With college football’s bowl season and the NFL playoffs as well as college and pro basketball on TV, I’ve been watching a lot of sports lately. It’s been entertaining to see the Orange Bowl, the NFL wild-card playoffs, and some key early-season basketball games. But along with watching sports comes all the TV commercials one has to endure over and over. I'm definitely feeling a hangover.
Usually I am able to avoid doing the time. While flipping channels, which incidentally is a personal pastime in and of itself, I can avoid watching any commercial in its entirety by merely hitting the channel-change button . But when I’m committed to watching a good game, suddenly I can no longer run. I've got to sit through them.
What used to torment me the most among the commercials in heavy rotation during sporting events was the endless refrain of Bob Seger’s “Like A Rock”. The song accompanied a campaign for Chevy trucks running so long you’d think they comprised some kind of religious mantra—a Hare Krishna for the Red States.
But now it's Budweiser and Coors haunting me. Each has made a pathetic attempt to distract viewers from the prevailing issue of taste—because neither beer possesses much of it, one assumes. Instead, Bud and Coors emphasize the comparatively benign issues of how recently the beer was bottled and whether it's consistently been kept cold through every stage of its trip from brewery to your fridge. Sure, these things matter, but not as much as taste. It's not even close at all.
Budweiser reminds us “fresh beer tastes better”. Maybe so, but I’d rather have a bottle of foreign or microbrew beer that had been sitting in a warehouse on the equator for an extra week or two than a just-brewed Budweiser with ice crystals forming on the outside of the bottle. And Coors says that their goal “is the coldest tasting beer in the world”. What the hell does that even mean? You can take any American "macro-brews" down to absolute zero if you want, and they still wouldn’t taste any better. (The fact that I occasionally drink Pabst Blue Ribbon is of course irrelevant.)
I know this does not comprise the most important message I’ll ever bring forth, but the desire to bellow my opinion from the rooftops about these bogus beer commercials reflects how frustrating it feels being berated by them over and over through the course of the game. Yes, I could simply avoid these ads by not watching sports, but it’s not that easy. I love watching some of the games I’m watching.
Perhaps you could consider this entire passage an indirect way of my advertising the need for Tivo.
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