My Day

I apologize to Eleanor Roosevelt for purloining the title of her newspaper column. It also might seem a bit egocentric were it not for the fact that enough recipients of this letter probably watched the Super Bowl, or had to watch it, to comprise a quorum.

To avoid the pre game nonsense my TV day didn’t begin until the kickoff, scheduled for 6:30, but starting ten minutes later, probably to squeeze in a few more commercials. So I missed the Obama-O’Reilly segment, more on that later.

My guess is that given the length of commercials and the half time show the mute button was on at least half the time. I missed Christina Aguilera’s singing the national anthem, a truly classic rendition which I caught later on U Tube. What a display of narcissistic body language! Bing or Frank never did this sort of thing. But then they didn’t have to. 

Parts of the halftime show, to which I’m too timid a soul to have listened, were impressive, the aerial shots in particular. But I thought they fell short of those Busby Berkeley kaleidoscopic dance numbers of the 1930’s which were filmed in black and white in the confines of the Warner Bros. set. On viewing the throng of gyrators my thought was that if there was a record for calories burned per minute per acre it had to have been broken right then and there.

I found the game interesting. But in view of dropped and poorly thrown passes it was not the sport at it best. The fact that the new champions are from Green Bay, Wisconsin, says something about the way the game is run compared to baseball, a game which I prefer. It’s to the NFL management’s credit that it rarely elicits the phrase “small market team.”

As to the interview with the president, which I didn’t see till later, we didn’t expect softball questions and did expect follow ups. The situation figured to be adversarial. But what we heard was more like a police grilling. O’Reilly did most of the talking and all the interrupting. MSNBC ran a running count of interruptions which came to 43. I wish they’d kept count of his questions to which Obama wasn’t allowed to complete his answer. My guess is around 43. 

There have been presidents with whom I would not have deigned to shake hands. You might guess their identity. But if I happened to be with one of them in public, particularly at my request, I’d have given the pretense of respect that the office demands.

I had prepared to say something profound about Egypt. But today Mubarak announced his resignation which changes everything. It puts an end to my idea of looking for a clone of King Farouk.