the World Cup

Tweet of the Year, 2010

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Tweet of the Year 2010

So, I’m finishing up some year-end lists that I’ll be posting over the next few days of my favorite albums, books, movies, etc., but I thought it would be fun to kick things off with what I’ve decided is the Tweet of the year for 2010.  This is mostly tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I still think it is pretty evocative of my 2010, particularly the summer.

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This showed up in my feed having been retweeted by someone else, I don’t remember whom, and I don’t even know whom edsbs is.  But this little time capsule manages to combine Twitter, the World Cup, and Inception.  Well done, sir or madam.  Let’s have a strong finish to 2010 and a fun start to 2011, everybody

The ESPYs, 2010

/ Jared / 4 Comments

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So, I’ve never watched the ESPYs.  I’ve actually never even thought about watching the ESPYs.  I doubt I know anyone who has watched the ESPYs.  They’re a non-event, kind of like the Daytime Emmys, except they seem even more artificial and tacky.  (Note: I spent about five minutes trying to think of a joke about an imaginary Daytime ESPYs and came up empty.  This is how I spend my time.)

That said, Johanna and I must soldier on in our 2010 award show winner-picking competition, so we’re going to slog through it.  Luckily, Seth Meyers is hosting.  Also, there will undoubtedly be ridiculously dressed athletes.  And, as Bill Simmons always points out, women in high heels who are not used to wearing high heels.  So that’s fun.

Let’s get this started.  In the sporting, masculine spirit of the evening, Johanna and I will be sharing a bottle of 2009 D’Autrefois Pinot Noir Rosé.  As always, categories and winners in bold.

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9:00 – Picking winners in these categories was really hard; this has been a crazy exciting and dramatic sports year.  Great Super Bowl, amazing March Madness, Phil Mickelson defeating his wife’s cancer at the Masters, a super-long tennis match, perfect games and no hitters, Celtics vs. Lakers, the World Cup.  The Olympics were sort of meh, but hey, it’s still the Olympics.

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Throwback Thursday: 1982

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I was thinking to myself the other day, you know what might be a fun thing to do for the blog?  Pick a year, do some research on it, write down my thoughts on the major events, and dig around on YouTube for corresponding videos.  And you know what?  It was absolutely as fun as I thought it would be, mostly because of the videos.  Old videos on YouTube are unbelievably great.  God bless the people that not only hold on to their old VHS tapes, but also willingly spend their time putting them online.  Or however it is these things find their way to my computer.

It seemed like 1982 would be an appropriate place to start; after all, that’s when I got my start.  If I do muster up the energy to keep this going, though, I don’t plan to go sequentially, because that seems like it would be really, really boring.

I came up with the idea of beginning this entry with the first video that showed up for me when I searched for “1982.”  I was pretty convinced that this would end up being a terrible idea, as I assumed that the first result would be something terribly dull.  Boy, was I wrong.  I think if I looked up “how to start a blog entry about 1982” in the dictionary, this video would start playing:

I was hoping to work things into a seamless narrative, but that would be too much work, so let’s just take things a category at a time.

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Commercials I Like

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My recent post about commercials that I find irritating might have led one to believe that I’m annoyed by commercials in general, but that’s really not the case.  I find advertising sort of fascinating, and I get real enjoyment out of a well-made television commercial.  In an effort to balance negativity with positivity, here are my thoughts on a few I’ve liked lately.

The ESPN campaign for the FIFA World Cup has a simple goal: alert unaware Americans, of which I’m sure there are quite a few, that the World Cup is coming soon and it will be televised on ESPN.  They do that quite well, but they also accomplish a couple of secondary things, most notably convince skeptical American non-soccer fans that this is a really big deal and worthy of their attention, and get Americans that are already interested in soccer absolutely, foaming-at-the-mouth, crazy excited about it.

The first ad I saw them air is a nice, concise 30-second spot featuring footage from World Cups past and a simple voiceover.  The key here, for me at least, is the use of “City of Blinding Lights” by U2, which is just the perfect song.  It was also famously employed during the introduction of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for President back in 2008, a totally goosebump-inducing moment for me.  I feel like a memo went out to all of the people that score things like this that this should be their go-to song.

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