Humor Columns by Horace J. Digby

I don't really know much about football, but when I was invited to a Super Bowl party a few weeks ago I wanted to learn more. It seems the Super Bowl started when two leagues merged. I think they were the American Football League and the League of Women Voters.

The hardest part of Super Bowl Sunday is calculating the date. Currently ("this year") the game is the seventh Sunday immediately before the first Sunday following the Paschal Moon. It may have something to do with Lent. You can also track it by watching for beer and corn chip company stock prices to spike.

It's also hard to figure out which teams are playing. The "official Super Bowl website" (I found five of them) are apparently for people who already know who the teams are. None of them made a big deal about which teams were playing. It looked to me like the city of Phoenix, might be playing against Peyton Manning.

Super Bowls have Roman Numerals in their names and I quickly learned this was "Super Bowl XLII," as soon as I realized "XLII" wasn't the size of some lineman's jersey.

But neither Roman Numerals nor Peyton Manning bring us back to the Super Bowl each year (assuming it's an annual event). We come back because of the competition, and not just the competition between teams, coaches, players and cheerleaders. The competition I'm talking about is among advertisers, each trying to plunk down a more embarrassingly huge wad of cash for their thirty-seconds—as much as $3 millions for the airtime alone, with production exceeding the per minute cost of Hollywood blockbusters.

We may not remember the score, the big plays, or even which teams a few years from now, but we will remember the commercials; like the Budweiser “Frogs” (1995); the Xerox “Monk” (1977); "Mean Joe Green's" Coke commercial (1979); or Apple Macintosh's "1984" commercial (1984) directed by Ridley Scott who also did Blade Runner.

I'm no expert on football, but I do get invited to my share of Super Bowl parties because I'm an expert on football snacks—to be more exact potatoe chips (oops I mean "potato") having pioneered various methods of opening chip bags. Need to know which chip goes with red wines; which chip to served with fish; the right chip for beef entree's? I'm your man. My talent is knowing the best chip for dipping in whatever that green stuff is they make out of avocados.

When I arrived the final seconds were ticking off the clock, means only three hours fourteen minutes of broadcast time remained. Luckily I'd missed the ads. Like one about a Ford pick up spinning on an immense centrifuge. Apparently Ford customers demand such trucks. Or the one with dancing lizards selling bottled water (perhaps it was the other way around).

I didn't catch the winning team's name. It had the word "New" in it. Oh, and their uniforms were blue, white and some other color. Actually I heard on the news that Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both claiming they won the Super Bowl.

The snacks were a huge success.

-- Horace J. Digby