Month: February 2020

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said he’s been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.Addressing listeners on his program Monday, Limbaugh said he will take some days off for further medical tests and to determine treatment.Limbaugh called himself the “mayor of Realville” in announcing his illness. He’d been experiencing shortness of breath that he initially thought might be heart-related but turned out to be a pulmonary malignancy.Limbaugh’s announcement comes at a tumultuous political time, as the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial nears.He started his national radio show in 1988 from New York, later relocating to Palm Beach, Florida.The hyper-partisan broadcaster has served as a Republican kingmaker through his decades on the radio.
 
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The Kansas City Chiefs are celebrating their Super Bowl win with a parade.
    
“The Chiefs Kingdom Champions Parade” is set for 11:30 a.m. Wednesday. Officials announced the celebration Sunday night, shortly after the Chiefs defeated San Francisco 31-20. The festivities will include a victory rally at Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, about 1:30 p.m., shortly after the parade ends.
    
Schools in the area have started calling off classes so students and staff could attend. Among those pulling the plug were across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas.
    
“For the first time in 50 years, our Kansas City Chiefs are bringing home the Vince Lombardi trophy, and we’re all excited to celebrate with our players and fans,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a news release. He said in a tweet he “better see ALL of #ChiefsKingdom there.”
    Details about the parade already had been leaking out in advance, as the city put generators in place near the site of the rally and businesses in the area made plans to close or operate on a reduced schedule. Hotels began booking up after the Chiefs won the AFC championship game.
    
When the Royals won the World Series in 2015, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the parade, parking along the side of the interstate when exits clogged. Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. said that those festivities showed that “no one throws a parade like Kansas City.”
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In the real world, political primaries are looming, impeachment is ongoing and heavy news never seems to stop. But during commercial breaks in the Super Bowl, advertisers did their best to serve up an antidote heavily spiked with fun.True, political ads did invade the game, with President Trump and Michael Bloomberg, one of his Democratic challengers, both running spots. But mostly advertisers struck back with millions spent on celebrities, humor and even some weirdness.
“Just let us have fun,” said Stacey Wykoski, an administrative assistant.in Grand Rapids, Michigan who watched the game at a Super Bowl Party with around a dozen people. “We’re going to be so deluged with political ads over the next nine months.”
For the most part, Super Bowl advertisers tried to oblige. They stayed away from social-cause messages and focused on lighthearted ads, stuffing them with popular celebrities, hit songs, funny dances and other gambits to appeal to Americans.
“This year it’s all about a return to Super Bowl basics,” said Kelly O’Keefe, managing partner of consultancy Brand Federation. “This is a year of pure escapism at a time when we all crave a little escape.”Delivering on fun
Since the Super Bowl falls on Groundhog’s Day this year, it was nearly inevitable that there would be a nod to the classic 1993 movie. Jeep took the ball and ran with it, painstakingly recreating the town square and other locations from the film and casting original actors Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray and Stephen Tobolowsky. The twist: instead of a Chevrolet truck, Murray uses a Jeep Gladiator truck for his daily exploits.
Cheetos capitalized on nostalgia by using the 30-year old MC Hammer classic “U Can’t Touch This.” The snack-food ad featured a man with bright orange Cheetos dust on his hands who can’t stop to help move furniture or take care of office tasks. Hammer himself — “Hammer pants” and all — also kept popping up to utter his iconic catchphrase.
If ads starred one celebrity, they often had more. Coke launched Coke Energy with an ad showing actor Jonah Hill rallying to meet Martin Scorsese at a party by drinking Coke’s new energy drink.
But stuffing celebrities in ads didn’t always work. Hard Rock International enlisted Michael Bay for a frenetic commercial showing a frenzied heist caper involving Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez DJ Khaled, Pitbull, and Steven Van Zandt.
Charles Taylor, marketing professor at Villanova University, said many ads were “busy” with a lot going on. “They’re going by quickly and it is hard to pick everything up.”
That was true for Mark Nelson, watching the game at home with friends in Chicago. He said the Hard Rock ad stopped conversation at the Super Bowl party he was at, but “the story overwhelmed the brand. As one of my friends said, ‘I have no idea what that was for,'” he said.Electric vehicles
The Super Bowl is always attracts automakers launching a new vehicles, and this year nearly every carmaker touted an electric car.
Audi showed “Game of Thrones” actress Maisie Williams singing “Let it Go” to promote Audi’s suite of electric vehicles. Hummer introduced HummerEV with a cinematic black-and-white ad touting how quiet yet powerful the car is.
Porsche promoted its Taycan electric car with a frenetic car chase. And Ford showed off its electric Mustang with the help of Idris Elba.Surreal humor
A tinge of weirdness crept into this years barrage of humor and celebrities. Quicken Loans Rocket Mortgage had an unsettling ad that showed “Aquaman” star Jason Momoa, known for his buff physique, heading home to “be himself” — as he strips off his muscles and hair to reveal he is skinny and bald. TurboTax tried to tie doing taxes into a CGI-enhanced dance of wobbling knees to a bouncy song, “All People Are Tax People.”
Snickers imagined a world where people sing on a hilltop (an homage to a famous “Hilltop” Coke ad) about digging a giant hole and putting a giant Snickers in it because the “world is out of sorts.”
And Pringle’s enlisted Adult Swim’s animated “Rick and Morty” duo with a meta ad in which the characters realize they’re stuck inside a Pringles commercial.Quiet messages
Advertisers worked hard to avoid the return of “sadvertising” from a few years back — when Nationwide Insurance did an ad about a child who died, among other gloomy spots — and generally steered clear of polarizing issues like income inequality or immigration as we saw in 2017.
But there were still some serious messages in the mix.
The NFL ran a 60-second ad about the devastation police violence has on families. Microsoft showcased Katie Sowers, the first female coach in a Super Bowl game. And New York Life focused on the different types of love in its ad. Verizon enlisted Harrison Ford to voice an ad that salutes first responders.
Google’s ad stood out. It features a man reminiscing about his wife, using the Google Assistant feature to pull up old photos of her and past vacations.
Cortney Effinger, watching the game with her family outside of Detroit, Michigan, liked the ad.
“It struck the heart chords,” she said. The ad worked because not many ads took the “quiet” approach this year, said Paul Argenti, a Dartmouth College professor of corporate communication.
“That’s why it stands out, it’s a little bit slower and focused on a social theme,” he said.  
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Uncomfortable and under duress for much of the game, Patrick Mahomes suddenly recaptured his mojo – and lifted Andy Reid and the Chiefs to a Super Bowl victory – the team’s first NFL championship in a half-century.All it took was falling behind by double digits in the postseason again. Then Mahomes, selected MVP, hit two long passes on touchdown drives for a 31-20 victory Sunday over the San Francisco 49ers.The vaunted 49ers defense wilted late, particularly on passes of 44 yards to Tyreek Hill and 38 to Sammy Watkins. The touchdowns came on short throws to Travis Kelce to cut the deficit to three and to Damien Williams for the lead. The first NFL title in Chiefs coach Reid’s two-decade career was clinched by Williams’ 38-yard TD run, sending red-clad Chiefs fan into chants of “Andy!” “Andy!”Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid is doused on the sideline during the second half of the NFL Super Bowl 54 football game against the San Francisco 49ers Sunday, Feb. 2, 2020, in Miami Gardens, Fla.Reid, 61, won a Super Bowl ring with the 1996 Packers while in charge of tight ends. He’s been seeking one as a head coach since being hired by Philadelphia in 1999. The Eagles lost in their only trip to the big game after the 2004 season.The Chiefs (15-4) trailed 24-0 and 17-7 in their previous playoff games. Their fans in the crowd of 62,417 at Hard Rock Stadium got little opportunity to chant and do the tomahawk chop as KC fell behind 20-10 with 17 1-2 minutes remaining.Mahomes even threw his second interception of the night after that. But then came the kind of Mahomes magic that makes him special.
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Sunday is a once-in-a-century day.The date is a palindrome, meaning it is the same read backwards or forward.It is February 2, or 02/02/2020, and the phenomenon is the same no matter whether regional custom calls for listing the day or the month first.As it happens, it is also a palindrome day on the calendar, the 33rd day of 2020, with 333 days left in the year as well.It is the only time such a palindrome date will occur in the 21st century, and it won’t happen again until few people alive now will be alive to see it again, in 101 years, on 12/12/2121.The last palindrome date came 909 years ago, on 11/11/1111.The word palindrome originates from the Greek words “palin,” which means “again, back,” and “dromos,” meaning “running,”  So literally it means that such a word is running back on itself.There are numerous words or phrases in the English language that are palindromes, including mom, race car, never odd or even, radar, kayak and the name Otto. 
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