(for Americans) Super Bowl Myths

For you non-Americans, the Super Bowl is the final football game of the season, between the champions of the two conferences, to determine the winning team of the year. Super Bowl Sunday--today, February 7, 2010, is the 44th Super Bowl--is almost as big a day as Christmas, with men gathered around big-screen plasma TVs for hours, drinking beer and eating junk food.

From today's Parade magazine (these excerpts have been edited for concision, clarity and continuity):

• #1. If you all flush your toilets at halftime, the sewers will overflow. FALSE -- Municipal sewage systems effortlessly handle huge surges every weekday morning between 6am and 8am when millions of people not only flush their toilets but also brush their teeth, take showers and make breakfast.
• #2. More people watch the Super Bowl than any other televised event. FALSE -- It has been described as the most anticipated annual event, but weekly NFL games typically have nearly 150 million viewers. Nonetheless this pales in comparison to February's other, quadrennial, sporting event: the Winter Olympics. The 2008 summer games in Beijing were watched by 4.7 billion people, including 214 million Americans.
• #3. Super Bowl Sunday is the best day to visit Disney World because everyone else is at home watching the game. FALSE -- Disney doesn't release attendance figures but its director of public relations assures us that the park will be busy today. Both Disneyland and Disney World have plenty of big-screen TVs for male visitors who want to watch the game while their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and girlfriends enjoy the park.
• #4. More than half the avocados consumed annualy in the US are sold in the week before the Super Bowl. FALSE -- More than 20 million Americans hold Super Bowl parties, where guacamole is a staple condiment, using 80 million pounds of avocados. But that's only 3% of our annual consumption, and besides, it's not as big a day for guacamole as Cinco de Mayo.

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  (A day mistakenly observed in the USA as Mexican Independence Day, it is only a regional event in Mexico, celebrating the defeat of the last army--the French--ever to invade a New World nation from another continent.)
• #5. More women are victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day. FALSE -- Domestic violence always increases on holidays, and Christmas and Memorial Day see many more women admitted to ERs with suspicious wounds than Super Bowl Sunday, when men and women are often not even together in the same place. This notion originated in 1993 because a public service announcement about domestic violence ran during the game to take advantage of the huge male audience--for free.
• #6. The outcome of the Super Bowl predicts the stock market's performance for the coming year. Wait for it... TRUE -- This is the only Super Bowl myth backed up by evidence. If a team from the old AFL wins, the odds are high that stocks will go down, and if an old NFL team wins they're more likely to go up. If an expansion team or a team that has relocated makes it to the game this can muddle the correlation, but many have links to former AFL or NFL teams or cities. This prediction has been accurate for 34 of the 43 Super Bowls, making it a better predictor of stock prices than most financial experts.

 

It's really easy. You don't need a recipe. Just mash an avocado with a little salt and you can stop right there if you like.

Most Americans like to add salsa, but then these days most Americans like to add salsa to everything, that's why it now outsells catsup. As far as I'm concerned a little goes a long way and if it's not there I don't usually miss it. Yeah, I'm the guy who used to have a girlfriend from Sichuan, I guess she burned me out.

I like to smooth it out with a little mayonnaise. My wife thinks that's heresy, so I have to remind her that Mexicans love mayo so much that they named a holiday after it.

A little garlic powder or liquid is good, and some chopped onions. You can add diced tomato but be careful not to make it too liquid or it won't work as a dip. Use firm tomatoes like Romas.

I can't stand to be in the same room with cilantro but a lot of people love it, and it's certainly an authentic Mexican flavor. Epazote is wonderful but you probably have to live in L.A. or El Paso to get it.