Sweet sweet commercialism

Staying up to ungodly hours has all sorts of bizarre effects on my imagination. Flashback to January 1st, just a few days ago. Here in the US, television for the first day of the new year consists of talk show hosts, lots and lots of commercials for gyms and weight-loss products, and football. Football may in fact be my least favorite sport, the day in question being the game day for some inane college teams to face off in the hideously warm California weather. This is a tradition commonly referred to as the Rose Bowl and is accompanied by a parade with a panoply of floats all (apparently) composed of flowers and various plant parts.

And of course, marching bands from high schools across the nation. Forgetting football for the moment, we can focus on the fact that the majority of these floats have some sort of hydraulics and carry some bizarre mixture of reality tv celebrities and small children dying of various diseases. Ah commercialism. The Rose Bowl Parade may be the main source of income of U.S. flower growers, sellers, and distributers, since we're looking at floats about 40 feet long and created entirely from poppy petals or wheat grass strands.

Anyway, having stayed up way past midnight the night prior tends to leave one in a less than top mental condition to remember whatever happened just minutes before. Take this wonderful example!:



Yes, George Lucas was the Parade's Grand Marshall or whatever, and some genius had decided to organize a marching company of storm troopers headed by a Darth Vader Marching conductor. I see marketability! Children's toys! Delicious money forth-coming! That's about all I remember from the entire parade now, though. I'll let you draw your own conclusions