I wasn't kidding yesterday about the sad spectacle underway in central Florida, as the booster- media pretend that this year's Super Bowl festivities are rockin' and rollin' just like other years. Which they manifestly ain't.
Some game tickets -- which come mostly from a vast pool of tickets made available exclusively to teams, NFL bigshots and their corporate pals, politicians and other grandees (who then re-sell them to scalpers who call themselves the "secondary market") -- were available today for around $1,000. That's two-thirds off the usual going rate for the day before the Super Bowl.
Hotel rooms are still available in the Tampa area. Bustout-level room rates are sharply down from a week ago.
Many of the usual corporate and other promotional parties have been canceled or cut way back. Even many people who actually still have the dough to charter a private jet for the weekend bacchanal don't have the nerve, given the lynch-mob public mentality afoot toward the public display of wretched corporate excess.
So I found it very amusing today to check out the online news site of the St. Petersburg Times, a local paper.
"Feel the Glow? It's Those Stars" declares the breathless main headline, on a story about the swell Super Bowl party that lasted into the morning hours -- can you imagine? A party lasting into the morning hours! -- at the local Hard Rock hotel. Among the "stars" providing that palpable glow, sez the St. Pete Times, were "Host Kevin Dillon ... Playboy's 50th Anniversary Playmate Colleen Shannon ... Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl..."
Wha? They couldn't at least get Rod Blagojevich? I hear he suddenly has the weekend free.
On the other hand, this collapse of the usual Super Bowl corporate-party vulgarity and the general toning-down of the excess might mean one good thing.
Maybe we can just watch a football game tomorrow.
By the way, Stephen Colbert had a very funny segment on the other night in his continuing drive to bring attention to the Great Buffalo Wing Shortage that threatens to adversely impact the really honest and worthwhile Super Bowl parties -- the ones in people's homes and in local bars.
Colbert had on the spokesman for the National Chicken Council, one Richard Lobb ("Lobb on the job," the spokesman explained by way of clearing up how to pronounce his name).
Lobb-on-the-Job explained the chicken-wing shortage (created by the growing nationwide popularity of Buffalo wings) with impeccable logic. "It's a simple matter of supply and demand," he said. "Every chicken has only two wings, and its really not worth it to produce a chicken just to get the wings."
Yes! An abstruse economic principle made invincibly clear by Lobb on the Job, who really ought to have a column.
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I live in Tampa and all of the foofaraw in the local media about Super Bowl activities is more than I can take. Reports about which celebs have been sighted where are being broadcast around the clock.
ReplyDeleteAll of the parties seem to be for out-of-towners, not for the locals who can't afford the exorbitant charges. Why someone would want to pay hundreds of dollars just for the privilege of being seen in the same room as a super model or gang bang rapper is beyond my comprehension, especially since these celebs are actually being paid just to show up at these gigs.