HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Wladyslaw Pleszczynski and William McGurn

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

What Was Britney Doing There?

By William McGurn
Posted Monday, Jan. 29, 2001, at 4:03 PM ET

Dear Wlad,

RSS

Ah, you can't bait me. When I agreed to do the "Breakfast Table" with you, I mentioned to my wife that the one thing I could predict was that there would be a swipe at the Fighting Irish. The truth is that I'm not really a fan per se. More accurately, I'm a loyal son. I have no love of the game, though I appreciate a good play as much as the next man. But if badminton or hopscotch were as big as football or basketball, I'd root for those just as happily, just as I'd root for my neighbors' kids over strangers. Which is why I was delighted this summer when a farm boy from Wyoming I'd never heard of (Rulon Gardner) beat an 11-time world champion Russian I'd never seen before (Alexander Karelin) in a competition--Greco-Roman wrestling--I hadn't until that moment known existed.

Anyway, I did go to see the Super Bowl at my brother-in-law's house, also a Domer and familiar with the Pleszczynski complaints about South Bend. This is the same brother-in-law, by the way, who runs a Web site not so subtly entitled "Ted's "Fire Bob Davie" ND Home Page." They had a nice party, and the girls had a blast running around with the other kids. I suppose that makes me akin to someone who goes to church for the coffee hour.

Definitely Al Gore was born to do a Super Bowl ad. (If you notice, a la Bob Dole the best ads go to the also-rans.) But he really should have been there this year: Monster.com or Hotjobs.com would have been perfect, perhaps zeroing in on a career government employee trying to find work in the private sector. (You know he's not going to stay at Columbia that long.) Even better would have been SNL's Darrell Hammond, whose does Al Gore better than Gore does himself--much the way Dana Carvey does George Bush better than Bush.

The thing I couldn't figure out from the TV was the target market. Having been living in Hong Kong for eight of the last nine Super Bowls, I'm out of touch with its development. The Budweiser commercials I can understand, given the natural constituency Super Bowl watchers represent. What I can't understand is why these commercials would be interspersed with a Britney Spears halftime show, given that her natural constituency, judging from my own daughter, appears to be 5- to 10-year-old girls. (We recently confiscated a Britney Spears CD that was sent by an uncle whose presents are always much appreciated by the kids for the same reason they sometimes don't make it past Mom and Dad.) Well, maybe it's not so strange. I heard Richard Bey on WABC Radio saying Friday that while Britney Spears is totally inappropriate for 12-year-old girls, she is perfect for dirty old men, in which category he included himself.

How long before the unflattering profiles of Greenspan begin to pop up, now that he's endorsed tax cuts?

Cheers,
Bill