Whipped Cream Difficulties

David Allan Coe, the man who wrote what should be our national anthem.

The first of those recordings, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a droll sendup of honky-tonk clichés written by the folk singers Steve Goodman and John Prine, reached the country Top 10 in 1975.

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Mr. Coe wrote or helped write most of his material, but had his greatest success with songs he wrote for others, notably Tanya Tucker’s “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” (1973) and Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” (1977). Both records were No. 1 country singles, and “Take This Job and Shove It” inspired a 1981 movie in which Mr. Coe had a minor role. He also wrote for the punk rock band Dead Kennedys and Johnny Cash.

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Coe released two albums — “Nothing Sacred” and “Underground Album” — that were later reissued as a compilation called “18 X-Rated Hits.” In 2000, the music writer Neil Strauss of The New York Times described the material as “among the most racist, misogynist, homophobic and obscene songs recorded by a popular songwriter.”
For years, Mr. Coe distanced himself from those songs. “Anyone that would look at me and say I was a racist would have to be out of their mind,” he insisted in a 2004 interview with the site Swampland.

J. Craig Venter, the guy who decoded the human genome.

In the 1990s, Dr. Venter, a risk-taker and intense competitor, made a bold move when he decided that the Human Genome Project, a $3 billion government program for decoding the human genome, was moving slowly enough that he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method.
His gamble paid off. In 2000, his company, Celera, made a joint announcement with a rival group saying that they had assembled the first human genomes, a landmark step toward uncovering the genetic basis of human disease and origins.