Monday, February 03, 2020

The Cultural Super Bowl, Part One

I spent a good deal of the day dealing with a fussy, elderly dog who didn't know what he wanted and a visiting Corgi who spent his time proving that Corgis are the worst dogs in the world. The rest of the day was wasted in a futile attempt to digitize my VHS tapes so I could throw them away.

Hint: Modern digitizing gadgets are all tiny USB gizmos and they produce appallingly bad results. The best option is the VHS to DVD dubbing deck. I have a dual deck, but it took an hour or so of screwing around with it before I realized that the DVD part won't record.

Argh.

So with the day totally ruined, let's discuss the Super Bowl halftime stripper show and the ads.

Deano calls me his favorite moral scold, so this time I was determined to give the halftime show a chance. When Shakira went on, I tried to enjoy her singing, but the songs were so broken up that I felt I was listening to a modern dance version of Hooked on Classics. If you are too young to remember that horror, it was about 30 seconds of a bunch of famous pieces of classical music glued together. I figured Shakira's music was fun at the clubs, but that performance didn't do it justice. She shook what her mama gave her, but that's par for the course.

JLo was simply horrible.

Reference point: I think that Olivia de Havilland in her roles in the old Errol Flynn movies might be as sexy as a woman can get.

Just give me a list of dragons to slay and villainous knights to defeat in single combat for you and I'm on it, girl.
Yes, I've seen thongs and thong teddies. No, I don't want to see any more of them. And what's up with stripper poles? If my woman tried to slither around on those, I'd wonder what was happening. "Err, I was under the impression we were doing something else tonight. If you need to climb about for a while, that's fine. Just let me know when you're done. I'll be downstairs."

One more bit of TMI. At work, a young woman once came into my office for a meeting. She sat down wearing a short skirt and then spread her legs in front of me. I wanted to spray both her and the chair with disinfectant. It was gross. I found out later that she did this to a couple of guys at work and one of them ended up getting fired for sexual harassment. Hashtag MeToo indeed. Oh yeah and #BelieveAllWomen.

So when JLo went into her pole dance and then jammed her fingers into her crotch, I shrugged and thought, I've seen this before and it wasn't any good then, either. I went into the kitchen to get some ribs*.

Wife kitteh hated it. That blew me away. I'm the prude and in charge both fuddiness and duddiness in our house. I was trying to be open-minded and hip during the Super Bowl show and not harsh her mellow. She was disgusted.

It made me think of Peter Tork's story about seeing Jimi Hendrix at Monterrey with fellow Monkee Micky Dolenz.


I didn't get it. Wife kitteh got it. I eventually got it. I'm a little slow.

When I looked at the top-rated tweets today about the halftime stripper pole show, I found that all the Important People loved it. All the family folks hated it, but they don't count online.

I've got more to say and an analysis to add, but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

* - Wife kitteh makes the best ribs in San Diego.

6 comments:

Mostly Nothing said...

We watched the half time show because we had a stupid dollar bet on one song that Shakira would sing. We had to take my son's word for it because I couldn't tell one from the next.

All of it just ran together completely indistinguishable. And not entertaining in the least.

Like you said, I'm not in the group of people that matter, so there is no need to coexist with me, just cast me aside.

Mostly Nothing said...

Oh, as to sexy, Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep.

tim eisele said...

My daughter was unimpressed. She said the costumes were ridiculous. I can't say I was all that impressed either, and would rather have had a better view of the fireworks.

Speaking of which, it occurred to me that the people in the stadium could probably barely see the dancers down on stage at all unless they had binoculars. So there were really two shows: the flashy fireworks and large-scale activities for the people in the stadium, and the close-ups on the dancers for TV.

I wonder if the people who thought it was great were mostly the people who were there and saw the stadium spectacle, while the people who thought it was "meh" were the ones who saw the TV closeup show?

Foxfier said...

About the most impressive thing is that a woman in her 50s and one in her 40s could be that athletic.

JLo looked desperate, and from the train wreck of costumes on her backup dancers, she feels it too.

Shakira OTOH is apparently confident enough to not just have flattering costumes on her backup dancers, but they were designed in a way that made them seem like way more was being shown than was; a variation on the frills that are on most of her costumes.

At least one of the camera angles was just yuck.

And the kids coming on stage was creepy.

Tim Eisele said...

Holy cow, Olivia de Havilland is still alive! She's 103.

IlĂ­on said...

"I think that Olivia de Havilland in her roles in the old Errol Flynn movies might be as sexy as a woman can get."

When I see women displaying themselves as though they were sitting behind one of those world-(in)famous windows in Amsterdam, I just shake me hear at how pathetic, and ignorant they are --

When I was a puppy, just starting my career at [a major telecom corp], there was an "older" woman (*) in the office who had a "figure that just wouldn't quit" (**). Now, the thing is, unlike today's women, she knew how to dress. What I mean is, she dressed in very respectable office/business attire, and still achieved what women are aiming at (***) when they put their bodies on open display.


(*) Man, she must have been pushing forty!

(**) the poor woman *also* had ... an unfortunate visage

(***) that is, attracting the dreaded-by-man-hating-feminists "male gaze"