You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.
A lot of people get upset by any protest - people taking a knee during the national anthem or raising a fist. As if we're being disrespectful. Or rude to the national anthem or to our soldiers, you know what I'm saying? It's deeper than that.
I sang the National Anthem at Dodger Stadium - at a baseball game - which was crazy; there was, like, 60,000 people there, which is a huge deal in America - singing the National Anthem.
I'm very excited to once again perform the National Anthem at Michigan International Speedway for the GFS Marketplace 400. The fans at MIS have always been great to me and it is always an honor to perform for them, whether it's a concert or the National Anthem.
It doesn't take much to get me up for baseball. Once the National Anthem plays, I get chills. I even know the words to it now.
I had so much backlash because, before in NXT, I used to come out with the Bulgarian national anthem. And people were like, 'Oh, why are you embarrassing the anthem?' How am I embarrassing the anthem? I'm from the freaking country.
You have to be sort of an emotional steward to really get a business to do something hard - to take people up the hill, to conquer the mountain, to sack the city. You have got to be a maniac.
I personally think our national anthem is not patriotic enough. There is another poem by Dwijendralal Ray called 'Dhono Dhanne Pushpe Bhora,' which is more soul-stirring as a national anthem.
I got tired of seeing people rush through the national anthem so they could have their popcorn and get to the game. Nobody ever sang the anthem with soul. It was always done clinically and they always stuck to the original. I put feeling into it. I sang it in a soulful manner.
The national anthem blows. Are you kidding me? Do any of you have it on your iPod?
But for my faith in God, I should have been a raving maniac.
I've heard a lot of people say you need white athletes to get involved in the anthem protests. I've said before I'll never kneel for an anthem, because the flag means something different for everybody in this country, but I support my peers.
Basically, the way I do it is I get to work with a bunch of people; get a bunch of great people together, and you'll be able to get something cool on the other side.
You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.
'The Star-Spangled Banner' should've never been made into our national anthem. That President Woodrow Wilson, widely thought to be one of the most bigoted presidents ever elected, chose it as our national anthem, is painfully telling as well.
Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don't try to 'arrange' them. It's surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table.
As the actors on the show we rarely get an opportunity to, as I said we get the scripts the night before but we have great producers on this show, so every once and a while matt or mike will say "I want to take the character in a different direction this season, what do you think about this?" and we do sort of get to add to it and feed it.