Anyone who knows me knows full well that my attitude to organized sports is careless at best and massively abusive at worst. I take a lot of my cues from my personal hero, George Carlin, especially for his points that good sportsmanship and competition isn’t where it’s at, it’s loss of property, loss of limb, and loss of life where the real drive is. Anyways, since I care not a whit for the players, their teams, or the entire endeavor really it came down to the commercials. After all, the game is just a sweaty grunty window-dressing for the real game – that is, drawing the millions of people who watch to the advertisers. The ad men spend millions to put their very best spots on TV. So after a while, the game becomes a foolish excuse and people look for whats in-between, they look for the ads.

What did Superbowl XLV Ads have in common? Ultra-violence. We’re talking Clockwork Orange level of abuse and mistreatment. The Pepsi Ad where a woman throws a full can of soda at ANOTHER PERSONS HEAD, the Doritos Ad where one man licks the fingers of another, then tears the pants off yet another and fetishistically goes Japanese-businessman on them, all the way out to the extremis, which would be Bridgestone’s ad where a cube-drone attempts to head a Reply-All Email off at the pass by hurting a great number of people, Wow.

After watching the ads I was filled with a kind of cheerful violence, if I had watched ‘Taken’ right afterwards I would have likely been trembling with the urge to pull people’s heads off and scream at the corpses.

So, what do we learn from Superbowl XLV? That when we are at the market buying Pepsi we should have helmets. When we are buying Doritos we should have gloves and secure pants and a rape-whistle, and when dealing with Bridgestone perhaps a taser, a handgun, or an aluminum baseball bat. The central theme is “buy our products and something horrible will happen to you at random”. So… avoid Pepsi, Doritos, and Bridgestone.

Save yourselves. 🙂