The good news first . . .

In dealing with the yearlong pandemic all athletic events should be put in a separate category. It hasn’t been an easy year.

However, over the weekend, a special event did occur.

The Nebraska Cornhusker 2021 Baseball Team captured the Big Ten championship trophy.

We know the anxious feeling most Husker fans felt with the results of the football team, the basketball team and even the volleyball team schedules. It isn’t a national championship, but it is the Big Ten Baseball championship. Put it with the Bowling Team’s National Championship, and . . . I’m happy for us.

A O

Technology . . . I never won any spelling contest in school and I don’t know if I’m any better now than ever. However, everyone tells me that you don’t need to be a good speller any more . . . . the computer will correct all my mistakes.

However . . . I recently had reason to question how to spell a word, so I asked the computer to correct my spelling.

The computer could not find the word in its vast array of words and said it did not exist.

I took out my trusty, old, copy of “Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary” and found my word right away.

Technology ? ? ?

A O

Memorial Day is here, for all practical purposes.

I’ll repeat printing the purpose of the holiday just in case there are still people out there who think it is just another day off of work . . . and not really know the reason why.

To wit:

The holiday started after the Civil War, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs, when Army Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, a leader of a Union veteran’s organization, called for May 30 to be known as “Decoration Day,” saying it was “a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers.” There are also reports of the tradition starting in the South when women decorated not only the graves of Confederate soldiers but the graves of Union soldiers as well.

Logan suggested that the graves of the war dead be guarded “with sacred vigilance ... Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”

The holiday has gradually ‘morphed’ into the opportunity for families to decorate and remember all their dead. That is not all bad, but I do hope people will remember the graves of soldiers with special consideration. Those men, or women, offered themselves to the service of their country. While most did not pay the ultimate price of death while in that service, they could have been called to do so.

For years, families had little opportunity to record family history. In this day and age I hope you all take advantage of the many ways you can record significant events in your family. It may seem un-important at this time, but at some time in the future that history will be important to someone.

And . . . they will be glad someone in the family took the time to record those facts and stories.

A O

Climate Science . . .

I certainly claim no expertise in this field, however, I do occasionally read about it and recently read bit and pieces about the chief scientist in the Obama administration’s Energy Dept. who is also a professor of physics at Cal Tech. His name is Steven E. Koonin and he recently published a book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

Most of what follows are quotes from the Wall Street Journal. “Tornado frequency and severity are . . . not trending up; nor are the number and severity of droughts. The extent of global fires has been trending significantly down. The rate of sea-level rise has not accelerated. Global crop yields are rising, not falling. And, while global CO2 levels are obviously higher now than two centuries ago, they’re not at any record planetary high – they’re at a low that has only been seen once before in the past 500 million years.”

Prof. Koonin continues: “Heat waves in the U. S. are now no more common than they were in 1900 . . . the warmest temperatures in the U. S. have not risen in the past 50 years . . . Humans have had no detectible impact on hurricanes over the past century . . . Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago . . . The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”

We have spent millions and millions of tax dollars already in an effort to reduce ‘global warming.’

According to this ‘expert,’ just maybe it is not all needed. I have no objection to wind or solar power, but I think it best if we just let nature take its course. Let it develop naturally. Government has a place in the development, but as I’ve noted before: ‘does it make sense to throw millions and billions of dollars at a ‘perceived’ problem?’

A O