lucky- I'm attuned to the negative metabolic effects of the tube and do not react positively to them.
Contrast.
Fun = spending nine hours at a coffee house you haven't frequented in years and discussing various occult systemology with friends, while at the same time doodling and making shorthand notes of the whole event.
Yeah, the Photoshop WAS work- about 200$ worth, thank you. And if I had not been tasked with freelance, I would be reading or working on personal artwork. I've had my dose of entertianment at the coffee house- it was real, it was tangible, I could SMELL it, and there weren't any commercials. I spent the day doing something memorable, and worked off the coffee-stasis hangover bitshifting, rather than lowering my metabolic rate in front of the idiot box.
Re:The E*trade Monkey (Score:3)
I have to say, though, the best ad I saw this Superbowl was the Herding Cats one, even though I can't remember what it was for anymore.
Re:I didn't watch it (Score:2)
As I wrote in a comment below, I deliberately avoided the game too. But it was real easy for me, considering I have no interest whatsoever in football to begin with. :-)
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
Make it a /. pole (Score:2)
Re:The "CNN" sign in half of the blimp shots (Score:2)
Commercials online (Score:4)
http://promotions.yahoo.com/promotions/superspots/ [yahoo.com]
Re:Commercials are great (Score:3)
Well, in the case of the Rams, you couldn't be more wrong. The ones without loyalty were the fans in LA--or the prodigious lack of them. Why do you think the nation's second largest TV market lost both of their football teams within a year (the Rams to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland)?? Because nobody in LA cared about football. Sure, the Rams were a mediocre team...but their attendence the last few years was abyssmal. Indeed, no one even lifted a finger to stop either team from moving.
Meanwhile, the Rams sold out nearly every game in St. Louis for the past 5 years--and believe me, they sucked for the first four of them. As for the assertion that neither of these teams has helped the local economies, that's clearly absurd. And even more than that, getting to a Super Bowl unites a city and makes it exciting to live in (if St. Louis can ever be called that...but that's another story) in important if not economically quantifiable games.
Both of these teams played their hearts out all season and in tonight's great game. Don't you have anything better to do than disparage them?
Re:Commercials are great (Score:2)
Re:If they would rather die .. (Score:2)
Anyway, this particular quote comes from the begining of the book when we're learning what a butthole Scrooge is. Some other business men come to Scrooge's shop soliciting donations for homeless shelters. Scrooge points out he pays taxes for poorhouses to which the business guys point out that "some would rather die then go to the poorhouses." To which Scrooge replies "then let them die and decrease the surplus population." Of course, its been awhile since I've read the book, so I don't remember if it happens exactly like that in the book, but in the last two film versions I watched, both the muppets and that one on the USA cable station with Patrick Stewert it happened that way.
Now if I can only get to see Patrick Stewert's one man performance of it....
Re:The E*trade Monkey (Score:3)
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Re:I didn't watch it (Score:2)
/. should have its commercial! (Score:3)
Cat Herding (Score:2)
URL of the movie itself is: http://www.eds.com/about_eds/homepage/catcommerci
Dieing of geekdom and slashdot? (Score:2)
I can think of only one application of anything geek related in this and that is the use of computers and various graphics programs to create the commercials. Aside from that everything else is just bad.
1. Sports -- generally the goals of sports and computing are opposite of each other. Want proof how many professional athleates have ever written a working program that actually did anything useful? I don't think anyone could really name one at all. 2. Commercials in general. Numberous times I have actually seen quotes that have indicated that television is a medium which is used as an opiate for the masses and is generally one of the vehicles by which we approach a totalitarian state. My question in this case is exactly why is this something that is good?
3. The super bowl. I couldn't think of a bigger waste of a peson's time than to be in front of a television when an event of little political or social importance is going on. Is the victor of the super bowl actually going to become the unquestioned lord and master of the world? No. Does football have anything to do with anything relating in even a smal;l way with computers.
4 Advertising in general. Advertising is not a field that lends itself to openness and the use of fair tactics of any sort. If you disbelieve this just look at how deceptive advertisements for automobiles are. Some bozo is driving his car along a mountain road or along a track at speeds well over the legal limit or some red neck is taking his 4x4 through the most unimproved area he can find and that is supposed to make an impression on people (and hey it's not technically illegal because they have little notices in 1pt fine sans serif font at the bottom of the screen). If this is the direction that the technical community is taking I want out before we have the next release of windows or linux to be codenamed Buckaroo or something equally corny.
5. Taco? Well this is a little suprise but I guess evolution can work in reverse can't it? Most humans usually decrease their mental abilities after age 20 or so and a general atrophy of physical and psychochemical elements also occurs about then so I guess it's not that much of a suprise?
The above comments are not necessarily flames or anything else however does sporting minutiae such as the super bowl actually count as something that is technically noteworthy? Theoretically if the entire human race is enslaved by reptilian creatures from the planet zoron it shouldn't appear on slashdot unless they make the drivers that run their spaceships opensource and run on linux.
To sum up this little post: sports and commercials relating to sporting events are far removed from the sphere of technical influence and necessity of the part of the human race that actually counts that it is almost laughable.
Does anyone have any hard facts about the actual image hardware/software that was used? Did anything actually revolutionary that is technically important actually go down then? PS. I make an offering of a dead cow to the first god that represses the posting of the actual results from the super bowl from slashdot.
The E*Trade Ass: Even Better (Score:3)
"Does he have health insurance?"
"What are you talking about? He's got money coming out the wazoo!"
The monkey was just another one of the cheap commercials with a more creative tagline. The ass commercial actually made a very strong humorous play on the amount of money floating around in our economy these days.
And speaking of asses, 7-Up goes from 'Make 7-Up Yours', which is pretty funny, to 'Show Me Your Cans', which is even funnier. They have some good spots now as well.
*clink* *clink*
NOTE: This post may not be allowed through by certain web filters. If you are using such a web filter, it is your loss.
Not a blimp (Score:2)
They said the weather sucked too much, so the blimp wasn't flying. They never said exactly what it was instead, but I assume it was a helicopter (although they did say something about an ultra-light(!))
Say what? (Score:2)
The Apple "Lemmings" ad was a complete disaster for them. It might've been original, but they shot themselves in the foot with that campaign.
I agree with your other ads, though. The only ones that actually made me laugh out loud were the E-Trade monkey and the Cat Herders. Less good, but still very amusing were the Budweiser crying dog, and the Gap singers running from an Oldsmobile. What made that commercial was that I really thought it was a Gap ad (and that seeing them run over would be funny), although I did remember thinking that they sounded especially off-key.
As far as the game went, that might've been the best 4th quarter of a Super Bowl that I've ever seen -- my God, the biggest game of the year decided by one freakin' yard! Since this seemed to be a down year as far as the overall quality of the commercials, it makes me wonder if there's some inverse relationship between the quality of each Super Bowl and the commercials that air during it.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The syndicate was qiute cool. (Score:2)
What is more interesting is the interface designs that the syndicate used to have a massive monitoring network from all the major vending sites for soda and their product.
Also what was brought up in those series of things was the use of a human/machine interface that was employed to transmit data from the monitering party to the individual who was networked. Quite interesting.
Has any research been done about machine/human interfaces for say transmitting simple words or vould sounds to the person't vocal center of their brain?
Is it just me or... (Score:2)
Titans vs. Rams? Sounds like a condom ad.
As a womyn I am very offended by you male pigs!
Yahoo has the ads (in Real Player format). (Score:2)
Cat herders (Score:2)
My $(1/50),
--Evan
Lucky Americans.... (Score:2)
I watched the game last night on Sat 1, (From 12:30 to 4:00a.m.) Unfortunately, Sat 1 just took the ABC feed of the game, used its own announcers (Superbowl in German!) and used it's own advertising. What this means is they took the same commercial breaks as ABC, but just filled them with the same spots over and over. I saw advertisements for:
1. Kinder MaxiKing (chocolate treat)
2. The Nike "What are you getting ready for" commercial where the guy runs up the hill in full pads and jumps off
3. An ad for Nutella with the Frankfurt Galaxy football team (where they make the Americans on the team look like idiots
4. A couple of other ads that were so nondescript that I can't even be bothered to remember them
I guess the good news is is that if the ads were especially funny or clever, they'll make their way into the mainstream, or be featured on "Die Dickste Dinger" (a weekly show about funny commercials)
Bjorky
"Dogs love me cause I'm crazy sniffable/
I bet you never knew I got the ill peripheral"
-Beastie Boys 'The Move'
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Re:Cat Herders! (Score:2)
Ads... (Score:2)
I also thought the Christopher Reeves commercial was awful, and tasteless. If it were for a charity, or maybe even for some medical company, I could understand. But an investment firm?? C'mon!
My favorite commercial by far was the cat herding commercial (download a crappy realaudio version of it at www.eds.com). They showed it a second time and I laughed even more because there were little bits I missed the first time (from laughing so much) -- like the guy rolling up the ball of string.
Other good commercials:
The "He's got money coming out the wazoo!" ad was great (I think this was an E*Trade commercial too). The 7-Up guy putting the soda machine in a "high-traffic area" (the center lane of a freeway) was great. There are a few others but those stick out the most in my mind.
Other bad commercials:
The car commercial that was a rip-off of a gap commercial. This was not a parody, because there was nothing funny about it. It was just a dumb rip-off.
The "Pepsi One tastes just like Coke" commercial. First of all -- ewww! Those people are giving each other germs. Second of all -- Pepsi One does not taste like Coke. At all. Get over it.
To the people who don't like football:
You don't have to like football. That's your choice. But for some reason a lot of you come out of the woodwork around the super bowl to try to make those who like football feel guilty about it. The only reason I can think of for this is that you are jealous that a lot of people are enjoying an event that you aren't enjoying, even though you *choose* not to enjoy it. Maybe I'm wrong.
And for the person who thinks wives are mistreated because of football -- get real. First of all, there are lots of females that love football. Second of all, I don't know of any guys that hide their football 'habit'. The women who get involved with these men know what they are getting into. If a woman doesn't want to be ignored 20 Sundays out of the year, she should not get involved with a guy who ignores everything but football when it's on. There are plenty of football fans (like me) who enjoy it but are fanatical about it, and don't have to watch every game. Bottom line: Don't blame football for people's relationship problems. Those people need to take responsibility for their own problems.
Re:World Cup? (Score:2)
But the one I was referring to is soccer (football for everyone else in the world), and yes, it is a european thing. Also a south american thing, african thing, asian thing, pretty much a thing for anyone who dosen't live in the US.
I believe the next world cup was held in France in 1998, and was won by france, followed by Brazil. And I think the one before that was won by Brazil. The US, OTOH, rarely finishes in the top 5.
The website for the 1998 world cup is here [france98.com].
Sporting World Cups? (Score:2)
Mens' tennis national team championship is the Davis Cup, this year won by Australia (though, to be fair, Andre and Pete didn't play). The women's equivalent is the Federation Cup.
As for other World Cups, there are many of them, but perhaps the biggest one that you haven't mentioned is the cricket World Cup which was (you guessed it) won by Australia this year. It might seem like a really strange sport to Americans, but go ask an Indian or Pakistani expatriate about cricket and see the reaction you get. Better still, ask an English expatriate about cricket and watch their downtrodden look . . .
descriptions? please? (Score:2)
Cat Herders! (Score:2)
The budweiser one w/ the horse was pretty incomprehensible. Also the "who can spend the most money looking cheap" contest among the dot coms was pretty worthless. But gee, I'm glad E*Trade is actually boasting about how they waste my commision money.
Nope (Score:2)
Don't know about this year, but only 133 million watched in the United States last year. Worldwide, though, over 800 million people watched it, with the game broadcast to 144 countries and territories, in 17 languages. I'm sure a lot of Europeans watched it, since there is (or was, anyway) an American football league there. American football also always does great business whenever the teams play in Mexico and Japan.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The E*trade Monkey (Score:5)
A chimp is standing on a box, wearing an etrade tshirt. There are 2 clearly senile old men sitting next to him. Some annoying song starts playing, and the men start clapping along while the monkey flails about and screams a bunch. This goes on for 25 seconds.
At this point, all of america is saying "This is the dumbest commercial I've ever seen."
Then it cuts to a text screen.
"We just wasted 2 million dollars. What are you doing with your money? E*Trade.com"
An interesting side note: There was a football game worth watching interspersed in all the commercials. I was confused.
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"What is that sound its making?"
Apu (Score:2)
Dot-Com is my favourite squadron.
I believe they can win the Nasdaq trophy in the next finals.
Pope
music trend (Score:2)
Re:The E*Trade Ass: Even Better (Score:2)
time. They can play the wazoo comerical forever and it would still be funny. The Monkey commercial was good for one shot only - the superbowl, and it was the best. Those Mountain Dew commercials just annoyed me and I love Dew.
The yellow line on the field (Score:2)
The $20K cost, I'd posit, is in keeping the equipment calibrated, transported, and maintained, and paying the expert staff required.
-La'Choppe
[X] - Drive nail here for a new monitor
Re:relive the magic (Score:2)
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I can't believe nobody's nominated.... (Score:2)
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Re:Commercials are great (Score:2)
Both of these teams played their hearts out all season and in tonight's great game. Don't you have anything better to do than disparage them?
For the kind of money they make, should you expect any less?
Re:the big game (Score:2)
1. Commercials are better than the vast majority of PROGRAMMING. And they are almost always better than the actual game.
2. Corporations have no moral, ethicial, or practical need to have "democratic representation." If you don't like the one you work for, start your own!
3. The super bowl is the single most-watched televised event in the world. The author made an assumption that 99% of the people would know the Super Bowl was yesterday.
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Agreed (Score:2)
All the rest left us wanting.
Commercials are great (Score:5)
Fun while it lasted... (Score:2)
Should be interesting to see how fast everybody who was going to boycott the major studios to put pressure on DVD CCA caves in when the big movies start coming out.
Re:I didn't watch it (Score:2)
A very out-of-the-loop
-nme!
relive the magic (Score:5)
Re:Dieing of geekdom and slashdot? (Score:3)
The above comments are not necessarily flames or anything else however does sporting minutiae such as the super bowl actually count as something that is technically noteworthy? Theoretically if the entire human race is enslaved by reptilian creatures from the planet zoron it shouldn't appear on slashdot unless they make the drivers that run their spaceships opensource and run on linux.
You know, I always thought that /.'s slogan was "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. For a large part of the general population (and even some nerds) Super Bowl Sunday has become an unofficial holiday, focusing around a sporting event, which has become a Pretty Big Place to introduce the masses to some nifty technology (someone's already mentioned the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad, I'm sure).
To be honest, I really didn't think that /. would even mention the Super Bowl, but it's not like we're discussing the game here. The post IMHO is more than justifiable as stuff that matters, at least to some.
Interesting Movie Trailers (Score:3)
Mission to mars is getting extremely good script reviews and the SFX look stellar. Not very sciency or whatall, but looks original at least. I will be in line.
U-571 is supposed to be very good to excellent. I will be in line too.
Re:descriptions? please? (Score:3)
Scene: The Serengti.
Cheeta (Think! It doesn't make sense if it was leopard.) running. Mountain biker chases, catches up, does a cowboy-dismount on the cheeta and wrestles it to the ground. Sticks ihis arm down the the cheeta's throat and pulls out a Mountain Dew can.
[cut to mountain biker's friends]
"See that's why I'm not a cat person."
Re:I could rant about carpetbagging and commercial (Score:2)
Yep. The way to do it is to stand still with the cat on the leash until it walks a few steps the direction you want to go. Then stop and wait again. And again. And repeat. And occasionally prod the cat with your foot when it lays down in protest. Then give up four hours later and carry the cat home.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Re:I could rant about carpetbagging and commercial (Score:2)
- -Josh Turiel
I didn't watch the Super Bowl (Score:2)
In the meantime, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the ads. Hopefully the better ones will make it onto normal TV hours, but that seems to happen so rarely...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine [nmsu.edu].
E-Trade too funny!! (Score:2)
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
adcritic.com (Score:5)
Re:Dieing of geekdom and slashdot? (Score:3)
It certainly does! (Score:2)
Heh, my personal favorite is the one where "the boss" calls a guy into the office...
Boss: It's always hard to say this...you're fired.
Guy: *pause* No I'm not.
Boss: *matter-of-fact* Yes you are.
Guy: No I'm not.
Boss: Yes, you are!
Guy: No I'm not!
Boss: Yes, you are!
Guy: *thinks* Yes I am!
Boss: Yeah, you are.
Fade to black, text on screen: "You are not bugs bunny."
Or what about the scooby doo project, with Shaggy going on about "oh I am soo scared" and a little scooby doo totem made in the same style as the one in the blair witch. Brilliant
There's actually some .rm files of these at http://ghostbusters.inte rspeed.net/cats/cartoon/shorts.htm [interspeed.net]. But yeah, too many great ones to mention!
Back to iCrave TV. (Score:2)
Here in Canada, we of course get American stations along with Canadian ones. However, it's standard practice up here during events simulcast on both an American and a Canadian station to cut the signal from the American station and replace it with the Canadian one.
For instnace, we watch The Simpsons on Sunday nights on both FOX and Global, but it's Global's commercials we get to watch. I guess the clocks aren't quite in sync. Usually the change is quite abrupt. If I'm watching Simpsons on Fox, I get right up to Bart at the Blackboard when it cuts out and starts over again, this time "The Simpsons On Global"
Now we didn't get all those fancy smancy commercials up here in Canada, but rather a lot of Canadian ones, even though we still see the American coverage (ABC, right?). So if someone watched the Superbowl on iCraveTV, they'd not see these $2 million dollar spots of advertising glory, but rather the standard Canadian "boring" commercials we regularly see.
mmm Oh how I fancy a McCain's pizza right now, or want to buy Petro-Canada gas instead of those other foreign corporate gas stations from Texas or Holland... Warm Canadian fuzzy feelings.
Any followup theories?
The Ads are worth the investment! (Score:4)
For example, OurBeginning.com, which spent over $3.5 million dollars, saw a spike on their web site today, from 40 connections per second to over 500 connections per secondb Kby teWmJu&Topic=Internet-News&Nav=na-search-&StoryTit le=Internet-News [newsalert.com])
(see http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=Cojpfu
Another advantage of the commercials is name/brand recognition. According to an article (http ://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/DailyNews/supe rbowl_netads_000113.html [go.com]) on ABCNews.com, HotJobs.com, which had commercials in last year's SuperBowl, found it was much easier to raise VC funds. To quote the article:
I find it funny, though, that the vast majority of the commercials were .com related. It seemed all commercials fit into one of three categories:
One thing I thought was interesting, were the couple of commercials geared towards women (the Oxygen.com commercial, for example). That seems like wasted money, since the demographics for the SuperBowl viewer, I'd assume, are heavily skewed toward the male gender.
This comercial thing (Score:2)
Re:If they would rather die .. (Score:2)
I got there late, so had to stand in the back - I forgot my glasses, so Stewart was just a generally human-shaped blob up front - and I spent two hours totally spellbound, listening to that man's voice.
I'm seen or read variations of that story a hundred times - I was just going because of the "celebrity" factor. He stated up front that he was essentially reading the story - he didn't change any of the dialogue. By the time the performance was over, I forgot I was standing up and nearly fell down when I tried to stand up again. It took me a minute or two to "return to Earth".
Frankly, you've got to have at LEAST surround-sound to get a feeling for the way his voice fills up a room - listening to him on the boob tube is a travesty. And although I couldn't make out his facial features (which were very expressive, based on 3rd-party descriptions), his body movements were VERY dynamic and extremely easy to read.
Of course, when I saw it, I think it was his 2nd year - he's probably only made it better since then...
Re:Cat Herders! (Score:2)
Do you mean the Anheuser-Busch commercial? They were Clydesdales, beautiful animals, and the "official" horse of the beer. I thought it was a rather tasteful commercial.
Re:I could rant about carpetbagging and commercial (Score:2)
A related thought - you see people taking dogs for walks - have you ever seen a cat be taken for a walk?
- -Josh Turiel
My favorites (Score:3)
EDS Cat Herders (Score:5, Funny)
7up Exploding Vending Machine (Score:4, Funny)
computer.com helped daddy learn how to download pictures (Score:4, Funny)
e*trade "Guy Jumping out Window" (Score:3, Funny)
e*trade "Money Out the Wazoo" (Score:2, Funny)
The game (Score:1)
MicroStrategy (Score:0, Redundant)
monster.com "The Road Not Taken" (Score:0, Offtopic)
Microsoft E-Business (Score:-1, Troll)
Half-time show (Score:-2, Kill me now)
Easy there friend...... (Score:2)
Publicly-funded stadiums are corporate welfare (Score:2)
It is? Tell me: do you have any numbers to back this up? I ask, because people who have looked at the econmic impact of publicly funded stadiums in particular, or the presence of sports teams in general, have found essentially no evidence of any net benefit. To be sure, there are people who make more money due to the presence of a heavily-subsidized sports franchise, but there are others who do worse, and there are also huge opportunity costs as well.
s/games/ways/?
But, actually, this is just the problem: the cash that St. Louis just basically gave to the Rams most certainly was economically quantifiable, and the other very pressing needs of St. Louis are also economically quantifiable, so the idea of spending that much cash on something just to "make it exciting to live in" goes way past stupid and borders on the immoral.
Re:Insanity? (Score:2)
You know someone. You refer to them as a hacker. I assume you're using the ESR defintion of "hacker". But then you go on to say that they're reading "C++ for Dummies". Now, granted, not all "hackers" need to know C++... but to read a "For Dummies" book... Egads man.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Commercials are great (Score:2)
E-This, E-That... E-Sucks (Score:2)
That's not my Internet, and I doubt it's yours, either. After a while I had to walk away from the television.
Let's all pitch in five bucks so next year Stallman can be on thirty seconds during the Super Bowl, talking about free (as in speech) software.
In the meantime, f*ck those "dot-coms" and their banal advertising.
P.S. As a BMX racer and mountain biker, I was bemused by the Mountain Dew ad...
For those with deep pockets! (Score:2)
Re:Cat herders (Score:2)
1 here, now I have to wait another 8 months before I get more football
Re:What game? (Score:2)
Last year on NBC, 133 million Americans tuned in, and millions more watched in 144 countries around the world. This year, the National Football League expects 800 million world-wide viewers in 180 countries.
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Re:e*jobs (Score:4)
I can't wait.
Re: (Score:2)
"It is pitch black. You are likely... (Score:2)
Every time I see the commercial for that flick, I can't help but think:
"Turn on the lamp and then find the torch!"
*sigh*
Re:Commercials are great (Score:2)
Re:What game? (Score:2)
Nearly 1 billion people watched the game, including 130 million Americans. The Super Bowl was broadcast in 24 languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Bulgarian and Hindi. The game even prompted an informal holiday in Germany, where many arose early to watch the 4 a.m. live broadcast.
"Lots of Germans have learned that the Super Bowl is the greatest party of the year," said Alexander Roesner, sports coordinator of Germany's SAT 1 network. "The game is a highlight event, especially for the younger people."
. There were 3,500 journalists covering the Super Bowl, including 476 from 162 international agencies. An estimated 500,000 also monitored the game through www.nfl.com.