Skip to main content

After the Super Bowl




I inscribe here my miscellaneous thoughts on this year's Super Bowl, a shockingly lopsided 43 to 8 Seahawks' victory. 
Queen Latifah started things off vigorously with her take on America the Beautiful.


Then Renée Fleming did an awesome job with the Star Spangled Banner.  Opera fans know her as a great diva. If you don't think you're likely to catch her performing in that capacity on stage, you might take a pick from this very partial discography. She is featured in each of the following CDs:


  • Handel Arias Decca 2003/2004
  • Requiem (Verdi) Philips 2004
  • Haunted Heart Decca 2005
  • Sacred Songs Decca 2005
  • Homage – The Age of the Diva Decca 2006
  • Strauss: Daphne Decca
  • Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss Decca 2008
  • Verismo – Arias of Puccini, Mascagni, Cilea, Giordano, Leoncavallo Decca 2009
  • Dark Hope Decca Records 2010
  • Poèmes – French songs, Decca 2012


    • But back to the game. The best thing you can say about the Denver Broncos is that they were right in the thick of it, right up until ... the first play from scrimmage. They received the ball in an unspectacular but non-disastrous first kick-off play. Then on their first play from scrimmage, the center snapped the ball erratically, and into the Broncos' own end zone, costing them 2 points.


    The sad thing is that their offense really never got better than that. And this was widely supposed to be the best offense in football. Well ... they weren't on this day. They can only by charity and literal-mindedness even be said to have been one of the best remaining two!


    Peyton Manning threw directly into an interception at the end of the 1st quarter. How did he do that? How did he not see the coverage?  Those were the frenzied questions I jotted down on a napkin at the time.


    Manning, and his place within the Manning family dynasty, made a great story going into this Super Bowl. Archie Manning was a highly respected NFL quarterback, back in the day, working with a team that otherwise stunk, the N'Orleans Saints of the days when their fans wore bags on their heads,


    Archie's two kids, Eli and Peyton, have both had -- are both having -- remarkable careers.


    But there is one Sunday that PM would surely like to forget.


    So maybe he should spend the off season listening to Fleming's CDs!
    By the way, since the Super Bowl took place in New Jersey this year, people who don't know opera from fuhgeddabodit might want me to be specific: she wasn't one of those Sopranoes. She was a Soprano of the musical sort.





    Labels:

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    A Story About Coleridge

    This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
    9 comments
    Read more

    Searle: The Chinese Room

    John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
    17 comments
    Read more

    Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

    I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
    4 comments
    Read more