A little segue

I don't watch a lot of football. Even though there are a lot of great athletic players in a football game, I find the game simplistic and brutish. There's certainly room for subtlety and intelligence in the game, but it is such a small part of it that it really is kind of meaningless.

One thing I've noticed, is how adept they've become at slipping little advertisements into the announcement. Yes, I did listen to some of one of the games on the radio. Every time that was an excellent block by a player, it segued right into an advertisement for H&R Block. All in the space of about five seconds (and notice how I segued here too).

That said, the last two football games this weekend, between Detroit and Pittsburgh and between Minnesota and Seattle, of which I watch not one second, both ended in equally horrific and completely different fashions.

The one thing that's great with live sports, even live sports that I don't like, is that they're live. You don't know what's going to happen, it's not scripted. Even scripted the way reality shows are scripted

Call me old-fashioned, but I long for the days when every single thing that you did or looked at or listen to wasn't trying to sell you something. I think that's part of why people feel stressed all the time, because somebody's always trying to sell them something. I'm not really aware of anyone who enjoys going in to a store or market and having to try to fend off the salesman trying to sell them something. It just isn't pleasant and it's stressful. And the ubiquity of advertising these days isn't really that different.

I studied and worked in advertising for nearly 25 years, so I have a pretty acute sense of when somebody's doing this to me, be it through banner ads or play-by-play mentions or pop ups or product placement. I make fun of it. My wife worked in advertising also and she does it with me.

So I don't find it the stuff stresses me out at all. It's really easy for me to ignore it, because I know what they're doing. We tried to teach our children about it. I feel bad for people who don't though, because if it makes them think about things they don't really want to think about, that means, and I know this sounds stupid, they are thinking about the things they want to think about. And that's bad.

I can't give you any advice as to how to avoid this; you can't avoid all the messages. What I can advise however, is that you become aware of their existence and what they're doing there. They're there to sell you something and absolutely nothing else. They don't care about anything else except your buying the product and making them money.

It's really nothing more than 1 million little Nigerian email scams every single day. They're not always actual scams, but they're always trying to make money out of you, one way or another. That's just the way things work.