Note : (While attempting to get this to post, ForeverSerenity also posted her thoughts here.)
Over here the Super Bowl is a pretty big deal (us being a bit starved for entertainment) so nearly everyone gathered around the various TV screens in offices and MWR tents across our little post to watch the Eagles waste a lot of opportunities against the Pats. I watched alongside SFC Calangelo and a group of his stormtroopers/kool-aid slupring cultists and had a high old time except for one thing. The halftime show was pathetic.
Groans of bored agony came from every office as we sat and watched one guy (yes I am aware of his identity and former musical relevance) stand in the middle of the field and strum a guitar/play a piano. Snoozefest. Of course the folks on the field were jumping around like crazy but they would have done that if the halftime show consisted of Little Orphan Annie slow-roasting a live meth addicted Chihuahua dangling from the end of a rope made entirely from the braided camel scrotums. Don't beleive me? Watch any number of jackasses covorting in identical fashion behind the set of every morning news show. The prosecution rests. Rests just like the folks in the darkened stand did, sitting on their hands like the WWF crowd during a Billy Gunn/Test match.
Thanks to the Puritan revolt last year over the horror of being exposed to 2 milliseconds of Janet Jackson's floppy milk jug we got a Superbowl experience that would have struck Edwin Meese as "staid". Even the course of the Fox broadcast was so sanitized it was painful. We saw about 4 shots of cheerleaders of which only one was more than a neck-up shot and through the course of that one exception the cheeleaders scrupulously covered every inch of themselves with their pom-poms as through bare skin would attract a swarm of killer bees.
This Superbowl was already sans ads (thanks AFN), sadly lacking in beer (thanks political correctness and the general pussification of the military, and now was also minus a musical act more than one year away from beocming a wax museum exhibit.
You just heard the first toll of the bell that will signal the death knell of broadcast TV as the dominant medium.