"The Who" Wins the Superbowl?

I don't know what halftime show this guy was watching, but it obviously wasn't this year's. Putting aside for the moment his astonishing dismissal of an absolutely gripping game, the is no way he can honestly say that he found The Who's arthritic performance to be anything but painful. Watching Roger Daltrey creak about as he tried in vain to reach the very high notes that he built his career upon felt unpleasantly akin to watching your Alzheimeric grandmother try to remember if you are her son, her husband, or the milkman. (It didn't help that Daltrey these days bears a striking resemblance to my elderly Jewish aunt.) Same goes for Pete Townsend, who - working windmill or not - still looked a great deal to me like the inevitable result of putting a copy of "Guitar Hero" in the community room of a second-tier nursing home. (As a side note, I would advise the author against making comments about Townsend ‘working the windmill’; considering that Pete is a registered sex offender, the immediate mental image conjured is not one most people find desirable.) As for the presentation itself, let's just say that I'm happy that I'm not an epileptic. I mean, c'mon! Lasers!? Really? Was that because the band feels more comfortable in the '70s, or was it to distract from the glaring fact that the core of the band is APPROACHING their seventies? I don't even blame them for phoning in such a plastic, emotionless performance: hell, at their respective ages, I'm damn near impressed none of them needed to stop for a nap! Seriously, when the youngest member of your band is Ringo Starr's eldest son, it's time to retire.

As for the rest of the game - I mean, did the author even WATCH it? Water-cooler talk, my ass! Seriously, man, even if you don’t like football, (and why the hell sit through the halftime show if you don’t,) THAT was a goddamn good game. From the Colts’ first-quarter domination of the Saints, to the neck-and-neck action of the third, to New Orleans’ avalanche comeback in the final fifteen, it was a classic, classic Super Bowl. Even if you don’t go in for the spectacular athletics, (i.e. Tracy Porter’s interception/ SEVENTY-FOUR-FRIGGIN’-YARD TOUCHDOWN DASH in the fourth,) there must be SOMETHING worth saying about the human drama: the stunning defeat of the greatest quarterback playing today, the heavy symbolic significance for of the victory for the state of Louisiana, the fact that New Orleans won the VERY FIRST Super Bowl they’ve ever played. Something, anything. It is impossible to have watched that game and not be totally immersed in it. I actually cheered out loud when the Saints won. And I’m a life-long GIANTS fan!

Eh, I dunno. I don't know why this half-assed little post bothered me as much as it did, I really don’t. Maybe it’s because this so-called ‘Live Review’ was obviously done by some dude sitting on his couch sucking a beer and flipping channels. Maybe it’s that said dude didn’t even TRY to write more than a perfunctory review of the performance that could’ve just as easily been written by a monkey watching clips of VH1 Classic. Maybe it’s that said lack of effort is so disrespectfully obvious, so shallow, and so poorly researched, (that’s “Daltrey” with an ‘e’, incidentally,) that I felt personally insulted by it; it’s almost as if this guy was writing something just to read himself online. Or maybe it’s that a website that is at least ostensibly attempting to be taken seriously would unthinkingly rubber-stamp such drek without at least proofreading it first. In any case, it did bother me. In fact, it profoundly bothered me, and that should be troubling to the editors. Really, if this is the quality of writing I and other thinking people can expect to find on Death + Taxes, then count us out as regular readers. I hope to be proven wrong, but I don’t EXPECT to be.