Mark Byron

Addicted to Spuds, Football Version

Could this be the year a non-power-conference team crashes the title game? Boise State is in great position to do so after Cal lost to Oregon today. Not only does that make Boise's win over the Ducks look all the better, it takes out one of the clubs ahead of them.

Assuming Penn State wins tonight over Iowa (it's 10-5 as I go to press), Boise will move up to #6. Ahead of them is Texas, Penn State and three SEC teams (LSU, Alabama and Florida). A maximum of one of the SEC clubs can go undefeated and if Tim Tebow is more than merely out of gas with the flu after leaving the UK game tonight, all three are likely to come out of SEC play with one loss.

If there are two big-conference undefeateds left standing, they'll likely play for the title. But it's more likely that Boise will run the WAC rather than two of those five running their conferences, and the mid-majors will go ballistic if a 12-1 club gets a slot over a 12-0 BSU.

It's an interesting year where four mid-majors are in the top-20 this early in the season, but schools like Utah and Boise have added to the props of the higher-tier mid-majors. 

Praying For One's Foes

As a former Lakeland area resident, I found myself watching Lakeland High playing Concord De La Salle on ESPN2 last night (and early this morning, the game in CA lasted until 1:30AM); Lakeland won 31-30 in OT when De La Salle went old-school and went for two on their TD and missed; the school with the 151 game winning streak now has a two-game losing streak.

However, this was the incident that stuck with me-

Lakeland's Tedward Hamilton, a junior defensive lineman, was injured in the fourth quarter, leading to a lengthy delay. Trainers were tending to Hamilton, who was injured while making a tackle.

He was conscious and able to move his legs and arms but was taken off on a stretcher.

As it turns out, he's OK and flew back to Florida with the team, but it was scary for a time.

What was most interesting was that I thought I heard the De La Salle student body saying a prayer in unison for the fallen Dreadnought while he was being tended to. Since it's a Catholic school with a strong emphasis on prayer (and social justice) that wouldn't be too surprising.

Here's a bleg for the Catholic members of the Peanut Gallery- what would that prayer be that they were playing? I couldn't make out any details, since it was in the background, but it was in unison and was decidely sounding like a prayer rather than a cheer or chant.

The End of Blackberry Season?

Here's an ugly stock chart for Research in Motion, the parent company for the Blackberry PDA. I'll often describe the stock market as a roller-coaster ride, but Cedar Point and King's Island are lusting after this one; a 17% drop straight down from 90 to 75 in one day on bad earnings news and a pessimistic report on the company's future.

That's interesting, since it now appears that the icon of the modern techie attached to his Crackberry may be on the wane, or at least becoming a mature company. RIM has, per the Globe and Mail, a beta of 2.14, which would make sense for something of a luxury item, but a modest price-to-earnings ratio of 19 would indicate a mature company rather than a high-flying tech stock.

Computers are a mature industry these days, even the PDAs. Amazing.

The Dirty Dozen

That's the difference between the G8 and the G20, which is set to supplant the smaller grouping as the main annual powwow of world economic powers.

Back in the 80s, it was the G7, which had the US, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. An earlier version was the G5 which lopped off Canad and Italy. Then, post-Cold-War, Russia was added, even though it wasn't nearly the economic powerhouse that the G7 economies were; a lot of big security questions were being discussed and the powers that be wanted them inside the room rather than outside.

The G20 includes the other three of what international economists call the BRIC countries besides Russia: Brazil, India and China, three key developing countries that have increasing clout in international trade and finance.

In addition, the G20 gives the EU a seat as well as the ones going to the four G7 Europeans as well as Argentina, Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Here's a quick rundown of the 12 newbies plus Russia as far as where their political systems are at.

Argentina	Young Democracy
Australia	Functional Democracy
Brazil	Functional Democracy
China	Autocracy
EU	Young Democracy
India	Functional Democracy
Indonesia	Young Democracy
Mexico	Young Democracy
Russia	Autocracy
Saudi Arabia	Autocracy
South Africa	Young Democracy
South Korea	Functional Democracy
Turkey	Young Democracy

I'm not sure there is a definition to be had, but Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa are less than two decades into a fully democratic electoral system and are still working out the kinks of the system, as is the EU. Russia is nominally a democracy, but the Putin clique run things just about as tightly as the Chinese Communist Party and the house of Saud.

The rule of law is still a work in progress in many of those young democracies and very stochastic in the autocracies. That's going to make the G20 somewhat problematic, as there is a lot of authoritarian tendencies in a majority of the countries.

For instance, many countries have a history of government-run banks, so straight-jacket regulations of banks isn't that much of a leap from their recent pasts or present. Other countries have a small number of large banks that are well connected with governments and act more as financial utilities than commercial, competitive outfits . That tendency towards centralization and regulation might not bode well for the future.

However, the world economy is bigger than the old G7. It's time to bring the teenagers up to the adult table. Just be careful of what their values are.

Side Effects of Tourism

This ad aired during the UK-Louisville game last Saturday and is worth a watch; it's from Louisville's tourism people and is a great spoof on those ED ads. Even if it is enemy territory from a UK fan's perspective, it's a great ad.

If that doesn't give you a chuckle, you haven't waded through all those WTMI ED ads that plaster the airways.

Standing in the Way

Here's some interesting food for though. I was reading Psalm 1 and caught something that may be read two different ways- verse one in the NIV reads "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers."

In context, that would be read to me not hanging out with sinners. However, there might well be times that we might want to stand in the way of sinners as in put yourself between them and their sin target.

One example that is common in modern advertising is keeping people from driving drunk. One recent liqueur ad has some Aztec-looking folks shooting out the tires of a would-be DUIer. Interventions into substance abuse is another area where pop culture has blessed getting between a viceroy and his vice. Smoking is another one where a whole industry has cropped up trying to get people to kick the habit.

Other sins are touchier. Eileen has to keep me honest on going back for seconds at a buffet or not having that extra roll or breadstick; yes, lest we forget, gluttony is a sin, albeit one that isn't frowned upon much. And, lest we forget, various sexual stuff; how do you tell relative X that living with your significant other isn't right when relatives A and B and Q it before them?

No great answers, but there are some times you need to get in the way before someone does something stupid; many vices are so attractive that they'll do them anyway, but we need to try and warn them anyway.

Murder in the Back Woods

Here's one thing to consider in this story of the census worker found dead in rural Kentucky in the Daniel Boone National Forest; if he was murdered, it probably wasn't by tea-partiers.

Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, told the AP that Clay County is economically poor and has a "pretty wild history of a black market economy, a drug economy."

"I don't think there is any deep-seated hatred of government there," he said. "Government is not seen as the enemy, except for people who might fear getting caught for what they're doing."

Davis said it was a dangerous time of year for someone to go knocking on doors because marijuana producers are typically harvesting their crop. "It would be reckless."

The area also has seen a growth in methamphetamine production at crude labs in people's homes.

I have seen numerous stories over recent years of drug dealers creating pot farms or meth cookers out in the middle of nowhere in national parks and forests not unlike the moonshine stills of yesteryear; hikers and rangers have been killed for wandering into the wrong patch of forest.

The "fed" epitaph allegedly found on the body is probably more anti-FBI/DEA than anti-Washington. Not that those rural areas aren't leave-us-alone libertarian-conservative, but my guess it was more likely the druggies that did the dirty deed.

Golden Rules

It's UN General Assembly week, and as usual, we have a truckload of foreign leaders coming to have their 15 minutes in the limelight, including the usual rogue's gallery of malcontents and bad actors. Today, Caesar Chavez was acting somewhat polite, but only somewhat. However, he was breathing the vapors of the left in accusing the US military of arranging the "coup" in Honduras.

Their new president, Roberto Micheletti, was one of the few foreign leaders not welcome; the US wouldn't give him a visa. Ousted president Jose Manuel Zelaya, a Chavezesque figure, wanted to get rid of the term limits he was under but their constitution has that as an unamendable part; discussing amending it is an impeachable offense per the Constitution, and their Supreme Court did just that.

Given that Micheletti is more moderate than Zelaya, the left is up in arms, and the world diplomatic community is treating it as a coup; dumping Zelaya out of the country didn't help matters, but this is more like (forced analogy alert) the world trying to get Nixon back in power after Watergate than what normally passes for a coup in the developing world.

Other than that, everyone else is welcome to say their piece this week. That is one of the good points of the UN, the less-than-straight-shooting nature of some of the apparat notwithstanding; as Churchill put it, jaw-jaw is better than war-war. The bozos of the world community get to play the clown; it's better to let them talk and be seen for who they are than to give them some martyr status by shutting them out.

Do under others as you would have then do unto you. That applies to Chavez and Ahmadinejad as well as the folks we like.

Captian Kirk

Some interesting shenanigans in Taxachusettes; their state legislature gave the governor back his authority to name interim Senators after taking it away from Mitt Romney for fear of his appointing a Republican to President Kerry's seat in 2004. Now that the governor is a fellow Democrat, Deval Patrick, they gave it back.

Signs of being  a political junkie. When I saw the name Paul Kirk as St. Patrick's pick, my memory bank came up with "Democratic chair." I scan down the piece, and yes, he was the DNC chair in the late 80s. Now he gets a gig as Senator until the replacement election in January, getting the title "former senator" as the lead of his obit and giving the Democrats a 60th vote (60 votes invokes cloture and kills a filibuster) in the Senate, counting the two liberal independents.

A Rosemont Horizon

Eileen heard through one of the gals at her Red Hat meeting Tuesday evening that our ousted Victory Baptist pastor, David Head, has landed on his feet as the interim music minister at Rosemont Baptist here in town. Rosemont's latest newsletter has them voting on Pastor Dave last Wednesday. From the reports this evening, he must have been voted in.

Our loss, Rosemont's gain; he has bachelors degree in music, if memory serves.

On a bloggy note, Rosemont has its church website in Wordpress blog format. That's an interesting use of a blog format to serve as a bare-bones church website.

Up Tates Creek Without a Paddle

Well, it looks like we found a church to lite in after having our church life at Victory Baptist collapse upon us. We were seeing both a new Sunday School class and a new pastor after a disgruntled segment of the church essentially forced Pastor Dave's resignation.

I'm not sure what caused the disgruntlement or if the folks were even gruntled in the first place; the party line at the post-resignation church meeting was pastoral aloofness, but underlying issues left unsaid were (1) bitter feelings over forcing out the previous pastor 3 years ago, (2) a number of changes that went too fast in 20/20 hindsight (3) a dysfunctional deacon board and (4) a more eclectic view of theology that included some Reformed thinkers.

One person even mentioned that he was upset that Dave'sservices went longer than an hour and didn't end by 11:30. Heaven help you if you get between a Baptist and his lunch; no wonder long-winded Pastor Stocker at Midland's Christian Celebration Center would joke about "not beating the Baptists out to lunch."

With a new, likely old-school Baptist, interim pastor coming and a lack of inviting Sunday School classes, we needed someplace where we could be at home. What we settled in on was Tates Creek Christian, about a mile north of where we live. It's a fairly large church, about 900 members, with a good Sunday school program and a solid Wednesday night class for Eileen (alas, I teach Wednesday nights again next term) as well as home groups.

The church history puts it in the Restorationist movementthat started circa 1800 with renegade Presbyterians and Baptists wanting to be generic Christians, tryingto ditch extrabiblical tradition and get back as best they could to a undivided New Testament church.

Of course, that unity didn't last, as they had a civil war before the Civil War over music. The rural churches who couldn't afford pianos and organs pointed to the lack of instruments mentioned in the NT and made that a doctrinal point; how much of that was making a virtue out of necessity is open to debate. That faction became the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, not to be confused with the rather liberal Congregationalists going by the United Church of Christ. I went to one of those churches in Midland as a young Christian; they're conservative evangelicals with a few quirks that I'll mention in a bit.

The city-slickers with the keyboards became the Disciples of Christ and started to become more denominational and more liberal as the years went by. This branch tends to go by Christian Church rather than Church of Christ. However, the conservative wing of the Disciples edged away from their more liberal colleagues; these independent Christian churches don't have a formal denominational structure, but have as a focal point with the Christian Standardmagazine and its parent Standard Publishing; Standard is sort to these indy-Christians what Lifeway is to the Southern Baptists.

These churches can be rather large, especially here in Kentucky where this bunch got a large part of its start; Southland Christian is the biggest church in Lexington and Southeast Christian in Louisville (nicknamed Six Flags over Jesus by some Sullivan U folks; we have our graduation ceremonies there) is the biggest church in Kentucky.

"What about those quirks?" I head the Peanut Gallery ask. Well, one quirk is that they do communion every Sunday. That's not unheard of in evangelical churches, for I know of a couple of Vineyard churches that do communion every Sunday; I remember that the Columbus Vineyard had streamlined thingsso that they had what I termed "communion lunchables", "peel open the top to get to a communion wafer, then peel off another cover to get at the juice."

What's a little off is their view of baptism as part of salvation. However, if you include an aversion to "once saved, always saved" which they have, that would make baptism the first major act of obedience in a believer's walk. If you have to maintain your believer credentials like a teacher taking continuing ed courses (a forced analogy, I know), baptism is your first continuing ed credit.

That's one that I struggled with back in the late 80s when I went to Wheeler Road Church of Christ; that seemed to be a bit works oriented for my taste when I cut my teeth on the idea of salvation being by faith alone. However, James will point out that "faith without works is worthless" and baptism isone thing that believers did in the New Testament.

For now, I'll cut them some slack on baptism. They seem to have their act together and the Holy Spirit does seem to be at home there; no, it isn't charismatic, but my spirit feels at home once I get that baptism issue out of my craw.

CCM: Missing a Few Face Cards

I boo-booed; the Michael Card concert is next week. We got a nice drive on a warm early-fall evening and a stop at Dairy Queen from our abortive trip.

One thing that struck me is that the CCM scene I remember from the late 80s was much more diverse than it is today. I don't recall Card getting any airplay to speak of since his Joy in the Journey greatest-hits album in 1994. It might be that Card doesn't play the CCM game; his Wikipedia states that "He has at times distanced himself from the CCM industry by criticizing the promotion of personalities over musical content and the shifting emphasis away from God in order to sell more albums."

The music played on most Christian channels, K-LOVE in particular, tend to be less diverse and less theological than it was twenty years ago. I don't recall hearing Nicole C. Mullen for most of the 00s, but she has been active recording in a more "urban contemporary" vein that might not get heard on K-LOVE and its clones. Other than Mandisa, I can't think of a black artist that gets regular airplay, but back in the late 80s, you saw the Winans (both BeBe and CeCe and the Winans gospel act), Larnell Harris and Earth, Wind and Fire falsetto Phillip Bailey (who put out two good CCM albums in the late 80s while EWF was on hiatus) get regular airplay.

It might be that the Christian music universe has grown larger and has room to splinter; even K-LOVE does a slightly rockier Air One channel aimed at a pre-boomer crowd. Cities with a large black population will have a seperate black-flavored channel and Christian radio will often have a edgy channel, a K-LOVE clone and an old-school channel. Sometimes the old-schooller will be really old-school and play white southern Gospel but others will play classic CCM that the K-LOVEs have ignored.

Coming back from shopping the other day, said old-school Lexington station played Steve Camp's Whatever You Ask. Circa 1987 per this page. Maybe I'm an oldtimer, less than two years removed from being AARP eligable, but I miss a lot of '80s stuff and the ecclective nature of early CCM that had room for Twila Paris and Petra and the Winans.

LIbrary Musings

I need to get back to blogging more often. I had the whole week off this week, but haven't blogged since last Sunday.

For the second straight week, we watched the end of a football game at a restaurant. Last week, it was a Fresno-State Wisconsin game in metro Milwaukee with a bunch of excitable cheeseheads at a Champps sports grill; that was the first time I saw the end of a game at a "sports bar" loosely defined. Today, it was UK-Louisville in a near-deserted Ruby Tuesday's in Lexington.

There was a method to our madness; our cable system didn't have the game. The local Insight cable system in Lexington took the ESPN-U feed and had it on their normal side of the cable, but the SatStar system that is the captive cable outfit for our apartment complex didn't do that. Thus, we had a very leasurly lunch and caught the whole second half at RT.

After getting past some turnoveritis in the third quarter, UK hung on to win 31-27, surviving a UL hail-mary at the buzzer.

More blogigng later; Eileen has her books and we're heading back home to catch Notre Dame-Michigan State and a Michael Card concert this evening.

Catanomics

I haven't blogged on the President's speech yet, but here's a lolcat for the occasion-




There are a number of things we need to think of about the proposed law and what it will do to both businesses and people. Getting Manuel Lebour emergency health care isn't high on my worry list, but I'll discuss what is when I'm more awake.

Four Sigma Phelps

I was looking at a 2002 post where I described gay-basher Fred Phelps as a "Four-sigma conservative." My footnote at the time, before Phelps became a household word, for "Four-sigma" was "Four standard deviations from the mean-to the right of 99.997 of the population. OK, maybe he's only 2.5σ."

As we've gone forward through the decades, that first tongue-in-cheek estimate may well be right. If we had a town of 40,000 like my hometown of Midland, would we have someone who is more kick-the-cat homophobic than Phelps? As Descartes said before he disappeared, "I think not." If we do 1/(1-99.997%) we'll have 33,333, which is within hailing distance of Midland's population.

An anti-abortion protester, James Pouillon, got killed in Owosso (about an hour south of Midland) on Friday ; the shooter seemingly blew his top and killed a gravel-company owner after killing the in-your-face protester, who was across the street from Owosso Hight before school started in the morning.

Owosso has about 15,000 folks, and one could argue that Pouillon would be a four-sigma pro-lifer. I don't recall anyone in Midland who had his verve on abortion, and we're a rather conservative town. Phelps makes him look tame, so four sigma might be a low estimate.

So, I might not have been too far off on Phelps. Do I hear five Sigma? Going once... going twice...or are there more hard-core bigots than I think

Cash Bar at the Memorial

Eileen and I went to a very nice wedding Saturday afternoon; her cousin got married in Milwaukee. They rented out the War Memorial's Fitch Plaza, which had a gorgeous overview of Lake Michigan. They had a near-perfect day for it, with clear skies, temperatures in the 70s and a nice breeze to cool off the effects of being out in the sun. Also, a park to the north of the memorial had a slew of kites flying above; I Googled a bit and found just now that they have a kite festival this weekend. The only thing missing was a TV to keep tabs on the Michigan-Notre Dame game ;-).

The service was nearly pitch perfect, with one of the couple's churchmates doing some acoustic praise music, a great sermon on the wedding staple of 1 Corinthians 13-("Love is patient; Love is kind...") and a three-hanky rendition of Steven Curtis Chapman's I Will Be Here.

However, I was taken a notch aback during the prelude to the reception. They had hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar (pop was free) back towards the memorial proper, a striking design done by the guy who did the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Eero Saarinen. The picture here has a shot of the base of the memorial, which has a reflecting pool with an eternal flame (at least it seems like it would be) and the names of the local dead in WWII and the Korean and Vietnam "conflicts" inscribed in the black marble along the edges of the pool.

Saturday being the day after 9/11, I was in a reflective mood on the folks who have made our current freedoms possible and have sacrificed for this American experiment. I went around to look at the names on the memorial, not looking for any name in particular but reflecting on the individual and collective sacrifices. I couldn't get to the front left part of the memorial as seen in the picture, since the cash bar was right in front of that part of the memorial.

I'm not an overly-patriotic god-n-country guy, but that seemed almost like the moneychangers in the temple. American culture seems to work well to turn churches into social clubs and memorials into bars, blissfully downplaying the Savior who died for us all as well as the folks who died to keep this thing called America going.

That's not to say that the people who were enjoying their cokes, beers, cheese and crackers and chips and salsa weren't godly and patriotic, but like El Nino getting lost in the Santaization of Christmas, the post-wedding party seemed to blow right past the reason for the facility being their in the first place.

"Socialism is an evil, and it can't stop regulating"

Flint's most famous human product, Michael Moore, has turned his cameras toward Wall Street in his latest big-screen foray, Capitalism: A Love Story. That's a colon in the title, and we know what the colon produces.

Anyway, the money quote from this piece is this

"Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil," the two-hour movie concludes.

"You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy."

The bad guys in Moore's mind are big banks and hedge funds which "gambled" investors' money in complex derivatives that few, if any, really understood and which belonged in the casino.

Let's tackle the low-hanging fruit first from front to back. I'm one of those few folks who understands most of those derivatives, although I'm rather green on credit default swaps. Those were designed to help people hedge risks, essentially credit insurance, but the models were ill-equipped to handle the meltdown in the housing market.

Even people who understand things can get burned badly by them. For instance, the two gentlemen who won the Nobel Econ price for their work on option pricing theory, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (the Black-Scholes formula is the standard option pricing model; Fisher Black died before the Nobel folks came a'calling), were on the payroll of Long Term Capital Management, the first hedge fund most people had ever heard of. LTCM got totaled by faulty modeling of foreign currency options during the 1998 "Asian Contagion" that rocked many developing country currencies. 

Capitalism and democracy can co-exist nicely; while there have been big-business friendly goons autocrats of the right in the past, the left tends to be more autocratic.  I can trot out another film subject as People's Exhibit A, Caesar Chavez I of Venezuela, who (put on the hasmat gear) Oliver Stone has done a documentary on. "Stone film says U.S. demonises Chavez." Nay, he does a decent job of that himself, closing any radio and TV station that disagrees with him.

However, Moore is right in part, that capitalism is evil in that it stems from greed. People should be more generous with their money. However, that greed doesn't go away in a socialist state; it just gets turned to less healthy endeavors, like political power seeking, theft and laziness ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work"). Give Hedrick Smith's The Russians a read to see how those issues played out in the USSR of the 1970s.

At least in a market economy, people have a healthy outlet for their greed by making stuff or selling services that people can use; the creativity that gets spent in unproductive activities in a command economy can be used to make new things that people like, like movies bashing AIG.

If I can borrow Churchill's line on democracy, a free market broadly defined (our friends on the libertarian right would argue it isn't free enough, but we'll ignore them for the moment) is the worst form of economy... with the exception of everything else we tried. Economy democracy is where 51% of the voters can rape and pillage the other 49%; People's Exhibit B is Bobby Mugabe; well, he only claimed to have a majority, but give me some poetic license.

Neither are pure; Capitalism is good at creating wealth while government intervention/socialism is good at getting wealth to people who have problems getting enough to get by. You need a blend.

By the way, Mike. If you hate Capitalism so much, why not put your love story in the public domain rather than sell tickets? People invest money in your projects and get nice returns. Let's do our best Church Lady and say "Could it be..... Capitalism?"

Football Musings

Football is back, as the colleges kicked off the regular season with a lot of target-practice games for the big-conference schools. Michigan looked good in their 31-7 spanking of Western Michigan. Rich Rodriguez has not one but two freshman quarterbacks who look very good; Tate Forcier can both run and pass out of the RR spread, and Denard "Shoelace" Robinson is a 4.3-40 bolt of lightning that looks like the second coming of RR's WV QB Pat White.

I'm not sure what to think of the overpracticing story; here's the original Detroit Free Press article. Players are only supposed to have 8 hours of supervised workouts in the offseason and 20 hours during the season and it appears that, if the players are on the up-and-up, they blew through those limits. How much of that extra time was unsupervised might be key; if they put in 20 hours in the weight room but were only supervised for 3, they might be in technical compliance of the rules.

However, like UofM found out two years ago, sometimes the targets shoot back. Iowa nearly had Northern Iowa pull an Appy State on them, having to block UNI game-winners twice in the last seven seconds to save the day. Navy was a two-point-conversion away of going to OT with Ohio State; OSU ran back the conversion pass for a defensive two-pointer. A hard-times Syracuse program, with former Duke PG Greg Paulus starting at QB for the Orange, took Minnesota into OT before falling. 

UK looked very good against Miami, with slash man Randall Cobb running for one score out of a real Wildcat formation and catching another TD. Whether they can hang with the powers in the SEC remains to be seen, but they made short work of Miami in a neutral-site game in Cincy. The game was on ESPN-U, which our cable doesn't have, but I got to see the first quarter during lunch out and the third quarter in the coffee shop of a bookstore; Eileen browsed while I did what any male worth his salt would do ;-).

___________

Here's an interesting thought. Southern K-12 schools tend to do their school year from mid-August through May, getting their first semester done by Christmas; that has been the pattern in Florida, Texas and Kentucky. A football star who can arrange his schedule to get his schooling done in 3.5 years can graduate in December and start college in January. The youngster then gets a full semester and summer term under his belt before football starts in the fall and has gone through spring practice with the team; Tate Forcier was one of the guys who went that route for UofM.

Thus, folks like Forcier can have enough understanding of the system to play as a "true freshman" as opposed to "redshirt freshmen" who practice with the team their freshman year but not play and then have four years of eligibility to go. January starts are sort of pink-shirts; they've got an off-season of practice time in before they start.

Michigan schools are required by law not to start until after Labor Day, which means that the first semester doesn't get done until mid-January, too late to start college early; I was in position to get done in 3.5 years myself, but would be sitting around until summer term or spring quarter in quarter schools, so I took a rather leisurely senior year instead. Michigan footballers can't do that pink-shirt trick.

More Popular than Jesus

We've been in Lexington for a bit over two years now, but it still amazes me how folks here absolutely bleed University of Kentucky (I almost went with UK from the get-go but some foreign readers might think we have a bunch of Anglophiles here) blue and white. Since there are no major league sports in Kentucky, all the local devotion tends to flow to UK.

A great example was a guy we were tailing on Man O' War (our main southern drag in Lexington) yesterday. Right above the license plate, he had a normal-sized Jesus fish medallion. Off to the right, he had a UK sticker roughly four times the size of the fishy, and to the left, a blue-and-white cat claw twice the size of the fish.

Even when you're never more than shouting distance away from a Baptist or Christian church here in Lexington, it would be uncomfortably fair to say that UK is more popular than Jesus, to borrow from John Lennon. At least it appeared to be for that one guy, where the UK hardware outpaced the holy hardware by about 6-1 in square-footage.

Pay Me Now or (Maybe) Pay Me Later

Here's an interesting BBC piece on various scientific fixes to excessive CO₂ and climate change. Instead of working to control CO₂ , we could either extract it from the athmosphere or do other things to mitigage global warming, like add extra salt water to the clouds to make them more reflective.

Here's the conversation-starting quote from chair of the study cited in the article, Dr. John Shepherd-

He said: "It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing CO2 emissions, we are headed for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future.

"Geo-engineering and its consequences are the price we may have to pay for failure to act on climate change."

I added some italics. Such terraforming of Terra may be needed. Then again, it may not.

Putting a bib on a messy kid is prudent, but if bibs cost $1000 each, I'll be happy to clean up after the kid, especially if there's a high likelihood that he won't make that much of a mess.

If we're going to spend multiple billions of dollars to speed up the process of weaning us from fossil fuels (it will happen eventually anyway as things run out) and we're not really sure it will make a dent, why not save the money to take care of other pressing needs and use the terraforming stuff if we need to later on?

#1 in Lusaka

I have in-laws in Zambia, so any Zambian story catches my attention.

It seems that their president, Rupiah Banda, was having a press conference on the grounds of their State House under some shady trees that monkeys inhabited. One of those monkeys was, ahem, very relieved to have the president serving under him.

Well, that's not going to happen again, at least not with monkeys; they've been banned by Banda and humanely moved elsewhere.

"It's a bird, it's a plane... splat... it's a bird... no, it's a monkey."