Miami Pop Rocks

The Super Bowl was in Miami this year. I don’t want to talk about the game. As a lifelong Forty-Niners fan, it was far too painful to watch the fourth quarter, a quarter in which, traditionally, both teams play. My team decided not to play the fourth quarter for some reason, and I still don’t want to talk about it, so please, just let it go.

Let’s talk about the halftime show, instead. J Lo’s butt joined Shakira’s butt on stage at the fifty-yard-line to entertain us for fourteen minutes. The butts wore skimpy outfits and danced around the stage. The butts swayed. The butts hung on tight to poles and spun down to the stage again. At the end of the show, the swinging butts even knocked all the rest of the dancers off their feet with two powerful sideways butt moves. The butts put on a pretty good show.

Not many people are aware of this, but the owners of the butts, J Lo and Shakira, are actually fairly talented singers. The NFL consented to let them have microphones as long as their butts were constantly visible to the cameras, as per the butt contract, and the two ladies were even allowed to sing a little during the show.

It is not a shock that the NFL would put on a halftime show centered around butts. We’re not exactly talking about America’s moral compass here. Let’s not forget the halftime show centered around Janet Jackson’s boobs. The NFL has a low bar, family entertainment-wise, and they continue to sneak under it to pick up all the dollar bills on the stage.

So, the butts weren’t surprising. Shakira is from Colombia, which also makes perfect sense, since the Super Bowl was in Miami, Florida, a town that operates completely under Colombian national law. I assume J Lo was invited because she is from New York - a nod to where the state of Florida imports the rest of its citizens from.

There were two male performers invited up on stage as well. J Balvin is another Colombian pop star, so he was probably required to be on stage under Colombian entertainment law, as a chaperone for Shakira’s butt.

The other choice for male entertainment was baffling. A guy in a diamond-encrusted silver trench coat wearing a silk dinner napkin as a hat showed up on stage with a microphone, as if he was a legitimate entertainer. It was bad enough until I was informed he goes by the name Bad Bunny. I am not making that up.

He crept around the stage, squatting down in his matching diamond-encrusted sneakers, doing a half-rap song in Spanish. Apparently, Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico, where I guess you are not required to have any talent in order to become a famous singer, or a famous outerwear BeDazzler, or whatever it is he’s famous for.

I’m not sure why the Colombian government of Miami agreed to have a Puerto Rican join the show. They literally, and I’m using literally correctly here, could have gone outside the stadium right before the show, thrown a churro blindfolded, and hit someone better to be on stage than Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny, however, was not my problem with the halftime show. My problem was the whole thing took place inside Hard Rock Stadium.

Hard Rock.

Not Hard Butts Stadium. Not Easy-Listening Latin Rap Stadium. Not Whatever-the-Hell Bad Bunny Does Stadium.

Hard Rock Stadium. You have one clear choice for a halftime show at Hard Rock Stadium: AC/DC.

They blew it.

If AC/DC had played, the Niners would have won. I blame Bad Bunny. I don’t want to talk about it.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Mamarazzi

You have heard of the paparazzi; the annoying in-your-face camera jockeys who follow celebrities around hoping to get a picture of them they can sell to People magazine. I recently watched the documentary, $ellebrity, with the Jennifers (both Aniston and Lopez), and every A-list star interviewed in the movie had some pretty crazy stories about the lengths these Hollywood parasites will go to snap a photo. I have mixed feelings about the complaints from the stars, though. On the one hand, if you wanted to be famous, you have to deal with the whole package, good and bad. On the other hand, the stories about invasion of privacy were pretty wild.

One group that hasn’t been given a voice in all this camera controversy is the children. I’m not talking about the children of celebrities, mind you, I’m talking about my own kids. They are mercilessly stalked by a different, but equally insidious group, the mamarazzi. The mamarazzi is well-armed with expensive cameras, detailed insider knowledge on when and where their targets will be, and a cold, ruthless willingness to stop any activity dead in its tracks at the first sign of fun to take a picture. Our children have never played for a period of longer than five minutes without having their picture taken.

We are, however, enjoying a brief respite from the constant stopping and posing, because my wife’s incredibly expensive Nikon digital camera stopped working the other day. I am of the opinion that if you spend a mortgage payment on a camera, it should be simple to use, but the people at Nikon disagree. One day it just started taking black-screen pictures, as if the lens cap was on, and none of the 32,000 menu settings seem to fix it. (Yes, we did check to see that the lens cap was not on, and yes, we are currently accepting any technical advice you have to offer.)

When the incredibly expensive Nikon camera was working as advertised, my wife was almost out of control. It may have just worn out from overuse, actually. We haven’t left the house since it stopped working, because in her words, “What’s the point?” This confirmed my earlier suspicion that she was taking the kids on outings merely for the photo ops. I got suspicious when she kept saying, “We’re going on location,” instead of, “We’re going to the lake.”

“Mom, can we go to the park?”

“Why? The camera’s still broken.”

“What?”

“Never mind. See if your dad will take you.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like that fact that our kids’ childhoods are being documented. We already have more pictures of Son Number Three than my parents and all their friends combined ever took of us kids growing up. Between the limitations of film cameras and the fact that I was the third child, my parents have exactly eight pictures of me. The problem now is, with the large memory cards and the fast shutter speeds, we have too many pictures. My wife will get home from a family get-together and upload the memory card to Shutterfly, then send the family an e-mail saying that the 457 pictures of our picnic are available for viewing. Even on fast-mode slideshow, looking at the pictures actually takes longer than the picnic did. I think that defies the laws of space and time, but I’m here to tell you it’s true.

If we could somehow print out all the pictures my wife ever took, and turn them into a giant flip book, you could actually watch our kids grow up in real time.

The good news in all this is the mamarazzi might actually be breeding a more thick-skinned future celebrity when it comes to tolerance for cameras. I know, as far as my boys go, God forbid, if one of them ever becomes a celebrity, he will wonder why the paparazzi aren’t taking very many pictures.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Give Me Your Money

I was browsing my way through the Yahoo headlines today, keeping abreast of the hard-hitting news items of the day, such as what dress Kim Kardashian was wearing inappropriately this week. (Abreast… get it?) Anyway, after I got done being outraged at the fact that a New York City traffic officer would have the unmitigated gall to give J Lo a parking ticket, I came across a headline that caught my eye in a different way.

New utility scam is popping up across the nation

Hey, wait a minute. This actually looks like something that could affect my life. This actually sounds like something I should read in order to better protect myself against the seemingly ever-increasing population of no-good, rotten scammers out there. Someone named Cameron Huddleston apparently has penned an article for Kiplinger.com, a well-respected financial magazine’s online presence, that will equip me to do battle with thieves. I’m interested.

The Better Business Bureau says that a new utility bill scam is popping up throughout the U.S. and Canada. And it involves an approach to get people to part with their money that's been growing in popularity over the past couple of years: prepaid debit cards.

Huh? I thought this was going to be about someone piggybacking onto my gas or electric bill? Debit cards? OK, I guess I’ll read on.

The BBB reports that scammers are calling people and claiming to work for a local electric, water or gas company. The callers tell people that they're late on a utility bill and that their service will be cut off if they don't pay immediately. Then they instruct people to purchase a prepaid debit card to pay their bill and call them back with the card number. Thieves then drain the value from the card.

Huh?

Scammers have turned to prepaid debit cards recently because wire transfer services have increased their fraud detection systems -- making it more difficult for them to use this once-popular method of stealing money from people. Scammers also like prepaid debit cards because they don't have to show a photo ID to collect or spend money on the cards.

Huh?

For help spotting a utility scam, the BBB offers these tips:

Then the article listed helpful tips like, “Utility companies would never operate with high-pressure tactics like this,” and “it’s a red flag if you are asked to pay by prepaid debit card.”

Huh?

Who is falling for this? How do you not know if you are behind on your gas payments, and even if you know you’re behind, who would go buy a prepaid debit card to pay the bill? Apparently it works, or it wouldn’t be “growing in popularity” among our nation’s degenerate scallywags.

Since there are obviously people out there who need my help, I have done the Better Business Bureau one better, and developed Smidge’s BBBB tip for spotting a utility scam: Live until you’re old enough to be responsible for paying the utility bill somewhere, then if you are still naïve enough to fall for a scam that idiotic, stop what you are doing and call me. I will walk you through whatever process we need to use to have you send me your entire life savings. I will give it all to charity, and you can consider it a valuable lesson and thank me later.

The article reminded me of a letter I received a while back from Ruby Addo Mills. She was the second wife of the late Ghanaian president who died not long ago. She was contacting me in view of the fact that we could be of great assistance to each other. She currently inherited the sum of ninety five million US dollars ($95,000,000.00) which she intended to use for investment purposes, specifically in my country of origin. She was very adamant about the fact that she would obviously never ask me for any of my account details until we met face-to-face in the bank’s vault in any of these three countries of my choice: Madrid, Spain, Johannesburg, South Africa or Kampala, Uganda. For security reasons, she wanted all communications go through her son. She wanted me to send her son, Samuel Kofi Atta Mills, the details to enable her contact me for more details, and she would explain more to me in next detailed fax to me.

Sam never did show up in Kampala like he promised.

Anyway… The end of the Kiplinger.com article had this to say:

Also, a utility bill scam that began last year has resurfaced. Utility companies in several states, including Kentucky and Tennessee, have received reports from customers who have received calls claiming that the federal goverment will help pay their electric bills. Click here to learn more about this utility bill scam and how to avoid it.

Since “government” was misspelled in the last paragraph, I’m half wondering if the whole thing wasn’t a brilliant double-reverse by some hacker, and the link to learn more was really going to steal my money somehow. Maybe it was going to trick me into paying to read the rest by entering a prepaid debit card number. The only problem with that is, I have an I.Q. above room temperature, and since I have been living a normal financial existence where I keep my money in something called a bank, and pay my bills with things like checks and credit cards, I have no idea where I would go to buy a prepaid debit card.

If it really was a real article, I guess maybe it was aimed at the same folks who care if J Lo is getting a parking ticket, or know where to buy a prepaid debit card.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!