Thumbs: Dolly rocks the NFL in style
If you were too busy bickering over politics at the Thanksgiving table to watch NFL halftime, you may have missed Dolly Parton giving a performance for the ages at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington. Parton was herself, ageless at 77, rocking a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit. After leading with “Jolene” and “9 to 5,” she belted out Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” Gesturing toward her revealing getup with a sly smile, she sang, “And bad mistakes/I’ve made a few.” Not at all. She easily stole the show from the 30 or so hip-thrusting, pom-pomming cheerleaders on the stage. Her power to reinvent herself — she just released her first rock album — is as infinite as her power to unite Americans. And all for a good cause: Her performance was part of the Cowboys’ annual Salvation Army Red Kettle donation drive, and she led by example with a $1 million gift. How about Dolly Parton for president? We’re not the only ones asking, but sadly, her answer is no. “We’ve had enough boobs in the White House,” Parton told Metro, a British tabloid. She added, “I’m not smart enough to be in politics, or maybe I’m too smart.” We’ll go with the latter. Speaking of reinvention and football, for the better part of the Texans’ history, the quarterback position has been a wasteland. Visions of David Carr, Brian Hoyer and Brock Osweiler getting thrashed by opposing defenses still send shivers down our spines. Even more competent signal callers like Matt Schaub and Deshaun Watson eventually wore out their welcome for on- and off-thefield reasons. So imagine our delight when the guy the Texans drafted with the No. 2 overall pick this year turned out to be an absolute stud right out of the gate! C.J. Stroud is everything Texans fans have been dreaming of for the past 20-plus years — a guy who can drop dimes all over the field, use his legs under pressure and give our city a face of the franchise to be proud of. Besides a few untimely interceptions, Stroud looks poised beyond his years. He’s accountable, bright and has led the upstart Texans to a winning record. With more than a month left in the regular season and a tough schedule ahead, the Texans are in a position to claim a playoff spot for the first time in four years. It’s been a long stretch in the wilderness, Texans fans, but with Stroud carving up opponents and head coach DeMeco Ryans orchestrating a tenacious defense, the future is bright.
Last week, Starship, the rocket Elon Musk says will make humans an interplanetary species, experienced a second “rapid unscheduled disassembly” during a test flight. That’s the too-clever turn of phrase that his company SpaceX uses instead of “exploded,” “blew up” or “turned into a massive fireball.”
Then again, learning from failure is part of the plan, and Musk can point to his smaller Falcon rockets as proof of a method behind the madness. He’s got more Starships rolling off the assembly line to test out as soon as the federal government gives him the green light. Unfortunately, churning out these rockets, the largest ever built by humans, comes at an unsustainable cost — and we don’t mean dollars. Musk has got plenty of those to burn. A Reuters investigation published this month found a disregard for worker safety at SpaceX as Musk pushes to build and test rockets at breakneck speed. The report documented 600 injuries since 2014, including crushed hands, head injuries, burns, electrical shocks, amputations, eye injuries and one death. We’re excited about returning to the moon, and reaching Mars, but “fail fast, learn fast” shouldn’t mean death and dismemberment. Maybe Texans are inured to risk because of our harsh environment rife with terrifying creatures. Just when you think the cold has quieted down the roaches and mosquitoes and 13-foot alligators lurking in our bayous, Texas finds a new way to torment you. Across the state, scorpion sightings are said to be on the rise. Are the end times nigh? Fortunately the scorpion species most common in Texas isn’t lethal, but we’ll still take a hard pass on making contact with the stingers at the end of those curving tails.
Plus: New QB brings hope for the Texans; SpaceX maims Texans.
For years, students at the University of Texas Dallas have painted a set of three rocks with various announcements and messages, including political ones. In the last month, the war between Israel and Hamas has ratcheted up tensions. An hour-by-hour back-and-forth ensued as pro-Palestine and pro-Israel students painted over each other’s messages, but the graffiti battle didn’t devolve into total disorder. Instead, the groups came to an agreement over how long their painted missives would stay up. “This was dubbed a three-rock solution,” one student told UTD’s newspaper, The Mercury. The university, however, couldn’t handle this peaceful exercise of free speech and announced the removal of the rocks entirely. According to the administrator’s mealy-mouthed statement, “The spirit rocks were not intended to be a display for extended political discourse.” But isn’t that exactly what we’d want at universities? While hate speech should be addressed, solutions to the world’s conflicts aren’t going to come out of “comfortable” spaces but ones that are conducive to uncomfortable debates. As Dolly Parton sings in her new rock song, “World On Fire,” there’s a “fire, fire burning higher” but we’ve “still got time to turn it all around.”