Please excuse the silly sibilance of this post’s title. I couldn’t stop my star-spangled self.
At the start of yesterday’s Superbowl game they offered up, in effect, two national anthems. Lea Michele sang America the Beautiful and Christina Aguilera sang the by-now traditional Whitney-Houstonized version of The Star-Spangled Banner (she didn’t quite pull it off, alas). Fans and players stood reverently for each performance.
Most Americans stand for America the Beautiful, even placing hands on hearts, just as we do for our official national anthem. In fact, if you don’t stand to America the Beautiful people are likely to glare at you. I sat it out one night at an outdoor concert in Tucson, and if stink-eye could kill I’d have been a goner.
I don’t think Americans really want two national anthems. What I think is that we, or at least a lot of us, wish we could swap anthems and replace The Star-Spangled Banner with America the Beautiful. I’d be okay with that. America the Beautiful is stirring, anyone with average skills can sing it, and the lyrics celebrate the beauty and bounty of our land but not its bloody history. Yea to all of that.
But for now, it seems, we’re stuck with two anthems. Maybe three, if you count God Bless the USA, but so far we only stand for that one in venues featuring mechanical bulls.
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Our gas is back on and we have heat and hot water again. We weren’t expecting the gas utility to reconnect us until today or even tomorrow, but they brought in temporary workers from California and got to our neighborhood around noon on Sunday. We don’t often think about our gas and water — truly we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. If there’s one positive result of Southern Arizona’s deep freeze and resulting utility failures, it’s that people are now thinking about infrastructure . . . I know I am. There’s a lot of work to be done, that’s for sure, because climate change means more of the same in the years ahead.
We have structural issues of our own in the wake of the cold snap: a broken pressure relief valve in the water system that feeds our yard irrigation system and a broken water pipe inside our pool heater. I thought I’d fixed the first one but it turns out I hadn’t, so I’ve called for professional help. The pool heater leak has to be repaired before we can run the pool pump again, and we can’t let that go for any length of time. Our pool guy says he can do the work and is looking for replacement parts.
Not weather-related but still on the must-do list: the ass end of Donna’s Town Car is dragging on the pavement (it has — or had — air-assisted rear suspension), and the registration renewal on my car is due this month. February, just one week in, is shaping up to be a cruel month.
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I started with sibilance and moved on to structure. I’ll end with science.
Bill Nye, the Science Guy, thinks he has personally failed, and that science has failed, because of the horrible state of science education in this country, particularly the widespread rejection of the basic fact of evolution, the cornerstone of biology. Bill, it’s not you who has failed, nor is it science. It is us.
Re: the state of science education. Your comment that it is us who have failed is, as my in-laws say, spot on.
I taught units on evolution and climatology at the Air Force Academy, and was amazed to discover that most of the cadets did not know the difference between evolution and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. Evolution is a fact, Natural Selection is a scientific theory. As scientific theories go, it meets all the criteria and has proven to be a good one. But it is still a theory, subject to development and change. So far, it has withstood the test of time quite well. From my perspective, molecular biology is the cornerstone of biology and evolution the result.
But don’t be too hard on the creationists who reject the science of evolution. Look how global warning theorists ignore, or discount, the most basic fact of climatology – climate is cyclic. We are now in a warming period and have been since the end of last Ice Age. Historically, there are warming and cooling cycles within the larger cycle. But some folks are now fixated on the belief that the current state of the climate is not cyclic but the result of human activity, specifically CO2 emissions, without being able to create a creditable model of climate change based thereon.
So what is the overarching lesson here? Never let science get in the way of a deeply held belief. Ouch!