I have a confession to make. I am stupidly fond of my country. Oh, not the way we usually are: arrogant, self-congratulatory, willfully dumb, and xenophobic. I love us in those rare moments when actually rise to the promise of our country. I guess the best example of that was during WWII, but even then we managed to incarcerate Japanese/American citizens and we ignored that pesky Concentration Camp problem until after the war. So my fondness is a mixed bag.

But there is one thing that I just can’t tolerate any more. I just can’t take singers adding extra notes to the national anthem. Honestly, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if you can sing like Maria Callas, stop adding freaking notes.

The Star Spangled Banner is a notoriously difficult piece to sing well. It covers an octave-and-a-half range. It jumps over that range with the wild abandon of the drinking song the melody was taken from. The lyrics are arcane and singers so regularly muff them that pre-recording the anthem at major sporting events is commonplace.

It’s a real act of ego to treat the national anthem like your personal tryout for “Cats.” It’s now de rigueur for anyone who performs the national anthem to act like it’s an opportunity to display their vocal chops. No, dude/dudette, you’re the three minute annoyance before the baseball game begins.

There has been only one singer to do justice to our National Anthem since this whole national-anthem-as-orgiastic-divafication scenario began. That’s Huey Lewis’ rendition from Superbowl XXXIX. He sang the living crap out of it – and with no extra notes. (Okay, Jimi Hendrix did do a bitching version that included some non-standard variations, but, he WASN’T SINGING. And his intent wasn’t exactly to display the beauty of the song.)

So, here’s the deal. You manage to sing the anthem straight — no trills, no runs, no cutesy verbal gymnastics at all — and maybe . . . maybe, we’ll let you get creative at some later date.

Another annoyance from this week:

Angels.

And here is part of my country that absolutely appalls me. In a recent survey about 80% of adults in the US believe in angels. (The number goes to 97% among evangelicals.) Oh, hoo-freakin’-ray. It’s not enough that we hate and distrust science, but we must also embrace the utterly asinine?

Why not believe in fairies and elves while you’re at it? How about orcs and trolls? What about sprites? (Or is a sprite just a sub-category of fairy?) How about unicorns? Gryphons? The Loch Ness Monster? Big Foot? Ghosts? Hey, why not go for the whole megillah? Witchcraft, magic, spells, channeling, demonic possession . . . oh, wait . . . never mind . . .

By all means, embrace your mythology, but don’t ask me to “respect” it any more. I’ll respect your religion when you start respecting my science.

And still it continues:

A 41 square mile ice shelf broke off from Canada’s Arctic shelf a while back. Oh, goodie. Thank goodness that pesky global warming thing is “just a theory.” And now this shelf has drifted into shipping lanes. I’m certain that it will only “theoretically” be in the way.

We watched “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, and it was both wonderful and depressing as hell. Much of the facts I’d heard a number of years ago when the host of “Connections,” James Burke, came to Austin and gave a lecture on global warming. (I think it was on global warming. Honestly, with James Burke, he starts in one place and the next thing you know, you’ve made a left turn at Albuquerque.) Let’s just say that Al Gore makes the medicine go down with a lot more sugar.

You can go to the “An Inconvenient Truth” website and see what your contribution to the CO2 problem is. You can also buy offsets for Native Energy. I knew the Prius made a difference, but when I enter the same info, but just altered the car in the formula, it dropped our CO2 contribution dramatically. I’ll be buying offsets, and my beloved Volvo’s days are numbered, I think.

Have a Happy New Year all. And I’ll see you in 2007.