Well…. it was a game. The Steelers did win. Other than that, the game was pretty boring. The commercials weren’t all that great. The halftime show was kinda lame… not that i’m a huge fan of the rolling stones and all. I’d rate this game higher than the Ravens-Giants Superbowl, but lower than the Eagles-Patriots game… even with Brady winning and all.
Wow. that was a game saving play if I ever saw one. I have to grade this two different ways.
Steelers get five stars.
Seahawks get none.
update…. steelers just pulled out the five-star touchdown play… i realize i’m just throwing out the five-stars and possibly devaluing them… but whatever… see Dan’s review below about trick plays
Ow… they just tried hitting each other to see who would quit first…. or bleed first. Yeah, we’re all for bloodsport around here…. hopefully we don’t have a hand-smacking competition like last time.
The game gets three stars if only for the picture I took.
Even when’s he’s smiling, he looks like he’s gonna yell at you. The best angry face I’ve ever seen.
The Seahawks WR just caught the ball, made a football motion (a turn), and put feet down, as the steelers player hit him and the ball popped loose. Unfortunately the refs blew the whistle for an incomplete pass, blowing the play dead, and unreviewable. In my opinion the refs never get this call right, because on iffy calls like this, both teams should be able to get a reasonable image of what actually happened. The safe call here is to let them play, like in hockey or soccer in a situation like that. when the play is dead, then the team that felt ripped off could officially challenge the play and get a definitive answer. In all reality it didn’t matter in this instance though, as the ball went all the way back to the pittsburgh 10 yard line or thereabouts, and the punt recovery probably gave them better field position.
the blown whistle on the iffy call gets no stars because the only reason for them to call a play like that dead is for the refs to save face and claim their authority on the field. Nobody likes refs though, and power plays like this don’t help their cause. This hurts both teams in the long run, because that really was a fumble, and by letting the play go through they can look at all the evidence, and not just a quickly-viewed, one sided opinion.
Harrison Ford and a bunch of NFL stars read an adapted version of “Oh the Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Seuss. Good Animation, good music, well read, and well edited. Interesting mood to set, a playful tone instead of a competitive one.
The opening gets four stars for being well made, and an interesting and different take on it.
As a warm-up to the Superbowl, Animal Planet is offering a marathon of the Puppy Bowls from years past. For the uninitiated, the Puppy bowl is at least an hour or so of about 7 or 8 puppies running around in a miniature stadium, made of cardboard. Multiple cameras around the “stadium” show images of puppies running around, jumping on each other, or mostly just laying on the turf, all set to zany music. To make matters worse, they spared no expense on the announcing, getting NFL Films, NFL Radio, and longtime Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas to do the deed. Also, this is a big production, probably 5 cameras, including one called the “bowl cam”, placed underneath a glass bottom of the water bowl that they drink out of. At halftime they clean up the turf with a blatantly used Bissell vacuum cleaner, and then they bring out the kitty castle for the kitty bowl halftime show. While an interesting diversion for about 5 minutes, it get incredibly boring and repetitive as the animals don’t do very much, other than walk around to wacky music and disco lighting. Also, you can buy the video here
Puppy Bowl II receives 1.5 stars for being a pretty big waste of your pre-superbowl time. I honestly think I’d rather watch a marathon of“The OC”.
Site note: We’ll be having our first night of live reviewing on Sunday, February 5 during the Superbowl. That’s right; we’ll be reviewing all aspects of the game while it’s still in progress: we’ll review plays, people, commercials, the foods we’re eating, you name it. Be part of our reviewing milestone starting at 6pm EST on Sunday Feb. 5.
MINI-REVIEW!
I had this sandwich the other day, and I suppose while I can’t really claim to have expected there to be any more to it, it was very underwhelming. Having not lived under a rock for the past however many years, I realize that ads for food usually exaggerate (or “overrexaggerate” as friend of The Bookshelf Josh Calloway would say) the overwhelming deliciousness that said foods provide, and that Quiznos is a big purveyor of such underhanded tactics.
First of all, and yet a side note, Quiznos likes to pretend that their prices are cheap when they’re anything but. When you hear them speak of just 2.99, you automatically jump to the mindset that Subway instilled in us about subs being 6-inch or footlong, however that’s not the case. It’s more along the lines of 4, 8, and 14 inches, or something like that, and so the 2.99 price is for the small. I’m willing to forgive the higher pricing as the sandwiches are mostly considerably more “gourmet” than subway, but the fact that they advertise them as cheap without saying the actual size, essentially preying on this mindset, really grills my flatbread.
Back on topic. So the sandwich looks all big and stacked full of slow cooked roast beef and melted swiss cheese, when in reality, all it is is a regular roast beef sandwich (the beef hasn’t been specially cooked or anything), with swiss cheese, served with a cup of roast beef juice, known better by some french term that i’m not going to stoop to saying. The sandwich was hot, but I’m not giving them the special credit for that because they toast all of their subs. Basically this was a plain roast beef sandwich, made to look all important, and the price that the people paid for it probably wasn’t worth the letdown.
Not saying that the sandwich wasn’t good (it was quite tasty), but I probably would’ve been better off with the Chicken Carbonara sandwich, the classic italian (minus the olives), or the more expensive black angus sandwich, but hey, I wasn’t paying for it, so nothing to lose.
This sandwich gets three stars, due to the fact that while it was good, it was small, and didn’t even have the filler (lettuce, tomato, etc.) to make it more substantial a meal. Add to it that the roast beef was actually cold in spots, due to the hasty toasting of the sandwich, and the fact that the commercial makes it look substantially more overwhelming than it turned out to be, the sandwich leaves a good amount to be desired.
Footnote: While I understand that I am again using the argument that a product did not live up to my prior expectations as a gauge by which to judge said product, this case is different from before in the sense that the company itself was inducing false presumptions, and not other noted reviewers.
So recently (maybe a month ago?), the Morning Call let us all in on a supposedly huge new puzzle game trend that’s popping up everywhere. Called Sudoku, it’s a Japanese puzzle game in which a nine by nine grid is presented (sub-divided up into nine three-by-three square groups), with a select few of the squares filled with numbers from one to nine. The object is to fill in the entire grid with numbers from one to nine, so that no number is repeated in the same row, column, or sub-grid. The puzzles really don’t have much to do with numbers at all; they just serve as symbolic place-holders. You could use anything from letters, to roman numerals, to colors, to chinese symbols, it’s just that numbers 1 to 9 are a lot easier to recognize and see which ones are missing, etc.
Rather than going into great detail on methods to solve the puzzles ( I usually use the process of elimination to determine which squares in a subgrid could possibly contain a certain number, or if there’s enough numbers filled in in a row or column, i’ll look into which numbers are missing from them and where each could go), i’ll just say that the wikipedia site on Sudoku has more than you’ll ever want to know on possible methods for solutions.
Anyway, it is important to know how addictive these puzzles are… if you’re into logic puzzles. Considering that simpler (probably story problem style) versions of this basic premise were the main subject of the logic problems that I had done in (say it with me) El’-e-men-AR”-y school, this is the sort of thing that I just can’t stop doing. Weekly you can find them in the Sunday comics section of the paper, or on Fridays in the little “Life” magazine inset (those puzzles tend to be easier, but the boxes are generally too small to make markings in, other than final answers). Also, occasionally you can come across an advertisement for the Sunday puzzle on a weekday. Those ads usually contain a full-size puzzle, but unfortunately don’t come with a solution.
Websudoku.com is probably the best for online Sudoku “puzzling”, and it keeps your time and tells you how good you are compared to other people, provided you don’t make a mistake. There are difficulty levels ranging from easy to evil, although they don’t have any of the super-puzzles pictured on the wikipedia site, which I would like to try sometime.
I used to have crossword puzzle thing, but I got to the point where I realized the same clues were being used over and over again. Not only that but you can get to a point in a crossword puzzle where you have no leads on where to go next, and you’re completely stumped, possibly because you’ve never heard of a word they’re using, and you don’t really feel like picking up a dictionary to look something up if you have the first letter. The thing about the puzzles is that there’s always a next step, it’s just a matter of figuring out where it is. Usually, that one breakthrough will create a sort of chain reaction that should lead to the end of the puzzle, and even if takes an hour, it feels extremely good to know that you just tackled something this challenging, even though you just wasted an hour that you could be spending eating, sleeping, or sitting at the computer.
Sudoku gets four stars for being a rather addictive and rewarding waste of time. It is much more interesting and challenging than a game of Carmen Sandiego would ever be, and it’s portable. You can get stuck, but there’s always a way out, and even if it takes walking away from it for fifteen minutes and coming back to it, it’s worth it.