super replay bowl

I thought Springsteen was great, the game was exciting, but ruined by excessive penalties and endless official reviews. The business of "challenging" the referees' calls, follows by long delays that distract attention and disturb the flow of the game, seems especially out of hand. If the calls that really matter are going to be decided in a television booth, why have referees at all?

Re: Springsteen. It's hard to overstate how important he was to people attending college in the mid-1970s. Every day of our lives we heard how wonderful the 60's were and how their spirit would perhaps, someday, return. But Springsteen was ours, and we made the most of it. It is interesting, in this respect, how Springsteen's brand of politics--a strong, if largely symbolic, identification with the working class and a large dose of religious spirit in his later albums--has outlasted that of most of the 60's icons, who with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Joan Baez) seemed to turn inward at some point, away from real-world concerns. To be sure, The Boss lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and he wasn't above using the Super Bowl to pump his new album. But he works hard and sings about real people; can you really ask more of him?