Mark Byron

Library Musings

We're off running Saturday errands, getting massive husband points, especially when I swung into Jo Ann's for brads for VBS; you know you're married when you (a) go into a craft store alone or (b) swing by the feminine products section whi

Eileen will be running herd over the second graders while I run herd over my mix of undergrad and grad students. I'd be avaible to teach a day VBS, but they have it in the evenings at our church.

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We may see the ghost of Payne Stewart at the British Open; plus-fours haven't looked this good since he passed on. Right now, defending champ Padriag Harrington is the leader in the clubhouse with a +4, one back of the silver Shark, Greg Norman. Second round leader KC Choi has dropped back to +4 as I go to press.

From what I saw of things this moring, the winds was going at a 30MPH+ clip, making normal golf probleatic and even making it hard to keep balls stationary on the green; they were noting that there is no hard-and-fast rule for how much wind is too much, but if you can't have a ball stay put on the green, it's too windy to play and they'd shut things down.

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The Barack Obama "Am I Experienced?" World Tour is on its South Asia swing, hitting Afghanistan today. He likes this area, wanting to send more troops; we could probably use a mini-surge there, but it's funny where he's hot to send more here yet wants a full pullout of Iraq.

Friday Musings

Things are going well; we're four weeks into the summer quarter, and things are moving along fairly smoothly, save for a flu-like set of symptoms that laid me low last night and today. We had a campus-wide picnic yesterday, so I had hot dogs for both lunch and dinner (they had a 11-2 shift for the day students and a 5-7 shift for the night students). I'm not sure if it wasn't a bad hot dog not cooperating or a rotavirus, which is the technical term for the stomach/intestinal flu.

For years, we jokingly called such a critter the Roto-Rooter flu, for it cleaned you out on both ends. Well, it may better be pronounced Rota-Rooter.

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The British Open might be interesting viewing this weekend. The leader board is shark-infested, with Greg Norman only a shot off of KC Choi's lead. Last year's champ Padraig Harrington is three back, as is US Open runner up Rocco Mediate.

That's a 53-year-old Greg Norman, set to bust the oldest-major winner record wide open, if Rocco doesn't do it. Hey, marrying Chris Everett must suit him well.

The other name a bit back on the leader board is a blast from the past; Jean Van de Velde. It was nine years ago at the British Open that he had probably the worse choke in golf history, coming into the 18th on Sunday up three, then making triple bogey to fall into a playoff that he lost. He's at +4, five back, but is a hot round from getting up into the short-version of the leader board. If Mediate or Norman can't bag a title, getting VdV to shake that image would be nice.

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Some interesting politics down in Argentina, where a tax on food exports (not imports, mind you, exports; they wanted to keep the food at home) was narrowly voted down in their Senate, with the Vice President voting against the government to break the tie. Picture Dick Chaney voting down a Republican must-pass bill, and you get a bit of the drama. That's going to be an interesting cabinet meeting, especially if president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner cusses like Hillary can when mad.

That's good for food prices, good for free markets and bad for left-populism. Between the FARC getting put on the run in Columbia and the Peronistas getting shot down in Argentina, it's not been a good summer for South American leftists.

"Whens a kittah ax u, 'Is u a ceiling cat?', u say 'Yes.'"

Or, alternatively, "I am the Bucket Master; you must be the Gatekeeper."

The Runaway Host Post

The Eucharist has been in the news as of late, after a UCF student pocketed a consecrated wafer last month and getting some death threats for his stunt; he's in the process of getting kicked out of the student Senate. Evolution maven PZ Meyers stirred the pot a bit more, blogging about looking to score a wafer in order to desecrate it.

It's always a bit amusing to see secular folks trashing Catholic stuff, like militant gay-rights activists sabotaging services. If you wanted to fight fire with fire, what would you do? There isn't anything a secular person treats as sacred. You can't hang a condom in effigy in retaliation or soak a copy of The Origin of Species in holy water as payback to Meyers; it would be a waste of good water, anyway.

The question that comes to mind for me as a non-Catholic is this; when does the wafer become the Body of Christ? Since you need a priest to properly do a Eucharist (if I understand Catholic doctrine correctly), would it become transubstantiated (if I can verb that) sometime during the service, possibly when he holds it up and declares "The body of Christ"?

For instance, you can buy communion wafers in bulk; if you bought a case of 1000 wafers, do you have a thousand Bodies of Christ? Probably not. For $14.95 plus shipping, Meyers can have a field day and build a mural of the Ascent of Man out of painted wafers, except they haven't been consecrated.

To question the point further, what is the status of the wafers that weren't used in that service? There are most likely going to be some spares; one would think that they're ordinary wafers until getting called into action during the Eucharist.

If a consecrated wafer gets pocketed, like in the UCF case, it is still the Body of Christ in his pocket, or does the host get untransubstanciated once it gets out of its proper role?

Consider this a shout-out to the Catholics in the Peanut Gallery; I don't want to be too flip, for I understand that the Eucharist is the centerpiece of Catholic worship, where the Church interacts with Jesus in a real way that reaches across time and space. If I understood the majesty and mystery of that a bit better, I might think about crossing the Tiber, for it's something that Protestants (especially Evangelicals; some liturgical churches have a high view of Communion) lack.

I know that the folks who are issuing death threats are overreacting; that's a given. However, the hue and cry over a pocketed wafer seems overblown. My first thought is that Jesus is a big boy and can fend for Himself, ask Ananias and Sapphira.

Feel free to give me a second thought.

Not Disabled

This sounds like a script for a corny sci-fi movie, but it's actually playing out. A South African "disabled" guy, Oscar Pistorius, is running on prosthetic legs at a pace that just missed making the able-bodied Olympics in the 400 meters. He needed to get under 45.55 to qualify, but came a bit short in his last meet with 46.25. He all but owns the Paralympics running events, but wanted to be in the regular Olympics; he still might get named to the South African 4X400 relay team.

It's a testament to both Pistorius and the status of artificial limbs that he's able to hang with the best runners in the world on artificial legs. The ruling bodies of track tried to keep him from running with the regular track folks, thinking that his artificial legs are springier and easier to run on than normal legs, giving him an unfair advantage, but follow-up tests proved otherwise.

Pistorius is only 21, so the 2012 Olympics are still very feasible. If he can make it then, he may wind up being a $6 million man; he doesn't have Steve Austin's speed, but he might have "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's bank account if he can get a notch faster and make an Olympic final. He'll be very marketable if he can pull this off, and is probably already getting some ad feelers.

Interesting thought; what happens when we get better-than-human prosthetics, so that we get real-life Steve Austins? We're not there yet, but Pistorius shows that we're not that far away from that.

If I Had $10,000...

...I'd bail you out of jail.

The lead singer of the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies has been charged with drug possession in upstate New York.

Steven Page, along with two women, were arrested after police allegedly found cocaine and marijuana in a Fayetteville, N.Y., apartment, according to a Syracuse-area radio station's website, 9WSYR.com.

Page and one of the women were apparently arrested Friday at about 2 a.m. after police discovered a car with an open door in the driveway of a home. While they were investigating the vehicle, officers observed a man and a woman sitting at a kitchen table with a white capsule inside an apartment.

Police said the man and woman had a substance that tested positive for cocaine. Page, 38, was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fourth degree. He was reportedly arraigned in Manlius, N.Y., Town Court and released after posting $10,000 US bail.

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Page's manager, Terry McBride, refused to comment on the case Tuesday while it is before the courts, but said he is confident Page will be cleared.

Until the case is settled, McBride said it will be business as usual for the Barenaked Ladies, who recently released a collection of original children's songs entitled Snacktime.

I guess the follow-up album will be Munchietime

Eats Shoots, Leaves and Grills

I recall a scene from National Lampoon's Vacation, where the family dog is tied to the back of the car for a picnic stop, then they forget to untie him as the go back on the highway. A state trooper tracks them down to let them know what they did, "Poor little guy. Must have kept up with you for a mile or so." I'll use that line during March Madness when a high seed manages to hang with the national power for five or ten minutes before things revert to form and the blowout ensues.

We have a more interesting story from Down Under, where a koala got caught in the front grill of a car. The little feller is OK.

Well, the front part of a locomotive is called the cow-catcher; shall we rechristen the front car grill as the koala-catcher?

Financial Overload-Part I

Tons of stuff is happening in the financial arena, and it's starting to blow a gasket as I try to process everything. On the good side, oil dropped $6/barrel today, which might get gas prices back under $4/gallon.

This Bud's for Fern'ers-Anheuser-Busch has agreed to be bought out by Belgium-based InBev; Becks and Stella Artois are the most prominent InBev products. I'm not a beer drinker, so I don't have a dog in the fight. However, it will give more jingoistic beer drinkers pause to know that their Bud is now owned by some financial muscles in Brussels.

I think it was a Miller ad campaign where they had faux football refs flagging foes for freshness violations. In one ad, they threw the hankie at a shipment of Bud, where the AB rep retorted "You can't flag the King!" A few folks are hollering "You can't buy the king!"

I'm not going to agree with Clair McCaskill on too much, but the weak dollar did make this deal feasible. American investments are cheap with the week dollar; we saw a Lexington horse auctioneer sold to a Dubai firm recently.

IndyMac, when are you comin' back?-Yesterday, as it turns out; the California-based bank was the second largest to be closed by the FDIC on Friday, but was quickly returned to operations under FDIC ownership Monday.

If you had five figures or less in the bank, things are normal; the FDIC covers deposits up to $100K. If you had more than that in IndyMac, you may get a bit of a "haircut" if the assets aren't worth the liabilities.

Personal finance 101- you shouldn't have more than $100,000 in a bank for a number of reasons. The lack of FDIC insurance is one, and the fact that you should have the money where you can get a better return if you have that much money is another. Ten or twenty thousand in CDs and money market funds might be a OK place for rainy-day funds, but any more than that should be in some form of stock or bond or mutual fund investment.

You can't sue a member of congress for doing something stupid, but if you could, the IndyMac shareholders and depositors could roast Chuck Schumer slowly over a mesquite flame. Yes, the bank had its problem, but Schumer basically yelled "fire" in a crowded building over some crepes Suzette.

I'll get to Fannie and Freddie later;  FIN 510 beckons.

The Stochastic Wok

I don't know what the future for this will be, but I've started a new blog to play off my Dr. Byron side; it's called The Stochastic Wok and will have a daily feature of a quick analysis of a randomly-selected stock. Today's inaugural stock stir-fry is of Frontline, the #1 oil tanker company. That's something that will stay in business for a while.

If that takes off, it could be an interesting site. We'll see if people like it.