I changed the calendar! The Bee Gees once sang “I started a joke.” Well I believe I started a joke… that became a meme! I’ll explain.
As most of you probably know, today is Super Bowl Sunday. Whether or not you’re a football fan, you undoubtedly know it’s the Big Game, this year between Kansas City and Philadelphia. Even if you’re not a fan, there’s a good chance you might be tuning in to see if Taylor Swift shows up or see the famous commercials, which are often made especially for the game. It’s been like that for years now.
But back about a decade, I noticed that if you wrote it together, all as one word – superbowl – if you split it one letter differently, you got something altogether different. I was quite pleased with myself and went to Facebook and probably Twitter and proclaimed
Happy Superb Owl Day!
I’d never seen anyone call it that or write it that way to celebrate nocturnal birds of prey. I felt quite clever, I’m sure, and found a good picture of a nice owl (like the one above which unfortunately I did not take) to put in the post. I can’t remember now, but I think a handful of people “liked” the comment and a few might have put a smiley emoji or something in reply. I said it to a couple of people in person and got maybe a “tee hee” or very faint smile as a reply to my astounding wit. I believe I followed up the next year on the football day and repeated the gag, somehow or other on the Social media… then even I got tired of making the same joke over and over. Fast forward to last year, and I see “superb owl” trending on things like Yahoo the day of the ballgame!
This year, the phrase is everywhere. Denver Zoo has officially declared it Superb Owl day there. NPR did a feature on owls labeled as Superb Owl. USA Today has an online story titled “It’s almost Superb Owl 2025, so please enjoy these cool bird pics.” Google it and tons of results come up. The birds are getting more attention than ever before.
Owls are superb; perhaps more so than football!
So if you’re not into football, Taylor Swift or President Trump (who’s rumored to be at the ballgame) you might want to step outside at dusk and listen, watch for things taking flight. And enjoy Superb Owl day. Me, I’ll probably be pondering how I have written books, articles, blogs and may end up changing the culture… with a little off the cuff joke.
I suppose the moral of it is to never under-estimate the power of your words. Or that, man, owls are cool, aren’t they?
Everydave Life 
I would rather watch the Tampa Bay Rays and the Tigers in a spring training game than I would the Superbowl. I did watch and I loved Ms Swift being booed…that was my favorite part!
I’ve seen that this year…the title. Those birds are so cool. I told you we had one that collided with one of our front windows…it knocked it out and I thought he was dead but he eventually woke up and flew away. It was a barn owl…
I probably saw the title on X.
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owls are incredibly cool. I still have only seen 2 Barn Owls – they’re exceedingly rare in the part of Canada I came from, but a friend/co-worker and I did see one fly by at night after we’d done an evening presentation at the office, which was in a ravine with an old abandoned factory nearby. Striking looking bird. It was only the third or fourth known in our county. And I saw one fly onto a rooftop here near my mother-in-law’s house one sunset a couple of years ago. But I’ve seen lots of other owls, like the Barred and Great horned ones that show up almost everywhere and the tiny Saw-whet Owls … about six inches high … up in Ontario. I even went to observe a banding station for them in the ’80s… they’d put up mist nets near woodlots they liked during migration and catch a few flying by to band and weigh, then release. Cool night (literally too, now that I think of it – it was October and pretty cold)
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Oh I love those…the eyes alone are enough for me to just love them! Dave what got my attention was the size…he was huge!
I’ve seen those small owls before just so cool. They are incredibly smart as well…and great hunters.
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yeah, they are that – I once saw one of those Saw-whet, tiny ones, perched with a dead cardinal in its talons. Now, sad for the Cardinal, but that’s nature, but the thing was, the prey was at least as large as the predator!
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I’ve only seen them on YouTube channels. Cute but majestic at the same time. It’s the circle of life…and yea it sucks for the others but not everything can like berries lol… oh yea…I’ve seen bald eagles on film lift moutain goats up and drop them off the cliff…it’s horrifying! They don’t play!
I’m sorry I missed 3 of these Dave! I should be caught up with you now on these.
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