Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 28
Super Bowl Halftime Shows, prop bets, a discussion about peanut butter, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
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YouTube Rabbit Hole of the Week
I spent way too much time on this piece from thrillest ranking every Super Bowl halftime show. I’ve got plenty of issues with the list, but it’s way too fun to take the nostalgia trip through these YouTube clips. Some highlights:
The Who were incredible. Sounded great, great staging, perfect setlist. I will always remember this halftime show because my friend Pierce had a bet on the number of Pete Townsend arm swings. Pete hit the over very quickly and it was quite the celebration.
The 2001 halftime show could not have possibly been more 2001. Put this in the Smithsonian. Also, a reminder that boy bands are/were/will always be lame as hell. Seriously, *NSYNC SUCKS. Hard to believe people lost their minds for five dopey bozos dancing and lip-syncing to slickly-produced Swedish pop songs. Shouts to Britney for rocking the hell out of a cut-up Aerosmith T-shirt. More on her next week.
I’m no U2 fan, but this is an all-time performance. Powerful.
And of course, the GOAT, Prince. Note: it’s very strange to me that all of these shows don’t live on YouTube (or at least NFL.com) in their entireties. It’s a shame that the only clip of the greatest performance watched by an audience of 100M people is the 3-minute video above. The halftime show is only 12 minutes long! Roger Goodell, please, post them all.
So what did we think of The Weeknd’s Halftime Show?
Not much. A totally forgettable show. No stand out moment. Cool visuals, lots of fireworks, but nothing jaw-dropping. It never made sense to me that the NFL picked a singer whose catalog that’s basically all about cocaine.
How’d you do on your bets?
On my sports podcasts, Back Door Cover and Too Much Dip, I picked the Chiefs to win and cover. I was loud wrong. However, I hit a couple of props. I jumped up and fist-pumped when The Weeknd opened with “Starboy” (+500). I also celebrated like a madman when a streaker ran onto the field (+550). Cha-ching.
Really, tho, nobody gives a shit about your bets.
Classic Quote of the Week
This classic Gary Cartwright story from Texas Monthly’s March 1976 edition is a must-read. It’s a look at the hoopla around Super Bowl X between the Cowboys and Steelers. It also features this classic quote:
In his curious, perceptive way, Duane Thomas said it best. When they asked him back at Super Bowl V how it felt to play in the ultimate game, Thomas posed his own question: “If it’s the ultimate game, why are they playing it again next year?”
A Brief Discussion about Peanut Butter
I love peanut butter. My preference is the crunchy variety. Always natural peanut butter. I like nothing but peanuts and salt in my PB. That being said, Jif, Skippy, and the like are all delicious. We use the processed stuff with our dog. She loves a Kong toy filled with PB and will not settle for the natural variety. My favorite snack is the classic Ants on a Log. For those who had terrible childhoods like my fiance and have never heard of this snack, it’s simply a piece of celery filled with peanut butter and topped with a handful of raisins. If you’re feeling loco, you can even add a little cinnamon or perhaps a drizzle of honey. Goodness.
We’re discussing peanut butter for two reasons:
First, this wonderful look into peanut butter’s origins from Smithsonian Magazine, A Brief History of Peanut Butter:
Peanut butter reappeared in the modern world because of an American, the doctor, nutritionist and cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who filed a patent for a proto-peanut butter in 1895.
By World War I, U.S. consumers—whether convinced by Kellogg’s nutty nutrition advice or not—turned to peanuts as a result of meat rationing. Government pamphlets promoted “meatless Mondays,” with peanuts high on the menu. Americans “soon may be eating peanut bread, spread with peanut butter, and using peanut oil for our salad,” the Daily Missourian reported in 1917, citing “the exigencies of war.”
Skippy debuted crunchy peanut butter and wide-mouth jars in the 1930s. In World War II, tins of Skippy were shipped with service members overseas, while the return of meat rationing at home again led civilians to peanut butter. Even today, when American expats are looking for a peanut butter fix, they often seek out military bases: They’re guaranteed to stock it.
By 2020, when Skippy and Jif released their latest peanut butter innovation—squeezable tubes—nearly 90 percent of American households reported consuming peanut butter.
No American is more closely associated with peanuts than George Washington Carver, who developed hundreds of uses for them, from Worcestershire sauce to shaving cream to paper. But our insatiable curiosity for peanuts, scholars say, has obscured Carver’s greatest agricultural achievement: helping black farmers prosper, free of the tyranny of cotton.
Delicious.
My friend John Duda wrote some words about Peanut Butter this week as well. You should subscribe to his newsletter, “One Thing with John Duda.” Seriously, just check this writing excerpted below:
I love the taste of peanut butter. When you get a few slices of hot toast and spread creamy JIF (and it has to be creamy I don’t care at all for crunchy peanut butter) across the surface, it’s damn near orgasmic to watch the PB just melt off the sides of the bread and onto the plate just a few centimeters below. If you’re loading up your toast correctly, after that first bite the peanut butter will begin melting onto the tips of your fingers and down the sides of your mouth and one may find it hard not to think about floating the idea of incorporating PB into the bedroom with your significant other. Or maybe that’s just me.
There is a slight problem with peanut butter, though. It smells. It’s a smell that bothers me to no end because it’s incredibly difficult to accurately convey.
It’s just a smell and you know it when it hits your nostrils. I’ve got a sensitive snout. I’m like a basset hound in that way.
Peanut butter on toast smells different than it does on a knife. On toast, it’s a pleasant aroma that lightly wafts upwards into the nostrils.
On a metal knife, peanut butter is offensive and loathsome and it only gets worse when you discard that thing into the sink for cleaning. You can try all you want to clean a peanut butter knife off with your tongue but you will never fully succeed.
There will always be PB residue on a metal knife after use, and when you turn that faucet on and get it to a temperature just below scalding hot in your kitchen sink, that’s when the smell gets really bad. The fumes from the pb mixed with hot water drifts upwards, hitting your face like a wave crashing down onto shore and there is nothing that you can do except pray to the heavens above that the water will wash away the remnants quickly and take mercy on your senses.
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