Super Bowl Sunday 2016

Game Day!

It is finally Super Bowl Sunday, and my best friend Skip and I began our day with Sunday Mass, followed by a late breakfast at the Village Inn.

After miscellaneous online farting around (including me trying to get this blog entry done with Wikipedia being down), we plan to grab an early afternoon snack of dead cow at a nearby Texas Roadhouse.

Then, as the game begins, we'll nosh on various traditional favorites (Fritos, potato chips, cheese and crackers, etc.).

Those salty treats will necessitate some liquid refreshment, of course. We plan to address that with some Samuel Adams Cream Stout.

Sometime after halftime, we will conclude the traditional face-stuffing with a pizza from the Godfather's Pizza joint that is right next door to my apartment complex.

"Good Lord! You guys won't be able to move after eating all of that!"

Fortunately, neither of us has anywhere to be until tomorrow afternoon...

Super Bowl Numbering

From the delightful comic strip FoxTrot, by Bill Amend, which you should read every Sunday, as I do.

Until Next Time...

Bands that enjoy lengthy careers typically have a handful of songs that are so closely identified with them that it is all but impossible for them not to perform those songs in live concerts. Forty-seven years ago today, my all-time favorite band The Who created one of those "signature" numbers that has been a staple of their concert set list ever since.

Original 1969 album cover

On February 7, 1969 the group went in to Morgan Studios in London to begin recording "Pinball Wizard," one of the songs in the "rock opera" song cycle Tommy which guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend had been working on since 1968.

The song is about how the deaf, mute, and blind boy Tommy becomes the leader of a quasi-religious cult because of his phenomenal skill at playing pinball.



Released as a single about six weeks after the recording was completed, "Pinball Wizard" peaked at No. 4 on the British charts and at No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart.

The Tommy album was released on May 23, and I spent the summer of 1969 listening to it obsessively. It quickly became one of the band's most successful recordings, spending almost a year on the Billboard 200 Albums chart (where it peaked at No. 4). It will always be viewed as one of the most iconic albums in the history of rock music. I'm very grateful that the band was still performing the album in its entirety the first time I saw them live in 1970.

Today's send-off is the 1999 remaster of the original album track. Enjoy...