Belichick Doesn't Use Pandarama: Power Ranking His Best New Media Words
And so it came to pass, that the greatest Football Coach/Malaprop Comic of all time added to his repertoire of great names for technology sites. He’s a writing machine. Cranking out the fresh material like a pre-Tonight Show Jay Leno, constantly on tour and never doing the same show twice.
Belichick is somehow able to come up with brilliantly satirical names for new media platforms faster than our smartest IT minds can crank them out:
… all while putting together a championship-caliber roster and coming up with diabolically mind-warping game plans week after week. And here is one Beliphiles power rankings of his best so far:
No. 7 – MySpace: “MyFace”
This was his first, and his most reliable, go-to laugh line. He wrote it a good 8 or so years after MySpace stopped being a thing, which in it’s own way helped the comedic effect because it played to his character of the Guy Who Doesn’t Know About All This Kid’s Stuff. And he’s still not afraid to pull it out when he needs a callback.
(tie) Nos. 5 & 6 – Facebook: “YourFace,” “YearBook”
Note the subtle way YourFace plays off his MySpace gag. Just a slight twist on the old classic that kept it alive for the younger demo. And YearBook is, while not quite as layered, is like a lot of your best written jokes, simple and elegant.
No 4 – NFL RedZone: “RedDog”
This one two has layers of subtlety, combining the part of the field he prefers to call “the red area” with the standard NFL coaching parlance “dog blitz” and somehow coming up with the name of the worst cheap beer of the 1990s.
No. 3 – Snapchat: “Snapface”
A nuanced mashup of Snap and Facebook, made ingenious by the way it accurately describes was 50 percent of Snapchat (ie the non dick and tittay shot part) actually is.
No. 2 – Pandora: “Pandarama”
An instant classic. There’s just so much packed into this one it can’t have been a slip; he had to have spent some time writing this one. Pandora plus panorama plus … Bananarama? Because he’s a big “Cruel Summer” guy? I don’t know. I just know his latest is an instant part of the lexicon. And speaking of instant:
No. 1 – Instagram – “Instantchat”
Sometimes misinterpreted as “Instachat,” but personally I prefer the much punchier, on-point “Instant” suffix. It ups the ante of a supposedly out-of-touch, technologically backwards old curmudgeon who doesn’t get what these kids are into nowadays. Basically a fictionalized version of your grandmother who calls your mom to ask how she can watch that 60 Minutes she DVR’ed. I mean it, it’s comedic genius. If Big Bang Theory had writing at Belichick’s level, I might actually watch it.
For the record, I’m convinced it’s all an act. And that in reality, The Hooded One has burner accounts all over every social media platform, with Ernie Adams monitoring them to come up with football trends, innovations and intel on every opponent. And he’s playing the clueless old man to throw everybody off the trail. Right down to pretending he can’t set a car clock:
Though I do think spiking the Microsoft Surface was real:
… because fuck those things and Roger Goodell for forcing them on everybody. But beyond that, he’s just messing with us for his own amusement. And ours.