Sunday, February 01, 2009

Superbowl Zeitgeist

Here it is Super Bowl Sunday and this is one of the few Superbowl Sundays in my adult life that I'm not in the kitchen cheerfully assembling homemade pizza for a pack of bonding males. I'll probably make pizza anyway, maybe with caramelized onions and roasted garlic, it's a good indoor Sunday project for a sub-freezing day, but I don't fan American football and IMHO the only virtue of Super Bowl is that it signals the end of football season.

I like the halftime show. I wondered "aloud" on Facebook how I could catch halftime without watching the game and got some good answers from my beloved wolfpack. The best was from 4ever bud and primo musical conscience Mark Sebastian:
You'll know it's halftime at the Superbowl when 200,000,000 toilets flush simultaneously, raising sea levels globally and wiping out coastal towns from Provincetown to Malibu.
I'm watching Sunday morning talk TV, a sacrosanct weekend pastime (don't ever call me before 2pm EST on a Sunday) listening to the flushing sound of the economy through various partisan viewpoints. Obama's stimulus chess game is a fascinating study in contrapuntal lesser evils. I have to admit that I listen to or watch conservative newstalk for the supreme pleasure of watching wingnuts squeal like the stuck pigs that they are. Oh excu-u-use me, that's not terribly bipartisan, but I've had to suck up eight years of predictable de-regulative fallout culminate on the verge of what would be my retirement. Even so, I am wary of the Democrats getting a filibuster-proof majority in the legislature; the ability to bulldoze is an invitation to corruption and excess no matter who's driving. I do believe loyal opposition, despite all evidence to the contrary, does exist and implements the constitutionally intended counterbalance of the three branches of the U.S. Federal Government.

China's Premier Wen Jiabao and Russia's PM Vladimir Putin were spot-on in rebuking the USA, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, for septic tanking the global economy with high consumption, low savings, rampant borrowing and irresponsible market oversight.

It's going to take a hell of a bailout to level out the Superbowl cluster flush, but hey, what's a meta for?