The PreGame

If you head to the movies this weekend, you might want to consider bringing a Furby or wearing one of the things people wore back in the ’90s (things I can’t name because my mom bought all my clothes back then). There are two films opening this weekend that invoke the spirit of this era — which, by the way, was the last decade we had with a clear, agreed upon name to it. (Can we, once and for all, decide what to call the decade from ’00-’09? The Aughts? The Oh-oh’s?)

I’ve never been good with slogans. That, and a crippling fear of rejection by my peers, prevented me from running for public student office in high school. The closest thing I could find that rhymed with “Carpenter” was “gardener,” and flower puns weren’t going to get me elected for anything more than homeroom representative.

But I’ve found a golden cause to rally behind — or rather, rush toward — and it could use a slogan.

The “Mad Men” image is iconic: a back view of a silhouetted man, presumably Don Draper, on an easy chair, relaxed and leaning to his left, with his right arm extended across the top of the chair and a chicken wing between his two fingers, its sauce having already dripped onto his white shirt.

I’d demand that Peggy get Mr. Draper a napkin, but I think I’m food-projecting again. There is no chicken wing, and that can only mean one thing: the 2012 Wingfest is here.

When I was in high school, a friend and I devised a game to break up the monotony of walking to and from class. The rules were simple: Walking between two people conversing earned a player five points; if you split two people holding hands, you got 20; no points for groups of three or more.

You should have seen the other guy … err, bear. You should have seen the other bear.

Because after I absorbed the beast’s sucker punch, I dispatched it with a furious barrage of fist that left its big, furry face a sorry sight. It scampered into the woods, leaving its youngest cub as a token of its defeat.

And that’s how I got a black eye.

But since people find that so hard to believe, I’ve just been saying I got into a nasty collision at an ultimate Frisbee tournament.

It’s a look not altogether unpleasant, but usually disapproving. The corners of the mouth rise slightly, an invisible force seemingly pushing against a full smile. The head tilts back, an eyebrow rises and the corresponding nostril flares as if catching a faint draft of sulfur.

“Oh … you play ultimate Frisbee?”

My fallback for Lent was always to give up sweets.

Not all the “sweets,” of course; that would be much too daunting. Usually just one subgenre of sweets, one sweet I could easily replace with another sweet — maybe an ice cream, a cookie, the ambitious yet cliched chocolate — for 40 days and nights before the Great Sweets Binge that is Easter.

Twenty-four-seven. Three-sixty-five. Ugh.

I hear it all the time. It has to be one of my least favorite ways to say “always,” “a lot” or “most of the time, but probably less than I’m implying.” Yes, the colloquialism relays that the person saying it understands the concept of time and days of the week and probably knows how to count. But ever so rarely is it an accurate portrayal of a situation: You aren’t hustling when you’re asleep; there isn’t drama when you’re folding laundry; you aren’t keeping it gangsta when you’re in the drive-thru, despite your best efforts.

In their recent Super Bowl ad blitz, Budweiser proclaimed, “Man has long dreamed of turning lead into gold. We dreamed of turning gold into platinum.”

In one fell swoop, Bud announced a new beer and revealed that it looks up to Rumpelstiltskin.

Bud Light Platinum debuted on shelves and in bars two weeks ago. It boasts higher alcohol content than Bud Light, a sleek, blue glass bottle and the enticing allure of novelty. As someone who would list “beer,” “the color blue” and “new things” as interests in a figurative Match.com profile, I was immediately intrigued.

Another Super Bowl has come and gone; congratulations to fans of the Giants who were treated to an exciting victory as well as Biff from Letterman touching the Lombardi Trophy before half the team.

But you’re not here about football; you’re here about ads. And this year, I don’t think there were any that we'll remember forever. But here’s what I liked and didn’t like about this year’s slate of commercials: