Superbowl Ads

Posted on 7 February 2011 by Erik Hare | 5 Comments

The Superbowl is over, and the Packers won a great game. I couldn’t have asked for much more, except a Steelers win, but that wasn’t coming to a team that managed to cough the ball up three times. For many people, however, the game was just the setting – the event that got them huddled around the teevee with friends with a little bit of everything for everyone. That obviously includes the ads – aired at a cost of $3 million for every 30 seconds.

But do these ads – big single events on what is increasingly called “old media” – really sell anything?

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The Pop Bowl

Posted on 28 January 2011 by Erik Hare | 10 Comments

Y’ins gon’ rut fer Stillers? I ask the room for its opinion in my best Pittsburghese, a language I’m woefully out of practice with. Nevermind. Out here in Saint Paul no one can tell if I’m getting it right or not. The language, with deep Polish and Appalachian roots never made it outside of the hills of Western Pennsylvania a land with its own rugged rhythm tempered by a gentle decency. It’s an easy culture to define by language but a hard one to get to know.

The upcoming Superbowl features two teams from “The Midwest”, the industrial heart of the nation that quietly defines much of what we consider solid and good about the USofA. We can find this stretch on a map as one people, but we can also hear it in the way they talk and the values they cherish. It’s where football itself was founded and continues to thrive in basic principles of fair competition. It’s America both unassumingly small and big hearted at the same time.

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Tweetup

Posted on 26 January 2011 by Erik Hare | 8 Comments

The room was constantly abuzz with curiosity. In the back room of the dimly lit restaurant newcomers would shyly approach the long table carefully, hoping to find a face they knew, a connection to the crowd. This is how a “tweetup” usually goes because as well as many of us know each other, it’s through our keyboards. The faces, the laughs, the eyes and the smiles are still apart. That’s why any of us tromp out into the cold of January in the first place.

But really getting to know people isn’t just about face time. It’s a learning process. That’s the message I took away from one of the many conversations I had.

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Heavenly Conflict

Posted on 21 January 2011 by Erik Hare | 10 Comments

Anyone who follows their horoscope has probably heard about the “new” set of astrological signs. The controversy continues as people’s ability to relate to their world has been thrown into chaos. But shouldn’t everyone involved have seen this coming if it’s so predictive? Actually, since there’s nothing new here at all, a bit of history tells us that this was a long time in coming. Horoscopes may seem like fiction to most people, but they had their roots in the foundations of science and civilization itself.

The main difference here is that fiction, as a product of the human mind, has to make sense. History doesn’t have such limitations.

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Dr. King’s Long Road

Posted on 17 January 2011 by Erik Hare | 5 Comments

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
– The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every year Dr. King’s Birthday comes around, and every year we have the same talk around the dinner table. My kids don’t feel that in a time when a black man is President there is as much need for Dr. King – the man, the life, the struggle, the values. Every year they want to tell me that this is their day, and they can honor Dr. King by honoring what he has done to make the world what it is, and I have to tell you I am happy for it.

But so much of what I want to tell them is what was not done, can never be, not in one man’s lifetime or in all the lifetime’s of all of us still here on this Earth. The ongoing struggle for a society that is just and decent is eternal.

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