Happy Fourth!

For International Subscribers, Happy Tuesday; for my Antipodean Friends, Happy Wednesday...I think

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As we are still allowed to celebrate our nation, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about history.

Not American history in general – how dare you expect me to enter that racist capitalist everything-a-phobic slime pit – but the history of Fourth of July accidents.

I have a friend who has one eye.  I asked how it happened once and he said his brother was shooting off bottle rockets on the Fourth and one got him right in the right eye.

So it actually happened – a mother’s warning of “you’ll put eye out!” came true.

Speaking of mothers, along with “put a sweater on – you’ll catch your death,” being warned you’ll put your eye out seem to be their most important child-related health concerns, as if partial blindness and pneumonia were the only things to worry about…or the only things icky enough to catch a typically reckless child’s attention.

Besides Wink’s accident (yup, that was his nickname and he didn’t care because he was very very rich and looked really good wearing a justifiable eye patch with a tux and because he never wore a glass eye or anything else he could gross out girls in middle school), the Fourth can be a dangerous holiday. 

Or it could be viewed as Darwin’s revenge, like this:

And while not as visually dramatic, this little re-cap of injuries – including "foreign objects in the scrotum,…” “an unexploded firework lodged in his leg…” and “When I walked up to his body, it was nothing but his shoulders down” should keep you in, um, stitches:

https://www.livescience.com/62835-weirdest-fireworks-injuries-ever.html

As for another painful Fourth moment, try singing the national anthem as it is a notoriously difficult song to manage.  So here’s the tune with the original words (it was a drinking song called “To Anachreon in Heavan” that was used by an English men’s club to figure out how drunk people were depending upon how they sang it):

I wonder if they could have picked a different tune.

An interesting point about “The Star-Spangled Banner:”  While it is four stanzas and each stanza is technically part of the song, the other three are rarely if ever sung making the anthem the only one in the world that is a question.

How’s that for a statement of purpose, a determination that our nation is not and never will be finished, and that the United States is as much an eternal quest for a more perfect union as it is a place?

And here are all four stanzas of the song – give it a try at home today (after apologizing to the dog, of course.)

Thanks for subscribing and Happy Fourth of July!!

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O'er the ramparts we watch'd were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket's red glare, the bomb bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there, O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream, 'Tis the star-spangled banner - O long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion A home and a Country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution. 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!

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation! Blest with vict'ry and peace may the heav'n rescued land Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto - "In God is our trust," And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!