Wait, yesterday was the what bowl? Oh, that's the thing with all the commercials, right? Yeah... well, whoever scheduled it against a night of Sunday night Fox reruns seriously misforecast our viewing habits, but hey, there's always the distant possibility that we weren't the target audience anyway. As far as the AtAT staff is concerned, the Super Bowl is most noteworthy for being the setting for Apple's revolutionary "1984" commercial that launched the Macintosh into its long, strange trip. And since Apple didn't buy ad time during the game this year, we saw no reason to miss our evening of televisual entertainment starring bored genies, level 5 vegans, and high-powered slingshots that inflict violence upon unsuspecting victims.

However, we admit that we're a little disappointed with the outcome of the competition itself. To find out that our pick lost by such a razor-thin margin, well, it stings a little, we admit. No, we're not talking about the bit with the pigskin and the big helmeted guys and the hut-hut-hike thing; we hear that was a good old-fashioned butt-whompin'. We're talking about the important contest, which was USA Today's top ten list of all-time favorite Super Bowl commercials. Of course we were pulling for "1984," and for a couple of days last week, we even encouraged AtAT viewers to vote for the ad. Unfortunately, we got cocky; we should have campaigned harder. As faithful viewer Grant pointed out, the "unthinkable" happened: when the dust cleared, "1984" was not number one. Our beloved hammer-tossing, state-smashing track star had been knocked into the runner-up position by Mean Joe Greene and his stinky ol' jersey.

Worse yet, "1984" only lost by a measly 309 votes, out of 72,894 cast. That's less than a half of a percentage point. It's bad enough that we lost, but now we also have to contend with unavoidable flashbacks involving chads and court rulings and dumb protest slogans as well. Ugh... Pass us the ibuprofen. Well, if we needed any more proof that every vote counts, we just got it in spades. And at least the Mac platform scored a victory in that other little game last night; as pointed out by faithful viewer Michael Grey, the Baltimore Sun reports that the Ravens prepared for what turned out to be their victorious clash with the New York Giants by analyzing and reviewing digital footage of previous games-- on the team's Macs. So you can credit the platform for contributing to the Ravens' 34-7 savage pummelling last night. That's something, right?