The 2009 Super Bowl is history, the guacamole is cleaned up and the next meaningful game is September 5^th.  The game itself was fun to watch, particularly the last quarter.  Poor officiating for a Super Bowl and too many stupid penalties by players kept this game from being the greatest Super Bowl.  Congratulations to the Steelers and their fans for their victory.

I also enjoyed Bruce Springsteen's halftime performance.  Never a great singer, the nearly 60-year-old Springsteen and his East Street Band put on a very good performance.  I would have preferred to have the new song and Glory Days replaced with a couple of other songs, but we can't always get what we want.  (Sorry for the Stones reference.)

If your party or house was like mine, the ads were a bit of a disappointment overall.  The anticipation of the 3-D ads set us up for a real let down.  Anyway, in my opinion, here are a few of the winners and losers for Super Bowl 2009 Ads.  Too see any of these ads again you can go to Super Bowl Ads: 2009 - SPIKE.

Best Bang For the Buck:  Disney World.  They didn't pay for an ad, but got a huge plug from Bruce Springsteen when he shouted, "I'm going to Disney World", at the end of his performance.  Not much later was a 30 second spot that cost $3,000,000.00 for Universal Orlando.  Free from the Boss is a better bargain.  Also in this category is the 1-second spot for Miller High Life.  It had as big an impact as any of the Bud or Bud Light ads, which for a change were mostly lame.  Finally in this category is the Doritos add with the crystal ball.  I thought the ad was one of the funniest - yes it was somewhat crude in its slapstick humor, but it was also filmed for just $2,000 by a couple of out of work guys that did most of it in one take.

Other ads that I liked included the other Doritos ad showing the power of Doritos to give you what you want.  This made Doritos one of the big winners of the night.  I also enjoyed the Bridgestone ad featuring the Mr. Potato Head and the way to talkative Mrs. Potato Head.  Nextel's ad featuring Roadies running the airport was entertaining.  The Hulu.com ad featuring Alec Baldwin was pretty funny and in an annoying until its funny spot, I enjoyed the people that should look for a new job in the Careerbuilders.com ad.  Finally, my favorite ad was one that had a little nostalgia.  It was the ad for Coke Zero that was similar to the Mean Joe Green Coke ad from 1980, but incorporated the new Coke Zero guys in a slight comic twist.

The losers of the night besides Budweiser had to be all of the movie ads and car ads.  I really didn't have any desire to see these movies base on the ads, and none of the spots for automobiles were all that clever.  GoDaddy.com laid a couple of eggs and other than the "I'm good", Pepsi Max spot, and the other Pepsi ads were fairly boring.  In a strange twist, a couple of the ads for NBC television shows were actually better than most of the ads that tried too hard to be entertaining.

What did you think?  Let me know and here's hoping next years ads are better, and that we get to see the Bears dominate in the big game once again.

We should be happy when Congress feels that it can ignore the economy, health care, social security and other subjects that us mere mortals are apparently concerned with for no reason.  But the events that congress was involved in last week leave me scratching my head. 

The biggest item from Congress making news this week were Congressional Hearings involving Roger Clemens, one of baseball's best and most dominant pitchers of the last twenty years, and whether he told the truth regarding his taking illegal, performance enhancing drugs.  Baseball is, we are told, America's Pastime, and I for one am a big baseball fan.  Like many fans I am greatly disappointed at the number of players using steroids and human growth hormone (HGH).  These players are cheaters.  This era will forever be known as the steroids era, and we will always wonder whether the records that have been broken during this era are legitimate or not.  Most of the players that have their names even remotely associated with steroids or HGH will never make it into the Hall of Fame.  Baseball needs to get their house in order and get the drugs out of the game.  Thank goodness Congress doesn't have any important work to do at this time so that they can waste their time and our money on something of such national importance.  If they feel the need to stick their nose into this then they ought to go after the real problem and nail the owners, commissioner and the players union for knowingly allowing this to go on as long as it did.  I find it darkly comical but not funny that politicians, who most people feel are liars, are trying to determine who is truthful and calling others liars. 

Apparently Major League Baseball is not the only sport that Congress feels they need to spend more time investigating.  The NFL, and particularly Bill Belichek and his New England Patriots are being accused of cheating by video taping opponents signals and practices.  Congressmen spent time asking Commissioner Roger Goodell about why the NFL allowed the destruction of tapes that were evidence of the cheating. 

Finally, congress is playing games themselves.  Nancy Pelosi is playing with our national security by refusing to take action on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expired this weekend.  It's great to see the Republicans stand up to Pelosi as she tries to be the bully and get her way.  This game is the scariest of all and if it continues we will all lose.

Congress needs to stop playing in areas that they have no business interfering in and they need to get to work on what is important.