It has long been said that a picture is worth 1000 words.  Living in the digital age, we are all so accustomed to absorbing images in 3 second bytes that we are therefore bombarded with billions of stories each day;  1000 words per picture, 20,000 words per minute, 1,200,000 per hour, etc.  We as humans can't possibly process those kind of numbers.

So, if we can't process all the images, what are we missing? If we focus too closely on the images, we also might just miss out on the bigger picture - the Miracle of life.  Life, after all, is not a spectator sport and the real stories are often what is not seen.

In the case of the Super Bowl, we as Americans celebrate it as if it were an official national holiday.  Restaurants close in the knowledge that people across the country will be gathered with friends and family to watch either the sports or the commercials. There is non-stop imagery once the game begins.  The fireworks, the sports action, the cheerleaders, the fans, the halftime show...and those commercials.  Each commercial this year paid an estimated 3 million dollars per slot.  So much profit was made on commercials there was a contest that paid $1 million to the creator of the favorite commercial.  The winners were two men who created the Doritos commercial.

The real show, of course, was the football action.  There were lots of pictures coming through of all the players and coaches and fans and cheerleaders, but how many of us watched every play?  We have to trust the officials who are trained to see things we do not - either because the camera is not focused on the action or because we do not know the rules (and therefore can't expect a penalty called for facemasking or roughing the kicker or unsportsmanlike conduct if we don't know what it looks like) or because we were intoxicated by alcohol or so passionately routing for one team that our "view" was skewed.

I agreed to watch the Super Bowl with an ex-boyfriend that I hadn't seen in a LONG time.  He spoke to me in the flowery terms people in relationships use.  He also made me laugh.  He also spoke in the future tense, like, "we have to make arrangements to..."  Believe it or not, he even used graphics and diagrams that he sketched on the paper on the table in front of us.  He drew stick figures inside a big cirlce, then put a big smile on the face of one figure.  "Here's my pitch.  That's us.  Look how happy you are."

Cute.  The problem is, like the $3 million pitches on TV, I'm not buying into the hype.  Next time we'll have to have more qualifies officials watch our game to make a fair ruling.  Surely someone else can see what I seem to be missing or rule on penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct...if there is a next time.