America asks: What time is the Super Bowl?

Friday evening's edition of the public radio show, Marketplace, ended with this squib by host Kai Ryssdal:

This final note which comes to us courtesy of the letters SEO. As in search engine optimization. So here you go: What time is the Super Bowl? (It starts at 6:30 p.m. ET, by the way.) Turns out most people, don't know how to spell Superbowl. Helpful hint: It's actually two words, both capitalized. A couple years back the Huffington Post published a story titled, "What time does the superbowl start?," just to game the web traffic. And, of course, it blew up. The rest of the Internet keeps trying to get a piece of that Super Bowl traffic. This year's version... the search words of choice … Superb owls.

That set me to thinking: What other questions are Americans asking the Google gods about the Super Bowl (or the "Big Game," as any unlicensed advertiser says to avoid trademark litigation)?

For instance, some people wonder, What is the best snack food for Super Bowl Sunday?

The Food Network has a hefty answer: "50 Super Bowl Snacks," from chunky guacamole to mini veggie pockets.

You might want to know, What is the best beer to drink during the Super Bowl?

Matt Rudnitzky of Sports Grid offers more than one choice in "Super Bowl BEER POWER RANKINGS: Buy These 9 Delicious Beers, Be Your Party’s Hero." His number one answer: "A German hefeweizen from Heaven, Germany."

If you want to combine those two questions, I recommend this article by my sister, who blogs as the Bierlady, called (naturally) "Cooking with Beer." There are some good recipes there.

Another question that comes to mind: What are the best Super Bowl commercials?

CNN is on top of that story already. Correspondent Breeanna Hare recommends "Seven Commercials to Watch" during the 2014 Super Bowl,including spots featuring Anna Kendrick, the Muppets, Noah's ark, and puppies.

Speaking of puppies, some people may want to know: "What time is the Puppy Bowl?" It turns out that the tenth addition of the adorability classic kicks off at 3:00 o'clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, February 2, on Animal Planet.

Here's a query you might not have thought about. What's the best book about the Super Bowl?

I know nothing about football, and therefore even less about football literature, but I'll go out on a limb and recommend The Ultimate Super Bowl Book: A Complete Reference to the Stats, Stars, and Stories Behind Football's Biggest Game - and Why the Best Team Won, a 2009 volume by Bob McGinn. At least it looks comprehensive.

Is there a "best movie about the Super Bowl"?

Again, I don't have a good base of knowledge from which to make a judgment, but Chris Eggertsen, Daniel Fienberg, Josh Lasser, Drew McWeeny, Melinda Newman, and Alan Sepinwall have created a list of the "10 greatest football films of all time" on HitFix.

Their choices include The Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers from 1932, which I have actually seen, as well as the tearjerker 1971 TV movie, Brian's Song. Also on the list is Harold Lloyd's silent classic, The Freshman, and Sean Astin's 1993 star turn in Rudy.

Tom Cruise's follow-up to Risky Business, All the Right Moves, is listed, along with Heaven Can Wait, the 1978 Warren Beatty-Buck Henry remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and the Burt Reynolds' prison comedy, The Longest Yard (but not the 2005 remake with Chris Rock and Adam Sandler).


The last three on the HitFix list are Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights (which became a TV series), and another Tom Cruise vehicle, Jerry Maguire,which won an Academy Award for Cuba Gooding, Jr.


Somehow the 1977 John Frankenheimer thriller, Black Sunday, did not make the list. Maybe the plot about a deranged Vietnam veteran facilitating a terrorist attack on a football stadium from the Goodyear Blimp was too distasteful to merit its inclusion.  (That movie starred one of this year's Oscar nominees, Nebraska leading actor Bruce Dern.)

Given that this is the tenth anniversary of "Nipplegate," the half-time show that gave the world the term "wardrobe malfunction," there may be a few people who wonder who this year's Super Bowl half-time entertainers will be.

It's a good bet not to be Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson.  Or Justin Bieber.

No, this year the musical performers will be Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I'm guessing the former is meant to attract younger viewers and the latter group aims to satisfy the older crowd.

By the way, do you know who the most frequent Super Bowl half time performers have been?

According to The First Book of Seconds by Matthew Murrie & Steve Murrie,  the Grambling State University marching band played at the first two Super Bowl games (in 1967 and 1968) and four more times after that.  The squeaky-clean choral group, Up with People, has played the Big Game five times.

Finally, in answer to the question that started this whole discussion, the broadcast of the NFL's Super Bowl XLVIII between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos will begin on Fox at 6:30 p.m. EST.  Check your local listings.

As for "superb owls"? I have no idea. Maybe there's an ornithology blog that can point you in the right direction.

So You Think You Know the Declaration of Independence?

Try this quiz, courtesy of the Heartland Institute:

It's harder than it looks. I only scored 110.

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Mini-Review: 'Snoopy!!! The Musical'

Last night I had an opportunity to see the Four County Players' production of Snoopy: The Musical, the follow-up to the much more successful (and familiar) 1967 off-Broadway hit, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which had a short-lived Broadway revival in 1971 and was revived again on Broadway in 1999.

Despite running only 149 performances, that 1999 production was nominated for a best-musical-revival Tony Award, with Kristin Chenoweth as Sally and Roger Bart as Snoopy winning their own Tonys in the "best featured" category. (That cast also included Anthony Rapp as Charlie Brown and B.D. Wong as Linus.)

Snoopy: The Musical lacks such a storied history, although it does have cast recordings from San Francisco (1975) and London (1983), and an animated movie version available on VHS but not DVD or Blu-ray. (Twin trivia: The San Francisco production was Pamela Myers' follow-up to Company. Her career never really recovered. The animated film, meanwhile, includes in its cast Growing Pains' Jeremy Miller as Linus.)

As sequels go, this could be worse -- but not by much. Fortunately the exuberant young actors ignored the show's mediocrity and gave it their all, so the evening was entertaining enough to justify the cost of the tickets and the 30-minute drive to Barboursville from Charlottesville.

None of the cast of seven is past high school age (even if you include one Princeton-bound recent graduate), and a couple have not yet reached junior high, but all of them show talents that could be put to more effective use with better material.

Simply put, the score of Snoopy: The Musical lacks any of the wit and tunefulness of its predecessor. Frankly, there's not a memorable song in the piece.

While there are attempts by the songwriters (Larry Grossman and Hal Hackady) to ape some of Clark Gesner's successful Charlie Brown numbers, they don't come close to "My Blanket and Me," "Suppertime," or "Book Report (on Peter Rabbit)," not to mention the big hit, "Happiness."

Snoopy's score is second-rate through-and-through, although there seems to be a Raffi-like sense that the writers intend their audience to be elementary-school children rather than adults.  (More trivia:  Grossman was the composer of five original Broadway musicals, including Minnie's Boys and Grind, none of which had runs longer than three months.  Lyricist Hackady was his collaborator on two of them; those plus two other shows also failed to run longer than three months.)

As for the book, one of the co-writers is "Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates." Enough said about that?

How distant this opening show of the Four County Players' 40th season is in quality from the musical that will close it, Into the Woods. That's something to look forward to. especially if one of the three young male actors in this show's cast -- Peter Balcke (Snoopy), Daniel Neale (Charlie Brown), or Aaron Cohen (Linus) -- ends up playing Jack. Any of them could do it, really.

If you've got kids, feel free to take them to see Snoopy: The Musical. Even if you're disappointed, they won't be.

Snoopy: The Musical continues through July 8 (evening performances at 8:00 p.m. on July 5, 6, and 7; matinees at 2:30 p.m. on July 1 and 8) at the Barboursville Community Center, 5256 Governor Barbour Street in Barboursville, Virginia. All tickets are $12. Call 540-832-5355 for ticket information.

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Happy Birthday, Doris Day!

I am hosting the 66th Book Review Blog Carnival at my other blog, Book Reviews by Rick Sincere.  The carnival features reviews of fiction, non-fiction, history, and books on writing from bloggers across the United States and around the world.  (I think at least one entry came from Australia.)

Published biweekly on various blogs, I chose to subtitle this one the "Doris Day Edition."  Why?

Today is the 88th birthday of actress, singer, animal-rights activist, and America's sweetheart, Doris Day, who herself has been the subject of several books in recent years, including Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, by David Kaufman (2009); Doris Day: The Illustrated Biography, by Michael Freedland (2009); Doris Day: Sentimental Journey, by Garry McGee (2010); Doris Day: Reluctant Star, by David Bret (2009); and Considering Doris Day, by Tom Santopietro (2008). All in all, that's a lot of attention paid to a film star who hasn't made a movie since 1968.

Doris Day started making movies in 1948 and for twenty years was one of the top box-office draws. She earned one Academy Award nomination but probably deserved more.

Severely underrated by a reputation for bubble-gum wholesomeness, not only could she play serious dramatic roles (the climactic scene in Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is illustrative) but some of her comic turns in movies like Pillow Talk were subversively transgressive. (Maybe the way her scenes with Rock Hudson were coded just went over the heads of critics and audiences alike, but those who were in the know knew.)

What a remarkable movie career Day had, even if judged only by the leading men she played against.

In addition to Hudson, she appeared on screen with Clark Gable, James Stewart, James Garner, James Cagney, Jack Lemmon, Cary Grant, Gordon MacRae, Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, Ronald Reagan, Danny Thomas, Ray Bolger, Jack Carson, David Niven, Rex Harrison, John Gavin, Rod Taylor, Gig Young, Arthur Godfrey, and Tony Randall, among others. The list of her castmates reads like a Who's Who of 20th century movie stars, especially if you add some of her female costars like Lauren Bacall, Ginger Rogers, Virginia Mayo, Thelma Ritter, and Arlene Francis.

Speaking of Arlene Francis, on an episode of What's My Line? in 1957, Doris Day was a "mystery challenger" facing questions from the panel that included regulars Bennett Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Francis, as well as the father who knew best, Robert Young.  She was in New York to promote her new film, The Pajama Game.  Let's go to the tape:

Day was equally adept at playing comedy, drama, or in musicals. She introduced the great lesbian anthem, "Secret Love," as well as her own theme song, "Que Sera Sera," and -- in her earlier career as a girl singer -- Les Brown's wartime hit, "Sentimental Journey." Any one of those things would have established her as an institution on its own.

Although she has avoided the public eye for most of the past three decades, movie star Doris Day is firmly embedded in popular culture. It's only appropriate to wish her a happy birthday.

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Christmas Carols: The Odd and the New

Christmas is unique among holidays in the music we associate with it.

Just think: What other holidays bring to mind so many, and so many different, songs? Outside of church services, Easter has “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and not much else. Patriotic commemorations like Independence Day or Memorial Day might be celebrated with “The Star Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful,” but those and other anthems are not identified with a single holiday. Diehard union organizers might sing “The Internationale” on Labor Day, but even that would be a rarity.

Christmas, on the other hand, has hundreds of songs – some spiritual, some secular, some a strange blend of both – dedicated to it. We hear them on the radio (almost every media market now has at least one FM station that plays Christmas music around the clock starting around Thanksgiving and ending only on December 26), in shops, on street corners, in school pageants, from wandering carolers, and in our own homes.

Christmas songs, it seems, are among the few – besides TV theme songs – that Americans have etched in our memories with the capability of singing by heart, without written notes or lyrics. We know them so well, we think they have been around forever.

Strangely enough, some of those “ancient” songs are newer than we might imagine. Not only that, but many of them became popular despite hardheaded resistance from religious leaders – and I am not talking about opposition to “Rudolph” or “Frosty,” but to deeply spiritual, Bible- or tradition-based hymns that today are more likely to be sung at Midnight Mass than heard on the radio or at the shopping mall. From 1700 until 1782, for instance, only one Christmas hymn – “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” – was permitted to be sung during Anglican church services; in 1782, “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” made the acceptable song list twice as long.

The stories of these, and 98 other, familiar (and some not-so-familiar) Christmas songs are told by church historian Ian Bradley in The Daily Telegraph Book of Carols, published in 2006 as a companion to his The Daily Telegraph Book of Hymns (Continuum, 2005). Many would be surprised to learn from Bradley that hymn-singing by congregations during church services is, historically speaking, a rather recent phenomenon. What’s more, “carols” (which used to be songs accompanied by dancing for almost any season of the year, including Lent, Easter, summer, and Christmastime) were particularly looked down upon by the official church.

Bradley explains:

“Yet although it now seems almost unthinkable to celebrate (or survive) the festive season without them, carols originally had nothing to do with Christmas, nor even with Christianity. They were among the many pagan customs taken over by the medieval church which used them initially as much in the celebration of Easter as of Christmas. The subsequent development of the carol as a distinctive genre standing somewhere between the hymn, the folksong and the sacred ballad and having as its subject matter the story and significance of Jesus’ birth serves as an interesting pointer to several major currents in religious, social and cultural history of the last five hundred years. Born out of late medieval humanism, carols were suppressed by Puritan zealots after the Reformation, partially reinstated at the Restoration, sung by Dissenters and radicals to the distaste of the established churches in the eighteenth century, rediscovered and reinvented by Victorian antiquarians and romantics, and re-written in the late twentieth century to fit the demand for social realism and political correctness. As well as reflecting the mood of their times, some of our best-loved carols also contain coded comments on contemporary events, including, perhaps, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the revolutions across Europe in 1848.”

Rereading that paragraph from the first two pages of Bradley’s book after having read the whole thing, it becomes remarkably clear that those 205 words serve as a near-complete summation of the 420 pages of text that follow. Bradley has put in a nutshell the whole history of carol-writing and carol-singing. In subsequent chapters, however, he highlights the origins of dozens of carols, some lost in the mists of ancient history, some by composers and lyricists still living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He offers tidbits of trivia and corrections of misconceptions that deepen our textural appreciation of much-beloved songs of the season.

In the latter category, misconceptions, for instance, the liner notes of many Christmas CDs attribute the words of “Away in a Manger” to Martin Luther. That’s historically unfounded. The first printed record of “Away in the Manger” was when verses one and two were published in Philadelphia in 1885 in the Little Children’s Book for Schools. Verse three was published seven years later in a book called Vineyard Songs. “Away in the Manger,” moreover, is sung to different tunes in Britain and in North America.

One of the favorite hymns on both sides of the Atlantic, “Adeste Fideles” (with its English-language counterpart, “O Come All Ye Faithful”) was long thought to date from the early Middle Ages. Not so, Bradley tells us:

“Until the middle of the twentieth century it was widely believed that this great Latin hymn calling the faithful to worship the newborn Christ was the work of the thirteenth-century mystic Bonaventura. However the discovery of a mid-eighteenth-century manuscript in 1946 by Maurice Frost, vicar of Deddington in Oxfordshire and a noted hymnologist, and research over the next three years by his friend Dom John Stéphan of Buckfast Abbey led both men to conclude that the author of ‘Adeste, fideles’ was John Francis Wade (1711-86).”

Here’s where the story gets even more intriguing. After it was determined that Wade wrote the song sometime in the 1750s – it first appeared in print in England in 1760 – more research led to the discovery of the song’s political overtones. Bradley continues:

“In 1990 Bennett Zon, a historian of music, gave a paper to the Catholic Family History Society in which he speculated that ‘Adeste, fideles’ might even have been written as a coded Jacobite call to arms on the eve of the 1745 rebellion. He pointed out that half-hidden Jacobite imagery, including Scottish thistles and the initials of the Stuart pretenders, often appeared in Wade’s musical transcriptions and manuscripts. Twenty years after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, Wade was still writing ‘Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Carolum’ rather than ‘Georgium’ for English Catholic congregations to sing.”

Such speculation – and, one must admit, the case remains to be proven – is of a piece with Clare Asquith’s theory of William Shakespeare’s crypto-Catholicism in Shadowplay (PublicAffairs, 2006). Asquith makes a persuasive argument that is based on more than marginalia in a few musical manuscripts, however.

Many of us have heard the touching story about the origins of “Silent Night,” perhaps the most beloved – and certainly the most-translated – of Christmas carols. (Even as I write this, I am hearing Tony Bennett sing it on the radio.) Supposedly mice ate the cables of the church organ and the parish priest and organist huddled together to write, as quickly as possible, a song that could be accompanied by guitar at Midnight Mass.

Well, sort of.

Bradley has done some digging and found out that there’s more legend than fact in that tale, though the song is no less delightful for it.

He notes that “Stille Nacht!” (as he calls it, using the original, German title)

“almost certainly deserves the accolade of the world’s favourite carol. It has been translated into 230 languages. It is often voted No. 1 in surveys of the most popular carols in Britain although it was pipped into second place by ‘In the bleak midwinter’ in the 2005 BBC Songs of Praise poll. A Gallup poll in December 1996 found that 21 per cent of respondents named ‘Silent Night’ as their favourite carol – more than twice as many as voted for the joint runners-up, ‘Away in a manger’ and ‘O come, all ye faithful,’ which each received nine per cent.”

The legend of “Silent Night” is that it was written and performed for the first time on Christmas Eve, 1818, in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, by musician Franz Gruber and the parish priest, Joseph Mohr.

It turns out, however, that Mohr had written the lyrics, and possibly the music, too, at least two years earlier, while he was still serving at a church in Mariapfarr. “It was there,” Bradley writes, “that he wrote his six-verse carol which is striking in its frequent references to fatherhood and complete absence of references to Mary or motherhood.”

That’s right: in the original German, there is no “round yon virgin.” That line is the invention of John Freeman Young, an Episcopal bishop who gave the song a very free translation in the 1850s, and that is the most familiar translation to come down to us. (Pace Evelyn Waugh, “Episcopal bishop” is not a redundancy, it’s just an Americanism.)

Another tidbit about “Stille Nacht” – it was the subject of what we now call copyright infringement litigation. Bradley continues his story:

“’Stille nacht’ might well have sunk without a trace, alongside hundreds of other Austrian folk carols, had a manuscript copy of it not come into the hands of Josef Strasser, a glove-maker and folk-music enthusiast who had a family singing group in the best ‘Sound of Music’ tradition. The Strasser family performed the piece as a newly discovered Tyrolean folk carol. As a result of a concert they gave in Leipzig in 1832 the carol was published as one of set of four Tyrolean songs. There was no mention of either author or composer in this first printed copy and it was only after recourse to the law that Mohr and Gruber were able to prove their authorship.”

The misidentification of a new carol as old and traditional comes up in another of Bradley’s sketches, this one involving “Calypso Carol” (also known by its first line, “See Him Lying On A Bed Of Straw”), written in London in 1964 by Michael Perry, an Anglican clergyman. Bradley reports that Perry “was amused to tune into the radio one day and hear a BBC announcer describe his work as ‘that traditional folk carol from the West Indies.’”

The number of well-known and well-regarded Christmas carols written by clergymen in the 19th and 20th centuries is quite stunning. During the Victorian era, Christmas celebrations were transformed -- depending on whether one was in the low-church or high-church tradition – from an austere day of prayer and mortification and/or a day of drinking and carousing to a family- and especially child-oriented celebration. Anglican priests, in particular, stepped in to write music appropriate to this new tone. A number of familiar Christmas songs were written also by Catholic priests (or Oxford movement Anglicans who later converted to Rome) and Baptist and Unitarian ministers.

In his introduction, Bradley explains:

“Carols played an important role in the Victorian reinvention of Christmas as a largely domestic festival full of sentimentality and good cheer. A huge number of new carols were written in the mid-nineteenth century, many in a pseudo-traditional style. Even the pioneer socialist William Morris provided a pastiche medieval carol with the refrain ‘The snow in the street and the wind at the door’ … It was the Victorians, rather than Bing Crosby, who invented the concept of the White Christmas, bringing snow into the Nativity story with Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the bleak midwinter’ … and Edward Caswall’s ‘See amid the winter snow.’”

That may be the primary reason for our assumption, ahistorical as it might be, that Christmas songs are older than old, even if they were written within our lifetimes: the composers have made an effort to make them feel ancient, and the artifice works. Is it doubtful that, a century from now, listeners will think “Do You Hear What I Hear” and “The Little Drummer Boy” are relics of the late Middle Ages?

In a way, I guess, they are.

Ferry Godmothers

On page 40 of the 1994 book, Virginia Trivia, by Ernie & Jill Couch, we find this Q&A:

Q: What is the last pole-powered ferry in Virginia?
A: Hatton Ferry, on the James River.

What was true in 1994 is still true in 2009.

As a matter of fact, I wrote about the Hatton Ferry just a few weeks ago, when it was announced by the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) that it would stop using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the ferry's operations.

The title of my blogpost that day explains my viewpoint:

VDOT Should Not Be Running Quaint Tourist Attractions

As if to justify my denotation of the Hatton Ferry as a "quaint tourist attraction," it seems that travel writers are in agreement. The ferry is suggested as an off-the-beaten-path thing to see in Lonely Planet Virginia & the Capital Region, Moon Virginia: Including Washington, D.C., Gourmet Getaways: 50 Top Spots to Cook and Learn, Journey on the James: Three Weeks Through the Heart of Virginia, Whitewater!: The Thrill and Skill of Running the World's Great Rivers, The Unofficial Guide to the Mid-Atlantic with Kids, Fodor's Virginia and Maryland, Escape Plans: Quick Getaways Within Easy Reach of Washington, Frommer's Virginia, and The James River Guide, as well as the aforementioned Virginia Trivia.

When I wrote about the Hatton Ferry in May, I noted that members of the local Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society were mourning its demise and engaging in special-pleading, asking VDOT to reverse its decision. I argued:

If the Hatton Ferry really has value, then the historical society will be able to arrange to buy it and run it privately. It should not be the responsibility of the government, and thus a burden to taxpayers.

Well, it seems my advice has been followed. Brandon Shulleeta reports in today's Daily Progress:

Local community leaders have been hitting the pavement to raise money to keep the Hatton Ferry running, and they already have enough to operate the ferry this year.

“We’re pleased with both the size and the number of contributions,” said E Marshall Pryor III, director of Old Dominion National Bank in Scottsville.

Pryor, who is heading the fundraising effort, said that there have been more than 75 donors and that enough money has also been collected to pay for about 20 percent to 25 percent of the projected cost to operate the ferry in 2010.

The ferry's operation will be returned to the private sector, where it has always belonged:

[Albemarle Supervisor Lindsay] Dorrier, who estimates that it will cost about $21,000 per year to operate the ferry, said the long-term goal is to hand over financial responsibilities to a nonprofit organization. Pryor said some groups are entertaining the idea of taking over the Hatton Ferry.

Let me parse that a bit: "some groups" are interested in taking over the ferry.

That means that, not only is government support and subsidy not necessary to keep the ferry running, there is competition among private organizations to lay claim to it.

Good old private enterprise. Good old private philanthropy. Good old community initiative. It's the American way.

The Daily Progress even points to the way that readers can help keep the Hatton Ferry in motion:

Anyone wishing to contribute may send a tax-deductible donation to the Hatton Ferry Fund, c/o Old Dominion National Bank, P.O. Box 321, Scottsville, VA 24590.

It looks like VDOT won't have to continue running a quaint tourist attraction, after all. Let's hope the Hatton Ferry's poles stay in private hands from this point forward.

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