Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is…..WILL YOU WATCH THE SUPER BOWL? The Super Bowl is literally the only football game I watch all year, any year: ever since 2012, I have attended a friend’s Super Bowl Party. The fun thing is that of the 5-6 regular guests, only one of us cares about NFL football at all; another guest only cares about college football, and the rest of us don’t care at all. For us, it’s an occasion to eat, drink, and scream at the TV. Fun story: last year we had streaming issues and thought we found it streaming on youtube; when the Halftime Show arrived, we were confused to see last year’s singer again, and those who had planned on getting irate every time the cameras swooned over Taylor Swift and her boyfriend were confused and frustrated that she wasn’t showing up at all. They had so been looking forward to being angry! Then we realized: WE WERE REWATCHING LAST YEAR’S GAME! This caused a bit of a rift between the P’O’d guy (the only one who cares about the NFL) and the rest of us, who thought it was hilarious that the same teams playing had led us into effectively missing The Big Game. This year it’s Bahston vs Seattle, so we won’t get fooled again.
And now, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Badlands, CJ Box. Part of his Cassie Dewell series. Also, technically, the APLS Guidebook for Library Board Trustees. Riveting stuff, that.
WHAT are you reading now? I’m still pecking at With Malice Toward None, but as mentioned I’m taking this week off from serious reads to relax a little. I’m also reading Cory Doctorow’s latest, a book on why the internet has gotten markedly bad in the last 10-15 years. (I’m bad at relaxing from serious reads.)
WHAT are you reading next? More Box or Connelly, I think.
Reading Freely 
That’s funny, Stephen! 😂
That was the consesus — and I said we should watch 2025’s game next year. XD
When I saw my first live game I was a little bemused – especially by the CONSTANT stoppages – but I figured out *most* of what was going on. I had no real ‘skin in the game’ but was impressed by the Detroit Lions who I was rooting for…. The following year I was thrilled to see the Miami Dolphins play (they had been ‘my’ team in the late 1980’s) and SO *disappointed* by their performance!
The constant stops are the most frustrating thing about American football — they turn a game that’s officially 1.5 hours into 4 hour dramas. I think the closest I ever came to caring about the NFL was rooting for the Cowboys in their 1990s heyday; these days, fb has twigged on to my Boston fixation and now promotes the Patriots, Bruins, and Celtics — football, hockey, and basketball. I do like the Patriot name/logo/colors, which is more than I can say for the others. ‘Celtics’ is pronounced with an S for the team name and it drives me crazy.
I little while back I was wearing my Miami Dolphins baseball cap in my Indie bookshop. The girl on the till said she liked it and I said that I’d seen them at Wembley. Oh, she said…. Are they a band…..? [lol]
They did have a fun logo back in the day. Over the years logos have become largely lamer — like website logos! San serifs, flat, boring, but easily portable to mobile browsers. -_-
Oh, and as a complete aside….. I was at the Mall today (first dry day for ages so….) and I saw a sign out front which said: Armed Police Training.
Did my (book) shopping and not a cop to be seen….
On my way out they were there – two guys in full gear each with a H&K G36 Assault Rifle… [lol] So I (naturally) went over for a chat and the guy I spoke to explained the gun (I said that I’d previously seen the police with the MP7 machine-pistol) and asked I if they were going to be patrolling the Mall in future. If only, he said, it’d be easy duty!
Weird day….!
Curious as to what your malls are like — I’m guessing not the standalone, detached American ones in the ‘burbs that are now dying? Those were, for a few decades, social/cultural hubs, but that began changing when I was in high school and they’re almost all defunct now. Abandoned malls are a big thing on urban-exploring youtube.
Urban exploring of malls: this is the Montgomery Mall (now abandoned except for one anchor store which is a police/fire station), which I went to MANY times as a kid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5ljL38wcI&
That story is hysterical!
The football fans I know were also annoyed by the attention paid to Taylor Swift last year.
Honestly, in fourteen years of watching with this group it’s the most entertaining thing that’s happened — even when Katy Perry rode a giant lion across the field when she was doing ROAR.
Not even the Patriots can get me to watch that much TV or that many ads.
But Super Bowl ads are a feature, instead of a bug!
I don’t feel that is true any more though. I think the ads are dumber but I am willing to entertain the notion that I might have gotten grumpier.
When I was a kid one of the ads — which went ‘viral’ — was CGI frogs burping ‘Budweiser’. 😉
I remember that one…
I haven’t read any of these.
Last #book I finished: Moi Fadi le frère volé, by #RiadSattouf
Amreading: Guilt, by #KeigoHigashino
Amlistening to: That Hideous Strength, by #CSLewis
TBR Reading next: The Chinese Maze Murders, by #RobertVanGulik
That Hideous Strength was the first of the Space Trilogy I read — on accident, I suppose. I was led to it because it was supposedly ABOLITION OF MAN but in novel form.
Oh interesting. I think reading it after the two others does help put it in a broader perspective, even more scary I would say
That story is hilarious! 😀
I love football, college the most but also NFL, BUT … I haven’t watched a single game since getting married. We don’t have “normal” tv, just a handful of streaming subscriptions {that we barely use as is}, so … no football for me anymore, lol
That is a great story, Stephen! Poor P’O’d guy. Enjoy your reading.
https://thebookconnectionccm.blogspot.com/2026/02/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge.html
What a great story! Enjoy this year’s party, game, entertainment and ads – or last year’s, it sounds fun either way.
LOL but the guy who knew about the NFL should have known 🤣🤣
You would think! The problem is, for the first quarter, the scores were actually really consistent, so when he was Googling for the current score to check and see how behind we were, he basically got a false positive. 😀
Reminds me of a might-as-well-laugh-as-cry story from my husband’s last half year in this world…
The third time he was hospitalized my husband knew he had cancer; we were hoping for a curable kind. His doctor, an old school friend, had ordered that a family member was to stay with him at night, preferably male but whomever he could get, meaning me. He was losing weight and was encouraged to eat.
The patient in the other bed, a city police officer, had been found unconscious in an alley. He had a nasty wound that only the RN and MD were allowed to touch. For diagnostic purposes he wasn’t supposed to have even a glass of water at a time.
When he was able to use the phone beside his bed he told a relative, “My doctor’s not been in to see me in 48 hours. They’re not letting me have food or water or stand up or anything. I had to use a bedpan, my wound hurt like –, and when the nurse came in for the bedpan she didn’t even give me water to wash myself. Had to lie here yelling for the nurse for an hour. This guy next to me, his doctor comes in just to visit two or three times a day, his wife’s sitting beside him going ‘Could you eat another piece of this nice juicy orange?’ and his whole family come in and help him bathe and shave and –… Well, he has the same name as the head doctor in this place! What does that tell you?”
Apparently the policeman lived alone, but friends and relatives soon came in to visit him, too. The wound was still nasty.
“At least we can watch the Super Bowl together,” my husband said cheerfully. The policeman seemed to be looking forward to watching the Super Bowl on what was to be his last day in the hospital.
Super Bowl Sunday came…and we came to find out that the policeman had been talking about watching a recording of the Super Bowl after he went home. While the game was going on, he watched a long infomercial about an upscale subdivision in Atlanta.
PK
That is funny. 😆