sleepless in seattle

I still can’t believe the Seahawks lost that game. Belichek kept his timeouts in his pocket while the clock wound down, so the Patriots would have no time left after Marshawn Lynch picked up one yard in two or three tries. I’m not excusing it, but I understand why Seattle’s players started punching Patriots in the final seconds. They wanted to hit their coach.

One thing dumber was the Nationwide Insurance ad. It’s hard to believe a room full of experts brainstormed the idea, wrote the script, hired actors, filmed and edited the commercial, showed it to their president and test groups, and no one asked, “Are we really going to show this during the Super Bowl?” I immediately wondered how parents who had lost a child must have felt. Or the others in the room. How do you break the ice after that?

One thing dumber was Katy Perry singing how she kissed a girl and liked it. I wondered how that got past the screeners, until I remembered that anyone who raised an objection would likely be fired for hate speech. We may not like that Perry kisses and tells, but we’d better get used to it.

The only thing dumber was the ad for 50 Shades of Gray. Is Hollywood really going to release a movie that glorifies violence against women, and on Valentine’s Day? And are media outlets, such as the Today show all this week, actually going to applaud them as they do it? I can’t figure out how the same Super Bowl that shows an ad that inspires women (Always’ “run and throw like a girl” commercial) also runs ads that objectify women (Victoria’s Secret) and far worse (50 shades of it). And I really don’t understand how these are the same people who claim it’s Christians who suffer from a too low view of women. We’re losing the cultural debate on gender roles to these people? Now I know how the Seahawks feel.

Image by Duncan McAlynn. Used by permission. Sourced via Flickr.