No Damned Celsius!

There's a strong streak of the yahoo spirit in the United States, and I'm not referring to the Yahoo! website, though I suppose one could argue that Yahoo! content targets yahoos. No, I'm referring to "yahoo" as Swift understood it when he coined the term. To him they were cretinous human-like creatures with vile and filthy habits. Remind you of anyone you know?

What got me going on this was an item I ran across online. The chief weatherman at Houston's channel 13, the ABC affiliate, has a blog. ABC 13 blog. On the blog, he announced that the station's weather forecasts would start including the temperature in Celsius. He opened the entry for comments and so far he has fifty. Eleven of them are from nut cases that oppose the change. (There are a few who oppose it for rational reasons.) Here are some of their comments. "This is just another example of giving in to people who come here from other countries and are too lazy to learn our ways (English, non-metric temps, etc.)." "This is the United States of America. We speak English and use Fahrenheit." "Just another concession to political correctness and liberalism."

You may be asking yourself how these people can be so stupid. It isn't so hard to understand though. In the minds of these people, and their evangelical Christian brothers and cousins, education is a corrupting influence. Study too much philosophy and you might start questioning the very existence of God. Study too much science and you'll start denying the Biblical theory of creation. And who are the chief proponents of the metric system? Why scientists, of course. If we let the weather man display temperatures with Celsius, the next thing you know, he'll be saying that the earth wasn't created in six days. Yeah, and them ain't monkeys swinging in the trees, their our great grandparents.