Professor Skip & The Professor Skip Singers, Muscle Shoals, AL (2026)

05/28/2026

On May 28, 2016, a gorilla named Harambe became one of the strangest symbols of the internet age.

Harambe was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. He had just turned 17 the day before. To the people who cared for him, he was not a meme. He was not a punchline. He was a living, powerful, intelligent animal — a silverback gorilla in the prime of his life.

Then, in a matter of minutes, everything changed.

A 3-year-old boy managed to get past the public barrier at the zoo’s Gorilla World exhibit and fell roughly 15 feet into the moat below. According to the Cincinnati Zoo, the child had climbed through a public barrier before falling into the enclosure. Zoo officials said Harambe was killed “in order to save the life of a child.”

Video of the incident spread quickly. People watched Harambe move through the enclosure with the child. Some believed he looked protective. Others saw a child in immediate danger. Zoo officials later explained that tranquilizing Harambe was not considered safe in that moment because it could have taken too long to work and might have agitated him further. A silverback gorilla can be gentle, but he is still enormously strong. One sudden movement could have killed the child even without intent.

So the zoo’s dangerous-animal response team made the decision to shoot Harambe.

The child survived. Harambe did not.

And then the world lost its mind.

There were arguments about the parents. Arguments about the zoo. Arguments about whether Harambe was trying to protect the boy. Arguments about whether gorillas should be kept in captivity at all. The incident became a national story almost immediately, and Ohio prosecutors later decided not to bring charges against the child’s mother.

But the story did not stop being a story.

It became a meme.

That may be the strangest part of the whole thing. A real animal died. A real child was endangered. Real zoo staff had to make a terrible decision in real time. And the internet somehow turned it into jokes, slogans, fake campaigns, tribute posts, absurdist humor, and one of the most bizarre cultural moments of 2016.

Harambe became less a gorilla and more a symbol of how the internet processes tragedy now. We grieve for five minutes, argue for ten, assign blame for twenty, then somebody makes a meme and suddenly nobody knows whether we are mourning, laughing, protesting, or just participating in the weirdness.

But underneath all of that, there are serious questions.

Could the barrier have been better? After the incident, the zoo improved the exhibit’s public barrier with a taller fence, mesh covering, and additional safety features.

Could the crowd have reacted differently? Screaming and panic can escalate an already dangerous animal encounter.

Could parents watch more closely? Yes. But any parent who has ever had a toddler knows they can move like tiny criminals with no respect for physics, fear, or social order.

Could zoos do more to protect both visitors and animals? Absolutely. If we are going to keep wild animals in human-built spaces, then the responsibility for safety has to be taken seriously from every direction.

And could the zoo have done something other than kill Harambe?

That is the question people still wrestle with.

Maybe there was no good choice. Maybe there were only terrible choices, and one of them saved a child’s life. That does not make Harambe’s death less tragic. It just makes the whole thing more painfully human.

A child lived.

A gorilla died.

A zoo changed its barriers.

And the internet built a monument out of grief, outrage, and nonsense.

So on this day, maybe the point is not just to remember Harambe as a meme. Maybe the point is to remember that behind every viral moment, there is usually something real. Something painful. Something complicated. Something that deserves more thought than a punchline.

What do you think? What, if anything, should or could have been done differently?

05/26/2026

English Has Missing Relatives, and Nobody Filed a Report

Today’s linguistic mystery: orphaned negatives.

These are words that sound like they should have a positive version… but English either lost it, buried it behind the shed, or never invited it to Thanksgiving.

For example:

We say someone is disgruntled.

But when was the last time you met a truly gruntled person?

“Good morning, Carol. You look very gruntled today.”

We say somebody is unkempt.

But nobody ever says, “Look at him. Shirt tucked in, hair combed, emotionally stable. Very kempt.”

We say something is inept.

But rarely do we praise someone by saying, “That plumber was extremely ept.”

Even though, honestly, I’d hire an ept plumber immediately.

Then there’s ruthless.

Which means without ruth.

But what is ruth?

Can I get some ruth at Target?

Is there a bulk pack of ruth at Sam’s Club?

Because some folks are clearly running low.

And don’t get me started on disheveled.

If you can be disheveled, surely at some point you were sheveled.

“Before the toddler birthday party, I was perfectly sheveled.”

English is basically a garage sale of other languages wearing a trench coat. It borrowed from Latin, French, German, Greek, Old Norse, and whatever somebody yelled during a tavern fight in 1432.

So over time, some words kept their negative forms while their positive cousins wandered off into history.

Which means English gave us disgusted, disappointed, disoriented, and discombobulated…

but left us wondering why nobody ever gets combobulated.

And frankly, after the last few years, I think America could use a national combobulation plan.

So today, I encourage you:

Be kempt.

Stay gruntled.

Act ept.

Keep your ruth.

And, above all else, may you remain fully combobulated.

Professor Skip’s Linguistic Life Lesson:
English doesn’t always make sense. But it does make excellent trouble.

05/26/2026

Professor Skip’s Science Desk:
Your GPS Works Because Einstein Was Right

Here’s your science fact for the day:

Your phone does not know where you are because it is “smart.”

It knows where you are because satellites in space are screaming around Earth with atomic clocks on board, and Albert Einstein had the audacity to figure out that time itself does not behave the same everywhere.

Which is rude, honestly.

GPS satellites orbit about 12,550 miles above Earth — roughly 20,200 kilometers up — and they are moving around 8,700 miles per hour.

Now here’s where your brain starts making dial-up noises.

Because those satellites are moving so fast, Special Relativity says their clocks tick a tiny bit slower than clocks on Earth.

They lose about 7 microseconds per day.

But because they are farther from Earth’s gravity, General Relativity says their clocks tick a tiny bit faster.

They gain about 45 microseconds per day.

So the net result is this:

GPS satellite clocks run about 38 microseconds fast every day compared with clocks on Earth.

And I know what you’re thinking:

“Professor Skip, 38 microseconds does not sound like enough time to ruin anything.”

Friend, 38 microseconds is not even enough time for a Southern Baptist to say, “We need to form a committee.”

But light travels fast.

Really fast.

GPS works by timing signals from satellites. If the timing is off, the location is off. And if we ignored Einstein’s relativity corrections, GPS could drift by roughly 10 to 11 kilometers every day.

That means without Einstein, your phone might not guide you to Starbucks.

It might guide you to a soybean field and tell you to “arrive on the left.”

Every navigation app, delivery route, airline system, shipping tracker, tractor guidance system, drone flight, and “Find My Phone” panic search depends on this.

Relativity is not just chalkboard physics.

It is not just wild-haired Einstein staring into the middle distance like he just remembered he left soup on the stove.

Relativity is built into the infrastructure of modern life.

Your GPS is basically saying:

“Turn left in 500 feet, because time is bendy and gravity is petty.”

Science is not just theory.

Sometimes science is the only reason you made it to Buc-ee’s.

And that, class, is why Einstein still rides shotgun.

Class dismissed.

05/26/2026

Healthcare Around the World: A Quick Tour Before Somebody Yells “Socialism” Without Reading the Brochure

One of the funniest things about healthcare debates is that people often act like there are only two options:

Option A: Everybody gets care.
Option B: You sell a kidney to afford care for your kidney.

But the world is messier, smarter, weirder, and occasionally more functional than our talking points.

So let’s take a quick trip.

🇮🇱 Israel

Israel has universal healthcare for citizens and permanent residents. Everybody is required to belong to one of four nonprofit health plans, and those plans provide a government-mandated basic package called the “health basket.”

Translation: Israel basically said, “Healthcare is public, but let’s run it through competing nonprofit plans.”

It’s not exactly Canada.
It’s not exactly America.
It’s more like: “Everybody gets covered, but please choose your healthcare team like you’re picking a cell phone plan.”

Many Israelis also buy supplemental private coverage for faster access or extra services.

🇨🇳 China

China has near-universal public coverage through major government-backed insurance systems, including plans for urban employees and residents outside formal employment.

But here’s the catch: coverage does not always mean affordability.

China still has major out-of-pocket costs, regional inequality, and urban-versus-rural gaps. So yes, most people are technically covered, but the quality and cost can depend heavily on where you live.

Because apparently healthcare systems also enjoy making people fill out a geography-based anxiety worksheet.

🇩🇰 Denmark

Denmark is the one that makes Americans stare into the middle distance and whisper, “Wait… what do you mean no medical bankruptcy?”

Healthcare there is mostly funded through taxes. All legal residents are covered, and essential hospital and physician services are generally provided without direct out-of-pocket charges.

So Denmark’s system is basically:

“Pay taxes. Get care. Complain about wait times like a civilized person.”

🇨🇦 Canada

Canada has Medicare, but not our Medicare.

Their Medicare is publicly funded healthcare for citizens and permanent residents, run through provincial and territorial systems. It covers medically necessary hospital and physician services without patients getting a bill at the point of care.

But Canada is not magic fairy dust healthcare. Coverage for prescriptions, dental, and vision can vary, which means some Canadians still need private insurance or pay out of pocket.

Still, the basic idea is simple: getting sick should not come with a financial jump scare.

🇺🇸 United States

The United States has what experts call a “mixed system,” which is academic language for “bless its heart.”

We have private insurance, employer insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, VA care, marketplace plans, state differences, premiums, deductibles, copays, networks, surprise bills, prior authorizations, and a partridge in a pear tree with an out-of-network anesthesiologist.

Public programs cover many older adults, low-income families, veterans, and some other groups, but affordable healthcare is not guaranteed to everyone.

The U.S. also spends more per person on healthcare than any other wealthy country, while still leaving many people worried about whether they can afford treatment.

That is not a healthcare system. That is a group project where everybody used a different font.

🇵🇭 Philippines

The Philippines passed a Universal Health Care law in 2019 that automatically enrolls all Filipino citizens in the national health insurance program through PhilHealth.

The goal is to expand access to preventive care, treatment, rehabilitation, and other essential health services.

But like a lot of countries, the promise and the reality are not always the same. The Philippines is still working through issues like funding, rural access, hospital capacity, workforce shortages, and uneven service quality.

In other words: the law says “everybody should be covered,” but implementation is where the dragon lives.

So what’s the lesson?

Most developed nations do not treat healthcare like a luxury item.

They may disagree on the delivery method.

Some use government-run systems.
Some use public insurance.
Some use nonprofit health funds.
Some allow private insurance on top.
Some are centralized.
Some are regional.
Some are efficient.
Some are held together with policy duct tape and a committee meeting.

But almost every serious healthcare system is built around the same basic question:

How do we make sure people can get care without letting the cost destroy them?

That question is not radical.

That is public policy.

Every country pays for healthcare somehow. The only question is whether we pay through taxes, premiums, deductibles, employer plans, government programs, charity drives, medical debt, bankruptcy court, or Aunt Linda selling chicken stew plates in the church parking lot.

And friends, if your healthcare model requires Aunt Linda to make 400 quarts of stew before your gallbladder comes out…

We may need to revisit the spreads

05/25/2026

Professor Skip’s On This Day: Hands Across America Turns 40

On this day in 1986, millions of Americans did something that sounds almost impossible now:

They went outside.
They held hands with strangers.
They stood shoulder to shoulder across highways, fields, city streets, parking lots, and desert roads.

And nobody asked if it was a scam, a psyop, or sponsored by Big Hand-Holding.

It was called Hands Across America, and the idea was beautifully simple: create a human chain from coast to coast to raise awareness and money for hunger and homelessness in America.

Here are a few things worth remembering:

1. It happened on May 25, 1986.
That means today marks the 40th anniversary of one of the strangest, sweetest, most 1980s acts of national optimism ever attempted.

2. Nearly 6 million people participated.
Imagine organizing that without smartphones, GPS, social media, or a group text named “Human Chain Logistics.”

They had landlines, maps, local TV, radio announcements, and somebody’s mama saying, “Get in the car, we’re going to hold hands with America.”

3. The cause was hunger and homelessness.
Not a trendy cause. Not a partisan talking point. Just the very basic idea that in a country with this much food, money, land, churches, civic clubs, casseroles, and people who own eight Crock-Pots, nobody ought to be hungry or sleeping outside.

4. Celebrities showed up. Presidents showed up. Regular folks showed up.
And for one afternoon, America tried to look like the country it always says it wants to be.

Not perfect. Not magically fixed. Not suddenly healed.

But willing to stand there and say, “This matters.”

5. It was peak 80s idealism.
This was the same era that gave us charity singles, big hair, neon windbreakers, and the sincere belief that a music video could change foreign policy.

Were we naïve? Probably.

Were we also occasionally better at public hope than we are now?

Also probably.

6. Maybe we need to try something like this again.
Not necessarily another literal coast-to-coast hand-holding chain, though watching people try to organize that in the age of comment sections would be its own documentary.

But maybe we do need another national reminder that compassion is not weakness.

Maybe we need to remember that neighbors are not algorithms.

Maybe we need to stand close enough to each other again to realize the person across from us is not a headline, a demographic, a voting bloc, or a meme.

They are a human being.

7. The real lesson wasn’t the chain. It was the reach.
Hands Across America didn’t end hunger. It didn’t solve homelessness.

But for one day, millions of people reached for each other instead of retreating into themselves.

And forty years later, that still feels like something worth studying.

Maybe even repeating.

Because America has always been at its best when we remember that “across” does not have to mean divided.

Sometimes it means connected.

Class dismissed. Hold somebody’s hand before you log into the comments.

#1986

05/24/2026

On This Day in Tech History- May 24

On this day in 1972, the world got a look at the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console.

And when I say “video game console,” understand what we’re talking about here.

This thing did not have surround sound.

It did not have online multiplayer.

It did not have downloadable content, loot boxes, achievements, season passes, or a twelve-year-old named Brayden yelling at you through a headset from three states away.

It had dots.

White dots.

On a television screen.

That was it.

The Magnavox Odyssey could not keep score. It had no sound. The graphics were so basic that the system came with plastic overlays you stuck to the front of your TV screen to make the games look like something was actually happening.

That’s right. Before 4K gaming, ray tracing, and cinematic cut scenes, we had families slapping a piece of plastic on the Zenith and saying, “There. Now it’s tennis.”

And yet, this little box mattered.

The Odyssey came from the work of Ralph Baer, often called the father of home video games. He had the wild idea that a television did not have to be a one-way box that only showed you whatever the networks decided to send. Maybe — just maybe — people could interact with it.

That idea changed everything.

The Odyssey sold only about 69,000 units in its first year, which sounds like a flop until you remember that nobody even knew what a home video game console was yet. Magnavox also reportedly limited sales mostly through its own dealers, and some customers thought it only worked on Magnavox TVs. That is not exactly how you launch a revolution.

But revolutions do not always arrive fully formed.

Sometimes they arrive as a brown-and-white plastic box with wired controllers, no sound, no scoring, and a TV overlay held on by static cling.

Soon after, Nolan Bushnell saw the possibilities, Atari brought Pong to the masses, and the home gaming industry began its long march toward Atari, Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, Xbox, and whatever device your kids are currently using to ignore you.

So today, we tip the Professor Skip hat to the Magnavox Odyssey.

It may have been primitive.

It may have been clunky.

It may have required imagination, patience, and a television screen covered in plastic.

But it helped launch an entire industry.

Because sometimes the future does not begin with a bang.

Sometimes it begins with a dot bouncing across the screen.

05/24/2026

There are college towns.

There are football towns.

And then there is Auburn, Alabama, where somebody looked at a perfectly ordinary stretch of asphalt and said, “You know what this road needs? A fight song.”

And friends, that is how you end up with War Eagle Road.

Yes, it is real. Near Auburn’s campus, on South Donahue Drive in Auburn, Alabama, there is a short section of roadway designed with specially spaced rumble strips that play the opening notes of Auburn’s fight song when you drive over them. The musical stretch is on the northbound lane of South Donahue Drive, between Len Morrison Drive and West Samford Avenue, as you head toward campus and the stadium area. Auburn Engineering describes it as the first musical road on a college campus and the first one built around a fight song.

Now, from a science standpoint, this is not magic.

It is vibration.

When your tires pass over the carefully spaced grooves or strips in the pavement, they create different frequencies. Those frequencies hit your ears as musical tones. In other words, your car becomes the instrument, your tires become the bow, and the road becomes the fiddle.

Which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes physics teachers and Auburn fans equally emotional.

The road reportedly sounds best around 35 miles per hour. Go too fast, and the song gets higher and shorter. Go too slow, and it becomes more of a low hum than a recognizable tune. That is because speed changes the frequency of the vibrations, much like speeding up or slowing down a record changes the pitch.

And I have to admit, this is one of those ideas that starts out sounding ridiculous and ends up feeling kind of brilliant.

Because college football is never just football.

It is geography.

It is memory.

It is the road into town, the color of the fall sky, the smell of tailgate smoke, the old sweatshirt you refuse to throw away, and the song you learned before you were old enough to understand why grown people were yelling at linebackers.

Auburn did not just put rumble strips on a road.

They turned the approach to campus into a ritual.

They took an ordinary drive and made it say, “You are entering Auburn now. Act accordingly.”

And honestly, that is what the South does best. We take ordinary things — roads, porches, casseroles, church signs, parking lots, old oak trees, football Saturdays — and we load them down with meaning until they become part of who we are.

So if you ever find yourself in Auburn, roll down the window, head north on South Donahue Drive between Len Morrison Drive and West Samford Avenue, and let the asphalt sing to you.

Because only in Alabama can you drive over road bumps and accidentally join the marching band.

That’s not just civil engineering.

That’s culture with lane markings.

WAR EAGLE!

05/24/2026

Professor Skip History Breakdown: The Treaty of Tripoli

Gather round, class. Today’s lesson is brought to you by international diplomacy, pirates, religion, and one sentence that still makes people on Facebook start typing with their whole chest.

The Treaty of Tripoli was signed in 1796 and ratified by the United States Senate in 1797 during the presidency of John Adams. It was one of several treaties the young United States made with the Barbary States of North Africa, where American ships were being threatened, seized, or held for ransom. Basically, America had just become a country and immediately discovered that international shipping came with customer service issues and pirates.

The part everybody argues about is Article 11, which says:

“The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”

Now, that sentence did not fall out of the sky like a hot biscuit from heaven. It was diplomatic language meant to tell a Muslim-majority government: “We are not coming at you as a Christian empire. We are not the Crusades 2: Electric Boogaloo. This is a political treaty between governments, not a holy war between religions.” The Constitution Center’s congressional resource also notes that the treaty assured Tripoli that religious differences should not disrupt peace between the two countries.

Here’s where folks get sideways.

Some people use the Treaty of Tripoli to say, “See? America was not founded as a Christian nation.” Others respond, “Hold up, that line was just diplomacy, and Article 11 may not match the original Arabic text exactly.” And yes, there is a real historical wrinkle there: the English version ratified by the Senate included Article 11, while later analysis found complications with the Arabic manuscript. But the key point is this: the English text containing Article 11 was the version submitted to and ratified by the U.S. Senate.

So what does it mean?

It does not mean the founders were all atheists. They were not.

It does not mean Christianity had no cultural influence in early America. It absolutely did.

But it does mean the federal government was presenting itself, in official treaty language, as a government not legally founded on Christianity as a state religion. That matters. Because the whole point of the First Amendment was not to make America anti-religion. It was to keep the government from picking a favorite child at the religious family reunion.

And let’s be honest: once the government picks a favorite religion, it eventually starts telling that religion what to do. That is not religious freedom. That is spiritual HOA management.

The Treaty of Tripoli is a reminder that the founders understood something we still wrestle with today: faith may shape citizens, communities, morals, and movements — but the government itself is supposed to belong to all the people. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, deist, doubter, seeker, and that one cousin who only goes to church when there’s ham afterward.

So when someone says “America is a Christian nation,” the Professor Skip answer is:

America has always had millions of Christians in it.
America has been deeply influenced by Christian ideas.
But the government was not designed to be a church.

And that distinction is not anti-Christian.

It may be the very thing that protects Christianity from becoming just another campaign slogan with a flag pin and a fundraising link.

05/23/2026

PROFESSOR SKIP STORY TIME: The Man Who Said “Eat Grass”

History has a way of making sure the punchline lands.

In 1862, the Dakota people in Minnesota were starving. Not “I skipped lunch and now I’m cranky” starving. I mean children-hungry, treaties-broken, government-payments-delayed, people-standing-outside-stores-begging-for-food starving.

And standing nearby was a trader named Andrew Myrick, who had food.

Now, when desperate Dakota people asked for credit so they could eat, Myrick reportedly responded with one of the worst customer service statements in American history:

“If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

Which is bold, considering most Yelp reviews don’t end in historical consequences.

And here’s where history stops whispering and starts clearing its throat.

When the Dakota War broke out, Myrick was killed on the first day. When his body was found, grass had been stuffed in his mouth.

Now listen, Professor Skip is not here to celebrate anybody’s death. That is not the lesson.

The lesson is this:

When powerful people mock the suffering of desperate people, they often mistake silence for peace.

It wasn’t peace.

It was pressure.

It was hunger.

It was humiliation.

It was generations of broken promises stacked up like dry kindling, and Myrick walked over with a match and said something cruel because he thought the people in front of him were too powerless to matter.

That right there is the part we keep repeating.

Societies love to act shocked when desperate people finally erupt, but they rarely act shocked while those same people are being ignored, cheated, displaced, underpaid, mocked, or told to be patient while their children suffer.

We are very good at condemning the explosion.

We are not nearly as good at condemning the fuse.

And that is why this story still matters.

Because “let them eat grass” is not just a line from 1862.

It is every time someone says poor people are lazy.

It is every time someone says hungry children should have picked better parents.

It is every time someone says entire communities should just “get over” centuries of theft, removal, violence, and neglect.

It is every time comfort looks at suffering and says, “Not my problem.”

History teaches us that cruelty is never as clever as it thinks it is.

Sometimes the bill comes due.

And sometimes history stuffs the receipt right back in your mouth.

Class dismissed.
But maybe don’t be cruel on the way out.

05/23/2026

Arlington National Cemetery and the Most Consequential Tax Bill in American History

Here’s a little history with layers.

Arlington National Cemetery did not begin as a cemetery. It began as Arlington House, the estate of Mary Anna Custis Lee, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. The property sat right across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., which made it strategically valuable during the Civil War. Union troops occupied it in 1861.

Then came the tax bill.

During the war, the federal government required property owners in Confederate-controlled areas to pay certain taxes in person. Mary Custis Lee, who was ill and behind Confederate lines, sent someone else to pay the tax. The government refused the payment because she did not appear personally. The amount owed was reportedly $92.07. That’s right. One of the most famous burial grounds in the world traces part of its origin story to a tax dispute smaller than a family trip to Costco.

The government then seized the estate and bought it at auction in January 1864 for $26,800, officially for government, war, military, charitable, and educational purposes. A few months later, in June 1864, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved part of the estate as a national cemetery.

And there was a message in that decision.

Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who had no love for Robert E. Lee’s decision to side with the Confederacy, helped turn the grounds around Lee’s former home into a burial place for Union dead. In other words, the nation’s fallen soldiers were laid to rest in the front yard of the Confederacy’s most famous general.

History does not always whisper.

Sometimes it backs a hearse up to your porch and says, “Let’s make a point.”

Years later, the Lee family challenged the seizure. In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government’s tax sale had been improper. But by then, Arlington was already sacred ground. The Lee family ultimately sold the property back to the United States in 1883 for $150,000.

So Arlington National Cemetery is not just a cemetery.

It is a Civil War battlefield of memory.
It is a legal argument carved into landscape.
It is a reminder that land can change meaning.
A plantation became a military cemetery.
A symbol of rebellion became a resting place for those who served the United States.

And somewhere in the middle of all that is one of the strangest truths in American history:

The government came into Arlington because of war, law, taxes, politics, grief, and a very expensive unpaid $92.07.

History is wild, y’all.

Professor Skip & The Professor Skip Singers

05/28/2026

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