I am not a football fan. Heck, I'm not much of a sports fan, period, especially when it's shown on television. I don't mind watching the occasional live game, but watching sports on television counts as one of the lesser tortures of Hell. This is because when a game is televised, there are announcers. And I hate sports announcers with every fiber of my being because they Never Ever Shut Up. Sports announcers never learned that golden rule that says if you don't have anything intelligent to say, don't say anything at all. Sports announcers suffer from diarrhea of the mouth, and a serious deficiency in brains.

But I digress. The whole point of this is that, my hatred of sports announcers aside, I watched the Super Bowl this year. This is because my mom called me and said, "Your father wants to watch the Super Bowl. Come watch the commercials with me and we can chat during the game and keep each other from leaping through the screen and throttling the yammering idiots." Or words to that effect. And because I have not watched the Super Bowl before and have always missed out on all the coolest of Super Bowl commercials, and because Richard was going to be gone anyway at his first class of the year, I figured why not.

Sigh. Apparently this was the year that the memo went out to all the big companies indicating that they really shouldn't bother with any grand, spectacular commercials for the Super Bowl. In fact, even worse, this was the year that some of the companies who advertised decided that the intellect of their target audience was so completely and utterly juvenile, immature, and flat out dumber than dirt, that they could show all those ads that were otherwise labeled too offensive and stupid to show at any other time. Okay, mostly those last ads were the ones for Bud Light, which sort of explains it all right there.

Mostly my mom and I were able to ignore the yammering idiots by virtue of the fact that we read magazines, tried (with not much success) to figure out how to purl, and otherwise occupied ourselves with other things. But by the end of the game we had exhausted our other activities and because we both suffer from the same defect that requires us to watch even the most horrendous of movies/shows/whatever simply because we are convinced that somehow something will eventually redeem it and make it worth the time we have wasted (although I should point out that this is not an inclusive rule because I would have cheerfully turned off Strange Brew after the first two minutes of the film except that it was my boyfriend at the time's favorite movie and I was trapped) we started to actually pay attention to the game. And despite our best efforts, a few muttered comments about the yammering of the sports announcers started creeping out of our mouths.

Luckily for my father (who, while he admits that sports announcers are, indeed, idiots, actually finds their yammering amusing) the game finally got slightly interesting because by then it was the fourth quarter and the Raiders were finally admitting that they were going to lose and lose big, and then the team in red whose name I can't remember scored another touchdown and then with barely any time left the Raiders lost the ball and one of the red guys caught it and started running and no one stopped him and you could see him hesitate briefly as if he realized "oh my god I'm actually going to score because I wasn't expecting *that*" and he scored another touchdown, and then the unthinkable happened and my mom and I actually cheered. So despite the fact that the commercials were mostly lousy and yes the sports announcers never did shut up, my mom and I had fun after all.

But I would like to make it very clear that this is not going to start a trend. One televised sports event per year is about all the patience I can muster right now. But it's a start.