Go Beavers!
My favorite moment in sci vs. fi history was when the JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by Caltech] launched the Cassini space probe of [sic*] Saturn in 1997. Soon after, the JPL phone rang; attorneys for clothes designer Oleg Cassini were demanding to know how JPL had the effrontery to name a space probe after the man who designed ensembles for Jackie Kennedy and almost married Grace Kelly – and not even ask his permission to do so? Ahem, said the JPL; the probe is named for an 18th-century astronomer named Jean Dominique Cassini.
Doh.
Can't we airdrop a seasoned strike force of [Caltech] Beavers into Kansas and Pennsylvania, where alarming outbreaks of the pestilence Cerebrus Doofus have just been reported? In Dover, Pennsylvania, two slates of school board candidates face off in Tuesday’s primary over a requirement to teach "intelligent design" in ninth-grade biology — "I.D." being a jumped-up and dressed-up version of creationism that deceives no one. And in Kansas, the whole state is dancing the anti-Darwin two-step again. Some state education officials are having a second go at embarrassing themselves on the world stage, hoping to change the very definition of science by not limiting it – wink, wink — to theories derived from natural explanations [ie, scientific principles and practices] and thus removing a "bias against religion." The very assumption that science is biased against anything except ignorance is itself a display of yawping ignorance. Maybe this is how Kansas intends to prove Darwin wrong, by practicing a resolute shrinkage of brainpower.
If we keep expelling science from schools, from public research and public policy and from politics, other countries will be glad to take up our slack. And Americans will wind up like the medieval rubes who were gob-smacked by the simplest science in Mark Twain’s "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,’’ believing a lightning rod and a farmer’s almanac to be the work of a magician, or a demon.
[Patt Morrison, "Creationism v. Evolution — Leave it to the Beavers", The Huffington Post, 16 May 2005.]
———-
* The Huffington Post has some nice writing by some interesting writers, but it is in desperate need of a firm hand in copy editing. Can't someone please check these posts and eliminate all those silly errors that run rampant, suggesting that all these writers can't write?
It's no longer there, having been corrected since, but my favorite so far was in Robert Evans' "Strictly Taboo", where he had originally written ménage a trios for ménage a trois. I was hoping it was a clever, bilingual pun, but it seems it was a typo.