Posted 9:06 AM by Gene

Every so often a blogger proves his worth -- even if he is a professional writer (as most bloggers now seem to be):

Other than the Apple effort, Super Bowl ads have been pretty much 99% lame, which is about the ratio prevailing for television commercials in general, year in year out. But the Super Bowl is worse somehow. Within that lame 99% lurk all those ads that make the game telecast an even more tedious experience than the watching of "Two and a Half Men": the chimpanzees, lizards, and frogs, the tendentious jokes, the self-referential winks (wasn’t there an ad last year that spoofed the Janet Jackson thing the year before?), the cringe-inducing attempts by fashionable ad agencies to nudge their buzz along for one more desperate year and by unheralded or unfashionable ad agencies to acquire themselves some zing, the celebrity has-beens (Burt Reynolds) and has-beens of the future (Jessica Simpson)....

Why do advertisers participate in this charade? The answer lies in the vicious circle of media masturbation. (Sorry if that sounds like a redundancy.)

We could say the same for the game, and the hundreds of encyclopedias' worth of press coverage, but media masturbation, like the poor, will always be with us.