07 February 2011
 
Big Pink Super Bowl



OK. I am not going to pour vinegar in the cornflakes this morning; we all know things are hosed up and likely to get worse. Still, you sure as hell could not tell it by the advertising on the Big Game last night.
 
I got on the scale this morning and saw to my horror that all that dip and Jeremy’s tiny wieners in BBQ and my shredded North Carolina Beef had combined to add five pounds to my heft.
 
I am alarmed by the excess, but that is what the Game was about. And cars.
 
Loved the ads, didn’t you? Every one of them contained a mini-story and required close attention to really appreciate. It made the feasting and human factors planning for personal comfort that much more complex.
 
Cars appeared to be king.
 
It seemed like half the ads were connected with them, which could mean that things are turning around in the economy. The only problem I had was that all the auto brands now seem to end in a vowel, something that did not use to be the case, and in a majority of the spots, I could not really tell what car they were advertising.
 
By the process of elimination, one really cool commercial was determined by our panel of experts to be for the Audi Corporation, although the conclusion was not unanimous.
 
I spent the pre-game hours cataloguing ancient pictures. Contrary to what you might think based on the recent string of tales about the Looming Catastrophes in the climate, the economy, the Arab Street and Public Health Emergency Response, I am actually having a pretty good time.
 
I have commissioned a full overhaul of the web site, and jumped through several hoops to set up a micro-business to do micro-publishing.
 
We intend to launch Socotra House Publishing as soon as this week, going live with al-new content, vast archives of pictures and dynamic links to the sites of other lunatics who live partly in the electronic world.
 
I suppose that is a vote of confidence in something. I have the pictorial account of some wild trips around the world: Burma, India, Thailand, North Korea, China, Hawaii, the P.I., Bosnia, Zagreb, Paris, Moscow, Paris and London. That is not the complete list.
 
Plus some weird stuff from Park City, Utah, and Northwest River, Labrador, Belfast, Maine, and Boston, in a more mundane vein. My agent found a college intern who is doing the digitization on the cheap, but the effort to caption a zillion pictures is more than a little daunting.
 
I spent the afternoon dazed with memory, looking at the pictures of things that were. The odor of barbeque infused with hot sauce and vinegar
 
Then it was time to gather my stuff together for the party down in Joe-the-Union-President's unit. He just retired and is away on extended travel, but he let Mary Margaret throw a bash in his place.
 
Chad and Jeremy were there, and Mandy, and Little Egypt. And Mardy One, of course, the sparkplug of much of the mischief around the building.
 
It was not the full pool crowd, but there was a lot to talk about since they locked the gate on the wire fence and cut off our social space for the season.
 
It was a great evening. I did not have a dog in the fight, though the crowd generally supported the Packers. Mardy One had her terrible towel that she waved in increasing desperation as the Steelers fell behind.


Spicy wieners, BBQ, onion dip, fifty kinds of chips, bean dip, salsa, pretty much the works. And bottles of wine and a mysterious bottle of 100-proof Absolut-brand vodka that I suspect had something to do with my inability to distinguish auto brands.
 
Still, it was a great game. I thought the Steelers might come back, and the game held our interest to the last second.
 
I was sort of interested in watching Glee, the bizarre variety high school melodrama, so I collected my dish of BBQ beef and what was left of the bottle of vodka and went back up to the unit.
 
I have no idea why they schedule the game for Sundays. What’s up with that? Saturday would allow us to really get nut.
 
Or maybe that is it. I trudged back up the stairs to my unit, turned on the flat-screen and watched that annoying gym teacher plotting her mischief. I promptly fell asleep in my brown chair, awaking to some very odd real-estate infomercial at around three.
 
Damn, this is going to be a long day.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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