Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … the buffet.

No, not the Jimmy Buffet, although an equally strong case could be made for that industrial-strength pop star who has made millions rewriting the same two songs for the past 30+ years. I’m talking about the American restaurant buffet, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner, be it at the greasiest Bob’s Big Boy knockoff or at the highest-end resort that gets away with charging 40 bucks a head because their just as flavorless eggs are a little less runny.

Not being a world traveler, I don’t know if the restaurant buffet is a strictly American phenomenon. I’m guessing it’s not, as the rest of the world seems to understand the concept of eating until one is full and then – snotty Eurotrash! – stopping. But many Americans need a daily caloric intake comparable to the size of the average AIG bonus check, and these Old Country Buffet-addicted superslobs are the same human beanbag chairs who have to wedge themselves into the seats beside me on planes or at sporting events.
I could almost understand the appeal of eating yourself into buffet nausea if the food was great, but it never is. It’s not even good. (Note that I’m talking strictly about restaurants and not weddings or family gatherings, where the buffet style meal is actually preferable.) Regardless of the variety of foods or of the noble but always failed attempts to add a gourmet flair to the slop they dump in the endless string of stainless steel bins, buffet food is a lot like an Angelina Jolie movie. It might look good, but afterward you feel queasy and rooked out of 10 bucks.

While any buffet scene disgusts me, the one that makes me sickest is the breakfast buffet, loved by the fattest of the buffet-loving buffoons. These people don’t walk to the food spread. They waddle, often unshowered and unshaved, the women draped in mumus and the men wearing whatever ratty shorts or sweatpants allow for the maximum elastic waistband stretchage, allowing them to blow out their bellies with minimum discomfort.

Once they have plate in hand, they begin the obscene heaping o’ the vittles, taking not only too much soggy bacon and watery eggs, but also both kinds of sausage (flat hockey pucks and shriveled midget cocks), cold underdone toast that could serve as damp wash cloths for the fever-stricken, a stale mini-bagel left over from the Battle of Antietam and a not even remotely edible English muffin limper than a eunuch’s pecker. And of course, in an attempt to move that Kilimanjaro sized plate of colon-clogging goo through their no doubt already impacted colon, they fill up a little bowl with canned fruit cocktail. They shovel the contents of the plate down their gullets, then, somehow, repeat the process, sometimes twice, because after all, it’s “all you can eat!” Watching these cretins powereat is like watching frantic colonial insurgents cramming their muskets with powder and bullets at Lexington and Concord.

Even the supposedly fancy buffets at resorts and finer restaurants are gross. They create an air of class and fine dining by adding a few overrated gimmicks, but the food is never that good. Take the omelet station, where some halfwit, coke-addicted cook one job removed from the Applebee’s grill dons a chef’s hat and becomes the maestro of the egg, cooking omelets to order just for you. And what do the buffet bozos do at this omelet station? Ask the Eggman to include thirteen items in their omelet, rendering the whole thing a sloppy, overstuffed mess in which none of the flavors can actually be tasted.

Mr. High-falutin’ Omelet Maker is also the non-chef who mans the roast beef or ham slicing depot at the higher end dinner buffets. He is invariably stationed at the end of the buffet line, meaning he must slap a 3/4 inch thick, Texas-sized slice of heat lamp warmed roast beef or ham atop the twelve other items the buffet buffoon has already plopped onto his first plate of the evening’s gorging.

The industrialized presentation of the grub helps quash any enjoyment of the meal. No matter how meticulously prepared the food (and how careful can a cook really be when making food by the vat), it loses its taste-bud oomph when it has to be scooped, plucked or tonged out of a metal tank which has already been picked through and coughed on by the virus-spewing slew of diners who trudged past and poked and prodded the food before me. When I select my lukewarm, no longer moist but now-incubating-hepatitis-germs glob of chicken cordon bleu (an item included in every chichi gourmet buffet by law, I think), I know I’m taking a piece of food that was shunned by everyone else that preceded me in the grazing line. Yum.

These gourmet buffets do have higher quality food, but they leave you just as unsatisfied. I once had the Sunday brunch buffet at one of the country’s highest rated resorts, Nemacolin, located in southwestern Pennsylvania. Options included lobster tails, sushi and caviar. It still sucked. Oh, the food was as good as you’ll find on a buffet, but that was the problem. When free to eat as much as you can of very good food, the sensory onslaught renders the whole experience an overdone exercise in Caligula-like gluttony (without the gang-banging, no less). I’d have much rather enjoyed another room service breakfast of a pineapple muffin and fresh fruit plate. (Only $18!)

Which brings me to my next gourmet buffet gripe: the price. Why am I paying $29.95 to serve myself? Walking should never be part of any eating experience that I am paying for. I understand that it at least allows the fat folk to get in a little exercise while they play “Watch Me Try to Fill the Empty Voids in My Life with Plate after Plate of Food That, Like My Life, Lacks Flavor, Zeal and Originality.” If I want to exercise while I eat, I’ll enter the Tour de France. Otherwise, please have some sweet-assed young waitress serve me my meal so that I can leave a ridiculously inflated tip in the pathetic hope that she’ll see through my grizzled middle-aged ugliness and the little matter of my sitting-just-across-the-table wife and insist on following me to my car for a post-dessert, thank-you hummer. With a buffet, I lose that dream, and anything that kills dreams is no good.

So spare me the rave reviews of the recent buffet experience that allowed you to make a embarrassing mess of yourself. The best meals provide an intriguing complexity of flavors, some intense, some restrained, but always interesting and delicious. Foods and spices are combined with a combination of care and daring, complementing each other with their flavor, texture and even color. The final products are artistic in their presentation. And a great meal has one more characteristic: You can’t go back for seconds. Or thirds. Or …

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … Dan Rooney.

As a lifelong Steelers fan now living in the DC area, I get to spend a lot of time gloating about my team’s superior ownership (and subsequent success), especially since billionaire brat Daniel Snyder took over the team and began entertaining Redskins haters with his annual off-season, salary cap shredding spending sprees on big-name future Hall of Famers whose hall-of-fame play transpired in another team’s uniforms during the previous decade.

Once again this year, he and yes-man general manager Vinnie Cerratto went and promised Skins fans that their plan was to build a winner from the inside with wise draft choices, then last Friday, Daddy Long Pockets, apparently unable to resist hearing the Redskins name in the off-season news, went and signed superstud Tennessee Titan Albert Haynesworth to a $100 million contract. This after committing 50+ mil to DeAngelo Hall, a player so allegedly cancerous that Al Davis booted him off the thuggish Raiders in mid-season.

Steeler fans revel at news like this, especially while still euphoric over our second Super Bowl win in the past four years. And I, like most other Steeler fans, in my post-Super Bowl frenzy, sucked the black and gold dong (figuratively, of course … ahem) of long-time Steelers owner Dan Rooney, whose steady leadership and fiscal restraint have kept the Steeltown studs competitive on an almost yearly basis for the past 37 years.

Our Danny Boy deserves every bit of the credit he gets for the way he runs the franchise. He has let big stars go free agent instead of paying them more than what they’re worth. He’ll still pay huge fair contracts to star players. He builds through the draft. His free agent signings are never of the big name variety, but instead are of good players who fill team gaps. He has had three coaches in the past 40 years, none of whom, when hired, has the name recognition of a Steve Spurrier. He didn’t hire the latest whiz kid assistant from whatever team won a recent Super Bowl or two. (In other words, no Norv Turner or Romeo Cremel or that fat bastard who has led Notre Dame to a delicious mediocrity.) He has stayed humble, walking to Sunday’s home games and driving himself around town. (No helicopter arrivals at practice for our Danny.) The Burghers love the Roonester, and with good reason.

But even with all those positive attributes and bust in the NFL Hall of Fame, Dan Rooney (and his lovable pappy Art, Sr.) can’t escape induction into the Ned Bitters Overrated Hall of Fame. Here are a few reasons why we might not want to grant sainthood to the old man just yet:

• Where was Dan Rooney’s voice of reason and leadership when his dominant teams of the 70’s were winning four Super Bowls behind a slew of offensive linemen with bodies the size of Checkered cabs? You won’t find any records of admission any of them “enhancing” their physiques with more than just steak, greens and barbells, but do you think that the Rooney family didn’t find it suspicious that 550-pound-benching, 6′ 2″ Jon Kolb could push Ed Too Tall Jones up an down the field in two Super Bowls? Maybe he was blinded by the glare of those four Lombardi trophies, which apparently were won at any cost.

• And while we’re on that syringey subject, why does the Rooney family get a pass on the treatment of Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, a member of the NFL’s all-time team, protector of Terry Bradshaw, and gaping hole opener for Franco Harris? Iron Mike, demented of mind and brittle of body, died almost penniless after spending a few post-retirement years living in his car and in train stations. I don’t know if the Rooney family offered Webby any help. I heard Webster refused help from some former teammates. It took two prolonged court battles to get the NFL to award Webster’s family the disability pay he was owed, since his problems were a result of his NFL career. I wonder which side of the suit Rooney was on. Something tells me he sided with the NFL.

• And while we’re on the treatment of former NFLers, why isn’t St. Dan at the forefront of the fight to get retired players a bigger chunk of the mega-billions the league makes? Seems that the Rooneys love their boys when they’re busting heads on national TV every other week, but once they’re out of the black and gold, well, time to get on with your life’s work, fellas. Thanks for destroying your body for 10 years in this no-guaranteed-contract league. Good luck finding meaningful employment, what with those wrecked vertebrae and arthritic joints and multi-concussioned brains.

• While St. Dan gets some deserved eponymous credit for the Rooney rule, which ensures that NFL teams interview minorities for coaching and front office openings, I wonder how many African Americans he interviewed before settling on Chuck Noll in 1969, when the NFL coaching ranks had fewer African Americans than a Jonas Brothers concert. (Okay, this one is borderline unfair, what with him having the big Irish balls to hire Mike Tomlin, but the Equal Opportunity Commission was onto this stuff long before the NFL, who caught the Up With Black People only after years of being bashed in the press with scalding editorials.)

• Finally, this past fall, Dan Rooney broke a long-standing tradition of shutting the hell up about politics and openly endorsed and campaigned for Barack Obama. He even thanked Obama in his Lombardi Trophy acceptance speech, a bizarro moment for which he got a stunning free pass from both the media and Steeler fans. Perhaps Rooney backed Obama because he was genuinely moved by the Obama tidal wave. I know I was. But there have been whispers that an ambassadorship to Ireland might be in the works for his public Obama backing. If so, it’s an in-front-of-the-curtains act of politics that should have been beneath someone of Rooney’s reputation as the best owner in pro sports.

If this last item comes to pass, perhaps he and the Redskins’ Danny Boy will have more in common that we Steeler fans like to think. Rooney might bleed black and gold, but like every other NFL owner, he lives for a different color: Green.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … the feel-good aspect of that US Airways Flight 1549 reunion.

Hell no, this isn’t going to be a borsch-belt comedy club rant on the tiny bags of peanuts, the screaming toddler in row six or the nonstop chatterer who sits beside you on that Seattle to Miami red-eye, enthralling you with every stirring detail of his humdrum life. The writing might suck, but I’m a bit more original than that.

When Mrs. Bitters and I saw the third or fortieth story about the reunion these lucky crash survivors had, I asked her, “[Wipes martini residue from lips] Even after being part of a miracle like that, do you think you would want to get together with those people ever again?”

Mrs. Bitters, always the voice of reason, said, “Hell no, because after every flight I hate every motherfucker on the plane.” The Bitters abode is a bastion of class, it is.

Flying makes me homicidal. My mood progresses – or deteriorates, if you’re one of those level-headed Buddhist types (pussy) – from irritation during baggage check-in to brooding anger in the waiting area to blood boiling wrath while boarding the plane to “give me four Valium and a syringe of heroin before I stab every prick on this plane with the nail cutter they so generously let me keep in my bookbag, which, yes Miss Leatherskinned 32-year veteran of the flight attendant world, is securely stowed under the seat of the jerk in front of me who I just know is going to slam his seat into my knees the second we hit cruising altitude, which will cause me great discomfort pain but will not, in fact, wake me up, as Captain Constant Update will feel the need to waken us every six minutes with the not-to-be-missed vitals on our cruising altitude, our cruising speed and the barometric pressure in Peoria, even though we’re headed to Dallas.

Yes, I really do hate every person on the plane.

I hate the phony-assed flight attendants. I don’t hate their safety spiels, and I don’t blame them for the pathetic snacks and soft drinks that I never eat or drink. I don’t hate the fact that their 27 trips up and down the aisle keep me from sleeping and instead serve only to distract this ADHD-afflicted moron from the too-easy in-flight magazine crossword puzzle I’m breezing through. (“Let’s see … 12 down … ‘Heston Movie ___ Hur’ … hmmm …) I don’t hate that they were last hot back when flight attendants were called stewardesses. What I hate is their phony, joyless smiles, smiles performed with the mouth but never with the eyes, those condescending empty grins that confirm that I am one more infinitely hate-able blob of airborne protoplasm crammed into smelly tube. You hate me, ma’am? Well, right back atcha Tiffani, or Melodee, or Barbi, or Misti …

I hate the pilots and their useless wind reports from our destination city. Gale force winds I want to hear about, but the fact that the winds are out of the southeast at five to seven miles per hour (oh wait, sorry, I mean knots … the pretentious pricks) is information I need only if I’m headed to Chicago for a kite-flyers convention, which unless I make some major lifestyle changes, that probably won’t be happening any time soon.

I hate the selfish asshole in the wing seat by the emergency exit door who assures the flight attendant that he for-sure-you-betcha can handle the door removal duties in the event of an unplanned landing (or, to put it in CNN Newspeak, “a fiery crash with no survivors”) when we all know good and goddamn well that he’s going to go all George Costanza on our asses and save his own lucky-to-be-in-a-row-with-no-middle-seat ass and forget the rest of us.

I hate the hot chicks. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. They strut through the airport with that born-beautiful sense of entitlement, reaping the probably-paid-for-by-some-moneyed-boyfriend-plane-ticket benefit that comes from the genetic lottery strike of a sweet little ass and a stomach flatter than Hugh Jackman’s singing voice.

I hate the fuckers in first-class. No, not because they’re in first class. They probably deserve it by having worked their asses off. I’d sit in first class if I weren’t such a shiftless blob of free-time craving sloth. What I hate about these bastards is their sense of first-class shame. When you walk through first class on the way to your seat (and I know no one reading this has ever sat in first class, because the people who sit in first class are too busy FUCKING WORKING to read poorly written online diatribes), no one in those seats ever looks up and makes eye contact with you. They pretend that they are busy, fiddling with their seatbelts and stashing magazines in the seat pocket and firing up their laptops. They don’t look at the coachbound unwashed for fear of inciting some sort of Tale of Two Cities-level class upheaval. I’d like these people so much more if they’d just glare at me with the sense of disdain and superiority they’ve earned in life, sipping their white wine while awaiting their smoked salmon appetizer. Their gesture of humility is worse than the gloating they are entitled to.

I hate everyone in the waiting area, or the pre-boarding area, or whatever the hell it’s called. It’s the Land of Flip Flops Showing Stumpy or Badly Gnarled Toes. It’s the Land of People Wolfing Down Shitty Airport Sandwiches, Doing that Ferocious Head Dive into Each Bite, Apparently Unaware that Their Fellow Flyers Can See the Disgusting Display of Ravenous Eating They Are Perpetrating on the Rest of Us. It’s the Land of Pointless Phone Calls Informing Some Bored Shitless Relative that You Are Now, At This Very Moment, Waiting for Your Flight. It’s the Land of Too Loud Phone Calls Aimed at Impressing the Rest of Us as to Your Business Acumen. (We’ll all see you in coach with the rest of us, so your bellowed phone stunt fooled no one.)

I hate the model quality blond chick who sat next to me on the flight from Florida, repeatedly bumping her bare luscious (and long, hence the incessant bumping) leg into mine for two straight hours. I hate her for her sense of entitlement, thinking she deserved whatever space she wanted because she was so hot she could be the “good looking sister” in the Aniston family. She wasn’t doing it to turn me on or to toy with me. She just wanted the space that was awarded her by the same cosmic forces that made her achingly gorgeous.

So, should I ever survive a plane crash, I’ll be forever grateful to the pilot (that is, if it wasn’t his fuckup that put us down in the first place), the flight crew (that is, if their septuagenarian asses were somehow able to assist me in my selfish, tossing-aside-of-all-smaller-bodies dash to safety) and any passengers (but not the first-out-of-the-plane douchebag with the well-stretched-out legs who was fortunate enough to land that cushy wing seat, always making him the winner in the People I Hate Most on This Fight contest I hold in my obviously sane mind) who aided in my miraculous avoidance of a premature death.

But damn it, I will not be grateful to the model quality with the long luscious legs, even if she does pull from the frigid waters and give me mouth-to-mouth. How dare she make me fly all the way from Florida with a zipper-stressing hard-on …

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … tax debt relief.

No, this isn’t going to be some political rant in the wake of two – count ‘em, two! – of Barack Obama’s cabinet nominees having to withdraw from consideration due to tax issues, although the Prez did take a well-deserved smackdown on that one. The person who really needs to lose his job over this is his Secretary of Vetting. How did both of those tax situations slip by unnoticed? I sure hope the people in charge of doing the Cabinet nominee background checks aren’t the ones keeping tabs on Al Quaeda. But those aren’t the people I’m pissed at this week.

The people who piss me off are these ramrods who don’t pay their proper taxes and then play the “poor me” card when they find themselves saddled with a massive tax debt they have almost no hope of digging out of. You’ve seen these reprehensible scum-sucking dogs gloating on those commercials for the skeezy firms that specialize in negotiating tax settlements.

Just how in the hell is this legal? Many people, famous or not, go to jail for tax evasion. Yet these delinquent dildos not only rip off the government (and in effect me and you), they go on TV and brag about how much money they “saved” by going to Seedy, Smarmy and Oily, Ltd.

I saw another one of these ulcer-inducing commercials today. One triumphant person said he owed the IRS over $100,000, but thanks to so-and-so’s help, he paid only $20,000. Another woman proudly stated that she and her restaurant owning husband owed “millions,” yet they settled for just a fraction of that.

Assuming these ads are true (and that might be quite an assumption), I can understand the government’s willingness to settle, at least to a point. Better to get some money out of these deadbeats than none at all. God knows it would cost big bucks to track down these bastards, convict them and then foot the entire bill for their jail time.

I just don’t want these people on my television boasting the sweetheart deal they cut and how many thousands they saved. Why can’t other criminals cut similar deals? Let’s say I anally rape a woman and then behead and dismember her. (Pause here for heavy breathing at the thought.) While I’m on the run, maybe I can go to some company that “specializes in getting your rape and murder charges reduced!” Instead of doing life or getting the chair, I can have a company of slick talking legal types bargain my rape and murder charge down to “a forced tongue kiss with cigar breath and two unsolicited ass gropes.” Then I can go on TV in my bloody clothes and vouch for my lawyers’ mad skills, all while somehow playing the victim card.

Another aspect of this whole thing that puzzles me is how these knuckleheads let themselves get into such a massive debt situation in the first place. Most of us are lucky enough to have jobs where some unseen accounting department takes care of all those deductions on every paycheck. But if you choose to be self-employed, it’s your responsibility to figure out how much tax you’re going to owe each year. You might not hit it exactly right, but at least be in the ballpark, for fuck’s sake. (That’s in honor of my new hero, Christian Bale.) I’m sure they have tables and charts and ciphering grids that allow the self-employed to make a fair guess at how much to take out of his and his employees’ paychecks each week. The same holds true for the business taxes. If you can’t figure this all out, then maybe you shouldn’t run your own business.

I used to be friends with a Methodist minister. He was technically self-employed. He had to pay himself every two weeks and was responsible for taking out taxes. He managed that Einsteinian feat just fine, and believe me, he was no math whiz. (Example: The dumbass used to refer in his sermons not to the Holy Trinity but to the Holy Quartet of “the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and a guy named Eddie.”) I never remember him screaming in horror every April at the realization that he owed the IRS thousands of dollars.

If I’m not understanding some basic element of this, please elucidate my cloudy thinking, because I’m tired of yelling at my TV every time these smiling scofflaws crow about ripping off the government to the tune of $70,000. It taxes 100 percent of my patience, and I don’t know if there are any anger management companies out there who can help me bargain it down to a more manageable 20 percent.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … bashing Bruce Springsteen.

Can the middle-aged nostalgia freaks please stop bemoaning the fact that Bruce Springsteen played the Super Bowl halftime show? He didn’t “sell out” for a big payout. He did that years ago, and to that I say “Fuckin’ A, Boss!” A guy gets into rock ‘n’ roll for one thing: chicks. Well, after banging out half of America’s pussy for ten years, Springsteen concocted the brilliantly commercial “Born in the U.S.A.” and went from cultish rock God to America’s rock God. If you followed his career for the last 25 years, playing the Super Bowl was pure Bruce.

But some alleged superfans are still in denial about what the Bossman represents. Sperm whale of a comedian Artie Lange (one funny motherfucker) has been bitching about Super Bowl Bruce since his halftime show was only a rumor. Longtime Washington Post reporter Liz Clarke, usually a voice of reason, wrote a lengthy magazine piece for Sunday’s Post in which she pouted like a freshman school girl who got jilted at the big fall dance. Have they been paying any attention at all over the past two decades, or did their sad nostalgia glasses skew Springsteen reality?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ripping the Boss. I’m a superfan and have been for, well, the exact number of years is too depressing to commit to this page. I stuck with him when he went commercial, and I didn’t bail on him when he got all experimental. I even found a few listenable tunes on those early 90’s love letters to his wife. (But just a few. Whew.)

I just can’t figure out why this image of Bruce as Cult Rocker still exists. Springsteen, to his eternal credit, didn’t spend the last 20-30 years rewriting Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. I’m sure this would have satisfied a huge segment of fans, the same fans who keep three classic rock radio stations flourishing in every big American city. But as he aged, he kept growing and changing, and his music reflects that. These complainers who long for old Bruce apparently want him to go all Bon Jovi and Aerosmith on our glory days-seeking asses, churning out the same catchy, meaningless pop-rock dreck that made those formulaic phonies rich in the first place.

The main thing these Bruce bashers don’t seem to understand is that unlike most rock stars, Springsteen has never been about exlusion. He has never wanted his act to be an Us vs. Them thing. His whole shtick has been inclusion. He has never been one of those rockers who dupes fans into thinking they are onto something that the uncool or unsmart people just don’t get. Springsteen has always gone out of his way to welcome every fan. That’s why playing the Super Bowl makes so much sense.

(And no, my hard-on for Springsteen doesn’t cloud my terminal cynicism. I know that his main motivation for his 12 minutes of choreographed halftime glory was mainly to beef up those already Artie Lange-fat coffers. I mean, the man didn’t exactly volunteer his time on Sunday. But back to the essence of his live shows …)

Those who have been to a slew of his concerts over the years, and we are a legion, have to know that he sends this inclusion message every night. It’s never, “Hey man, we’re all on to something special, but let’s just keep it between us and we can feel cool!” No, it’s more like, “I’m throwing the best three to four and a half hour party you can find tonight, and I don’t care who you are or what you believe in. Tonight you can believe in the redemptive power of rock. If you can lay out the scratch for a ticket (and hopefully a CD, two shirts and a poster, ka-ching!), well, come on in and let’s rock this fucking roof off. I will sweat until I have no more sweat, I will bleed, I will tear up my joints and vocal chords, I will play until you are as exhausted as I am … and I’ll even slam my big Bruce balls into a camera like I did during the Super Bowl stage slide.”

What also makes sense about him playing the Super Bowl is that he himself has always said that he got into rock to be accepted, not to the cool outsider, the anti-”everything mainstream.” His goal when he started playing music was to get people to like him, the more the better. (Of course, that soon meant “The more people that like me, the more records I’ll sell, which means more poon and more money, which means I can marry some ridiculously cute Hollywood piece of B-list quiff and then dump her shortly after for my much harder-core tambourine player, which will provide fodder for another successful album, which will bring in more bucks … and now here’s a song about a car.”)

So chill out on how your idol has let you down in some way. Liking Bruce never made you a rebel or counter-anything. In fact, quite the opposite. If you were not a fan of either team and you still watched the Super Bowl, you’re one of every three Americans who feels compelled to participate in a common television experience because you’re afraid of missing out this big common television experience that everyone will be talking about the next day. That means you aren’t that cool or original, which means that you like everyman entertainment and have rather pedestrian tastes, which means you like Bruce Springsteen. And that’s fine. Embrace it and embrace his hokey act, because no one does it better.

If you have to rue anything about the halftime show, rue the fact that you had a ball. Two of them actually, speeding right toward your singing-along face in glorious hi-def stage dive.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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