Friday Afternoon Moment of Whimsy. It is the end of the work week, and you know you want it. Some people in the Catholic blogosphere are content with humor that's merely "little-old-lady" funny, as opposed to serious "ROTFLMAO" funny. The former is what passes for laughs at the Catholic Blog Awards, stuff like cheap-@$$ Photoshop pics of Pope Benedict on a surfboard. (yawn!) But the truly discriminating among you know better. And until Der Tommissar decides to come down from Mount Olympus and regale the Catholic blogosphere with more of his Iowahawk-esque wisdom, you have nowhere else to go.

Hey, why else would you be here?

And so, for this installment, we review the highlights of this year's Super Bowl ads. For reasons beyond this writer, the top-rated ad at USA Today and YouTube, was the "Free Doritos" ad. We all know guys like these two at the office, hanging around the water cooler or the vending machine. We avoid them like the plague, but we vote for them at moments like this. Duh.

Then there are jobs like mine. Until about ten years ago, the scene from this ad for CareerBuilder.com could have described MY job. My boss at the time would walk by my desk and make some cheap-ass remark, or would wait until I got up out of my cubicle when he was a few spaces down kibbutzing with the rest of the staff. For awhile, the rest of the boneheads that passed for middle management around here were perfectly okay with it. Then the political winds changed, and most of the aging while male douche bags, who couldn't get a job in the private sector stealing chickens, opted for early retirement. The rest is history. And I didn't need CareerBuilder.com after all.

You remember in our last installment, when we told you of the Miller High Life "One-Second Ad." Well, here's the one that made it. Yes, in television, they measure things right down to the second. This one took two of them. Guess they'll be getting the extra bill for double the "Miller Time." I imagine most of the "buzz" for this promotion was the "buzz" itself during the preliminaries. If we can get a hold of the next issue of Advertising Age or Ad Week, we'll find out how they did the math.

Sometimes we wonder what would make the world a better place. Having been an amateur musician for most of my life, I've been around enough professionals to know, that it's the road crew that makes everything happen. Ever try to talk to the guys in the band? They're sequestered somewhere being interviewed by some armchair critic, usually a woman who moved up the food chain from "groupie" who just wants to go nighty-night with them. Trust me, the "roadies" are a lot more fun. They're not all unsavory characters either, just hard-working guys who don't hang their hat in one place for too long.

There's a certain magic to "deadpan" humor, and we may all love it on stage or screen. But meeting people like that in real life makes us look at each other and wonder whether the guy's meds are wearing off. I know this, because people look at me like that all the time. Obviously, I'm staying on the meds. It's the only way I can sleep at night after watching Alec Baldwin confess to "an evil plot to destroy the world." What if he isn't kidding? What about all those people who proudly eschew owning a television set, for the more selective medium of internet-based media (and you know who you are, Kristie)?

Finally, my personal favorite. Pay close attention to the lady in blue. If I were thirty years younger, this is the woman I would want to be the mother of my children. Obviously she'd also have to be a nice traditional Catholic girl. And love dancing. And be at least as well put together as our example here. I don't think I'm asking for much, really. Other than that, I think we could find a way to close the deal.

Give Daddy a kiss.
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