Relive the magic over and over again. This is all you needed to see from the Super Bowl. Oh, also the team named like the bird won.

Someone told me the 49ers and Ravens a football game last night was prelude and postlude to the life-changing Destiny’s Child reunion. Anticipation for the concert (and shock after it) was so great that companies paid millions of dollars for mere 30-second ad spots. OK, I’m kidding. Super Bowl XLVII was great. New Orleans got blackout, and the Niners almost pulled off the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. That being said, the ultra-high production value ads deserve their assessment as well. Here are BlogDailyHerald’s awards/superlatives for last night’s commercials:

1. Best space commercial. There were four that fit the bill last night (including babies!), but the winner is definitely the 30-second spot for Axe Apollo. Now we know that the great chain of being goes something like Spaceman>Lifeguard>Shark.

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Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Three cheers for the nachos, the beer, and the heartburn. Hip hip…Beyonce!

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday, which means large men from Baltimore will brawl with large men from San Francisco in the greatest place in the world New Orleans’ Superdome. Many of us will be watching for the commercials. Some will tune in to watch Beyoncé rock the halftime show, and others still will go out of their way not to watch in a show of apathy toward professional sports. A few will even watch for the game. I for one will be in denial, in full Saints regalia, doing a shot for every Hurricane Katrina reference and wishing I was at Mardi Gras.

There’s a lot of buzz this year about San Francisco’s wunderkind quarterback, Colin Kaepernick; Baltimore’s Ray Lewis, who’s so good at linebacking that he literally gets away with murder; and the fact that the head coaches of the competing teams are brothers (sup #HarBowl). But if you think that’s crazy, get this: There are eight sets of siblings in this year’s Puppy Bowl. If you couldn’t care less about football, or if you just really like dogs, this is the show for you. Today for Puppy Bowl IX, Animal Planet will be bringing together hoards of adorable rescue puppies to play on a mock football field complete with canned audience sounds, “referees,” and kittens performing at halftime. New this year is a team of hedgehog cheerleaders. REAL HEDGEHOGS!

In case it isn’t already clear to you, this is literally the best idea ever. Tune in at 3 p.m. to watch these 27 pups change the meaning of flea flicker. You can meet the full roster here, but we’ve included a few of our favorites after the jump. [Read more →]

You see, this is what I was getting at with the whole creepy Graph Searches thing. For the gratuitous run-up to the Super Bowl—I saw Dan Marino playing football on a daytime talk show yesterday on the TV in the basement of Faunce—Deadspin has created a very cool fandom map for the NFL. The first image shows fans’ allegiances during the regular season, but later images offer something even more interesting. With the help of Facebook, they were able to create maps of fans’ preferences before each round of this year’s playoffs. The results? Looks like the Ravens are a bit regionally challenged. The last, and maybe coolest feature? You can see what team the friends of fans of a certain team are most likely to support. It shocks me that so many people are likely to be friends of Cowboys fans.

We feel like we’ve been setting up a Time-waster/Alums-who-do-cool-things binary, so to de-problematize that, we’re giving you some audiovisual, Brunonia-reppin’ magic. Now that it’s topped 10 million views on YouTube, we figured it’s high time we post OK Go’s latest insane music video, “Needing/Getting.”  Lead singer Damian Kulash ’98 (Art-Semiotics anyone?) apparently learned how to stunt drive just to shoot this thing, which took four months of prep in the California desert, with help from Chevrolet’s Super Bowl commercial budget.

Hmm… hold on… Four months of work, funding from a parent organization, a ridiculous premise — it appears as though Kulash and the boys got Chevy and 10 million YouTubers to help them complete a GISP. Real World: Brown edition.

All Super Bowls have their drama: the onside kick to start the second half, the game-changing interception, the helmet catch. For the diehard football fans among us, this Sunday is a half-step short of Christmas, especially if your team is playing for the Lombardi trophy.

If this Super Bowl is half as exciting as Super Bowl XLII, the commercials won't be the only things worth watching.

For the rest of our great nation, Super Bowl Sunday is a truly American holiday: food, football, and TV. I’m not talking about the game itself, of course; I’m talking about the commercials. Advertisers still think reaching a massive national audience is a worthwhile pursuit, so the going rate for 30 seconds of air time during the Super Bowl is a preposterous $3.5 million ($4 million if you want to be right before kickoff). The companies who spend this fortune on commercials always make it worth our while (and their money), sometimes more than the game itself.

Now, in a very Black-Friday-becomes-Black-Friday at 5AM-becomes-Black-Thursday right after Thanksgiving-meal way, a lot of companies have released their ads on YouTube or elsewhere before the game; they’ve become an institution unto themselves.

So BlogDailyHerald can make even your Super Bowl commercial watching even more mindless and convenient, we’ve prepared a preview of some of the ads already out online. [Read more →]

Last-minute centerpiece?

Ah football, that most American of traditions. And what Easter is for Christians, what Yom Kippur is for Jews, what Festivus is for the rest of us, the Super Bowl is for America. On this high holiday of American athleticism (and capitalism at its best), it’s imperative that we be GIANTLY PATRIOTIC by insulting each other, throwing temper tantrums over missed field goals, betting irresponsible amounts of money, and glutting ourselves on Mexican food. (Makes sense, right?) And what could be more Amurrican than New York vs. Boston? A showdown between the two in the heartland (say, Indiana…in a stadium named after an oil company). We all know that New England clam chowder trumps its Manhattan (or, to be accurate, Jersey) counterpart, but that barely scratches the surface of classic Super Bowl food. Below, our ideas for snacks you can make — be it off meal plan or completely BuDS-sourced.

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Pizza seems to be a theme this weekend / msn.com

XLV ways to eat free or dine trying.

Friday 2/4

Film with Faculty Series: 10 Things I Hate About You with Professor Gail Cohee
6 pm
Petteruti Lounge, Faunce

Come enjoy a classic work of 1990s teen cinema, which is actually an adaptation of a classic work of 1590s British theatre, with the Director of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. Free pizza is provided, but let’s hope it’s Nice Slice or else there might be an impromptu performance of 10 Things I Hate About Domino’s.

Hip-Hop vs. America – Unity Day
4 pm
Wilson 102

Promising a screening, stimulating conversation and “delicious food” at this Third World Center-sponsored gathering on the implications of hip hop culture. I wonder if they’ll be serving Sugarhill Cookies… [Read more →]

Photo courtesy of Super Bowl 2011 (45) Live Stream

On Sunday, February 6^th, people across America will drop everything and anything to watch the showdown between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers in Arlington, Texas. For football enthusiasts, it will be four quarters of nail-biting, snack-munching, beer-drinking euphoria…or absolute disappointment. However, if you’re like me, watching a football game like attending a differential equations class taught in Mongolian—but that doesn’t exclude people like us from tuning in. Our attention will just be geared towards another aspect of the Super Bowl’s charm: the commercials. [Read more →]