Gillette CEO James Kilts, in the Onion, courtesy of a GS commenter:

Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That’s three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I’m telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we’re standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we’re the chumps. Well, fuck it. We’re going to five blades.

Sure, we could go to four blades next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let’s play it safe. Let’s make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we’re a business, that’s why! . . .

We didn’t claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five blades is the biggest chance of all.

Here’s the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don’t tell me what to invent—I tell them. And I’m telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don’t care how. Make the blades so thin they’re invisible. Put some on the handle. I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

I love the city of Pittsburgh and generally admire the Steelers. Cower is a great coach; Hines Ward is a fabulous player; they beat the Colts–what’s not to like?

But it’s not clear that the best team won last night. (Actually, it’s not clear that either the Steelers or the Hawks really looked like championship-caliber squads.)

If not for the benefit of some highly questionable calls, Pittsburgh probably loses that game. They trailed the Seahawks in first downs, total yards, and time of possession. They had more turnovers than the Seahawks and their quarterback finished with a passer rating of 22.6.

That’s 22.6 for the winning quarterback! Makes you long for the legendary days of Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer. Does anyone have a link to a page with quarterback ratings for previous Super Bowls? Because I’d be surprised if there was another game in recent years where the rating of the two quarterbacks–combined–barely broke 90. (Hasselbeck and Roethlisberger put together totaled 90.4.)

In any event, maybe this was a fitting finish to one of the more disappointing NFL seasons. Everywhere you looked, the league suffered from disappointments that stemmed from things not on the field. The Eagles had their undefeated season demolished in the first week, when McNabb was speared. Before the season was over, they were playing without their star quarterback, running back, or wide-out. The Colts had their undefeated season wrecked when their coach suffered a debilitating family tragedy. And the Patriots, clearly still the class of the league, were so riddled with injury that they never really had a fair shot.

With the elite teams hobbled, the playoffs stunk with few close games and many, many instances of lousy officiating. So maybe last night shouldn’t have been much of a surprise.

I’m not saying there were any great commercials during Super Bowl XL, but there were a few good ones. My picks go to the Nextel/Sprint homage to Benny Hill and Ameriquest’s mile-high club spoof. Not bad was ESPN’s mobile ad to the tune of Chad and Jeremy’s “A Summer Song.” As for bad (or lame), I would say Gillette’s Fusion razor (five blades!) is up there. No doubt you all have your own best and worst.

If you’re thinking about getting in on an Oscar pool, now is a good time to look at what the HSX market thinks of the race.

Somewhat surprisingly, the HSX market favors Brokeback for Best Picture, but has Crash a close second. We’ll see if this trend holds.

Ang Lee is favored by a slightly wider margin over George Clooney for Best Director.

The Best Actor race is still wide open. Best Actress is also still close, with Reese Witherspoon getting the early edge over Felicity Huffman. (How tragic would it be if Huffman won an Oscar before Bill Macy?)

The market is still sorting out the other awards, with most races very close. Of course, intuition says that Brokeback will win nearly across the board, so it will be interesting to see if the market catches up with intuition, or if the conventional wisdom turns out to be wrong.

Ricky Jay–Ricky Jay!–is back in a series of internet shorts called, ESPBilly. Not vintage stuff, but it’s Ricky Jay.

Ricky Jay!

I don’t know what I’m saying.

Is Spengler the new Gary Brecher?

Wilfred McClay at First Things, writes about Nelle Harper Lee:

How is it that a book and author that have been so indisputably influential remain so obscure? As this article makes clear, it’s partly because the author chose to let her book speak for itself, and has for the nearly five decades since the book’s publication quietly but firmly rejected the cult of authorial celebrity. She did not even play the Salinger-like game of being the well-known recluse. She simply refused to become a public person.

Blog crush:

Man what an awesome year Jennifer Aniston is having. She’s had three movies come out that bombed, she got her ass dumped and now gets to see daily updates as her ex starts a family, and now her prized investment blows up and basically becomes worthless. I think I read somewhere that science proved stuff like this happens because a girl isn’t pretty or thin enough. Makes me feel bad for that time during oral when I thumped her on the forhead and said “do it better”.