It’s the Super Bowl!

Sunday, as any North American living in mainstream society, or even simply not living in a cave in the wilds of northern Saskatcheawn knows, is the Super Bowl. Apparently the top 10 most watched shows in the U.S. are all Super Bowls, which just goes to prove how popular this game is.

The game... and the commercials. For some reason it seems the commercials are a huge selling point. In Canada we get the game, but with Canadian commercials and in Montreal at least, bars are selling their Super Bowl by touting the fact that they have the U.S. feed, thus the real commercials. How weird is it that you sell the biggest sporting event in the U.S. for its commercials? How weird is it that it's the commercials that are attracting viewers? Is there something I don't quite understand here?

Anyhow, I don’t watch the Super Bowl. Neither for the game nor for the commercials. I never have liked American football – I’m much more of a soccer fan.

Still, in the interest of Super Bowl blogging, here’s some trivia I found most interesting.

• According to Hallmark Cards, Inc., The Super Bowl represents the No. 1 at-home party event of the year. Believe it or not, it’s even bigger than New Year’s Eve.
• Hallmark also figures the average number of people attending a Super Bowl partyto be 17 – what, did they count?
• No fewer than $55 million is expected to be spent on food for The Big Game (spoken in a deep booming echo-y voice).
• After spending an estimated ten million man-hours (give or take a couple of seconds) preparing all that grub, Americans are expected to consume the lot within approximately fifteen minutes, well before the first touchdown is scored.
• Super Bowl Sunday marks the day on which Americans chow the second-greatest amount of food after Thanksgiving
• In the week before the Super Bowl, sales for processed cheese go up 15%!
• Almost 15,000 tons of chips and 4,000 tons of popcorn are eaten.
• Lining up each and every chip would produce a trail of almost 293,000 miles (not quite 1-1/2 times the distance to the moon, or six feet per American).
• A popcorn string consisting of all that popcorn would ring the Earth almost 5-1/2 times.
• Some 12 million pounds of avocado are sold in preparation for the game so that Americans may gorge themselves on an estimated eight million pounds of guacamole. This is enough avocados to cover Miami's Dolphin Stadium football field end zone to end zone more than 20.5 feet deep.
• There are more pizzas sold on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day of the year. Domino's will deliver twice as many pizzas as they would on a normal Sunday, and their delivery drivers will travel four million miles that day.
• An average person watching the Super Bowl will consume around 1200 calories during the game.
• 7-Eleven claims a whopping 20 percent in sales of antacid the day after the Super Bowl.
• Statistics show that six percent of all working Americans will call in sick the day after the Bowl. (They have to go out and get all that antacid – still, I’d like to know the proportion of working Americans who call in sick on any given Friday or Monday. )
  
  Trivia gathered from here and here
  
  Not that this has anything to do with the Bowl, but here, because I adore avocados (cut in half with a light vinaigrette… mmmmmmm) here is a bit of avocado trivia I found along the way: Avocados will not ripen on the tree, but must be cut from the tree for ripening to begin. The leaves supply a hormone to the fruit that prevents ripening; when the fruit is harvested this cuts off the supply of this inhibiting substance and starts the production of ethylene. That is why the best way to store avocados is to leave them on the tree, sometimes for up to seven or eight months.