You try to sing the National Anthem

I know it's been a few days, but nothing has really tripped my trigger lately and I'm getting really weary of winter and blah, blah, blah.

You know what I mean.

OK, some quick-hitters:

-- You'd have thought Christina Aguilera committed an act of treason because she screwed up the National Anthem prior to the Super Bowl. Please give the poor girl a break. She was dressed very conservatively and I'm sure she wanted to interpret the song the best she could and she just messed up. I mean half the country was watching and there were 100,000 people in the stadium. My Facebook friends were all atwitter over Aguilera's performance. Ever make a mistake, people? Geez, give her a break. Yeah, and you're perfect, too. No, I don't know Aguilera. She's not my sister, or anything like that.

-- AOL bought the online Huffington Post for $315 million. Compare that to the purchase in 2006 by Gatehouse Media of seven daily newspapers owned by Copley Press for $380 million, which are worth a fraction of that today. Now the Huffington Post is widely known to NOT PAY its contributors, so someone (Arianna Huffington?) is getting rich while the "content providers" are not. Mama, don't let your children grow up to be journalists.

--  There is something inherently wrong with the system when a mother is thrown into jail for the crime of stealing educational services for her children because she believed they were safer in a suburban neighborhood and school system rather than in west Akron. Yep, I know. She was wrong. Violated the law. This is America, after all. Justice must be served.

-- Let's revisit for a minute the Marsha Mills case, which I examined in one of my last commentaries for The Times-Reporter. ProPublica, the online investigative journalism endeavor, has been examining death investigations in the U.S. Here's an explanation of its initiative: "In detective novels and television crime dramas like 'CSI,' the nation's morgues are staffed by highly trained medical professionals equipped with the most sophisticated tools of 21st-century science. Operating at the nexus of medicine and criminal justice, these death detectives thoroughly investigate each and every suspicious fatality. The reality, though, is far different. In a joint reporting effort, ProPublica, PBS 'Frontline' and NPR spent a year looking at the nation's 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices and found a deeply dysfunctional system that quite literally buries its mistakes." It's interesting reading and I encourage readers to check it out. 

-- If it's unconstitutional to force people to buy health insurance is it then unconstitutional to force hospitals to provide treatment to people who don't have health insurance?

-- OK, I don't know where this debate is going on the Tuscarawas County Port Authority but I think it's safe to say this entity has a huge public relations problem.

-- Caught "The Social Network" last week and while there are some questions about what is fact and what is fiction in the movie, clearly Facebook's popularity exploded because it allowed young college men and women to garner information on possible mates. Now, just about everyone is on Facebook -- some 600 million worldwide at last count -- and that includes us old people. You know what Facebook does? It exaggerates your personality. Think about that for a minute.

-- Dover Board of Education is dreaming of a new high school and it should. The current facility is old, decrepit and depressing. No doubt, as the community discusses the idea, you likely will hear from someone that the building "was good enough for me" and "we can't afford that right now." Change comes hard for people in the Valley.