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Top five Super Bowl ads of 2010
Thanks to all the regular readers for your patience with my decision to include yesterday's nothing-whatsoever-to-do-with-kids Super Bowl ads live blog on The Poop. It was nice to see some familiar commenters.
sugarcraft.com
The article I wrote for the Chronicle is available here. Here are my all-time favorites, from a recent freelance column I wrote for MSNBC.com.
My five favorite ads from 2010 are below. I should note that I think a little bit like an ad executive when I declare winners and losers, and factor in whether people will remember the commercial in relation to the product. Ads like the house made of Bud Light cans and the Volkswagen commercial playing off the "punch dub" game do this well. My fourth place whale-themed choice might have been bumped up a spot or two if it did a better job of selling tires.
I'm not including my least favorite advertisements, because I'm pretty sure some of the losers are making bad ads on purpose so people like me will write about them even more.
Your favorite in the comments. Read More »
| February 08 2010 at 06:46 AM
Super Bowl advertisements live blog is here!
Welcome to the third annual Super Bowl advertisemens live blog on The Poop. Why are we talking about Super Bowl commercials on the San Francisco Chronicle's baby blog? If you were a regular reader it would make perfect sense. Let's just say random live blogging is a hobby of ours.
tvgasm.com
Will it ever get better than this?
I'll be adding two or three updates every quarter, posting videos from some of the best and worst commercials of Super Bowl XLIV, so check back frequently! Read the San Francisco Chronicle (or SFGate.com) tomorrow to see my picks for the three best and three worst Super Bowl ads of the year.
Updates will be posted below with the newest ads on top. Please use the comments to post your favorites and least favorites, and to let us know what you think of the ads overall compared to previous years.
(And let us know what's going on with the Saints and Colts once in a while. We plan to fast-forward through the actual football game.)
LIVE BLOG BELOW ...
FOURTH QUARTER
6:46: p.m.: Saints finish strong and so do the E*Trade bachelor party babies. I'm going to write my story for the Chronicle. What was your favorite/least favorite commercial? Let us know in the comments ...
6:28 p.m.: Loved loved loved the Audi "green police" commercial. "You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy." Excellent. ... Really starting to like the Denny's chicken ads. The panicking chicken president was a nice touch. ... The Honda Accord ad also confused me. Maybe that was the point with the Census ad, too. Get on the "worst ad" lists and salvage some publicity. ... Rapping Charles Barkley sucked. ... With a few minutes left, I'm thinking that overall this was an above average year for ads. Still, I can't think of one that's going to be remembered 10 years from now.
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6:15 p.m.: Emerald/Pop Secret ad with trained people instead of dolphins kind of creeped me out. I take what I said at 5:58 p.m. back. Actually glad that marijuana isn't legal yet. ... "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire is becoming the new "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley. Great song that has become all but ruined by sheer repetition in commercials/TV shows/movie soundtracks. ... Feel like I've seen that Budweiser Clydesdale ad three or four times before. ... Dante's Inferno looks kind of awesome.
THIRD QUARTER
5:59: p.m.: Third quarter is over. I give it a B overall.
5:58 p.m.: The Kia Sorento ad with the mechanical bull riding sock monkey and the sex toy-looking character from Yo Gabba Gabba kind of grew on me. Can't wait to watch it after California legalizes pot. ... Ad with sleepwalking guy ad just stressed me out. If I wasn't getting paid to watch these I wouldn't have stuck around to see Coke paid for it. ... Anyone else notice that every other ad features a pantsless guy? That's this year's trend. ... Those E*Trade babies never get old. ... Watched the Census ad three times. Still don't get it. Something about Ed Begley Jr. and a confusing conversation. (And they wonder why no one wants to answer their door.)
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| February 07 2010 at 02:32 PM
Gone But Not Forgotten: Up With People
I wrote a column today about the best and worst Super Bowl halftime shows of all time, and during my "research" ran across several Up With People videos on YouTube. This one ran during the halftime show of Super Bowl XVI, and I can't for the life of me remember if I watched it live. I was 11 years old and the 49ers were in their first Super Bowl, so it's likely everyone at our house was too game-focused to pay attention to what looked like hundreds of meth-crazed cultists invading the field.
A few thoughts about what we've just witnessed ...
-- This makes me respect Joe Montana and the rest of the 49ers that much more, realizing they were able to come out at halftime and play football after this spectacle. If I heard this music coming through the walls of the locker room, I would have tried to burrow out underneath the stadium like the soccer players in "Victory." Read More »
| February 05 2010 at 09:32 AM
Broke Guy Day Care: The $15.99 Adidas tracksuit is back!
I'm starting to become that creepy parent at the park. Except instead of hitting on the moms or playing too enthusiastically with random kids, I have one annoying habit: Walking up to parents of children wearing this and saying the words "$15.99 Costco tracksuit?"
"Send us your worst tracksuit photo" winner, Year 2042.
Since I wrote about the garment a few months ago, I've been seeing a lot of kids wearing them -- distinguishable from non-Costco tracksuits by the unique Adidas logo stitching pattern on the back. The last mother who I confronted said the word "Ummmm, no," and quickly walked away. But I know she's a freaking liar, or at least a horrible bargain hunter. Because after not being on the shelves for a few months, THE TRACKSUITS ARE BACK!
I learned this about two weeks ago when my mother-in-law walked in with two dark blue Adidas tracksuits -- size 5T and 2T -- for my sons, which will probably fit them both in the summer or early fall. (They run a little big.) Since then, I have received at least three e-mails, and one blog post comment, from loyal readers letting me know that they're back.
And thankfully, they're the same price. Because the query "$16.59 Costco tracksuit?" just doesn't have the same ring to it ...
Read More »| February 04 2010 at 07:02 AM
The redemption of Kip Winger
My favorite kinds of Chronicle articles to write are feel-good comeback stories. I spent about eight years covering courtrooms, where almost everything focused on the low point of someone's life. I would be perfectly happy spending the rest of my career writing about people who works hard, are doing something productive and have good things happen to them as a result.
Every once in a long while, I luck out and find a redemptive story that crosses over to my interests in popular culture. Writing about "Breaking Away" star Jackie Earle Haley was like that. Here's a guy who was a talented young actor, fell on hard times, picked himself up and ended up an Oscar nominee in his late 40s.
This article I wrote about Kip Winger for today's Chronicle is one of my all-time favorites. I enjoyed his music in the 1980s hair band days and beyond, and thought it was unfair when he literally became the poster boy for the collapse of the genre. When my editor came up to me a couple of months ago and told me Winger has quietly become a classical music composer who created a symphonic piece for the San Francisco Ballet, I was floored. I have an unapologetic fondness for Winger's era of music, and after watching countless of his contemporaries on "Celebrity Rehab" and in other dubious situations, it was nice to see something great and unexpected happen to one of the biggest casualties of the grunge era. Read More »
| February 04 2010 at 05:02 AM
What do you want on your tombstone?
I've long requested that my loved ones cremate my remains when the time comes. I'm not really excited about the whole decomposition thing, and avoiding a burial seems so much more green. Even in death, I plan to act really smug about my personal decisions. Hopefully by then, my cremains can be used to power a Prius ...
s3.amazonaws.com
My tombstone role model ...
I'm starting to budge a little on this edict, though, and thinking that a cemetery burial might be the way to go. This is mostly because of all the awesome things I keep thinking to put on my tombstone.
I went to quite a few cemeteries for this article I wrote in October, and was surprised by the uniformity of the headstones. Names, dates of birth and death and maybe a "Loving father and friend" are thrown in. After people spend a lifetime trying to think of clever things to say in yearbook senior write-ups, wedding toasts and Facebook updates, one would think we would see more flair on cemetery plots. It makes me respect celebrities such as Mel Blanc and Merv Griffin, who have offered a little chuckle to those who pass by their graves. We should all aspire to that kind of morbid humor.
Below are my top three tombstone inscription requests. It should be no surprise to longtime readers of this blog that all are 1980s popular culture references. On the remote chance that someone in my family is rich enough to fund a mausoleum, please inscribe one of these quotes on each of the outside walls. Otherwise, just use the first one.
Read More »| February 03 2010 at 07:03 AM
Your favorite Highway 101 landmark
Longtime readers of this blog have learned to tolerate my occasional bitching about how the downtown of my once Mayberry-esque hometown of Burlingame has been pillaged and desecrated and rendered nearly unrecognizable by Polo Ralph Lauren and Sephora franchises.
en.wikipedia.org
Maybe I'll stop next time ...
But to get glass-half-full for a second, my second most memorable destination while growing up -- the drive down Highway 101 -- is almost eerily unchanged. Yes, there is an enormous amount of housing and retail growth in places, particularly in Gilroy and Salinas. And yet almost all of the notable roadside landmarks have been virtually unchanged for the past 30 years. Things get particularly frozen in time from Morgan Hill all the way down to Pismo Beach.
I thought about this as I drove by my all-time favorite Highway 101 landmark, the "It's Happening in Soledad" sign, while heading to a funeral early Friday a.m. I once wrote an entire column based on this sign. It has given me so much pleasure over the years. And I drive south with the confidence that it's almost certainly going to outlive me, and deliver its unintended punch line to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well.
Below are my three favorite Highway 101 landmarks, with a few more honorable mentions. Yours in the comments. Read More »
| February 01 2010 at 06:50 AM
The fictional character that scares the crap out of your kid
I generally enjoy weekday mornings around our house. Most days are rushed -- my wife leaves for work at 6:20 a.m. and I get both boys clothed, fed and to their preschool and babysitter -- but still not without fun. We listen to KNBR, sometimes eat meals without fruit or vegetables and play a lot of None Shall Pass.
beliefnet.com
100 percent clown-free photo.
What I haven't enjoyed lately is the daily discussion with my 4-year-old son about Pennywise the Clown.
Pennywise, for those of you who didn't read Stephen King's scariest book, is the homicidal child-eating clown in "It." My son happened to see this clown about two weeks ago, while we were in the DVD section of Target looking for a birthday gift for my father.
Despite the horrifying photo on the DVD cover and the subject matter of the movie, I was a little bit surprised at my son's reaction. We watch a lot of sports in the house, and advertisement for horror films and other monster movies are common. As I rush to block the TV or turn the volume down, my sons usually just keep playing. A guy in a hockey mask wants to kill some campers? Whatever. A piece of me is also relieved that in a home filled with video games and zombie movies, my son's first traumatic encounter with a piece of media came outside the house. In other words, it's technically Target's fault, not mine.
But a lack of guilt is starting to feel like a smaller and smaller consolation. Below are some questions my son asked me yesterday morning -- which was pretty typical of similar conversations we had the rest of the week: Read More »
| January 28 2010 at 06:32 AM
Send in your 1976 Bay Area snow day photos!
Courtesy Adriana
Snowstorm in San Leandro.
Since posting yesterday about the great Bay Area snowstorm of 1976, we've received several photos -- which is several more than I thought would come in. The above image is from The Poop reader Adriana, who writes the following ...
Hi Peter,
Here's my photo of the snow in 1976. We lived in San Leandro at the time -- behind City Hall. I was 4 years old and sick so I wasn't allowed outside. If you look to the left of the photo you'll see that the front curtain is drawn back -- that's me. What I really remember is that my dad brought in some snow on a cookie sheet so I could play with it.
-Adriana
Thanks, Adriana!
The Poop bylaws explicitly state that I can't start a new contest before the prizes are mailed from the last one -- sorry, Santa Tantrum people -- but I'm still hoping to collect as many photos as I can and post them on Monday. The original post with a lot of memories in the comments is here. If you have a Bay Area photo from the 1976 snowstorm (or 1962 or 1932 ...), please scan the image, write a little bit about the scene (including when and where it was taken) and send it to phartlaub@sfchronicle.com. Unless you specify otherwise, I'll use the name you provide.
| January 26 2010 at 04:02 PM
Children's books that deserve a bigger audience
I reached a critical point with my almost 5-year-old son a few months ago, when he asked me to read a story and I very predictably pulled "Hooray for Fish" out of the bookshelf.
randomhouse.com
More than 114 words ...
"Dada, that one doesn't have very many words in it."
One hundred and fourteen, to be precise. (In my most high-maintenance move so far this year, I just called my mother-in-law -- who is babysitting our toddler for free -- and asked her to count.) And he probably memorized every one of those words two years ago. It was definitely time to find another go-to book ...
Since every parent already has 12 copies of "Goodnight Moon" and "Where the Wild Things Are," I thought this would be a good time to turn to The Poop readership for recommendations of underrated children's books.
My first choice is "Milo's Special Words." This was a Christmas gift, which I'm guessing caught the purchaser's eye because my youngest son is named Milo. The plot is very simple -- Milo wants some milk, but can't get it until he learns to say "please." Then his mom refuses to leave the rug he's sitting on until he says "thank you." In a very John Sayles-like open-ended final scene, Milo shocks his mother by (spoiler alert!) using his special word to ask for a pony, a rocket and a magic wand. Read More »
| January 26 2010 at 11:02 AM
