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Being a University of Michigan fan whose kid enrolls at Michigan State is like the situation in the Sound of Music. In the picture below, MSU people are like Herr Zeller and I’m like Max Detweiler. They are zealous for their cause and I don’t really care for it, but I don’t want to upset them so I give a half-hearted reply.

I think in the movie it was actually Rolf that gave the Nazi greeting that Max Detweiler somewhat returned, but Herr Zeller looks more appropriate for this image.

Thanks to someone’s generosity in loaning us her car while ours was in the shop, I got to hear a few days’ worth of satellite radio. So we tried to get a wide variety of stations while we could, and I tried to explain the significance of various songs in regard to the culture at the time. One of the songs that came on was “The Beat Goes On” by Sonny and Cher.

It was written to highlight how things are changing, and things are staying the same. And it oddly still works today. It reminds me of a monologue by Roy Rogers, I think. The way it was written it spoke of politics and societal events in a general enough way that it was timeless. I wish I could find it on the internet, but no such luck today.

Anyway, here are some of the lyrics to The Beat Goes On

Charleston was once the rage, uh-huh
History has turned the page, uh-huh
The miniskirt’s the current thing, uh-huh
Teenybopper is our newborn king, uh-huh

I suppose miniskirts are still around, not sure about teenyboppers anymore though. This verse is a wash: +1 and -1.

The grocery store’s the super mart, uh-huh
Little girls still break their hearts, uh-huh
And men still keep on marching off to war
Electrically they keep a baseball score

This one’s still true on all counts. Although it’s not noteworthy now that baseball scores are kept electronically, it was a big deal back then. But it’s still true today.

Grandmas sit in chairs and reminisce
Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss
The cars keep going faster all the time
Bums still cries, “Hey buddy, have you got a dime?”

This one’s mostly true. Cars do keep going faster all the time. As far as I can tell, we’ve reached diminishing returns on that one, both in top speed and in 0-60 acceleration – however you want to consider “faster”. The things that not quite true is that bums don’t ask for dimes. They still ask for money, but in denominations larger than dimes.

And the beat goes on

Okay, this one’s the chorus not a verse. But it needs to be acknowledged that the beat is still going on today, so +1 for that too.

A friend of ours got a case of Bai flavored water (I forget if she was given it or it was just a really good deal so she bought it) but once she tried it she realized she didn’t really like it. So we got to try some Bai flavors and take what we wanted.

That was my introduction to Bai. I don’t particularly like it because it tastes like fake sugar. My son thought it was okay.

Anyway, that’s all the background for why I was thinking about Bai. And while thinking about Bai, I thought they missed an opportunity for an ad campaign with NSYNC.

It’s a perfect fit, if you ask me. They don’t even have to change the song, just put images of Bai water on the screen each time NSYNC sings the word “bye”.

Some longtime readers of this blog may remember I wrote something about why Jesus lived for only 33 years and what was significant about the number 33.

I still like my answer, but I did find another meaning to the number 33, and I think it fits in quite nicely.

One of the many Old Testament laws had to do with impurity and cleanness after childbirth. If a woman gave birth to a male child she was unclean for 33 days and if she gave birth to a female child she was unclean for 66 days.

What does Mary giving birth to Jesus have to do with this?

Nothing.

But if we consider that Jesus was born of this world, then the earth would be unclean for 33 units of time. I haven’t worked out how to make the jump from days to years, I’m just concentrating on the number 33.

I also don’t want to take the comparison too far lest anyone think that the earth was Jesus’ mother.

Back to the numbers now. So the earth would be unclean for 33 years after Jesus’ birth. Hmm… It was also unclean for the 3756 years before Jesus was born. We’re just going to ignore that part for now too.

Anway, the earth would be unclean for 33 years after the birth of Jesus. Then how did the mother become clean after 33 days? She had to sacrifice a lamb, of course.

Jesus is both the child and the lamb in this analogy. He was sacrificed 33 years after his birth and that purified the earth. Hmm… Maybe that’s not the best way of phrasing it either, because that hints at universal salvation. Maybe “allowed inhabitants of earth to be purified” would be better.

Maybe I’m stretching it a bit, but I thought there was a decent connection between the 33 years that Jesus lived and the 33 days of uncleanness.

Now I realize that it could also imply the earth was only unclean while Jesus was on the earth. I’ll leave that topic alone also.

That’s all – just something to think about.