My convalescence has been proceeding . . . slowly. I've been feeling somewhat better, and managed to check out a movie over the weekend (Lost in Translation, which I quite enjoyed); however, at work today they more or less hustled me out of there early, as my wracking coughing fits were discomfiting the rest of the skittish staff. Geeks are fragile little rodents, and get twitchy when they see someone nearby getting hammered sideways with coughing attacks and spuming out microdroplets of some hideous, unidentifiable plague into the air. Go figure.

Probably a big impediment towards achieving good health--pointedly ignoring the cigarettes--was actually watching the Super Bowl. My friend D. came over to watch it with me and the wife (who, it probably doesn't need to be said, really could have gave a fuck anyway). Things did not start auspiciously (do they ever?): some idiotic flack unwisely exhumed Aerosmith and turned them loose onto the stage for the pre-show. Aerosmith. These antediluvian fucks. Whose idea was this? Anyway, there they were, prancing ridiculously; they looked like the Living Avatars of Fruit Leather. Joe Perry arthritically strangled his guitar like a recalcitrant stepchild, and Steven Tyler . . . good god. He clutched frantically at the microphone, like a drowning man, as his glassine bones moaned under the weight of his terrible array of scarves. And of course his voice is just ruined any more: he searched myopically for notes the way a frustrated man looks for a missing sock in the back of the dryer, and unable to locate any, resorted to some terrible, grainy shrieking. At this point, mysteriously, tiny men began parachuting into the stadium, for unclear purposes. Tyler eyed them nervously, and I thought, ecstatically, They're coming to kill Steven Tyler! Finally! But no, the weird 'chuters touched down and just kind of scampered off, pointlessly, and Tyler flashed a relieved smile at the apparent reprieve from Death from Above.

That was just the pre-show I caught. Christ only knows what the network sackheads inflicted on an unwary public before I bothered to tune in.

Well, there was a bit more: Beyonce was dragged in to spang out a typically flashy rendition of the National Anthem, and there was a whole bunch of thumbs-uppery and backslapping for the good NASA folk in the wake of the shuttle debacle, but it really just kind of felt . . . out of place. Especially the "what the fuck?" moment (little did we know how many of these we would have over the evening) when the stage birthed up a freaking astronaut, with a big, stiff flag, miming the famous old moon photo. They stuck that poor bastard there for the entirety of the National Anthem too; one fervently hopes that at least his helmet rendered him immune to the singing.

Anyway, the game. It sure looked like it was going to be a sack of wet shit for a quarter and a half--D. howled hopelessly at one point, "This is fucking boring!"--but then both teams caught fire, and a real game was to be had.

Meanwhile, the weirdness continued to pile up (I know everyone's heard this shit before, but hey). There were, of course, the ads, which were, by and large, tremendously terrible. Come back, dot-coms! All is forgiven! Come back and make us more freakishly expensive, mind-shatteringly terrible advertisements!

Oh, they're not coming back. Which means we're stuck with the brain ticks over at Budweiser, whose "farting horse" ad achieved instant legend in the house. (For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, the nitty is this: a horse farts explosively at a woman who happens to be holding a candle, and she is burned terribly, while her boyfriend asks, "Hey, you smell barbecue?") This one pretty much blasted our synapses all to hell, and we sat, stunned. "Did that just happen?" I said. D. blinked erratically. It was like the TV had farted explosively in our face, and in a way it had: I certainly smelled something, but I'm not sure it was barbecue. As the evening progressed, I wanted desperately to see that . . . thing again, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming, and I periodically screamed, "FAR-TING HORSE! FAR-TING HORSE!" But my exhortations were ignored, and I knew, desolately, that the awful thing would never see the light of day on TV again. (Later, of course, I found it on the internet, where nothing is ever allowed to die.)

Budweiser ads were front and center on the evening, but also omnipresent were the various get-a-boner! drug ads. Most egregious, of course, was former Bears coach and current mustache-gnawer Mike Ditka, who barked at us like erectile dysfunction was something vaguely all our fault. Never mind that I don't need visions of Mike Ditka in my head when I'm thinking about sex, please; but I did note that Levitra's little logo consists of a tiny flame. "Levitra!" I shrieked, "It'll set your dick on fire!"

Considering the prominence of advertising featuring alcoholic beverages and boner drugs, I idly wondered, Maybe if American men weren't drinking all that booze, they could get it up once in a while. I was soon disabused of this notion by another beer ad: This one showed a ref being screamed at by a coach on the sidelines, and wondered how he could take such scorching abuse so stoically. The answer: The wife at home is a hysterically shrieking shrew who berates him at all times! Now I understood: men don't get boners any more because of (a) a tremendous beer deficiency, and (b) their wives are all nightmarish harpies. If I suffered from these incredibly dystopian views, like apparently Budweiser's ad men all do, I'd need something pharmaceutical to help me get in the mood too.

I won't even get into the halftime eye-poison, as it will be gummed to death over the next few days, except to note that there was spirited discussion amongst us as to what the exact notional sound was made when Ms. Jackson's boob flopped out depressingly on national TV. "Muuuh." was suggested, as was "Blop," but in the end the winner was something close to "Lllllurp." Just so you know.

And these were the sounds of my evening: Aerosmith. Equine flatulence. Screaming wives. Mike Ditka obliquely talking about his penis. Lllllurp.

I don't know if I'll ever get better.