This used to be one of the greatest days of the year.
New Year’s Day meant football, and while there are games on and I will watch most of them, it won’t be the all-day overdose that it used to be.
The other day, I was talking with my wife and our 20-year-old son about this year’s bowl games, and we all agreed that we had little interest in the bowls. No wonder. Sixty-eight teams were invited to play in 34 bowls this year. All they had to do was win half of their games.
Mediocrity is now cause for reward and celebration in today’s college football world.
When my wife mentioned that she missed the old bowl system, our son had no idea what we were talking about. We tried to explain how there were fewer games back in the day, but that they meant something beyond a paycheck for the school or the conferences.
Some years, as many as four games could have an impact on who would be named national champion, and sometimes you still didn’t know for sure how voters would react.
There are nine bowl games to be played after today, including the championship game, which is set for next Thursday night.
* Is there anything more annoying than having the volume on your television set suddenly jump to heavy metal levels?
OK, there are actually plenty of things more annoying, but that is pretty bad. You adjust the set for optimum listening while you are watching your stories and then a commercial comes on and the volume is suddenly blaring.
Apparently a Congresswoman in California finds in troublesome as well. Rep. Anna Eshoo has proposed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM as it is being called. It mandates that commercials can be no louder than the regular programming.
According to a news report, the TV folks have a year to come up with a method for fixing the problem.
And you thought Congress rarely did things that mattered.
* Either Hollywood did a good job of making movies people wanted to see, or we were all so depressed by the economy that we decided to forget our situation by watching a movie.
Last year, movie-ticket revenues topped the $10 billion mark for the first time ever. According to Box Office Mojo, an industry Web site, revenues were up 9.5 percent over last year.