This Week's Sneak Peek

I was hoping to find inspiration in any of the commercials or halftime show during the Superbowl last night. But I decided that having Rihanna's and her floating dancers targeted by U.S. fighter jets was just too damn mean to draw. 

Although I'm sure someone else has done it by now.

The musical performances were impressive, one way or another. Sheryl Lee Ralph gave a stirring rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (which has stirred up the hornets nest of Butthurt Right Wingers). I schedule the Black National Anthem every February, so we had sung it at Redeemer that morning — if not quite as slowly as Ms. Ralph's version. We did sing three verses of it to her one, however.

A few weeks ago, Daily Show guest host D.L. Hughley showed film of himself asking White people-on-the-street if they could sing the Black National Anthem; and I realized that while I could sit down at a piano and play it from memory, I wouldn't make it through the second line singing the words.

Which would at least save me the embarrassment of trying to hit the two pairs of high E's in every verse. 40 years ago, I could just barely hit the high E in the bass part of "Even So In Christ Shall All Be Made Alive" in Handel's Messiah, and that's just an eighth note at the top of a run up from a low A. In "Lift Every Voice," the high E's come as a climactic dotted quarter and a triplet in a song meant to be sung at a stately pace, and they're quite out of my range now.

I'd transpose the song down a step, but that puts the low notes out of the range of most sopranos and tenors. The song spans well over an octave, just one step less than "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Which makes Ms. Ralph's modulation up a step for the final two lines all the more impressive.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Well, another Superbowl has come and gone, and the highlights of the game were The Weeknd's dance squad wearing jock straps over their faces, and this guy.

 

Now, I don't know if you can rightly call him a "streaker," since a moon shot lasting barely a second hardly qualifies as streaking. But I guess the label "idiot" fits, even in Spanish, since he went into his slide just short of the goal line.

But at least he livened up the game well beyond the point that anybody cared whether the hapless Kansas City Chiefs would ever make it into the end zone either.

As is usually the case with idiots like this, he was out there advertising some website that couldn't afford a TV commercial during the game. I hope, however, that they paid him more than the fine he's going to end up playing, plus whatever income loss he'll suffer when the hospital wherever he works suspends him without pay.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon features the type of person whose vocabulary keeps "homosexual fornicators" at the ready, so tune in later this week for plenty of ad hominem fun!

Meanwhile, congratulations to the Green Bay Packers on their thirteenth championship title! Way to keep intact your reputation as the "heart attack Pack"!

I had the cartoon mostly finished by the time the big game got underway last night, but I kept on the ready for any commercial that might set off a firestorm at GLAAD. A few years before their hit with Betty White last year, Snickers won a scolding for its commercial featuring long-haired auto mechanics eating a Snickers bar from opposite ends, each somehow unaware of the other until their lips met. Viewers were invited to vote on four options for the end of the commercial, most of which involved some degree of violence.

If there was such a commercial this year, I missed it. This year, the umbrage can be taken by Tibetan sympathizers and Francis Scott Key enthusiasts.

फोचुस ओं थे फॅमिली'स टीवी अड़

This cartoon refers to contradictory decisions by CBS regarding two advocacy commercials intended for airing during the Superbowl. The first, in December of 2004, was for the United Church of Christ, and showed a bouncer at a church door, rejecting various minorities, including a same-sex couple. Christ wouldn't turn you away, went the tag line, and neither will we. CBS (and NBC) rejected the ad on the grounds that it was controversial.

Fast forward five years, and Focus on the Family brings an ad featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother. Now, I'm sure the text in the cartoon is not a verbatim quotation of the ad, but anyone who knows the Tebows' life story will be able to catch whatever subtext underlies what they do say. Mrs. Tebow was on medication that, because she became pregnant with Tim, could have threatened her life; but she went through with the pregnancy in spite of her doctors' warnings and Florida won the Sugar Bowl.

Focus on the Family flaks contend that FotF merely "supports families." You'll forgive me if, since they have spent the last couple of decades loudly and enthusiastically undermining and demeaning my family, I don't believe that for a minute.