O, Say Can You Sing

Donna and I tuned in late to the Super Bowl and missed the national anthem. Both of them.

As usual, when it comes to sports, I divide my attention between the iPad and the TV. Shortly after kickoff, I started seeing tweets about two national anthems, and assumed the crowd in the stadium must had sung The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful. We’ve all been at public events where everyone stands up and sings both, am I right?

Well, I’ve always been a curmudgeon about that. Up to now I’ve been Team One National Anthem, and America the Beautiful ain’t it. So fifteen minutes into the game, when a lady tweeted this:

I responded with this:

Oops. Anyone reading my comment must think I’m a MAGA racist, because what everyone on Twitter knew, and I didn’t, was that the other national anthem sung at the Super Bowl was Lift Every Voice and Sing, which has come to be thought of as the Black national anthem. Damn, now that lady’s tweet makes sense, and I shouldn’t have popped off.

Francis Scott Key, who wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, was a slaver. And then there’s his third verse, even though no one ever sings it:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It’s not an anthem I’d sing, were I Black, and the more I think about it I’m done with it too. Being that the Black experience of America is so vastly different from that of white people, I don’t think we can ever agree on one national anthem. So let there be two, and may we sing both at football games.

Or, better yet, skip the forced patriotism and get to the damn game?

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Something sure isn’t right with that United Airlines Boeing 777 nosedive after takeoff from Maui last December. The fact that the pilots, after recovering less than 800 feet above the ocean, elected to continue the flight to San Francisco, indicates neither of them thought there was anything wrong with their aircraft, as was the case with the fatal Boeing 737 Max autopilot-generated pushovers in 2018 and 2019. If they thought there was something wrong with the aircraft, they wouldn’t have continued the flight, but instead returned immediately to Maui. Which, in turn, suggests one or both pilots made some terrible mistake, that the dive was pilot-induced. The fact that United put both pilots into “additional training” after the incident strongly suggests they think the same.

I’ll also venture to say United wanted badly to keep this hushed up, and with the cooperation of the FAA and the NTSB did so, as a glance at the calendar will show: the incident, which happened on December the 18th, didn’t become public until this last Sunday, February 12th, when an aviation news site broke the story. That the FAA, which has always been in bed with the airlines, helped UA keep this quiet, is no surprise, but the NTSB? According to the linked article, it hasn’t even initiated an investigation.

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Another Valentine’s Day come and gone. We exchanged gifts this year, something we don’t normally do. Donna got me a digital caliper so I can measure widths and gaps in millimeters (or so I informed her after buying it for myself on Amazon); I gave her a quartz Timex like mine and now we’re Geranimals. Oh, I also cooked hearty fare for dinner (see what I did there?), a Dutch oven pot roast, the recipe for which I’ll put on the cooking blog later this morning.

Now, of course, my heart lusts after the strap on Donna’s Timex, and I’m looking for one like it in my size. This doggone watch obsession is turning into … an obsession.