Super Bowl ads score; Chimp shines and Budweiser again goes for laughs.

As always, this is being written 2 1/2 days before kickoff, so we're just curious .... Was there a commercial on the big game for that hotdog stand at 57th Street and Ninth Avenue?

Reason we ask: At the last minute, we're told, CBS was cold-calling around New York like Jack Lemmon in ``Glengarry Glen Ross,'' trying to peddle its Super Bowl inventory at very favorable rates. We ourselves got an offer for two fourth-quarter slots and a free rhinestone-stud setter if we'd act now. But they wanted nearly $600 for the package, so we passed.

It wasn't like this last year, of course, when the GDP was still humming and the e-economy was inflating prices for worthless stocks and terrible Super Bowl commercials.

Ah, dot-coms, we hardly knew ye.

But if this year's sales were soft in the media marketplace, they were finally hardening again on the broadcast itself. The dot-coms' oblique-and sometimes invisible-selling propositions gave way Sunday to genuinely smart, thoughtful, strategically sound advertising. And, overall, it was still the most entertaining Super Bowl of Advertising lineup in years.

For instance, now it is clear. The sock puppet is dead. Long live the chimp.

4 stars

E-Trade

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco

One of the few dot-coms to break through in last year's dot-fiasco was E-Trade, with a spot featuring a chimpanzee dancing to La Cucaracha next to two ultradweebs in a New Jersey garage. The message: ``Well, we just wasted two million bucks. What are you doing with your money?'' And while nearly all of last year's dot-com advertisers have been throttled in the marketplace, E-Trade-and the chimpanzee-survived.

So here was the chimp again, mounted on horseback, grimly surveying the wreckage of the e-economy. In a brilliant parody of the 1973 anti-pollution Ad Council spot, the chimpanzee apes Iron Eyes Cody, a tear of regret rolling down his furry cheek. ``Invest wisely,'' the onscreen message says. Hi-lar-i-ous.

Budweiser Goodby

If ``Whassup'' were performed by WASPy Heineken-sipping white guys. ``What ARE YOU DOING?'' is very, very…