For some reason I was up quite early this morning - so early that last night's New England Patriots football game was still on television, and only at halftime.

Sweet.

I've seen a few other games this year, but always on the Monday afternoon replay. Orbit, our satellite television provider, rebroadcasts one or two of the games the day after, at a more reasonable time.

Since 'live' is always better that 'delayed' I watched the game. Jeesh. I actually felt bad for Buffalo at a few points, especially on the overly aggressive fourth downs. 56-10. Wow. They got crushed.

But what really was interesting is how in live football there are so many commercial breaks. That's where America gets their weekly fix of beer and truck ads.

But not on Orbit ESPN. Because of the Islamic nature of the UAE, beer obviously doesn't advertise here. And also there really aren't any pickup trucks on Sheikh Zayed Road. So instead of beers and trucks we have a mishmash of ads for the Orbit movie channels (if I see one more ad for Letters from Iwo Jima I might have to commit Hara-kiri myself) and the ads for soccer.

Oh, the ads for soccer. They always have annoying music - usually salsa-esque, always have a louder-than-the-rest-of-the-channel announcer - usually in Arabic, and generally have the worst production values known to humankind. Like, think of the worst local television ads you've ever seen, then divide by 100. They're that bad.

One ad uses the song The Final Countdown ... in a non-ironic way.

They're that bad.

I almost had to turn off the game. I mean, I knew the Patriots were going to win, that's a given, and towards the end of the game the ad time is just about equal to, if not greater than, the playing time. And seriously, one more ad with Ken Watanabe or Europe and I was going to lose it.

Man, give me Clydesdales running through a river in slow motion or a truck offroading in some desolate playa anyday, and twice on ... well, Monday here.