Braunstein Speaks

Super Bowl XLIV: Recalling Super Bowl XLIII

Once again it is Super Bowl Sunday—This Super Bowl being number XLIV. Two football teams will play, there will be a halftime show, and sponsors will air the most novel commercials.

The only two things that will be different—excepting the participating teams—will be that the game is in Miami, which is a good place for any midwinter event, and last year’s Hope and Change has been replaced by the Hope that the president doesn’t try to Change anything else.

So we proudly reprise last year’s Super Bowl column, from February 1st, 2009:

Today is Super Bowl Sunday, which is practically a national holiday. In a tradition started XLIII years ago, promoters in the National Football League found a way to extend the fall football season well into winter, and in doing so, make a ton (MM pounds) of money.

The Super Bowl is obviously an important event, because otherwise they wouldn’t use Roman Numerals to mark its sequence, which began in MCMLXVII when the Green Bay Packers played the Kansas City Chiefs at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

The Super Bowl—like NASCAR racing—is a heavily blue-collar happening, and this year few fans have any idea what XLIII means—just as they had no idea what XXXIV meant only IX years ago.

Roman Numerals are always used to highlight important historic dates, like MDCCLXXVI, which was the year of our nation’s founding, and is written along the base of the pyramid on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States, which appears on the left side of the one-dollar bill.

Like Roman Numerals, Latin is also used to impress the hoi polloi (Greek for “the masses”) with our national mottos—like Annuit Coeptis (Providence Favors our Undertakings) seen above the eye on the pyramid; and Novus Ordo Seclorum (A New Order of the Ages) written on a banner below the pyramid.

On the obverse (front) of the Great Seal, which can be found on the dollar-bill’s right, E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) appears on the banner held in the eagle’s mouth.

Another place where impressive Roman Numerals are used is in movies, where production dates are also written in this obsolete gibberish, which was quickly abandoned by the rest of the world when the Romans were no longer around to kick their asses.

The last impressive-looking Roman Numeral date was MCMXCIX; because when the century turned, the year became MM, which was nowhere nearly as impressive as the more mundane 2000.

This year, MMIX, really doesn’t have enough letters in it to impress, and we will have to wait another XL years—until MMXLIX—when we’ll get two more letters in the date, making it more impressive looking than 2049.

My own date of record is MCMXLIV, a year which is impressive enough by the fact that I was born in it.

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