Here’s a little old school shark jumping to take us into the weekend (are you most people aware that “jumping the shark” stems from the infamous Happy Days episode where Fonzie literally jumps a shark?).

And let’s hope that I have not jumped my personal blogging shark (let’s name him Tippy) quite yet. Or something.

If you’re a fan of Parks and Recreation (and you should be), Star Wars (who isn’t? and we’re talking original trilogy here!), and, ideally, both you will absolutely go out of your mind for this opening theme parody called Hutts and Recreation.

Okay, so if you absolutely don’t go out of your mind, there’s a very very good chance you will at the least get a chuckle out of this. Or not. But please know the attempt was made in good faith.

But seriously… I thought I’d give a little sprinkling of some of the more interesting things I’ve seen going on around the big game today.

I’m a somewhat serious football fan, so I’ll start with the “real” football stuff. Pretty good analysis of Super Bowl XLIV over on NFL.com, in which typical considerations (stopping the run, getting to the QB) are covered, as well as X factors such as the Dwight Freeney injury situation, Reggie Bush, the genius of Peyton Manning, and the seemingly unstoppable New Orleans offense. Unfortunately, the video over there is not available to an embed (not to NFL.com: set your videos free!).

It’s also fun to look at experts’ predictions, not so much for the fact that they have a lot of relevance to the actual outcome, but to see that most expect this to be a high scoring affair as well as one of the more competitive Super Bowls in Super Bowl history. (It’s my wacky sense of humor that makes me think it would be pretty cool to see a 6-3 squeaker or 44-0 shutout, no?)

Now that huge events are now hip to social media, it’s fun to see what they’re doing with it. Lost Remote notes that the NFL is pushing the Twitter hashag #SB44 for wild tweeting on game day. Those tweets, along with photos and other stuff, are supposed to be showcased on nfl.coms/sb44, but it seems to be down at the time of this writing.

Of course, the Super Bowl becomes about so much more than just football. Hulu is running an ad zone to highlight the advertising industry’s biggest day of the year. Here’s one for Cheetos:

The Saints reaching the Super Bowl for the first time is also shedding new and updated light on New Orleans post-Katrina and the resilient spirit of its people.

On a much lighter note, Asylum is running a “LiveTweeting/drinking extravaganza” (via TV Squad).

And finally, we save the best for last. Puppy Bowl VI. That’s all you need to say.

Enjoy the game! I have no clue who is going to win but am expecting a thoroughly entertaining aerial show.

Ah, television. That brings us to “Boxed In,” which is Hendrix’ exploration of why “giving someone a TV series on DVD is like giving them a life sentence.” So, first of all, I get that the premise is not to be taken terribly seriously. Seasons of television series packed into DVDs, often including lots of extra features and commentaries, are… well, they’re long.

They are long. Well, yes. That’s the point. They are there for fans to enjoy at their leisure or in great sweeping all night marathons over coffee or martinis or Cheetos or whatever. (I’m not saying I’ve done any of those… but don’t make me take a lie detector test, okay?).

But that’s not how Hendrix sees it:

The DVD box set is the newest and most terrifying form of ritualistic abuse we inflict on one another. In the past, a sick person received unwanted hardback books, but these days when someone is laid up with an illness, they are buried beneath an avalanche of DVD box sets containing hundreds of hours of television series.

This statement makes a number of assumptions that don’t sit right with me. It assumes that sitting through seasons of our favorite DVDs is a painful experience that the world populace is being forced to endure. It assumes that most people can afford to pay for “an avalanche of DVD box sets” at all. And it assumes that humankind possesses not the freewill to turn off the television when we are no longer engaged with the products we have purchased.

But even so, I can hang with the thread of the argument for a bit. The marketplace for DVDs is surely oversaturated with crap – Hendrix mentions Jake and the Fatman and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (which wasn’t that terrible, truth be told) as examples of shows that need not be foisted onto the innocent consumer.

It’s when Hendrix reveals that he doesn’t really respect the medium of television that I feel rubbed the wrong way. “Television should be a glorious time waster,” Hendrix writes. Really? Who made up that Law?

Tell that to the creators of The Sopranos or The Wire or Mad Men or The Shield or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Six Feet Under, incredible and layered shows that play out like visual novels over a number of years.

Perhaps, Mr. Hendrix, some of us enjoy revisiting these masterpieces to get even more out of the experience.

For five years running, I’ve received a season of The Sopranos from my wife’s family during the holidays. If I’ve been a good son-in-law this year, I’ll receive Season Six later this month and will block out a weekend during mid-winter when I can reconnect with Uncle Junior shooting Tony, Tony’s bizarre internal journey (to Purgatory? I’ve long wondered what’s going on in that house that Steve Buscemi / Tony Blundetto is standing in front of), and the delicious end run that leads up to the already infamous and controversial series finale.

And over Thanksgiving I introduced my mother to Mad Men Season One and was delighted that she was immediately enthralled with it. She entered the workforce in 1960s New York so it was wonderful to discuss the period detail and cultural mores portrayed on Mathew Weiner’s exquisite creation.

So that’s to say that television is as worthy of preservation and reexamination as any other artistic medium. Of course there’s lots of garbage on the air, and plenty of it would be a huge waste of time/money to spend on the DVD version, but isn’t that true of music and books and movies as well?

Hendrix intones that “Boxed sets have transformed television from light entertainment into homework.”

It’s okay, Mr. Hendrix. You can put down your homework and go outside and play. You’re allowed.

Let the bloggers have their voice:

* All Things Digital: YouTube already lets users watch a smattering of TV shows for free, with advertising. Now it envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.

* Mashable: Certainly, this is a big issue. If, for the same price, I could own a show via iTunes as opposed to stream it via YouTube, I’d choose iTunes every time. On the other hand, if I could watch it on YouTube for less, I’d likely go there, as I only want to watch most shows once. Whether or not a middle ground can be reached will likely determine if this service will ever come to fruition.

* VentureBeat: Google already streams some TV content free on YouTube, but it doesn’t carry current shows the way the successful Hulu does. Lately, YouTube traffic has been flattening, while Hulu shot up 50 percent in October.

* bub.blicio.us: Now, the reason I will occasionally buy shows from iTunes is that I then have the freedom to watch them on my phone, my iPod, my TV, or my laptop. I can watch the show on an airplane because it’s local to my device. Personally, I hate the idea of paying $1.99 for streaming content. So until they figure things out, I’ll definitely stick to free Hulu for the television that I miss and downloading episodes from iTunes for television on the go.

* technovia: No doubt that Google’s cheerleaders will be racing to claim that this is a daring move, and certainly doesn’t try and impose any kind of artificial scarcity like that nasty old-fashioned Mr Murdoch is trying to do for news. After all, it’s hard to find TV shows for free on the Internet, right?

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Let’s recap.

CBS News: Yep.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

MSNBC: Yep.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

CNN: Yep.

Fox News: Yep.

ABC News: Nope.

ABCNews.com has been consistently behind on producing a world class online news product (more examples here and here).

Not allowing visitors to embed video is a strategic decision that shows an old fashioned and out-of-date mentality when it comes to the web.

Not being able to embed means not being able to market. Not being able to market means that people aren’t going to find your content (and share it again, and so on).

Now, to be fair, I used the word “embed” in the paragraph above and not “share.” They do allow you to share via Add This… but providing a URL that’s friendly to WordPress versus Blogger or MySpace doesn’t get a lot of points on today’s web, I’m afraid.

I did a little research to see if anyone else has been covering this issue, and found that NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht was “baffled” way back in May, 2008 to find that ABC.com (not ABCNews.com) was not yet offering embeds.

Oddly, there is a large Facebook widget on the ABCNews.com homepage. Now how about adding embeddable video guys!

If anyone has further insight into the history or status of the issue, I’d love to hear about it.

Something seems deeply strange and wrong to me, seeing Betty Draper (January Jones) in a pic with John McCain.

Sports geeks are well familiar with the concept of “power rankings,” which ranks teams relative to one another each week.

Tim Goodman’s Bastard Machine has long been one of my favorite TV blogs. It has earned even more respect from me by rolling out its own version of TV power rankings. Geeks of TV land, oh ye rejoice!

And of course Mad Men takes the top slot. There is nothing on TV that can touch AMC’s powerhouse drama of 1960s ad firm mayhem.

I had a similar reaction to the initial television coverage of the LA fires as this TV critic. In fact, I spent much of Sunday anxiously scouring TV and the webs looking for updates on evacuations going on in my area. LA Times online was just about the best resource I found, along with the Los Angeles Fire Department website.

“Community” looks promising. I grew up loving Chevy Chase movies, particularly Spies Like Us. And Trudy from Mad Men!