I don’t have a huge problem with Budweiser like some people do. Sure, I now prefer other beers to the “King of Beers,” but I had my days of loyal Bud drinking.

I also don’t get too bothered when some art form gets a commercial use. If I hear a favorite song or artist in a commercial, well, that’s just how the world works.

But a commercial Budweiser filmed in Canada for airing during the Super Bowl up there (yes, they do special commercials in Canada for an American football game) has me at odds with both of those two sentences.

The commercial below shows how a “flash mob” turned a rec league hockey game into a time to remember for the players on both teams. The popular hockey blog Puck Daddy posted some info about the story behind the commercial shoot.

The problem is, Budweiser didn’t have “an ingenious idea” as Greg Wyshynski wrote in the blog post. They just recycled an idea which Improv Everywhere did almost four years ago, just at a Little League baseball game. And IE didn’t have to pretend they were filming a documentary to pull off the stunt – they just did it. They also didn’t have to pay actors to be in the crowd. They used their ready cadre of “agents.” Read the story behind the “mission.”

But, wait. Improv Everywhere actually stole this idea … from themselves. The idea first came alive in 2004 with the “Best Gig Ever.” That night, IE found an unknown band and filled their Sunday evening concert with rabid fans.

One friend has already called me a Grinch on this, but it’s undeniable. I know people steal get inspiration all the time from other creative types, but this is pretty blatant and to pass it off as something that they just came up with themselves for the biggest commercial day on television is just pretty sad. I’m glad the players on those teams got to experience it, but they were merely tools for Budweiser to sell more beer. The band and the kids in the IE missions really just benefited from people trying to have fun and make someone’s experience special. So is Bud’s attempt to profit the “ingenious  idea?”

You would think after my running out of gas experience 13 months ago, I would have learned my lesson. That would make too much sense though.

I first had trouble with my car battery in October. I had to drive the Saturday morning when we had that freak snow storm and rushed out of the car and into the house without unplugging a charger from the cigarette lighter. When we went to go to church Sunday morning, the car wouldn’t start.

I got a jump the following morning before I headed to work and thought nothing of it. Sure, the engine seemed to hang a little when I turned the key in the morning, but I figured I would hold off worrying until I had a real problem.

That came the first day of work in January. We had a little bit of a cold snap, and I hadn’t driven the car in a few days. When I jumped into the driver’s seat that morning ready to tackle 2012, nothing happened.

Some people would look at this as an obstacle. I saw it as an opportunity, an opportunity to go into work a little later than normal while I took care of the battery.

I could have also seen it as an opportunity to get a new battery and put all these problems behind me, but that again would make too much sense. Besides, this was a Tuesday. Getting a new battery is totally a weekend thing.

Each day that week, I promised myself I would call and make an appointment with my mechanic to get a new battery. And each day I found myself derailed by thoughts like “is Cougar Town ever coming back to ABC” and “how did I manage to end up at the bottom of my college football bowl pool?” In other words, I procrastinated and never made the phone call.

I could have done a drop-in appointment, but I had to referee wrestling and had a bunch of other stuff planned. Besides, the car sounded better when I started it Saturday morning to go ref. The problem had resolved itself.

Or so I thought. Later that afternoon, I sat in my car at our church parking lot to pick up my daughter and a friend from a Girl Scout event. I had my phone plugged in to charge and decided to play a game of Tetris – back off, I grew up in the 1980s – as I waited for them to arrive.

A little while later, they piled in the car and I jumped in the driver’s seat. Then, nothing. The 15 minutes of Tetris on my phone drained the battery. By the time I got done cursing my stupidity, everyone had left so I had to call my wife to come get us.

We jumped the car the next day, and I went right to an auto center to get a new battery. I only need the thing to die three times – well, actually four since I drained it while waiting out the rain at a sports assignment 18 months ago – to get the message.

I had trouble trying to figure out what I liked most about Tina Fey’s best seller. I hesitate to call it an autobiography because while it does feature the Emmy winning writer/actress/Mom telling her life story, it also contains a peek behind the creepy curtain of television and a healthy dose of  ”female empowerment.”

In fact, I think Fey might be one of the few people out there who can drop the c-bomb and effectively complain about the way Hollywood treats female performers while also telling stories working Moms can relate to even if they don’t have a nanny and a car service. That’s Bossypants for you.

As I went through the book, I found it hard to reconcile what I see on TV – Fey and Amy Poehler taking over their shows, Julie Bowen killing on Modern Family – and the stories Fey told about executives still drawing a direct connection between their carnal feelings for an actress and her employability. If you don’t like coarse talk, be prepared. I said it a lot nicer than Fey does.

But I guess it’s not a surprise that she tells stories of women getting the short end of the stick. We want to see the strength of her and Poehler and the now-celebrated Melissa McCarthy, but I bet they could all tell similar stories of the sausage making which would make us hug our daughters and tell them they are wonderful and talented and fantastic no matter what anyone else says.

If these stories have you wondering if you want to read the book, I implore you to not focus on them. Her “women good, Hollywood executives bad” angle is necessary, but doesn’t cover the whole book. The book also provides a look at how the whole Sarah Palin impersonation happened, how 30 Rock  came to be and truly shows how someone as famous as Tina Fey can be as normal of a person as a television star can be. Her stories of rushing from eastern PA to eastern Ohio to celebrate Christmas with her in-laws cracked me up.

The book checks in at a reasonable length and really does provide an easy and funny look at what actually happens in the life of a multi-talented entertainer who is scared to death of offending her babysitter.

I had to go to the mall with my daughter recently. I noticed that she lagged behind me most of the time as we walked. I figured she had figured out she needed to stay close enough so that I would not worry, but far enough away so that people might not think she was with me.

Typical tween behavior, I assumed. But when I brought it up, she had a completely different answer. “You walk too fast.”

I should have known this answer would come. In fact, she has probably told me the same thing before. I know my wife has. On more than one occasion, she has squeezed my hand and told me to slow down.

I have the same answer I do for most of my problems – blame my family.

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At this point in our lives, I think we have all given up on the notion of truth in advertising.

We gladly accept beer commercials that promise beautiful women to an overly chummy group of young men who choose a particular brew. We’re OK with seemingly healthy people talking about how a drug helps them cope with a debilitating disease. We can deal with chain restaurants hawking an “authentic” experience.

But a new set of ads has come along which pretty much demands we stand up as a nation and swat the executives in charge on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

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So a bunch of people I know are going crazy because the Oscar nominations came out today. That only means one thing – horribly overwrought examination of what people wear to an awards show is just around the corner!

OK, it means two things, that first thing and that The Brians will be coming up soon. If you don’t know, The Brians are my yearly awards for movies which I saw in the theater in the previous year. This year, I believe 12 movies will be eligible. I say “I believe” because I only looked at what I posted about online and already notice that I somehow never blogged about seeing The Muppets. That means I need to go check my ticket stubs to make sure I didn’t leave anything out.

Anyways, the qualifying movies for The 2012 Brians are:

• We Bought a Zoo
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
• Happy Feet 2
• Moneyball
• Horrible Bosses
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• Bad Teacher
• Bridesmaids
• The Muppets
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules
• The King’s Speech
• Gulliver’s Travels

The Brians will be announced on Feb. 28 in my weekly column in The Evening Sun. Secondary awards will appear online later that week.

Before I get to my thoughts on this book which took me far too long to add to my reading stack, I want to talk about how awesome it is to get books for Christmas. I walked away with six things to read. That should, unfortunately, hold me through Easter at least. I wish I could read faster because I bought one interesting book after Christmas and have found a couple of more since.

One of the best parts of my Christmas bounty belies my support of local businesses, but is still really cool. My wife got me three books for my Kindle, but took advantage of the program which allows someone to purchase them as a gift and not show on on the device until Christmas Day. She gave me a note telling me about this, I went to my e-mail and clicked a button to download each book. Very cool.

I do wish it were a little more seamless – yeah, this is me complaining about the magic of books appearing on a wireless electronic device – so they just appeared the next time I turned on my wireless, but it’s not a big deal. I still try to support local bookstores and libraries when I can, but this experience was pretty fun.

One of those Kindle books was Moneyball, something I had talked about reading a bunch of times, but never got around to it. I had hoped to read it at the beach last summer, but the library didn’t have any copies available for the week I traveled. My nephew brought his copy, but I was already buried in my stack of books and didn’t pick up Michael Lewis’ book .

When I saw the movie recently, I knew I needed to change this. Luckily, my wife pays attention to me when I talk about things like this. When I tried to choose which book I would tackle first, I knew I had to knock this off my list once and for all. What a great decision.

I really get into the analytic aspect of sports. This comes from hours upon hours of playing Strat-o-Matic sports and trying to figure things out. While I generally loathe sports talk, I do enjoy the bits I can find where the announcers really examine what happens on the field instead of just yelling.

So I can relate to the quest Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta went on to find a better way of evaluating players. As someone who has, during my days as a reporter, suffered the glare of pro athletes because they think you’re not worthy to ask them certain questions, I can understand the motivation “outsiders” have when they want to prove the establishment wrong. As someone who watched the way Earl Weaver managed growing up, I wondered why more people didn’t choose their own path.

The book did a great job getting into the details of how and why the whole “moneyball” approach came about and actually worked. It also showed how dangerous emotion can be in athletic decisions, something we have known forever but don’t heed often enough.  This sounds silly now, but it’s easy to see why this book had such a huge impact. Not only did it cut to the heart of many of baseball’s problems, but Lewis wrote it in such an engaging and readable style that people had to pay attention.

Unless you’re an idiot like Joe Morgan or stubborn fool like Peter Angelos.

The Oakland A’s may have not won a World Series in the early days of Beane’s strategy, but his outlook undeniably changed baseball. His critics point to Oakland’s declining success since the early 2000s, but a lot of that is because other teams have caught on and the market correction made it harder for the A’s to get the bargains they wanted.

Just take a look at the way Beane analyzed the 2002 amateur draft, a topic the book covers in great detail (and was understandably lost in the movie version). Maybe he just got lucky, but his perfect 20 and resulting picks have an amazing success rate. Jeremy Brown, the primary poster child for the strategy, may not have made an impact at the major league level, but he did continue to get on base at a pretty solid rate in the minors. He just didn’t seem to adjust as the pitching got better, but the things Beane and Depodesta saw in the big guy certainly did play out.

Billy Beane never professed to get everything right. He just said that other people who said they got things right may not see the whole picture. Since most people have started to adopt his approach in some way or another, their criticisms of how he did it don’t carry much weight with me. I just hope the next time someone writes a groundbreaking book about how someone has changed an entire sport, I don’t wait eight years to get in on the action.

As parents, we do things for our children that might go against every instinct we have. That’s pretty much the feeling I had last month when I walked into our local movie theatre with my daughter and purchased two tickets to see We Bought a Zoo.

We had a free day, and we always like to go to the movies together. I figured I would survive the Matt Damon effort in my final movie-going experience of 2011. Besides, I would have movie popcorn to cheer me up.

A couple of hours later, I apologized silently to everyone involved with the movie for ever doubting them. I thought I bought a ticket for a goofy kids romp when I really paid to see a pretty emotional story of loss, regret and ambition with a solid cast and surprisingly strong story.

I had no idea of the background of the true story which inspired the film, but found myself pleasantly surprised when I discovered they made the overall story darker than the tale of the English man who bought a zoo with his mother and brother. Damon did an outstanding job in carrying the emotional weight of the movie-version of Benjamin Mee. The presence of his small daughter wasn’t just for laughs. She did a great job in counter-balancing her sullen and angry teenage brother.

Oh, and she brought down the house when she called John Michael Higgins’ character “a dick.” She didn’t actually call him that, but she did use the word in correct context and proved to parents and grandparents in the theatre that they should have read up about the film a little bit more before they brought a 5-year-old to see the animals. Those kids learned a bunch of new words that day.

I commend Cameron Crowe, who has producer, writer and director credits on this one, for not beating us over the head with a forced love story between Damon and Scarlett Johannson. It’s there, but exists around the edge of the film.  They could have left it out altogether since it occupies such little space, but a little is better than a lot.

I don’t think the movie will win any wards, either in real life or at The Brians, but it delivered a much better experience than I expected and should probably vault higher on people’s list of things to see if they missed it.

I finally broke down and bought the (supposed) final album from R.E.M. I say supposed because Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982–2011 may be the last project the band works on together in the studio, but I really doubt the business entity that is R.E.M. will never release anything ever again.

I’ve blogged before about Peter Buck’s fascination with bootlegs and demo tapes – a passion not shared by Michael Stipe – and think nostalgia and money will eventually coax some more live shows or hidden studio offerings out into the marketplace. At least I hope so.

But just in case they never commit anything to vinyl or CD or MP3 again, I bought Part Lies recently. To be honest, I had gone to Amazon to buy something else and really wanted to get free shipping so I added the CD somewhat reluctantly. I will probably reference the liner notes more than I play the discs. Each song has some explanation from the band with each member weighing in on whichever songs they felt like.

Some of the stories shed no new light, but others gave those nuggets of minutiae that I love. This piece from Time checks in on each song and shows why the liner notes rock as the reviewer tracks immodest statements from Stipe within the notes. Not only that, but he does pull the curtain back on a few song inspirations/meanings. I had no idea they really considered not putting “Radio Free Europe” on Murmur. Since the song had helped catapult them to success as a single, they didn’t know if they wanted to release it again. But they did and the differences between the original (fast) version and the one most people have heard from the album indicate, to me at least, the ability the quartet had even in their earliest days.

I also enjoyed the nuggets, mostly from Buck, about who wrote what song. The quick and easy description of how he and Bill Berry put together “Driver 8″ makes me like the great song even more somehow.

On the downside, they threw three new songs on the end of the album. I have heard (and was unimpressed by) “We All Go Back Where We Belong” when it was first released and doubt I will intentionally hear it again. I haven’t heard the other two songs and feel no compulsion to ever do so. I’d rather hear yet another live version of “Rockville” or “Gardening at Night” so I hope Buck is getting antsy about breaking open the vault.

So I haven’t blogged for a while. Three weeks, pretty much. I have no real excuse. I have thought about writing things, but have been busy at work, focused on another writing project and not really motivated at home.

Never fear – or I’m sorry for the people who come here because they don’t like what I write – I plan on getting back in the swing of things this week. I have a couple of columns to post that have run in the paper. I have a book and a movie to review, plus the usual inanity.

So get ready for some fun here.