The Boredom Bowl

Weekend Assignment: Share your memories of the first Super Bowl game you remember seeing. Which is to say, the first one you had an actual interest in -- Super Bowls playing in the background while you faced away from the TV and read a book or something don't count. If you remember watching one but don't remember quite the year, here's a list of the Super Bowls to date to assist your memory (click on the particular game to a full description of the game). Those of you in Canada, the UK and elsewhere can substitute your own massively nationally important annual sporting event in the stead of the Super Bowl if, in fact, you have no Super Bowl memories. I mean, I'm sure there were some rockin' Grey Cup games.

Extra credit: So, ever been to a Super Bowl game?

Oh, yuck. It's the annual football-related Weekend Assignment. Only my regard for J.S. and my stubbornness about never skipping a Weekend Assignment keep me from skipping this weekend assignment.

I'll make it brief:

I have never, ever watched a Super Bowl game. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've never watched more than a couple minutes of any football game, ever. I don't expect this to change any time soon. One year I left the Super Bowl on for an hour in an empty room, and wandered in for a few commercials. Another year, or maybe it was the same year, I think Paul McCartney - excuse me, Sir Paul - performed at half time, and I watched him. There was a flurry of research and glad exclamations when Al Calavicchi's comments in a 1990 Quantum Leap episode about Super Bowl XXX turned out to be very close to what happened in the actual game years later. And way back in the mists of time, around 1970 or 1972, a water main broke in front of our house in Manlius on a Super Bowl Sunday, a fact I mentioned in a poem a year or two later. But I was watching the flooding in the street, not the game on the tv.

That's it. That's the sum total of my Super Bowl anecdotes.

Football isn't the National Pastime anyway, so I see no need to care about it. I barely care about the real National Pastime any more. It's been a few years since I went to a baseball game, but the Tucson Sidewinders won the AAA championship in 2006, and I cheered them on by updating their Wikipedia article frequently. And it was fun to go to a handful of Arizona Diamondbacks games (in spring training and at the BOB, as it was called then, in Phoenix) during the run up to their World Series win against the Yankees. And back in 1993, I got to watch my Tucson Toros - back then a brand new obsession of ours - win the Pacific Coast League championship. But I've told my Toros stories and showed you my Toros stuff, so I'll just show you Craig Counsell's weird batting stance at a spring training game and let it go at that.

I'd rather post some experimental photos from today anyhow. It was a cold and cloudy day by Tucson standards, only 42 degrees according to my car's thermometer when I got to work this morning. Parts of the Santa Catalina Mountains were hidden by clouds and fog, which on the mountains are pretty much the same thing. It rained a bit, but it hasn't snowed again in the city. I doubt that it will, despite the fact that this unusually cold Tucson winter is hanging on.

This first shot is for you, Carly. I played with the hue a little, and ran it though the Impressionist and oil painting filters. Monet it ain't, but I like it.


This is a somewhat clearer view than actually existed this morning.


For this one, I pushed the contrast in a big way.


And this last one is fairly close to how the mountains actually looked.

There. Isn't that a lot more interesting than me talking about football?

Karen