This year, I am encouraged that a new mini-trend might be on the horizon. Yup, we might have finally reached so low that the standard lowest-common-denominator approach has outlived its shelf life.

Intuit -- isn't that the company that supplies software for migratory Arctic peoples? Or am I thinking of Intel? Wrong again? Anyway, you must have intuited by now that the financial accounting software maker (which actually produces Quicken and TurboTax) will advertise on the Super Bowl.

Chris Christie has in the past famously criticized Snooki and the other stars of "Jersey Shore" for reflecting badly on the state. But who'd have thought that lane closures on a bridge could become such an object of national fascination that an assemblyman from Sayreville, N.J. could precede Robert Gates as a guest on "Face The Nation"?

The singing mom who opens this (new) Old Spice commercial is so grotesquely invasive and overbearing that she spies on her adolescent son from behind his bedroom door and then drags herself behind his car, grabbing his rear bumper, riding the highway atop her plastic laundry basket like a deranged witch. With the comically uninviting tag line "Smellcome to Manhood," this spot positions the Old Spice spray to be a bar mitzvah in a bottle. As the song puts it, the stuff "sprays a man on my son."