No falling snow today, just real cold air. Of course I had to be out in it for a while, including a period spent figuring out why the garage door wasn’t closing. Once I figured it out, it was all too obvious. A chunk of snow had attached itself to the bottom of the door, and when it passed in front of the electric eye, it stopped the door.

Until I thought to visit the Coca-Cola web site itself, I couldn’t find a list of all the seven languages used in the “America the Beautiful” commercial aired during the Super Bowl. The descriptions I saw simply mentioned that most of the languages weren’t English, which seems to have fueled a short-lived tempest in a teapot. I didn’t see the commercial live, or any of the commercials during the game, or the game either.

I caught it on YouTube the next day (the commercial, not the game). A pretty piece of work, even considering that at its heart, its goal is to sell sugar water (or more likely around here, corn syrup water). Where’s that street at 0:35? Looks like a Chinatown, but I can’t tell where. I want to go there and get some noodles.

The languages are English and Spanish, naturally, but the others were impossible for me to pin down just listening: Tagalog, Hebrew, Hindi, Keres (spoken by the Keres Pueblo people), and Senegalese-French. Interesting selection. It didn’t take long before some jokesters created a parody that included the likes of Klingon and Dothraki – which I’d never heard of before, since I’ve missed Game of Thrones entirely.

Another thing I didn’t know, but just found out: as a child, Charles Nelson Reilly attended the circus in Hartford, Conn., on July 6, 1944, the day the big top caught fire and killed over 160 people. As an old man doing his one-man show, Reilly described his escape. Separately, another fellow described his escape.