lucky in love

Breaking the rule

2011-08-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

about not discussing religion or politics, Ross and I talked religion last night. We annoyed Janett and Kim a little bit. It started "innoccuously" enough when I asked how evolution led us to reinterpret original sin.
Ross is a biblical Christian, and isn't inclined to accept evolution as the story of creation. After a long discussion I came away with the image of Ross's bible as a beaker containing a quart of extra extra extra pure virgin olive oil, light golden, clear and complete.
I sometimes use a cliche about religion informing science as science informs religion, and that led me to imagine pouring a cup of clean water into the beaker. Of course the two liquids did not mix, and I next imagined putting the beaker on a blender, and obtaining an immulsion, pale and no longer transluscent. Not only had the oil lost its lovely appearance, it had also lost it's suitability for cooking or as a salad dressing. This imagery provided me with a deeper appreciation of literal adherence to the Bible.

It's all about me

2011-08-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

Some of you may remember the old "Lucky in Lover", feeling the need to alert, explain, and forewarn of things. Well, that's still me. So I took several months off, fearful of screed fatigue on the part of myself and the occasional visitor.
But now I'm on an adventure as I explained the other day, and have a lot of experiences to describe. I won't do that right here or now, but I was just reviewing my Facebook posting over the last week, and it's very first person-y.

Who would want to read a travelogue or journal if every paragraph started with "I"?

It's well known how I admire daughter Kim's writing style; informative, casual and a little elegant, seldom judgemental. I doubt that I can copy that style. But maybe I could attempt to write more observations of milieu and tempo, without pontificating about motivations or integrity.

In any case, Janett and I are very happy to be in Las Vegas, enjoying Kim and Ross's hospitality, and trying to shape a relationship with a slightly self-absorbed one year old. We'll see how the narrative develops.

Janett and I have moved

2011-08-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

For any reader not acquainted with the recent history, this past winter we began to think of moving to Las Vegas. The first cause was daughter Kim, who we wanted to be closer to in case she ever got lonely. Also, Kim understands Janett pretty well and they can share ups and downs. If anything ever happened to me I think Kim could offer Janett a pretty firm arm to lean on. (which is not to slight Jason, Val, Nate, Stephy, or Noah since I myself am inclined to notoriously bad responses to Janett's worst moments. offering support like "Buck up, little camper" and advise like "Quit your whining."
Then there's the hot and dry thing which we hope will have beneficial effects on Janett's fibromyalgia symptoms. Also, after 45 years I'm still a white knuckle driver in January and February, and I slipped and fell on the ice three times last year. Luckily nothing broke, but maybe I was pressing my luck.
Then there was the condo lure. we picked out a really pretty one at a low price and had our offer accepted - Then got turned down for a mortgage. Kind of a "no credit history" thing since we've been living off a debit card for five or six years and paying cash for cars etc. We'll spend six months to a year establishing some good history and then apply again. Latest news is that prices could go even lower! Fortunately Kim was on the scene and able to find a nice little apartment for us for the mean time.
Early on in our deliberations we opted for the keep it simple approach to moving.
1 Trade in both our cars for a newer more reliable van. Taking one vehicle reduced the chance of mechanical mishap, reduced Janett's apprehensions about my falling asleep at the wheel and driving off a mountain, and riding together increased our enjoyment of the trip.
2. Move only what fit in the van. We figured we could buy furniture here cheaper than paying to move our old furniture, which might not have fit into a condo floor plan very well anyway. We were a little sad, of course, to give up things that had a family history. Janett was able to sell off several nice things for a little money, but also to insure a good home for those items. Oh, and we cheated a bit by parcel posting about 15 boxes of varying sizes to Kim.
I think our approach worked out well, but the proof will be in purchasing another car and furniture without spending a whole lot of money.

We're here in Las Vegas now, staying with Kim, Ross, and Remy until our apartment is cleaned up. (September 10th?). I downloaded skype so I could be in touch with the grandchildren left behind. Maybe I'll blog a little more often now to share how things are working out.

Winner

2011-07-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

For 4 months, the title of my last blog, " I'm a loser" has conveyed to any visitor a sense of self revulsion I don't really feel. So, I'm updating to correct that impression. But I think I feel more out of the game right now than a winner or a loser. The word i would have chosen last week to describe my sense of self would have been ephemeral, but with connotations only I may associate with the word.

I mean the dictionary says ephemeral means "intended for short duration" or something like that. I think of a dream-like state, insubstantial but with with faint luminescence, transient and haunting. Well, I guess the transient part fits, but the rest I must have added myself . Maybe that's the poet in me. Which reminds me of the quote from my father. "Ireland was a land of poets and pig farmers, and we weren't the poets" False modesty.

I'm such a loser...

2011-02-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

I came to my blog site to connect to Kim's blog, and thought I should post a little something, which I did, commenting on my indifference to Khaddafi and Wisconsin's governor, noting this indifference is not my usual reaction to the news. More commonly, I am keeping a scorecard on the class war and can get pretty upset when I sense that the other guys are winning. I said I was more preoccupied of late with generating revenue at our little tax/bookkeeping service, and feeling thankful to Kim for provideing a supplement to Janett, which seems to be diminishing her fibroid myalgia symptoms without the crazy ups and downs (mostly downs) usually accompanying prescription medications.

I posted my comments, then viewed the blog, which is my customary method of proof-reading. and wondered at the intuit ads showing up next to my post. Oooops I'd taken the wrong turn at dashboard and posted to our business blog. Strangely, I found it impossible to copy the text from that blog to a post here. That raises some concern. Has Blogger changed something? Will I still be able to copy in articles of interest, some several pages in length, to my blog?

Love to all.

Good news from South Bend

2011-01-17T06:19:00.000-08:00

Recruiting for the 2011 freshman class will continue for a couple of weeks before the day the young men must formally sign their letters of intent, and lock in their choices. It is not premature to comment, however, on progress to date, particularly as regards Notre Dame.
Irish fans are elated at the verbal commitment this weekend from Ishaq Williams, and the recommitment of Aaron Lynch. Both are top rated defensive ends. Stephon Tuitt is another top ranked defensive end previously committed, and still on board. All of these kids are ranked in the top 100 of their peers. Ben Councell, another defensive end verbally committed, may be upgraded to the top 100 on the basis of the very strong impression he made at a recent all-star game. Of these four defensive ends, Williams and Councell actually project to be most promising as playing outside linebacker positions. Louis Nix recruited last year at the nose tackle position, promises to round out the best defensive line in college football in the next few years. Of course, Manti Teo, a sophmore superstar in 2010, and Carlo Calabrese, the other leading tackler on the 2010 team, another sophmore, complete a "front seven" likely to be dominating and fun to watch. ND has also received commitments from 4 or 5 promising defensive backs adding needed depth in that category.
It's almost embarassing mention Carrico, Rabassa and Springman , defensive linemen or Jarret Grace, a promising linebacker, as afterthoughts. All of these four could compete for playing time, and one or two could be asked to switch to the offensive line, where they would be equally promising.
All of this defensive power recalls the Brian Kelly quote, that he could build an offense, but that he needed to recruit a defense. Well he certainly done that. Also interesting to a ND fan is the diversity of geographic origins. The six "top 100" recruits this year come from NY, PA, GA, FL, NM, and CA. Compare this to other powerhouses like Ohio State, Texas, LSU and Florida, all of whom's "top 100' recruits come from within their own state.
Less one suspect that this effusiveness over the defensive side of the line masks concerns regarding the offensive side, Coach Kelly has recruited a SC quarterback, a TX running back, an IL receiver and a potential slot receiver from CA, ideally suited to his "spread offense" scheme. Add a top rated offensive lineman from CT to the previously counted "top 100" offensive lineman from NM, and perhaps the best tight end in the country, the PA kid. Another offensive lineman (from IN) is the promising kid brother of a current starting offensive guard. Oh, and ND has signed up an excellent kicker (MI) and remains in the running for 5 star running back from NJ .
Obviously ND fans should be elated about the overall quality of this class, the extremely talented defensive players, making recruiting inroads into the deep south, and the "RKG" on offense to bring Kelly's plans to fruition. For this long time ND fan, the outreach to a national recruiting base is particularly edifying and elicits complements to what must be, start to finish, the hardest working staff in college ball.

Babysitting

2010-12-11T11:32:00.001-08:00

"Animals" I think was the first thing Owen said to me when I walked in his front door. "Animals, Owen?" "Yeah, come on," walking down the hall toward his room. "Wait, I want to say Hi to Malachy and your mommy and daddy." It was Mally who I needed most to speak to, It wasn't long ago that I was his playmate, sounding board, and unconditional love benefactor, and I never want him to think either of us have outgrown the relationship.

I think he understands. Last fall one night I was caring for him at our "old" apartment. We walked to the Burger King a couple blocks away, holding hands at the crossings and talking about continuing our game of City Cousin Country Cousin when we got home, kind of an unstructured role playing that encourages his imagination in developing scenarios dialogue and characters. "Poppo", he said, "You know you're my best friend." "Well, I used to think that I was, but then you met Calvin, and he was like your best friend, and then you met Ross, and he was your best friend, and now I was starting to think Frankie is your new best friend."

"Poppo, you know how I am...when I make a new friend for a while I have to treat them special so they know I like them." Very nice of him to say, but I know I'm not as energetic at play as his newer friends, and it's not just a social stratagem that makes him happier when one of the younger guys walk in than when I do. So the trade off works, he's OK with Owen currently monopolizing my time, and I'm OK with his asking "Calvin/Ross/Frankie, do you want to play?"

When I get to their house, though and before I leave, I complement him on his good looks, dancing skill, strength, helpfulness, or academic advancement and try to ask him one or two questions about recent experiences that I think maybe no one else has asked, because I always want to be special to him as he is to me.

Sure enough it was animals Owen was talking about, and soon after his brother and parents left we had brought ten of his stuffed creatures from his closet to the living room. I organized a game of hide and seek. The hippo buried her face in the corner of of the sofa cushion and counted til fifty while Owen and I helped the others hide. Then she searched high and low til she'd found all but two, whom Owen couldn't wait for her to find and excitedly retrieved and ran to her with.

Then he pulled five little cushions from the sofa and arranged them in a large square with one resting centered on top, and this he said was breakfast, and we seated the animals around the table, but were having a little trouble keeping them all sitting up, and before he got frustrated I suggested a trip to McDonalds, where incredibly he ordered apple slices instead of his old favorite french fries. After we shared the apple slices, he cleaned the table taking one article at a time, including the caramel dip which he hadn't sampled, to the waste paper basket, built into a a cabinet in a little alcove with the top a half foot over his head. After I lifted him the first time. he stood on tip toes and tossed the remaining items into the receptacle without being able to see the large round opening but knowing where it was.

Having still an hour to kill I suggested a trip to Elgin to see Mommo and the kitties. He was pleased with the idea, and in the car mentioned "treats" a couple of times, and I tried to remember what we had in the pantry that might please him. After greeting and hugging Mommo he went in search of the kitties and asked for treats again and I realized he'd been thinking of treats for the kitties, so I got out the yellow Temptation bag and had him reach in and grab a few for each cat in turn. Laboring under the misunderstanding, I'd already asked Janett about a treat for Owen and she'd suggested a some fragements of Aldi brand tostito chips and milk served in a double shot glass of mine that we've found to be just his size. He asked for seconds on the chips and we obliged, but he hadn't finished by the time we had to leave for Dundee to reunite him with his family, so we poured the remainders into a little plastic sandwich bag which he held happily onto on our return ride.

We beat his folks home. I invited him into the house a couple times, but he preferred we stay outside and walk across the snowy lawns; he must like the feel of snow crunching under his feet, and he was amused by my concern that his feet would get cold We made a big deal of occasionally stomping our feet on the sidewalk to get the snow off our shoes. Eventually I lured him into the house on the pretext of being sure the dog, Guiness, was alright.

Stephie Mark and Malachy got home soon, and after asking Mally how he'd enjoyed the movie and whether there were any scary parts, I was ready to say good-by. They were all going to lunch so I told Stephie about the chips, and she asked me how I'd done strapping Owen into the child seat, and I admitted I'd gotten the shoulder straps on and clipped together, but hadn't been able to hook up the lower strap. Poppo, like everyone else, isn't perfect.

Random Sampling?

2010-12-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

Did you ever notice the "next blog" caption at the top of your page? Doi you ever click on it? It's cold in our apartment this morning and the HVAC man wont get here for a couple of hours, so for diversion I clicked on it several times.
There were a couple pages featuring friends and family photographs, one hosted by a bar showing people having a good time, one by a collector showing stuff he'd found that was in a foreign language, and various other miscellany, like road trip photos.
But easily, over half the pages were sponsored by runners that talked about conditioning and events. One page's header featured the comment,"Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win."

I guess I'm relieved that most peoples' blogs are not sbout what's wrong with the world and how powereless we are collectively and individually. What a bummer that would be. It would be nice if there were some blogs about how Christianity, Christian faith, ethics and charity will redeem the world, but I didn't find any of those. But the running thing was curious to me. Should I infer that this subculture embodies a community of sharing and caring, or that runners are obsessive types, who when not running are thinking about running?

My brother Mike and sister in law Molly are enthusiasts, always running, biking, or skiing, and not half heartedly. Their activities seem to make them very happy and appreciative of the environment, and also more conscious of now to manage a healthy life style than I would care to be. Given our close relationship and my respect for their achievements, I hesitate to ask whether there's something narcissistic involved.

So, I don't know. Perhaps if you click tne next blog caption repeatedly, you'll find a different pattern of occurrences.

PS I continued my research and may have to coorect my statistics. My next samle contained several bycicling blogs, a few shoe(?) blogs and more family and friend blogs. Still not a lot of pessimism/hope blogs, but I found this picture. Do you think it's photo-shopped?

Korea North vs South

2010-12-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

The only Korean I've ever know personally worked at an accounting firm with me and was pleasant and pretty and does not personify my observation that the Koreans are a fractious lot, except that her parents were 7th day Adventists and did not feel that their daughters should succumb to a western lifestyle and certainly should not feel free to choose their own husbands.
My earliest recollection of a radio newscast was about President Eisenhower agreeing to a truce settling the Korean conflict, and I remember the names of Syngman Rhee as leader of South Korea and Kim Il Sung as leader of the communist North Korea.
Later my sketchy knowledge of that episode was fleshed out slightly by fitting the conflict into the cold war strategy of containment defined by American senior diplomat George Kennan, as not fighting the Soviet Union, but opposing efforts to expand their influence.
At the end of WW II the Japanese withdrew from Korea which they had invaded and controlled from early in the 20th century. The Russians moved in and occupied the northern half and the US had moved in and occupied the southern half of the peninsula. Both the great powers installed their clients in positions of power, then withdrew. After Rhee, who had lived in the US for 33 years before returning to Korea after the war, established a South Korean state, rejecting a UN proposed peninsula wide plebiscite, an election Kim Il Sung thought he would have won, the North Koreans invaded the South in June 1950, quickly over running Seoul and pushing the South Korean forces, and a contingent of American troops into a tiny southernmost corner of the country, maybe a hundred square miles around the port city of Pusan. Being reinforced by American forces from Japan, the South Koreans held on to this enclave, while General Doug MacArthur devised and implemented a strategy of an American led invasion at Inchon, a couple hundred miles north, close to the overrun capital of Seoul.

Being counter attacked in the south by a growing United Nations force and threatened with being cut off by MacArthurs invasion force the weakened North Koreans fled back across the nominal border, the 38th parallel. MacArthur pursued them, invading the north and advancing nearly to the Yalu river, the North Korean border with China. In October of 1950 Chinese communist forces entered the conflict pushing the UN forces south and again taking the South Korean capital of Seoul in January 1951. The retreat of the American forces in the frigid winter and inhospitable mountainous terrain was disheartening and a torturous ordeal for the UN (mostly American) forces. The UN forces reorganized defenses south of Seoul and counterattacked, regaining the capital in March of 1951. The war continued for two more years, but combat was localized around the 38th parallel, each side losing thousands of soldiers in attacks on objectives providing tactical advantage, both sides using massive artillery barrages to support their infantry in the costly battles.

A truce was signed in June of 1953, but a peace treaty was never negotiated. leaving the two Koreas in a state of war for the last 57 years. Occasionally the North Koreans undertake some aggressive action, like the shelling of the islands last week.

It would seem the South has prospered during the last half century while the North has not. The South has industrialized and is a successful exporter while the North has imposed a communist style planned economy, struggling at times to feed its people, but investing heavily in its military and developing an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

But political turmoil has continued in the South. Labor unions and students often engage in violent confrontations with the elected governments. Neither side seems really content or secure. Syngman Rhee was forced to resign in 1958, after alienating most of the country with autocratic policies that approached dictatorial government. Kim Il Sung held power until his death in 1994 and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Il, who is now reportedly ill and preparing to transfer power to his son.

The US and South Korean governments are not sure of how to deal with the North Koreans, mindful of the always present possibility of a million north Korean soldiers streaming across the border. They seem to be relying on the Chinese to exert some stabilizing influence, because the Chinese strategy is to achieve economic power and prefers stability to conflict. Also, in the event of war, the Chinese have to worry about a million North Koreans streaming across their border - not combatants but unwelcome starving refugees.

Why can't we all just get along?

Often one player, or one play, becomes emblematic

2010-11-28T20:27:00.000-08:00

to fans of a sporting event. For Notre Dame fans the fouth quarter scoring drive which put ND ahead to stay was a thing of beauty for several reasons, partly because that scoring drive featured several runs by fan favorite Robert Hughes. Maybe I'll post a little more on that subject later.

Just now, I'd like to express admiration and appreciation to the Notre Dame defense. All the USC scoring came off ND turnovers, interceptions or fumble, within ND's own 40 yard line and the Trojans' only touchdown was scored after recovering a fumble on the 2 yard line, and took 4 plays to score. The defense never looked shaken by the repeated turn overs, they appeared resolved to deny Southern Cal the benefit of those take aways, holding them to field goals in the three other instances.

There were heroics from the offense too. Michael Floyd leading the first scoring drive, and blocking downfield for runners when not catching passes, Cierre Wood running 28 yards on a draw play with 30 seconds left in the first half to set up the second score, and freshman quarterback Tommy Rees who might have made mistakes contributing to those turnovers, but never looked shaken or uncertain in the face of a very good USC defense. And of course the unsung heroes are the offensive linemen, oft maligned but, like the defense, firm in their resolve last night, and playing their best game of the year.

But this is the image most Irish fans will recollect when they think of last night's game:

Lyrics

2010-11-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

It may not surprise you to read that I like Irish songs, most all kinds, brave defiant songs of rebellion, sad songs of lost love and pretty girls, and uniquely Irish silly songs like this one, which I just linked on Facebook and thought I'd post here so you can see what makes me smile.

The Irish Rover

Traditional

On the fourth of July eighteen hundred and six
We set sail from the sweet cove of Cork
We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks
For the grand city hall in New York
'Twas a wonderful craft, she was rigged fore-and-aft
And oh, how the wild winds drove her.
She'd got several blasts, she'd twenty-seven masts
And we called her the Irish Rover.

We had one million bales of the best Sligo rags
We had two million barrels of stones
We had three million sides of old blind horses hides,
We had four million barrels of bones.
We had five million hogs, we had six million dogs,
Seven million barrels of porter.
We had eight million bails of old nanny goats' tails,
In the hold of the Irish Rover.

There was awl Mickey Coote who played hard on his flute
When the ladies lined up for his set
He was tootin' with skill for each sparkling quadrille
Though the dancers were fluther'd and bet
With his sparse witty talk he was cock of the walk
As he rolled the dames under and over
They all knew at a glance when he took up his stance
And he sailed in the Irish Rover

There was Barney McGee from the banks of the Lee,
There was Hogan from County Tyrone
There was Jimmy McGurk who was scarred stiff of work
And a man from Westmeath called Malone
There was Slugger O'Toole who was drunk as a rule
And fighting Bill Tracey from Dover
And your man Mick McCann from the banks of the Bann
Was the skipper of the Irish Rover

We had sailed seven years when the measles broke out
And the ship lost it's way in a fog.
And that whale of the crew was reduced down to two,
Just meself and the captain's old dog.
Then the ship struck a rock, oh Lord what a shock
The bulkhead was turned right over
Turned nine times around, and the poor dog was drowned
I'm the last of the Irish Rover

So much going on - where to start?

2010-11-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

The big news lately has been our move around the corner to the first floor of a big house from the second floor of a bigger house. We may have given up a hundred+ square feet of living space, a LOT of closet space, and our precious little roofed porch, but somehow we seemed to have gained living space, and our lives are becoming more integrated since we have a more comfortable living room where we spend time together.

I commented previously, maybe here, maybe on Facebook, on how many Knights of Columbus activities required participation in the last couple months. At the last meeting the secretary announced he'd taken a job out of state and asked me to succeed him. The grand knight said I could but we'd have to obtain a letter of resignation from the other fellow and then accept nominations and have a vote. He asked me if I would mind continuing in my current post as well as assuming the new responsibilities. Fortunately someone pointed out that an officer can only hold one job at a time. Thank you very much. Yesterday I called Louie to check and see if the pancake breakfast was scheduled for today, because I had signed up to serve for a couple of hours. I was relieved and embarrassed when he told me the pancake breakfast was last week. More relieved than embarrassed.

I also have to think about registering for a tax preparer identification number this month before testing becomes a requirement. Doing so will so will exempt me from testing for three years, by which time I should have obtained sufficient continuing professional education credits to get my CPA license, and continue exempt from testing.

The cigarette saga continues. Cigarettes go for $7 per pack at Kane County gas stations and more at the Cook County stations, Janett and I each smoke more than a pack a day. I have philosophical objections to spending more on cigarettes than on groceries. I just can't justify spending over $20 a day on cigarettes. But rather than quit we look for economies. (Readers will please recall that I started smoking in high school when a pack of Camel straights cost $0.25.)
A couple of years ago, at the time of a previous tax increase, Janett and I availed ourselves of the option of buying our cigarettes over the Internet from an Indian tribal reservation outlet in upstate New York for $27 per carton. Then, this option was closed by part of last year's health bill. So we began to buy the economy brand at a Speedway gas station for $3.75 per pack, but weren't happy.
This week we got a call from the distributor for the Indian outlet who told us we can buy a different brand for $13 per carton, because this brand is wrapped in tobacco leaf (or brown paper?) and is classed as a cigar but still has filters and menthol flavoring. So we ordered a couple cartons to try them out. I'll let you know how this works out, although I do worry about the excise tax police googling cheap cigarettes, finding this blog and uncovering my machinations.

PS re the dark Irish as Celts. A wiki article yesterday acquainted me with a volume of Irish legend that that recounts the invasion of Ireland by Celtic people from the Iberian penninsula. This contradicts my inference that the Celtic people were originally more widespread over Europe and were pushed to the remote corners by other tribal invasions. I still believe the Celts at one time to have been spread over more of Europe, but I'll have to look further into it.

PPS Regarding airport procedures, how many bombers have been caught by the TSA procedures that have violated the privacy of, humiliated, and delayed millions of travelers. Zero? Not a very good trade off, not a bad jobs program, though. As always we'd like to follow the money, and learn who had the friends in congress to persuade the government to buy these screening machines which the GAO had previously rejected. The TSA rep on TV in response to Kathy Crowley's questioning whether, since airline bombers have all originated oversees, imposing these searches at American airports while not imposing them on travelers boarding flights oversees seemed reasonable, could cite only Israel as a foreign country that engages in such stringent measures, letting slip that Israel uses profiling, presumably exempting Jews and targeting Muslims. OK, there's a model to emulate, except of course, that it's illegal.

Careful what you wish for

2010-11-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

An article from the Christian Science Monitor.

Otherwise things are going OK with the move. We have a list of things to call the landlord about; furnace hasn't shut off for 12 hours but has been blowing cool air into the apartment, and at 33 degrees out we need more heat, and there was a sewer gas odor emanating from the basement yesterday. Then a few smaller things, we need someone (he or we) to call the city for garbage cans, we need a shower curtain rod, and would like to know when the washer and drier will be delivered.

Got to go. I'm going to pick up Mom's friend Carrie, who has volunteered to help.

partial repost of item from a couple years ago because of my mood.

2010-10-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

The Dark Irish

The term generally refers to Irish with dark complexions and black hair. I heard it theorized once that they descended from sailors from the Spanish Armada who swam ashore and stayed in Ireland. I think it's the Celtic strain, the old Irish from before the fairer Gaels and later the Vikings invaded. Even though the Celts were spread all over modern Europe 2500 years ago the bloodline and culture remain purest in the remote corners of the continent, Galicia in Spain, the Vendee in France and in the west of Ireland. The music and dance of these regions reflects a common heritage.

But, the phrase to me brings to mind the darker side of the Irish psyche. The inclination to wish ill to the prosperous, to suspect that their misfortunes result from conspiracies against them and betrayal, and to turn bitterly on their fallen heroes.

I think so too

2010-10-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

Blarney Green posted this at Rock's House. It touches on the core of my doubts about ND. That the school and the population it serves have evolved away from the working class roots and become effete

"Our problems for the last 8 years have gone far beyond scheme -- we changed from a tough team to a soft team. (One thing I will grant Bob Davie is that his teams weren't soft -- poorly coached, but not soft. But I digress...)

Scheme does play into whether or not you're tough. Weis had soft teams, and that softness was enhanced by the scheme (pass protect, finesse, etc.). Kelly seems to be paying lip-service to increasing our toughness -- and hell, maybe he means it. But you cannot morph a soft team into a tough one when they have to play this scheme.

Scheme isn't the only issue though. Our whole University is soft. Being a "Notre Dame Man" used to mean something -- there was pretty heavy emphasis on the "Man" part. Now it is meaningless, or it means you're a dork, or a rich kid with pussified ways and designer clothing. Our University leadership is not tough in any way, and so they don't breed toughness. All the stupid Disney-land shit we have to witness -- the fund-raising and pep rallies and the ability to buy an ND-logo-emblazoned Barco-Lounger for only a quarter millions dollars -- it all contributes. The fact that our coach has to schmooze stupid alumni clubs, and we can't tailgate properly because of fear of litigation, and "Legends" -- its all symptomatic of a deep malaise

ND is no longer ND. Its not even Stanford. Its less about character and more about GPA, less about being an athlete/scholar/leader and more about getting research dollars. ND doesn't breed toughness in its student body, why should we expect it in the football program?"

Three Reasons

2010-10-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

Three reasons not to buy a new TV:
1 We already have three TV's, smallish, appropriate for my viewing habits
2 Janett's worried about money (that one's too easy)
3 We're moving in a week and it'll just be one more thing.

So today we went to Costco and brought a TV. They had a big display of Vizeo flat screen LCD's (redundant?) by the front door when Janett was there last week, and they were priced very reasonably. She mulled it over for a few days, then we googled Vizeo, the brand name, and the reviews were good. So off we went.

I'd had a couple of things I wanted to get done today, but volunteered to go along and help. A lot of husbands shop with their wives at Costco, maybe something in the Costco ambiance or profile appeals to happily married couples. Or maybe the other guys go along for the samples like I do. Today I had a gyro style cucumber sauce on a cracker, then a buffalo wing while Janett had guacamole. I complemented the buffalo wing chef so enthusiastically he said I could have another, but I didn't. Then I had a little piece of quiche. Then I had a something else I don't remember, then some kind of fried potatos that you bake in the oven and finished up with a new kind of Dorito chip and a few pretzel crackers. Very generous of them, but it worked out OK for everybody. Janett bought a three-pack of the guacamole and a big bag of the chips, and the guacamole lady told Janett she could probably get hired as a sample lady too if she wanted to.

Oh, yeah and the TV. Well, the display was gone, and we felt a momentary misapprehension but browsed the TV aisles and found the same models even cheaper, so we brought the next size larger screen for the same price Janett had been prepared to pay. And feeling like successful shoppers we splurged on a little insulated zipper front vest with faux fur trim for Janett, for those days when neither a sweater or jacket really fills the bill.

We checked out and, maybe this will surprise you, stopped for a late lunch on the way out of the store. (I can't pass up a polish sausage priced at $1 and Janett feels the same way about a slice of supreme pizza.) And as we finished, a good day got even better with a phone call from daughter Kim, residing now with husband Ross and baby Remy in Las Vegas. They commiserated briefly over sleep lost to a teething baby, and then Kim asked Janett to warn me that my Facebook had been compromised. Pause. Janett listens to Kim, then asks me if I called Mark an idiot. "I called somebody an idiot, and his name might have been Mark, but it wasn't our (son in law) Mark, and it was a comment on a yahoo news post, not on facebook. They both admonished me that I shouldn't call people idiots.

I checked when I got home, and yahoo news had apparently rejected my comment, but there it was on facebook. Andy replied to Mark's comment "Mark, you're an idiot."
revealing to my entire facebook community the sort of guy that lurks behind the affable mask.

play list

2010-10-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

It's kind of a quiet cloudy Sunday. Janett and I went for a little ride just to get out of the house. We're still uncertain about our plans to move, but the realtor hasn't been able to show us the least expensive alternative (maybe the current tenant doesn't want to leave), so the house around the corner now seems our likeliest destination.
Yesterday Notre Dame lost to Navy,a mild disappointment, though in previous games including the few wins, the Irish haven't looked good to me. On the Notre Dame boards some posters are blaming the coaches, some the players. I'm blaming bad offense on the players and bad defense on the coaches. In any case our problems don't appear to be near solution, and now we'll have to worry about some of the better players recruited for next year beginning to hedge on their commitments.
I posted a couple of items to Facebook expressing my dismay about the current state of our nation. I won't get into it here. It's nice to express myself in facebook shorthand rather than with a longer blog, although I run the risk of annoying more readers there than here.
So I didn't really have anything to write about when I opened my blog today and decided to check my musical playlist. I'd lost the connection to at least eight of the previously linked songs, so I reconnected to a few of those, and addded links to a few different selections. Then I scrolled through the list playing only the first few bars of each song. That's a thing about my favorites, they got me right from the get go. The exception is Wildwood Flower by Reese Witherspoon which has a very nondescript opening. I might check to see if there's a version by the Carter family that starts with the melody, but I suspect the soundtrack version pretty well copies the original. Maybe I'll scroll through again to see if I think of something I missed. Then maybe I'll go read for a while.

PART TWO

Being interupted briefly to nibble cheeses and crackers while Janett and I watched an episode of a HomeTV show about how to rent an apartment, I did some reading. Alas, I didn't escape the internet but went to Wiki and read up on the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912-1913), and then on Serbia's struggle for independence in the first quarter of the previous century. The Balkan Wars were significant events in the lead up to the First World War.

Now, I'll try again to escape the internet.

PART THREE

Janett Prepared a fine dinner teryaki chicken, some kind of dirty rice also with bits of chicken, green beans, and little yellow potatos mashed with the skin on. Then we watched a most enjoyable Masterpiece Theater mystery presentation of a contemporary Sherlock Holmes. You can see why I feel I'm the luckiest man in the world.

Renting

2010-10-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

Acquaintances know Janett and I are now engaged in seeking a new apartment. We've been very happy in the current premises, the second floor of a very large house, complete with a ten by twelve roofed porch where we could enjoy a pretty day, chat and drink coffee. Janett is somewhat agorophobic and sometimes has anxiety attacks, so the porch was an easy way to get out of the house without having to deal with people, and she enjoyed tending a garden of potted plants.
Our landlord, (like our previous landlord) apparently overextended himself in the boom days, and ran into trouble. He probably hasn't made a mortgage payment in a year and the building is on the the sherriff's auction block. Janett, while saddened, is accepting, suggesting that this is God's way of helping us cut our rental expense before we start relying on social security for most of our income in January.
We'd like to rent a two bedroom for under $900 per month. That may sound unrealistic but remember we live in Elgin where such things are possible. So far we've considered three options, having looked at 5 or six other options that were unsuitable due to lack of space, a ban on pets, or some other reason. The three options priced out at roughly $700, $800, and $900. I think yesterday we eliminated the middle option, an apartment in a four flat, nice building, nice neighborhood, nice landlord, but not overly spacious, priced a little below market due to the time of year. Janett had an anxiety attack while looking at the apartment which suggests she felt a little crowded.
The upper rent place is right around the corner from our current address, newly renovated, not quite as commodious as our place here, but on the first floor. We sent the landlord an application and expect to hear back any day now.
We're not hounding him because we haven't yet been able to arrange a visit to the third and lowest priced option, the second floor of an older home on the other side of the river. The building appears well kept, but is not as large as the more expensive unit. We've driven by a couple times and Janett says she likes the neighborhood well enough, and has a good feeling about it. The realtor says the former tenant has not turned in the keys, and she's arranging for a locksmith to come out and change the locks so she can show the place. I told her we had another application pending and would appreciate her calling to let us know as soon as the unit is available for viewing, which she said she would do.
I think we'd be happy enough with the premises around the corner, and it would be less expensive than our current residence since here we pay all utilities, and there would pay only for electricity, but it would be nice to feel sure we'd made the best choice. I guess we're a little nervous and unsettled, but not really stressed out yet over the search. One small concern is that the utilities here might soon be shut off since the landlord has stopped asking us for our payments and presumably has stopped paying the bills.:o(
We hope a few close friends and relatives will be feeling the need on Nov 1 to work off the snickers bars, and I suspect they would vote that we move to the first floor around the corner.

PS. The around the corner rental features a little room across the hallway from our front door, which would serve nicely as a home office should we want to spend an extra 50 or 60 dollars per month. Hmmmm?

UPDATE

2010-10-18T06:53:00.001-07:00

Larry Lives. I went to IMDB and pulled up the Banger Sisters and found the screen credits, including "Man in bar", Larry Trask. I pulled up pictures, and they sure looked like our Larry, though a touch buffer, and credits were listed for this Larry as recently as last year. The earliest credits date back to the approximate time of Larry's move to the west coast. Unfortunately, no bio information on Larry Trask was offered.

So, either Larry Trask is our Larry and is still alive and getting by in Hollywood, or Larry Trask just looks like our Larry, who died in a car crash. Or neither. If I had subscribed to IMDB Pro I could have contacted Larry's agent and maybe requested biographical notes, but I didn't.

Maybe someone else who Googles Larry Trask will see this post, and perhaps have more information to share. Until then, let's go with the alive and getting by theory.

R Bar

2010-10-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

is the one establishment I've had experience with (under 3 different names) over 2 (2 1/2?) decades. It came up in conversation today because Janett ran into an old friend and former owner at Target and he said he was reaquiring the bar and asked her to let any of the former clientele she ran into know the old management would be returning. His name is Stan, and he was the fourth owner in our experience there. He sold the bar 4 years ago to Ernie, the week-end disco guy, and we haven't been there since. Ernie's purchase of the bar was a small, but not insignificant, part of our detachment.

In the year and a half prior to his acquisition Ernie would DJ at the bar on week-ends, I wasn't sure why they needed a DJ since they had a pretty good juke box. Maybe because guys like to visit bars where girls hang out and girls like to dance and the girls couldn't dance to the music I'd play on the jukebox, so maybe it was all my fault.

But Janett missed the juke box music, too. And she would request Ernie play some of her favorites and was always disappointed. She had accepted that his hoochie mama dance retinue didn't include songs like John Deere Green or David Allen Coe classics like the Rodeo Song or You Never Even Called Me by my Name, but it didn't seem right not to be able to hear the Rolling Stones reminisce about The Girl with Faraway Eyes or Wild Horses. So I'd have to go over to Ernie a couple times a night and remind him he'd told Janett he was going to play some such song. We kind of got on each other's nerves.

When Ernie took over we assumed he'd like to attract a younger, maybe a more hispanic crowd, not native to West Dundee, but drawn from near-by towns, and we and a lot of the old patrons probably would not be missed. Also about that time we'd moved from Dundee to Elgin. We'd lived a short block from the bar in West Dundee and that contributed to our identification with the place. And about that time Janett's closest friend and partying partner, the wife of my good friend, became very ill and subsequently passed away. Then they made it illegal to smoke on the premises. So for a lot of reasons the bar lost our patronage, and we missed it less than we might have expected.

I've observed that the crowd frequenting a bar seems to turn over every five or so years, so in our 20 plus years I guess we'd gone through three or four generations, and I'd survived the shifts in pretty girls and young scrappers pretty much with my grand old man status in fact. I'd even given up the pool table for the Golden Tee Game. But even without the advent of the Ernie years, maybe I was beginning to feel like it wasn't really my place any more.

Still, we'll probably call a few friends and go back to congratulate Stan, and to lift a glass to Larry and Celia, the spirited 30 somethings who owned the bar. then the Scot's Inn, when we'd first dropped by. They sold the bar and moved west because Larry wanted to be an actor, and legend has it, Larry even got a part in a movie, The Banger Sisters, I think. The legend goes on that they were killed in a car wreck not long after. The movies credits identified Larry as "Man in bar" Fair enough.

PS I think Rule 1 in Stan's "How to Run a Bar" book would be to hire really pretty bartenders, so if you like really pretty bartenders drop in and see.
.

Randall Road

2010-10-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

A drive on Randall Road in the northwest suburbs of Chicago leaves me with a feeling of incredulity. From Lake in the Hills to Crystal Lake, a stretch of more than five miles, shopping centers and strip malls line the six lane highway. On the same road, further south there's another similar stretch from St Charles to Aurora, as well as a shorter strip in Elgin and South Elgin, in between the two longer stretches. I haven't done the numbers, but I feel there must be a thousand retailers in shiny new stores(most built in last eight years), and hundreds of dining places. Fast food chain outlets dot this twenty mile drive and a $10+ entree restaurants are commonplace. Maybe the thousand is an overestimate, but is not hyperbole.

Commercial real estate developers and mall management companies are suspected of being in financial difficulty, but with a couple of percent interest rates, they've mostly survived so far. Again an undocumented estimate, but I don't think I observe a vacancy rate of 10% along the entire stretch.

My question is how is this retail expansion supported in a declining economy? 20% comes to mind. The top 20% of income level families are the target market, and Randall Road runs through communities featuring this demographic. (roughly household incomes over $92,000, I would guess the top 10% to have income in excess of $135,000)
It might also be observed that the current economic downturn has adversely impacted a lot more mid-level wage earners that it has the higher earning segment.

The corollary to this thesis is"What about the other 80%? I have not thought these numbers through, but in another post re Malaysia I referred to superfluous workers. My concern is that 50% of the American population (guessing at household incomes less than $45,000) are not only superfluous workers but marginalized consumers as well.

PS Thank goodness for Aldi's

Genoa City

2010-10-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

Driving home from a wedding in Lake Geneva at 2 AM last night, I was trailed for a few miles on Rte 12 and eventually pulled over by a Genoa City WI policeman. Dating back to the time a younger drinking age was in force in Wisconsin than Illinois tales abound of unfortunate traffic stops in this area. I'd had a few drinks, but I've been stopped in a lot worse stages of impairment, and never even been asked to perform a road sobriety test, so I wouldn't have been very nervous except I'd left home without my wallet. A back up squad car arrived as the officer approached my window. The policeman said he'd stopped us for a faulty brake light, and asked for my license, which I explained I'd left at home. He took my name and Janett's driver's license and went back to his car to run a check. He eventually returned and asked if I knew my license was expired. I told him no, but that my birthday was 3 days ago, so it was possible. He was being pretty low key about it, so I still wasn't getting very nervous. It was a relief, though, when he said that he and the other officer would be leaving and no tickets would be issued, and it would be left to my judgement whether to continue on the road. I said thanks, adding that I would like to get home, and he repeated that was up to me. So we drove on home.

I could have been charged on several counts, including the brake light thingy, and could have been subjected to the sobriety test, which might have been disagreeable (though I do occasionally practice reciting the alphabet backwards). Without a license to surrender for bond we would have had to go into town and I probably would have been in the lock-up for a few hours til Janett could recover enough to drive to an ATM for my bail, all in all a real nightmare. So I was grateful for the young man's discretion and forbearance.

This morning I googled "Genoa City WI police" to see if there were comments indicating if others had the same kind of positive experience that I'd had or whether I was particularly fortunate. I found links to several blogs and facebook pages of surprisingly attractive 20-somethings. And they mostly recounted traumatic life stories involving bad romantic choices and mysterious deaths. What had I stumbled across? Was Genoa City the 21st century Spoon River? Unfortunately, no. I eventually linked to a site that identified Genoa City as the fictional setting for a soap opera named the "Young and Restless", and the blogs and facebook pages are apparently for the benefit of aficionados of the series. Mixed emotions again since for a moment I'd felt like maybe a visit to the lock-up in the small Wisconsin town could have been very interesting.

It appears to be a pretty day through my window.

2010-09-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

ButI haven't really sampled the weather. I've been preoccupied with Janett's first real Quickbooks client. Jose took the call and relayed to us that the client wanted to be set up on Quickbooks, and we assumed that meant installing the program on his computer, selecting a chart of accounts and maybe entering beginning balances. As it turns out, the program was already installed with a workable chart of accounts. What the client really wanted was to be told how to do things appropriately for their unique business, especially how to account for inventory, sales. and costs of sales, as well as how to generate appropriate transaction documentation in a fast paced environment. We'd met on Thursday and Friday evening I sent them a few pages of recommendations on how to proceed and pointing out a few potential complications. Saturday I sent another page, clarifications and explanations of items included in the Friday letter which I thought would be helpful to non-accountants as they reviewed the first letter over rhe weekend.
I woke up at 3:30 this morning with a better idea for one step in the process, and a couple of questions, so I sat at my computer and typed in notes on the possible improved procedure and the peripheral questions, and went back to bed for a couple of hours. I'm thinking of emailing them a note of the amended procedure today. Not that I assume they're at the computer on a Sunday, checking their emails, but to update them at the earliest possible moment in order to give them time to think about it a little before we speak tomorrow, and in order they have written notes in front of them when we speak.
I think we've done enough work to justify Janett's standard "set-up" charge, but I don't know if they'll like my recommendations, or consider our proposing a plan to be the kind of work they anticipated being billed for. I think if they appreciate our recommengations and don't object to the bill, the question will remain as to how much additional help they will need catching up on the several months they've been operating with manually prepared sales documents and trying to keep their records on excel sheets. Also, things like sales tax provisions will require a little tinkering, since they probably thought they were selling a service and proceeds weren't taxable, which is only partially true.
Don't mean to bore you with the details, but it's an interesting experiment in light of Janett and my attempted collaboration (which is every bit as complicated as learning about customer relations).

Maybe, another good thing about blogging is that it

2010-09-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

may prove to be therapeutic; may help me to get in touch with myself. What's the psychological name for what I am experiencing? An episode? And would the term be, disassociating?
I know, ND losing a couple of close games in the last minutes may have something to do with me feeling dislodged. But selling corned beef sandwiches at Irish Fest last week end, roasted corn on the cob at Heritage fest this past week end, and tootsie rolls to people a couple mornings in between? Why am I doing things I never did before?
I've stopped going to Huffington Post, because they post provocative captions that elicit all kinds of moronic responses, and the provocations and the morons both annoy me, and I generally sense that the commentors might not have read the articlein the first place. I can't even go to Facebook without remembering the simile of the internet as the drunken librarian who won't shut up. But TV is even more disturbing. The five o'clock local news is the closest thing to a real news show on all 100 24 hour stations, and even they tend to sensationalize. The dramas are even worse, contrived and implausible story lines, devoid on meaningful dialogue, but long on featured actors and actresses striking their favorite cold blue steel poses for minutes of each show. Also, what's with these full color renderings of what bullets, blades, and blunt objects do to a victims vulnerable anatomy. How cold and callused do they wish us to become? And don't get me started on flash backs and flash forwards. The Office is my last refuge.
I can't afford to try to discuss the economy or the political environment except to say I'm a lttle worried for all of us. Personally, life is a somewhat out of kilter as well. We may be moving next month because our landlord stopped paying the mortgage last year, and the sheriff is scheduled to auction our building off. Not unreasonably, the landlord also stopped paying the utilities a couple of months ago, and we got a warning from the city that they're going to shut off the water the day after tomorrow. I went to our downstairs neighbor to propose we go halvsies on the arrears to keep the water flowing another month, and she, matter of factly, informed me that her son took a call from the gas company last week and that they said they were going to shut off the gas. WTF, people?
Maybe, it's just me, rapidly approaching my 65th birthday...no, it's more than that, but age may have something to do with it. Tonight I saw an ad for an apple NANO, or something like that, and I didn't know what it did, and they didn't tell me. They didn't tell me anything, but there was a song, something about wanting a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket.
I'm going to retire for the evening with my newly arrived edition of the Atlantic, (Thanks, Kim). And I do feel a little better.

PS I omitted reference to the constancy of God, and our security in Him, because i didn't want to obscure that reality with my disoriented perspective. After mass on Sunday, though, I saw a bird nesting on top of the cross on top of the steeple, and in my mind wanted to compare notes with him on why we were each there, looking for some awareness shared that would reassure me.

I Write Like Arthur C .Clarke

2010-09-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I tested my writing on someone else's page and don't know how to link to the page here where you might insert a sample of your own writing for analysis. If you'd like you could go to Kim or Lauren's pages and give it a shot.

PS would you say Arthur Clarke is a good writer?

Letters

2010-09-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

As I grew into my 30's and 40's, I would be impressed with women I knew who continued to correspond with friends from college or from even earlier in life. I don't know men who do so, which may not be a fair basis to generalize. But the virtues implicit in correspondence always struck me as virtues of a passing age, friendship, honesty, an air of permanence through fluctuating environments, a wish to communicate, making one's self known, while supporting the other through informed affection, and, not least, having a command of the language and adequate penmanship. Not that I got to read the ladies' correspondence. That was just what I sensed and revered

I would have thought a good letter should read like a mini-essay, crafted, and have a point or make an observation. The year's chronology tucked into a Christmas card, while informative, did not qualify. On the contrary, the brief history dissipates the air of permanence, or should I have said timelessness?

I suppose this gentle envy and nostalgia were what led me to post to a blog page. My posts are often rambunctious, lacking in gentility and refined thought, but still I am corresponding, (and circumventing the penmanship requirement). Why haven't I posted lately? I guess, because I felt I had expressed all my opinions, and was becoming strident in my insistence on my point of view prevailing.

But because I stopped coming here, I stopped visiting other's sites. This evening I read three months worth of daughter Kim's blogs, and enjoyed her style and content, including etchings and photos and the in the moment accounts of life far away. I felt a little bad not to have been more attentive. I suppose I could simply resolve to come to read more often, but that would violate the time honored first tenet of corresponding. To get a letter, send a letter. I guess, I'll resume posting.

Hi there.

2010-07-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this Onion Sports Network article today. It's a year old and shouldn't be taken to have anything to do with the "new" Bryan Kelly coached Irish.
In light of last year's disappointing season, we can look back and laugh.

Small, Unathletic Walk-On Injures 9 Starters In Notre Dame Football Practice
September 3, 2009 | ISSUE 45•36

via @TheOnion - Small, Unathletic Walk-On Injures 9 Starters In Notre Dame Football

SOUTH BEND, IN—During Wednesday's afternoon practice, 17-year-old Brian Novak, a 145-pound walk-on for the struggling Notre Dame football team, injured nine starters, including third-year quarterback Jimmy Clausen, junior wide receiver Golden Tate, and 295-pound defensive lineman Ian Williams.

, who had virtually no organized football experience prior to joining the Division I team, has injured a total of 24 players since his arrival in South Bend, prompting many to question whether or not the Fighting Irish have another disappointing season in store.

"I'm not really that fast or strong or anything," said Novak, adding that of his friends back home he's "not even close" to being the best football player. "But during my first practice with the team I was playing linebacker—or it might have been defensive end—and I got past the big blocker guys no problem, then somehow broke [starting halfback] Armando Allen's leg with a tackle. That's the first tackle I've ever attempted in my life."

"I'm not trying to hurt them or anything, but in general I would say everyone here is a lot slower and weaker than I thought they'd be," Novak added. "I can only bench-press about 90 pounds, but all the players gather around to watch me lift."

According to members of the coaching staff, the former high school yearbook editor is by far the team's most athletic player, despite Novak's inability to do more than two pull-ups or jog a mile without walking. During an intrasquad scrimmage last Sunday, he recorded eight interceptions, rushed for 225 yards, and ruptured the Achilles tendon of safety Sergio Brown with what appeared to be a fairly slow-moving, awkward juke move.

"When I play with these guys I feel like I did when I was a camp counselor playing dodgeball with my campers," said the 5-foot-7 Novak, whose athletic resume consists of two weeks on his high school lacrosse team. "I can pretty much overpower anyone, anytime. It's really fun, but I'm not actually learning anything about football."

Though he reportedly promised Notre Dame's head coach Charlie Weis he would "take it easy" on the rest of the team until the season opener, Novak broke the arm of 302-pound center Dan Wenger during tackling drills last Monday, and fractured starting linebacker Brian Smith's skull on a 14-yard touchdown run in which Novak dragged Smith 10 yards into the end zone.

While Novak went 0-4 in field goal attempts during Sunday's scrimmage, he was the only Notre Dame kicker to get the football up into the air.

"He's really powerful and fast," 255-pound defensive end John Ryan said of Novak."I'm glad he's on our team because looking at the guys we have, he's our only hope if we want to beat USC, Nevada, or really anybody."

"He's a much better leader than Jimmy [Clausen], that's for sure," Ryan added. "Better quarterback, too."

Recently, Novak has even been spotted giving coach Weis several tips about his strategy and tactics.

"Until Brian, I never thought about how establishing the run could create opportunities for us downfield," said Weis, who has led the Irish to 15 losses in their last two seasons. "Novak was telling me about something called a 'fake handoff,' which is like this fake run thing, but then you pass it. I would assume that's illegal, but he's proven himself to be an amazing football player, so I trust him."

According to Novak, when he committed to Notre Dame, he had no intention of walking onto the football team, being more interested in the school's theater group. But when assistant head coach Rob Ianello saw the freshman tossing a football around campus, he knew instantly that Novak would be a valuable addition.

"He was catching the ball," Ianello said. "Like, actually catching it."

Despite the team's recent injuries, and the fact that its best player is admittedly "really terrible" at football, former Notre Dame head coach and college football analyst Lou Holtz still predicted the Fighting Irish would go 12-0 this season and win the BCS championship.

OK I admit it.

2010-06-22T09:38:00.001-07:00

I cut and pasted this post from Huffington

I have been critical of Obama recently on several issues: the capitulation to the Big Banks, the coziness with BP, aquiescence to AIPAC, and yesterday for weak leadership in Afghanistan. All of a sudden, I think, this may be the moment for a cool reappraisal.

Remembering that all his problems were more or less inherited from the most inept and criminal administration in the nation's history and that he was faced on every side by entrenched adversaries, with the country engaged in two wars and in the midst of an economic crisis more severe than anyone wants to admit. Remember that politicians are not like other people, and that when you think you know what they're trying to do, you may be kidding yourself. Maybe the only way not to get eaten alive was to assume this iron fist in a velvet glove persona, to become the Machiavellian prince, who puts his arm around his adversaries' shoulders while he slips the vice over their gonads, and starts to turn the screw. Worked with health care, maybe working with BP and Israel, may even work with GS. Rememder the Prince does not seek resplendent triumphs, he converts a string of likely setbacks into a string small wins, and ends up way ahead.

Re Afghanistan: to "surrender" (order withdrawals) during his first year in office would have hurt him with a lot of right wingers, military Moms and Dads, and a couple powerful lobbies, so instead he appproves a surge, but at the same time shifts strategies to try to protect the lives of our young men. In his disdain for Karzai, you get a glimpse of his true feelings. A year later Karzai is unraveling, the generals are collapsing at hearings and giving interviews in Rolling Stone Magazine. The assessment is widely accepted that the war is unwinnable. Win, Win, Win. To complete this tour de force with a sardonic gesture, I hope he retains the mercenaries till the end and employs them in a rear guard action as he withdraws the troops

My new soapbox.

2010-06-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry to be away so long. Facebook was already a distraction, but now I'm engaged with a majot time eater, the Huffington Post. I had saved the site as a news source, and visited every couple of days, but a month ago I signed up as a member so I could post a comment regarding a Kennedy wife who got a DUI. "There but for the grace of God go I." and, what the heck, two people fanned me. Wasn't that nice.

A couple days later, I read an article about a scientist who'd was being hounded off Obama's scientific team because he had written a few years ago about feeling the gay community was responsible for the aids epidemic, and, besides, the writer of the post said, the scientist was a "global warming denier" I posted that I'd been reading lately that some scientists were investigating the effects of solar activity on climate change, and proposing that hydrocarbons in the atmosphere might not be as important a factor in climate change as thought a few years ago, and also,that I didn't think his position re gays and aids was completely unreasonabe.

I don't know who was more upset, gays, global warming activists, or gay global warming activists, but I got a lot on negative responses. Well, I didn't feel that strongly about either of these subjects, so I answered the comments in fairly non-confrontational words, saying I really wasn't expert in either area.

Then I commented on an article about the Gulf disaster to the effect that Obama should have dropped a nuke in that hole within a week of the blow out and sealed the gusher off, and that BP was fooling around with ineffectual measures to appear to be doing something while actually stalling for time to drill relief wells and recover theit investment. Manwhile the environment was suffering untold damage. I wasn't trying to take an extreme position, but a few people felt that they had to tell me what an idiot I was. I didn't demure this time, responding with references to an aricle about Russia sealing a blown out well that way.

Then of course there was the Israelis and the flotilla. Obviously, I would havw words with a few people on such an event as that.

Meanwhile Janett has been stressing to me that Facebooks is family recreation and not a place to argue about politics, and I pretty much agree. Besides now I have Huffington Post. The novelty will soon wear off, I hope, and I'll resume my Faceboolk and Blogger activity. On the bright side, it was probably a good thing that I was distracted from college football last week while this Mega Conference tempest blew itself out. I think that episode ended OK for Notre Dame, and hopefully left the Big TelevEN with a little egg on its collective face.

A thoughtful balanced commentary.

2010-06-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Continuing my thoughtful balanced approach to our economic quandary.

Leonhardt on Risk: BP, the Housing Bubble and Budget
Tuesday, 01 June 2010 19:42

Share David Leonhardt's magazine piece on mis-estimating risk gets the story of BP largely right. The top executives felt free to take big gambles with safety and the environment because it was entirely a one-sided bet for them. Large profits from increasing production could mean millions or even tens of millions of dollars in additional compensation each year. On the other hand, the downside from even the worst possible disaster carried little consequence for top executives (who will still be hugely rich) or even the company since Congress capped liability at $75 million.

However he gets the story of the housing bubble and the budget deficit almost completely wrong. He argues that Greenspan and Bernanke missed the fact that the economy faced a nationwide housing bubble because we had never seen one before. While that may be partially true, this comment also ignores the incentives facing the Fed chairs. Large financial companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup were making enormous profits from the financing that fueled the bubble. If Greenspan or Bernanke had tried to clamp down on the bubble they would have been confronted by the full force of this powerful industry. They may have found themselves ridiculed and pushed to the side as happened to Brooksley Born when she tried to regulate derivatives in 1998 as head of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission.

In contrast, their decision not to clamp down on the bubble led to catastrohphic results leading to the worst economic downturn in 70 years with tens of millions of people unemployed or underemployed. Yet, both Greenspan and Bernanke are still wealthy men and highly respected. In fact, Bernanke was reappointed to a second term as Fed chair in spite of his disatrous first term.

In short, the problem was not that they underestimated risk. The problem is that they face an entirely assymetric tradeoff structure. Clamping down on financial speculation was sure to have serious consequences for their careers, even if they were right. By contrast, failing to regulate properly did not seem to damage either man's wealth or stature in any major way even though it led to just about the most distrous possible outcome.

Leonhardt also gets the story of the risks from the budget deficit largely wrong. He writes:

"The big financial risk is no longer a housing bubble. Instead, it may be the huge deficits that the growth of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will cause in coming years — and the possibility that lenders will eventually become nervous about extending credit to Washington. True, some economists and policy makers insist the country should not get worked up about this possibility, because lenders have never soured on the United States government before and show no signs of doing so now. But isn’t that reminiscent of the old Bernanke-Greenspan tune about the housing market?"

First, it is pecular to include Social Security in this list. Social Security is growing at a relatively slow pace. It is projected to grow less rapidly than interest on the government debt. Like interest on the government debt, Social Security benefits have already been paid for in advance by their beneficiaries. Wall Street tycoons like Peter Peterson have been desperate to gut Social Security for decades and have invented numerous stories (e.g. that the Trust Fund does not exist) to advance their agenda. However a responsible newspaper should not be advancing this agenda under the guise of news reporting.

The projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid, driven by the explosive growth of health care costs in the private sector, will impose strains on the budget. However, if the growth in health care costs really follows the path assumed in budget projections it will provide a much greater burden on the private sector than the public sector. It is difficult to imagine that the public will itself to be priced out of the market for health care rather than taking simple and obvious steps that challenge the industry's power and ability to continually jack up prices. The point is that this is first and foremost a health care problem. It is only the Peterson Wall Street gang that insists on discussing the issue as a budget problem.

The second reason why the discussion of the budget is not entirely right is that we have been here before. The country has had ratios of debt to GDP in excess of 100 percent following World War II. In spite of this debt burden, interest rates remained low and the economy grew rapidly. Other countries, like the UK and more recently Japan and Italy have sustained much larger debt to GDP ratios without seeing any financial panics.

Finally, unlike Greece, which does not control its own currency, the debt of the United States is in dollars and the United States can always print more dollars. This means that the actual risk is not insolvency, but inflation, since the country would presumably print money rather than face bankruptcy. An honest discussion of the debt problem in the United States would discuss the risk from inflation. In the current environment, this is extremely low. In fact, according to a recent paper by Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's chief economist, the United States would actually benefit from a somewhat higher inflation rate (3-4 percent) since it would reduce debt burdens and lower the real interest rate.

So, the supposed threat from the deficits has been seriously misrepresented by the Wall Street deficit hawks. It is hardly irrational to disregard threats that are incoherent.

The Joys of Apartment Living in Elgin

2010-06-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

Due to Janetts concerns about my giving offense, this post has been deleted but will be emailed to any interested reader upon request. Email me at Jandman2002@Yahoo.com

Beautiful Baby Sweepstakes

2010-05-29T20:15:00.000-07:00

We're sure Owen will represent well at his second birthday party tomorrow, and we all eagerly await photos of the exquisite Remy, but tonight let's share a round of cheer and a shout out to little Johny (and his handsome daddy, Noah)

High Frequency Trading

2010-05-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

While still apalled at what the investment banks have done to our economy and our society,I am not at this point hysterical, and present the article below simply because it is informative.

DK Matai.Chairman: mi2g, ATCA, The Philanthropia
Posted: May 29, 2010 06:39 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index .

The Achilles Heel of Markets?

It has been the worst May for stocks since 1940. The last time May was this bad, neither had Pearl Harbour been bombed forcing the US to enter World War II, nor had the US recovered from The Great Depression. Although suppressed for much of the global markets recovery that began in March 2009, volatility has sprung back with a vengeance in May. On May 21st the "fear index" -- the "volatility index" of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, also known as VIX -- rose to a 12 month high. May 6th, the day of the "flash crash," saw the biggest intraday point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The last-hour market swings, as the European debt crisis injects more uncertainty, are also increasing with every passing day. This volatility reflects a lack of buying interest among long term investors and an intra-day focus for high-frequency traders in the absence of a clear market direction.

High Frequency Trading
Super Arbitrage

The role of high-frequency trading is gathering pace, commanding a bigger and bigger share of financial markets' activity worldwide in equities, bonds, commodities, futures and currencies. High-frequency traders are behaving like computer jockeys. They run complex trading algorithmic software on superfast computers and search the markets for tiny price differentials so that they can carry out super arbitrage. By trading hundreds of millions or even a billion units a day at lightning speed, high-frequency traders pick up fractional pennies each time. The more volatile the market, the easier it is for them to make money jumping in and out of assets across multiple exchanges. High-frequency traders are really just trying to skim the bid to offer spread on a trade. It may only be as low as $0.01 on many trades but, if one does it for 100,000,000 -- 100 million -- units that's over one million dollars a day of profit! High-frequency trading firms rarely go home with a position if they can help it because they make money by maximising transactional volume and minimising risk.

What Does Volatility Mean?

Markets become volatile when liquidity dries up. This means people can't trade stocks at a fair price, when they want. High-frequency traders thrive off volatility, because when liquidity is in short supply, it becomes very profitable for them to provide it. On days with big movements, in the realm of triple digits, high-frequency traders can make a lot of money via this super arbitrage. As a result, May has proved to be the biggest gold mine for high-frequency trading firms since the crash of late 2008 and early 2009. While many long-term investors lost their shirts during The Great Unwind (2007-?) and The Great Reset (2008-?), the high-frequency traders posted huge profits, as they are doing now.

Shadow Markets

In their defence, high-frequency traders say that because their intense trading provides liquidity, they help markets run smoothly, improving the environment for all investors. They say their actions make the markets more functional and fair to typical investors. Given that the high-frequency traders and broker dealers have a symbiotic relationship, they are both actively masquerading as liquidity providers when in fact they are normally liquidity takers, the knowledge transfer of the transactional information being all important. It is clear that high-frequency trading serves no larger purpose. It does not raise capital for companies, create jobs or stimulate innovations in the broader economy. The trades remain completely divorced from underlying economic fundamentals. The high-frequency traders know little or nothing about the companies their computers are feverishly buying and selling. If one combines the speed at which they operate, the outsourcing of decision making to computer algorithms, and an almost complete lack of regulation, this shadow market can fuel and exaggerate volatility.

Anti-Value Investing

High-frequency traders have been branded as the new "black hats" of high finance. Their computer-driven methods, which now account for upwards of two thirds of all US equity volume, are proliferating. To a large degree, fundamental investment strategies -- such as buying and selling stocks based on a company's long term performance -- have taken a back seat to high-frequency trading algorithms hunting for inefficiencies in daily pricing and super arbitrage opportunities.

Reach, Richness and Speed

High-frequency trading has been spreading from the US and Canadian stock markets into new geographies -- Europe, Asia and Latin America -- and all asset classes including equities, bonds, commodities, futures and currencies. Assuming the new financial regulatory reform bill forces over-the-counter derivatives on to exchanges, high-frequency traders will no doubt trade them too. Every day, things are getting faster in the world of high finance and trading. Four years ago, executing a trade in a millisecond -- one thousandth of a second -- was considered fast; now the top high-frequency trading firms and broker dealers are trading in microseconds. That's one millionth of a second.

Conclusion

Law-makers and regulators are right to get nervous. Senator Ted Kaufman -- Democrat from Delaware -- who understands the risk of high-frequency trading, or HFT, says, "I'm afraid that we're sowing the seeds of the next financial crash." He has called for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate high-frequency traders and the impact they have had on the broad markets.

In the aftermath of the May 6th "flash crash", the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently voted to propose rules that would give the agency and securities exchanges more timely information about high-frequency trades so that they can better oversee the markets. The proposal requires exchanges and broker dealers that trade on the exchanges to provide detailed information about quotes, orders and trades to what would be a newly created central repository.

Whilst the creation of a central repository may be helpful, it is unclear how this could prevent a "flash crash" caused by high-frequency trades in the future. Human real time is measured and understood in minutes and seconds, whereas the machines are trading in millionths of seconds. In order to be able to understand what happens in a future "flash crash" the regulators would have to play the data from a central repository in slow motion over days or even weeks! What good is it to drive an open-top car at high speed with one's eyes glued to the rear view mirror?

Follow DK Matai on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DKMatai

Previously on The Financial Fix

My brother Mike and I

2010-05-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

It's been a turbulent week. Very busy and some complicated emotions involved. The best news was that my brother John's son Michael married a lovely girl named Caitlin in Alpharetta GA. A bad thing was the gulf oil spill which slightly eroded my confidence in President Obama and prompted this Facebook exchange

Me:
Abraham Lincoln "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the pre...judices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Mike:
Guess he missed ACORN, SEIU, fed takeover of GM with UAW, takeover of healthcare against voters' wishes w. bill no one read (have to pass it to see what's in it), apology to China (!) for AZ having to enforce Fed law vs. illegals whom administration considers unregistered Democratic voters despite their drug-smuggling, kidnappings, murders of agents and civilians, etc. Good thing he was not in business of predicting future; he sure got that wrong!!!
: )

Nephew Mike:
BP.

Mike:
As in BRITISH Petroleum?

Let's not drill there, let Cuba and China do so, and then buy it from them! Yeah, that's the ticket!

Better yet, let's go back to the horse & buggy! Then every city, not just Chicago and DC, will reek of horsesh-t.
: )

Brother John:
Spill baby. Spill.

Me:
Mike, they tricked you. BRITISH, as in Amoco. BRITISH as in Chevron, BRITISH as in Gulf Oil, and BRITISH as in Atlantic Richfield. Dont feel bad that's what they wanted to do.

Mike:
Right, Andy. It's all an evil capitalist plot to deceive us workers of the world, done in anticipation of oil spills. Oh, silly me, I feel so deceived. I should have listened to Marx and Lenin! They tried to warn me!
: )

Sister Dean:
calm down, brothers.

Do other families encompass such varying political sentiments?

Remy

2010-05-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

Remy Cangelosi was born last Wednesday, son of Ross and Kim, in Las Vegas. Here I am posting the news six days later. Of course we've shared a lot of facebook chatter and photos, but it's weird not to have commented here.

I think that's because I feel remote fron the event. Strange. Janett flew there Friday with Stephie to help Kim during her first days at home with her baby. She's returning today. I hope she'll have glowing descriptions and anecdotes to help me feel connected to the little fellow. I don't think I'll get out there til September.
I'll do some real bonding then.

Another explanation is that my primary sensation is one of relief, instead of jubilation. I worried, perhaps without cause, right up to the last minute. This little creature has been a very important part of Kimmy's life for a couple of years, and bringing him into the world wasn't as easy as Kim and Ross deserved it to be.

Now Remy is here, and Kimmy and Ross can rejoice and marvel at his beauty, and I can relax and thank God.

No fat fingers

2010-05-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a joint report today that they found no evidence that mistaken orders, terrorism or computer sabotage led the drop, which briefly sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 998.5 points.

Just too many sell orders and not enough buy orders. That's how crashes happen.

Quick post

2010-05-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

What won't they think of next?

Audit the fed?

2010-05-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

Heres a couple paragraphs from an interesting article.

If you recall, back in 2008, Hank Paulson, our treasury secretary at the time, convinced Congress over a weekend that he needed $700 billion of TARP funds to get the toxic assets off our commercial banks' books. Amazingly, within weeks of being given the funds by Congress, Paulson decided not to proceed with the purchase of toxic assets from the banks, instead giving away hundreds of billions of dollars to the commercial and investment banks and funding a series of bailouts — giving money to Chrysler, General Motors and AIG (some of which immediately found its way back to the commercial and investment banking community).

At the time, nobody explained what happened to the toxic assets on the banks' books whose purchase was the original stated purpose of TARP. We now know that the financial crisis was not caused solely by a liquidity crunch or an irrational loss of confidence, but rather by the fact that the marketplace realized that the commercial banks held more than a trillion dollars of very poor-quality assets, mostly mortgage securities such as collateralized debt obligations, or CDO’s, and that these bad assets were sizable enough to bankrupt even our biggest banks. How bad? Even the AAA tranche of the typical CDO is facing a mortgage default rate of approximately 93 percent today.

I believe the reason Paulson didn’t pursue his original toxic-asset purchasing plan is because such a purchase would have created a market price for these assets, and then all of the banks would have had to mark their poor-quality assets to this low market price. This would have resulted in the bankruptcy of almost all the major commercial and investment banks, because their leverage was so high that they couldn't withstand such a hit to their equity.

It's a gusher

2010-05-05T21:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a seeminlgly objective commentator who says the gulf "leak" is a very serious problem. BP has been practicing PR and lobbying skills, but will end up wringing their hands and saying (like the bankers) "Nobody imagined this could go so horribly wrong. While we were getting paids millions to do it, it seemed like a really good idea."

ND Rap Video elicits letter

2010-04-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame Outdoes Super Bowl Shuffle3

4/30/2010 11:49 AM ET By John Walters

John Walters
College Football Writer
To: Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., President, University of Notre Dame
From: John Walters, '88
Re: Ever Being Able to Wear ND Gear in Public Again

Dear Fr. Jenkins,

Hasn't the Class of 2010 suffered enough? Four straight losses to USC. Two home losses to Navy. The 3-9 season. A first-round NCAA tournament loss to Old Dominion (which, okay, if it were women's hoops, would not be so awful) before half the student body had even woken up that day. And now, just a week or so before graduation, this video, which we've also embedded later in this letter along with some other reviews of the thing.

There needs to be an investigation. Isn't this exactly what the NCAA means by the term "lack of institutional control"? I've watched many a disturbing video in the past decade (the Zapruder film, those Sarah McLachlan animal-cruelty ads, Miss Teen South Carolina's "U.S. Americans" response), but this tops them all. Or bottoms them.

Honestly, Padre, whither the self-inflicted wound? This is like a fragging incident without the live ammo. If I'm Lane Kiffin I open every press conference next season with this tune.

My editor sent me a link to this video on Friday morning, warning me that it was disturbing news related to Notre Dame. Before opening the link, I was a'feared the video might contain incriminating footage of a certain head coach with a certain former South Bend anchor woman. If only it had been that tame.

Fr. Jenkins, you're an alum. Please tell me this is a joke. Please tell me this is an hilarious outtake from The Keenan Revue and you thought it would be fun to release as a social media experiment. Please tell me you're deaf.

Losing at home to Syracuse...and Pitt..and UConn...and Air Force...and of course the aforementioned Midshipmen (twice!) the past three years provided more than enough "laughing-stock" fodder for the rest of the country. But this--this is like finding out that Charlie Weis stayed up late watching game film in a Snuggie (and I wouldn't put it past him).

I don't even want to get into the details: The pilfering of the bass line from Morris Day and the Time's "Jungle Love." The white rap interlude from someone who appears to be the president of the Notre Dame Young Republicans (I know, redundant). The Mike Golic and Brian Kelly cameos. When Appalachian State's promotional video is better than yours, that's just sad.

Seriously, how many verbal decommits will it take before Notre Dame disassociates itself from this unbearable whiteness of being? Even "Up With People" is laughing at this video. Suddenly "The Super Bowl Shuffle" doesn't seem so abominable. The Vatican just this morning released a statement that read, "We acknowledge, accept full blame and express the deepest remorse for decades of improper behavior regarding altar boys, but we had nothing to do with the Freakbass video."

The reviews are already shaking down like thunder:

"If ND can land Manti Te'o in a snowstorm, Irish recruiting can survive this."
--Bruce Feldman, ESPN.com

"If ND leaders had any hand in this, I take back any nice things I said about them in today's column."
--Andy Staples, SI.com

"I like Freekbass' early stuff, but he's just getting too commercial now."
--Brian Hamilton, Chicago Tribune

"You can tell that this is a Notre Dame music video because it has no hot girls, just a lot of cute ones."
--Dave Fink, Dillon Hall, '88

"Dear Dude who punched out Jimmy Clausen: I have another job for you. Holler back."
--Me

I'm trying to imagine the meeting in which this video got the green light.

"Let's do a music video to promote Notre Dame because, you know, we just never seem to get any attention."
"Great idea! Let's get U2. They're Irish. They're Catholic. And I've been watching ESPN lately and they seem to be into that whole football thing."
"I don't think we can afford U2."
"Who can we afford?"
"Are you familiar with the funk stylings of...Freekbass?"

Earlier this month a few Purdue students conjured up a video that went viral entitled "Boobquake". They do Boobquake and we do this? Somewhere Jim Delany is laughing and re-thinking the wisdom of inviting Notre Dame to join the Big Ten.

Fr. Jenkins, we all have our moments of embarrassment associated with Notre Dame. Two of my friends once penned -- and sent- - a letter to a female high school basketball player from Iowa who appeared in Sports Illustrated's "Faces in the Crowd" imploring her to attend our fine institution (she did not). Another buddy handed in a term paper that began, "Moses was a very historic man." I may (or may not) have appeared on the front page of The Observer taking a nap in the library as spittle dropped from my lip.

But we were young...and subsisting on a diet of Meisterbrau and Doritos. What's the administration's excuse?

I'd like to think that this is my alma mater's nadir. I'd like to think that. But then I imagine Digger Phelps dancing to this tune next season accompanied by two extremely uncomfortable cheerleaders and I realize that the worst is yet to come.

PS I wont link it. You'll have to find it yourself. I am not responsible. ABT

"Patrick Coughlin (#29) is a throwback to Don Hogan (#44)."

2010-04-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

"...a senior accounting major named Patrick Coughlin was the second-leading rusher (75 yards, 11 carries)" in todays spring practice finale at ND, the Blue Gold game. I didn't recognise Coughlin's name. I guess he's a walk on, kind of a Rudy, only better.

The reference to Don Hogan was what made my heart stop for a second.

"Don Hogan, Notre Dame's leading rusher in 1962, has died according to an e-mail from the Irish's sports information department. Hogan gained 454 yards on 90 carries and scored three touchdowns that year, when Notre Dame went 5-5 under Joe Kuharich." Don Hogan passed away in 2007.

I was two years behind Mr Hogan at Saint Ignatius, a sophomore when he was a senior.
That was the season when Tony Carey and the Mount Carmel Caravan played Dick Butkis' CVS team for the city championship. and I lived in Mount Carmel's back yard, so Don didn't get a lot of recognition in my neighborhood, but he was a "living legend" in his Beverly neighborhood.

After his great sophomore season at ND, over the Christmas break, Don was in a car accident on the way home fron his girl friend's house. His sister was in the car with him, and was killed. Don's hips were so badly crushed in the wreck the initial prognosis was very bad "never walk again" kind of thing.

Of course he did rehabilitate himself and was determined to rejoin the Irish on the field, spending a lot of time the next year running the stadium steps, trying to regain his strength. It was spoken of in hushed terms my freshman year at ND, his obsessive determination. Sadly he was soon afflicted with severe arthritis and had to give up his hopes of returning to the team.

His senior year, he wrote a letter that tne new coach, Ara Parseghian read to the team the first day of practice. A gipper kind of message about the times, in games or practice, when players were fatigued or discouraged, asking that they think of him and of how much we would give to be able to be there with them. Parseghian and that team went nine and one, losing the last game of the season to USC, after having lost seven out of nine games the year before.

I knew Don had joined his father's company after graduation, and I didn't hear or think of him much after that, so seeing his name was almost like a ghostly apparition. I hope he had a good forty years and is in heaven today.

I was preoccupied this week with tax stuff,

2010-04-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

but now in the calm of a beautiful Saturday evening, still happy about attending Malachy's first T-ball game earlier, I'm contemplating the big news of the last couple days with a sense of serene detachment, and wondering, is this what a black swan looks like?

Owen and POPPO

2010-04-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

I baby-sat Owen at his home once or twice when he was at a young and impressionable age. Since I couldn't smoke at Stephie's house, I would take him outside and sit on the back porch or the front steps with him on my lap to have a cigarette. He was interested to be out of doors after dark, and observed me smoking closely. Somehow these occasions became one of his earliest learning experiences, but maybe he was too young to differentiate because the aspects of the situation merged into one.
POPPO to Owen was not just my name, it was the experience of going out for a smoke.
Now at two he's figured out that my cigarettes are generally in my shirt pocket and that he can reach the package when I pick him up. So now when we get together. he happily calls "poppo" "POPPO" "POPPO", until I lift him, and then his hands are in my pocket for my smokes. He extracts the flip top box and pulls out a cigarette which he hands to me then another which he keeps for himself. "Out" he says, "Later". I say, and usually he doesn't insist. But eventually, we get out into the yard. He usually just carries his cigarette around and doesn't mimic the motions of my smoking but occasionally exhales as if blowing smoke.

I think it's an interesting little ritual, and am glad we share it especially since imitation is the highest form of flattery. The rest of the family shows more forbearance than amusement. But now the problem is getting a little out of hand because Owen wants Janett to feed his habit when she visits without me, and not just at home but at the park and at the local malls. Aside from the mild embarrassment Janett feels at being in the company of such a young tobacco fiend, she generally resists being told what to do by a two year old. "POPPO POPPO POPPO" he cries, while Janett promises herself that she will cut back on the visits until Owen has grown through this stage.

And if you think I'm a bad person for allowing the child such liberties, let me say in my own defense that no matter how often he asks, I won't let him have my lighter.

They're back.

2010-04-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

It's been a long day and I'm tired, but wanted to give a little reconition to the courage and resolve of the Thai people in the face of corruption and opression. You could search this blog for "Thailand" to see previous updates on this struggle.

BANGKOK (AFP) – Bangkok was under a state of emergency on Thursday after anti-government protesters stormed the Thai parliament, but the demonstrators remained defiant and said they were ready for "war".

Lawmakers fled and several senior government figures were rescued by military helicopter after the red-shirted supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra forced their way into the parliamentary compound briefly on Wednesday.

The protesters idolise ousted former premier Thaksin and tens of thousands of them have been rallying in the Thai capital for weeks, at one point splashing their own blood at key locations in a grisly show of defiance.

To contain the growing crisis, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva invoked emergency rule Wednesday, banning public gatherings of over five people and giving broad powers to police and military in Bangkok and surrounding areas.

"The state of emergency aims to resolve the situation and bring a return to normal," Abhisit told a nationally televised news conference.

The premier, who has cancelled a trip to the US for a nuclear security summit next week due to the unrest, said the mass rallies were unconstitutional and had tarnished the country's image, eroding investor confidence.

It is the fourth time since 2008 that emergency law has been declared in the capital because of political turmoil.

But thousands of protesters flouted the decree, waving flags and cheering as their leaders railed against Abhisit's government from their rally stage close to a clutch of luxury hotels and giant shopping malls.

"We have to prepare for another war. If the military comes you should not panic -- just stay put," Reds leader Veera Musikapong told protesters.

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters have refused to leave the city's main commercial district, where they have been since Saturday, disrupting traffic and causing major stores to shut.

Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban urged people with relatives rallying in banned areas "to tell them to leave immediately," adding that authorities would provide transportation for demonstrators from outside Bangkok.

The United States Wednesday rebuked the protesters.

Redemptive Sacrifice

2010-04-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

I went to Willow this afternoon for Easter service, although it seemed to me to be a little premature. Perhaps a good thing, because Easter morning we all celebrate the Resurrection, which demonstrated Jesus' power over death, and held the promise of resurrection for His followers. But on Saturday we have only to celebrate the crucifiction and death, something I never thought to do.

But His death, not His revival, was the redemptive act, and I think would have been sufficient even had He not returned in His transformed body to console and inspire His followers before ascending into heaven. Somehow, I'd come to think of it as a heartbreaking loss on friday with a big comeback win on Sunday. At this moment I'm feeling that Friday was the victory, and Sunday, while still worth celebrating, was not the most important day of the week.

This is new to me, and some have probably prayed over this already. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Bailouts

2010-04-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

The Anglo Irish Bank of Dublin failed last year. The bank had lent a lot of money to builders in the boom early this century, contributing to successive years of 6% GDP growth, and references to Ireland as a Celtic Tiger. But of course, commercial property values have fallen now almost by half, and loans aren't being repaid, and the bank's gone bust. The government estimates cost of a bailout at 30 billion dollars. Hmmm, Ireland has 4 million people. That's $7,500 for every man woman and child in the country.

The quoted cost of the TARP to date is 306 billion dollars, with 513 having been loaned out and 207 having been repaid. The TARP money didnt include the bailouts of the mortgage giants Fannie May and Fredddie Mac which are estimated at another 126 billion. So, not including whatever shady deals the Fed is managing, bailouts of financial industry has cost $431 billion. The US populatiom is just over 300 million, so the per capita cost to date 1s $1,435.

Neither of these numbers include other stimulus or welfare costs.

Aren't you glad you're nor Irish?

I wonder how to compute the cost for Icelanders, since the government couldn't bail out the biggest banks and let them go into receivership. Four or five big banks there were paying close to 10%, drawing deposits from around the world to make risky loans. Of couse the loans went bad and the banks failed. The government deposit insurance was supposed to reimburse depositor losses in excess of $22,000, but just paying off foreign depositors would cost the men women and children of the population of 300,000 $16,000 each, a hefty sum considering the Icelanders have already had their savings wiped out by the bank failures. The Icelandic government has said it would try to pay off the foreign depositors when it is able, but doesn't sound very hopeful. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't think of anything Icelanders have to sell except herring, and they have to import everything else.
Maybe they could organize an ad campaign like Chick-Filet, with the cows holding signs that say "Eat More Herring"

My belated St Patricks day story

2010-03-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

My friend Louie called this evening and invited me to join him and his son Skip at the Elgin Public House. We haven't socialized much of late, and I was agreeable, and Janett gave her permission so I accepted the invitation. Janett "offered" to drop me off there so I wouldn't have to drive home, and gave me some cash and told me not to use my plastic money. She's been very careful in her oversight of me lately, especially about whether I've turned off the burner on the stove after preparing something, but I don't take offense.

Louie, as is the custom, was running a little late and so I was into my second Harps before he arrived, enjoying Monday night bar quiet, and a congenial lady bartender. Once they arrived Skip and I talked about the Oregon (his alma mater) Duck quarterback arrested for burglary who it appeared had been suspended for spring practice but would still be working out with the team, and possibly reinstated in the fall. Louie and I talked about business and how he was looking at a busy spring, thank goodness. Later we talked about his recent trip to Biloxi, Ms with Habitat for Humanity. and the gulf five years after.
Meanwhile, a working man sort of guy came in and sat down one seat away from me. He was the kind of fellow I always am interested in talking too and often enjoy. His soft southern accent and age identified him to me as one the Kentucky coal miners who'd migrated north in the sixties, and I asked him about possible mutual acquaintances, and sure enough he was acquainted with a few gents I'd known. But he was pretty drunk. so we didn't spend a lot of time talking, although when the conversation turned to Rye whiskey, an occasional interest of Louie's, I was thinking of standing a round for the four of us, but fortunately asked the waitress what a shot of rye went for. "Do you really want to know," she asked, "or should I just ring it up?" Turns out it was $8.65 each, so forbidden to use my plastic I had to demure, unembarrassed, since that was a stiff price in this neck of the woods.
Another fellow had occupied the seat between me and Tommy by then, a high school teacher named Tim who was wearing a nice peaked cap and a green tee shirt emblazoned with a Paddy day wish for the world. Tommy and I went out for a couple smoke breaks and compared our histories at local bars. but he was more seriously drunk each time.

So the third time we went out, after Skip had ordered a sandwich to go and we'd soon be leaving Tommy announced he'd better start walking towards home. I asked where he lived and he said by St Joe's. The church or the hospital? The hospital. Well, that's close to five miles. Maybe you should think of calling a cab. I would he said, but I'm $3 dollars short for the fare. I checked my ready cash and found a couple singles and a couple fives, so I had to give him a five. Then Tim walks out the door and asks are you ready? Tom stepping backward and falling to be seated in a big flower pot, says he is, and it becomes apparent Tim has committed to giving Tommy a lift home. So you won't be needing cab fare, I ask. "No" says Tommy, "but I have to stop and get a six pack on the way."

I went back into the bar and confessed how I'd been shorn, and Louie and Skip and the congenial bar tender and I all laughed. But I momentarily wondered if I should have given the drunk in the flower pot a bloody lip. Better not, I decided, and to chalk it up as a lesson in life and cheap at the price.
.

Kelly's offense

2010-03-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

First day of Spring Practice.

Heres the first couple of paragraphs of a pretty good write up of Coach Kelly's offensive perspective. See the whole article here

Spread and Pass, Brian Kelly's (Somewhat) New Irish Offense
by Anthony Pilcher Analyst Written on March 09, 2010
Frank Polich/Getty Images While the defense may be a bigger problem, one of the primary concerns for many Irish fans is the spread passing offense of new head coach Brian Kelly. Kelly makes no secret of his offensive goal, he wants to be aggressive and vertical, scoring on every possession. As such, he favors the pass over the run, operates heavily from the shotgun, and employs an up-tempo pace.

Some question the lack of a consistent, power running element while others worry about ball control. There are also concerns about the how a spread passing scheme will fare against good defensive competition and Kelly’s ability to fill the roster with elite talent at the skill positions.

Former head coach Charlie Weis’ recruiting record should be enough evidence to negate the last of these concerns, but the others may be valid. There are certainly negatives that come with Kelly’s offense, but many successful teams like Utah, Boise State, Texas, Oklahoma and Florida run versions of the spread, and excel doing it.

So what is a spread offense and how does Kelly’s particular brand work? Furthermore, what is the fundamental problem with his approach and is it compatible at Notre Dame?

What Is Kelly’s Spread Offense and How Does It Work?

At a fundamental level, the intent of a spread offense is to stretch the field horizontally with multiple wide receivers. This effectively accomplishes two goals. First, it makes crisp tackling in open space a commodity. And second, it forces defensive coordinators to use smaller, quicker personnel, and to empty the box in order to matchup on the outside. The result is an advantage for the offense on the interior. Defenses can’t overload the box and the offense has one-on-one blocking opportunities in the running game and in pass protection.

The guys over at NDNation asked Chris Brown of Smart Football to summarize Kelly’s flavor of the spread. True to form, Chris penned a solid synopsis. He makes some excellent points and the entire read is worth the time, but a few highlights are noted here with some additions of my own below.

Kelly’s offense is a “traditional” spread that, for the most part, maintains balance and doesn’t tilt too much towards the run (e.g. Michigan) or pass (e.g. Texas Tech).
The run game is simple, particularly without a running quarterback. There is a lot of zone blocking and Kelly’s approach is based on space and angles rather than power, but he does make frequent use of a lead blocker. Mostly, he utilizes inside and outside zone running plays, counters, and some power runs.
The concepts in the passing game are almost equally simple. Kelly prefers a vertical stem route tree aimed at getting upfield while giving the same initial post-snap motion. This accomplishes his goal of being aggressive, but also detracts from the ability of opposing defenses to read routes as they all appear similar through the first several steps.
Kelly also likes to use overloaded formations to isolate receivers on the backside. This generates favorable one-on-one matchups for players like wide receiver Michael Floyd or tight end Kyle Rudolph, or overloads the strongside of the field if the defense rolls the coverage to double the weakside receiver.

Too cute for words; Noah and pet

2010-03-24T20:46:00.001-07:00

Oh, Boy. If it's not one thing its another.

2010-03-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

Last year when I heard of diminished sun spot activity as a possible forecaster of cooling weather, I thought maybe that it was an unsubstantiated theory, possibly being promoted by the carbon fuel industries to dilute anxirty over global warming. But as time goes by, similar reports keep showing up in scientific journals. Maybe there's something to it. Here's a recent example, followed by another article addressing other causes of cyclical glaciation which the quoted scientists are presenting as possibly on our horizon. (From a personal perspective, I dont think it's fair that, as they postulate, we only get ten or twelve thosand years of warming, then a hundred thousand years of cooling. - But I'm glad Kim and Ross have established a familial outpost in the sunny southwest in case others in the family are driven to migrate in ten or twenty years as the Midwest becomes tundra.)

It’s the Sun, stupid!
By Willie Soon, solar and climate scientist

.
5 Mar 09 – (Excerpts) "The amount and distribution of solar energy that we receive varies as the Earth revolves around the Sun and also in response to changes in the Sun’s activity. Scientists have now been studying solar influences on climate for 5000 years.

"Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather on Earth. In 1801, the celebrated astronomer William Herschel noticed that when there were few spots, the price of wheat soared – because, he surmised, less “light and heat” from the Sun resulted in reduced harvests.

The price of wheat soared! As I've been sayingall along, I fear that
we'll be fighting in the streets for food long before we're covered by ice.

"Between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were very rare and temperatures were low. Then sunspot frequency grew until, between 1930 and 2000, the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years. The oceans can cause up to several decades of delay before air temperatures respond fully to this solar “Grand Maximum.” Now that the Sun is becoming less active again, global temperatures have fallen for seven years.

More active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years!

"We have known for nearly 80 years that small changes in solar activity can cause large climatic changes. Where sunlight falls, for how long, and with what effect, determine how climate will respond.

"The most recent scientific evidence shows that even small changes in solar radiation have a strong effect on Earth’s temperature and climate.

The second article:

See entire article by Gregory F. Fegel
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-earth_ice_age-0

(Most data) shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles known as the Milankovich cycles. … (including) the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

In 1976 the prestigious journal “Science” published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled “Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” which described the correlation … between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles.

Imbrie, Hays, and Shackleton wrote that "…the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

In 1999 the British journal “Nature” published the results of data derived from glacial ice cores collected at the Russia’s Vostok station in Antarctica during the 1990s. The Vostok ice core data includes a record of global atmospheric temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and airborne particulates starting from 420,000 years ago and continuing through history up to our present time.

The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern, the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram tracing.

Three little words

2010-03-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

I went to a link for a ND recruiting story in the South Bend Tribune, and on the right hand side of the page were listed headlines linked to other stories. One caption read "Girl's body found." It chilled me to read those words, even without knowing any of the facts of the story. Whatever singular tragedy was represented by those words, how many times must we see them repeated?

I googled the phrase, and here's the result: 3,730,000 for "girl's body found"

For the sake of comparison I tried a couple other phrases: 1,650,000 for "hope for the future".

557,000 for "Jesus loves you".

and 207,000 for "parents protect children"

Let's say a prayer for the children and their families, and a prayer of thankfulness that our own daughters have been safe and well.

Wiki

2010-03-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

While reading about the British naval hero of the Napoleonic era, Thomas Cochrane, an interesting adventurous character, I found references to Francis Burdett. Cochrane has been immortalized, being recognised as a model for O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and Forrester's Horatio Hornblower, but Burdett was not someone I knew about, so I thought I'd share this account of his life.

Aside from the other admirable things he did, I liked that he stopped eating when his wife died and passed away ten days later.

Francis Burdett
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sir Francis Burdett

by Thomas Phillips

Born 1770
Died 1844

Residence Foremarke Hall
Nationality English
Occupation Politician
Political party Radical, Tory
Spouse(s) Sophia Coutts
Parents Francis Burdett and his wife Eleanor

Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Baronet (25 January 1770 – 23 January 1844) was an English reformist politician, the son of Francis Burdett and his wife Eleanor, daughter of William Jones of Ramsbury manor, Wiltshire, and grandson of Sir Robert Burdett, Bart. From 1820 until his death he lived at 25 St James's Place.

Contents [hide]
1 Burdett Family History
2 Education and Early Life
3 Political career
4 Notes
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Burdett Family History
Sir Francis Burdett (5th Bart.) was a member of the Burdett family of Bramcote and inherited the family baronetcy from his grandfather Sir Robert Burdett in 1797.

[edit] Education and Early Life
He was educated at Westminster School and the University of Oxford. When young, he was for a long time the notorious lover of Lady Oxford (according to the journal of Thomas Raikes), and afterwards travelled in France and Switzerland. He was in Paris during the earlier days of the French Revolution.

A young Sir Francis Burdett.Returning to England in 1793, he married Sophia Coutts, the second daughter of the wealthy banker Thomas Coutts.[1] She brought him the large fortune of £25,000. They had a daughter – Angela Burdett-Coutts – who inherited the Burdett family's baronetcy from his father and became the first Baroness of the Foremark Burdett family.

In 1796 he became Member of Parliament for Boroughbridge, having purchased this seat from the representatives of the Duke of Newcastle, and in 1797 succeeded his grandfather as 5th Baronet.

[edit] Political career
Baronet and Member of Parliament

His inheritance included the family seat of Foremarke Hall and 'the hamlets of Ingleby and Foremark (sometimes referred to as a manor) which were under his Lordship'[2].

In Parliament he soon became prominent as an opponent of William Pitt the Younger, and as an advocate of popular rights. He denounced the war with France, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the proposed exclusion of John Horne Tooke from parliament, and quickly became the idol of the people. He was instrumental in securing an inquiry into the condition of Coldbath Fields Prison, but as a result of this step he was for a time prevented by the government from visiting any prison in the kingdom. In 1797 he made the acquaintance of Horne Tooke, whose pupil he became, not only in politics, but also in philology.

His last election?

At the general election of 1802 Burdett was a candidate for the county of Middlesex, but his return was declared void in 1804, and in the subsequent contest he was defeated. In 1805 this return was amended in his favor, but as this was again quickly reversed, Burdett, who had spent an immense sum of money over the affair, declared he would not stand for parliament again.

At the general election of 1806 Burdett was a leading supporter of James Paull, the reform candidate for the City of Westminster; but in the following year a misunderstanding led to a duel between Burdett and Paull in which both combatants were wounded. At the general election in 1807, Burdett, in spite of his reluctance, was nominated for Westminster, and amidst great enthusiasm was returned at the top of the poll.

He took up again the congenial work of attacking abuses and agitating for reform, and in 1810 came sharply into collision with the House of Commons. A radical named John Gale Jones had been committed to prison by the House, a proceeding that was denounced by Burdett, who questioned the power of the House to take this step, and vainly attempted to secure the release of Jones. He then issued a revised edition of his speech on this occasion which was published by William Cobbett in the Weekly Register.

A warrant for his arrest

The House voted this action a breach of privilege, and the speaker issued a warrant for Burdett's arrest. The charge was libelling the House of Commons. Barring himself in his house for two days, he defied the authorities, while a mob gathered in his defence. Burdett's colleague Thomas Cochrane offered assistance, but, realizing that Cochrane intended to use military tactics during this civil and political affair, Burdett declined. At length the house was entered, and under an escort of soldiers he was conveyed to the Tower of London. Released when parliament was in recess, he caused his supporters much disappointment by returning to Westminster by water, and so avoiding a demonstration in his honor. He then brought legal actions against the speaker and the sergeant-at-arms, but the courts upheld the action of the House.

Reform in parliament Burdett denounced corporal punishment in the army, and supported all attempts to check corruption, but his principal efforts were directed towards procuring a reform of parliament, and the removal of Roman Catholic disabilities. In 1809 he had proposed a scheme of parliamentary reform, and returning to the subject in 1817 and 1818 he anticipated the Chartist movement by suggesting universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, and annual parliaments; but his motions met with very little support. He succeeded, however, in carrying a resolution in 1825 that the House should consider the laws concerning Roman Catholics. This was followed by a bill embodying his proposals, which passed the Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords. In 1827 and 1828 he again proposed resolutions on this subject, and saw his proposals become law in 1829. In 1820 Burdett had again come into serious conflict with the government. Having severely censured its action with reference to the Peterloo Massacre, he was prosecuted at Leicester assizes, fined 1000 pounds, and committed to prison for three months. After the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 the ardour of the veteran reformer was somewhat abated, and a number of his constituents soon took umbrage at his changed attitude.

His legacy and death

Consequently he resigned his seat early in 1837, but was re-elected. However, at the general election in the same year he forsook Westminster and was elected member for North Wiltshire, which seat he retained, acting in general with the Conservatives, until his death. He was nick-named by fellow conservatives as "Old Glory". His wife, Lady Burdett to whom he was devoted died on 13 January 1844. Sir Francis, then 74, became inconsoleable and felt he had nothing left to live for. He refused all food and died just ten days later on the 23 January 1844. He and his wife were buried at the same time in the same vault at Ramsbury Church, Wiltshire. He left a son, Robert, who succeeded to the baronetcy, and who inherited his very large fortune, and five daughters, the youngest of whom became the celebrated Baroness Burdett-Coutts after inheriting the Coutts fortune from her grandfather's widow Harriet (Duchess of St Albans) and appending the Coutts surname under the terms of Harriet's will. He was a member of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland.

PS Cochrane's life was also interesting if you want to look him up.
.

When at a loss for words, talk ND football.

2010-03-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

Irish fans usually get all hot under the collar when the idea of giving up their independent status and joining a conference comes up. Lately it's coming up more often. Reasons include difficulty in scheduling quality opponents during October and November when conference play dominates schedules, the potential for better money than even its exclusive deal with NBC pays, and being less vulnerable to getting shut out of the BCS (Bowl Championship Series). Here's the latest conjecture. Note, adding Texas to the Big 10 has been mentioned occasionally lately.

From Rock's House

"Here's a scenario
by I Got A Rock (2010-03-09 16:14:04)

The Big Ten calls ND and says they have Texas and Pittsburgh ready to join, but want to keep an even number. They propose the following:

ND joins with the other two.

Divisions:
South -- Texas-ND-Pitt-Penn State-Indiana-Purdue-Illinois
North -- Michigan-Ohio State-Michigan State-Minnesota-Iowa-Northwestern-Wisconsin

Six division games, two crossovers with one protected. Guaranteed games every year with Texas, Penn State, and one out of Michigan and Ohio State. Four non-conference games, two if you count USC and Navy as protected.

If you look at the tiers, you've got four in the top tier every year with Penn State, Texas, USC, and Michigan or Ohio State. Some years Wisconsin would be the second crossover, so that would make five.

That's a pretty compelling schedule every year."

A conference championship, usually between Michigan or Ohio and ND or Texas would be a pretty fun annual event, make a lot of money, and probably reinvigorate the Big 10 If Texas won't move to the Big 10 consider Missouri as a substitute: not quite as enticing.

The Irish fans who most strenuously object do so because of the Big 10's rejection of Rockne's efforts to join the conference in the 1920's. Big 10 coaches didn't want to play Notre Dame and appealed overtly to anti-Catholic prejudices to justify their rejection of Notre Dame. Alternatively to joining the conference, Rockne developed a national following by traveling across the country to play the best teams available.

Prayer

2010-02-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

"Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts."
— Mother Teresa

“Prayer for others…. is the very beat of a compassionate heart. To pray for a friend that is ill, for a student who is depressed, for a teacher who is in conflict; for people in prison, in hospitals, on battlefields – is not a futile effort to influence God’s will, but a hospitable gesture by which we invite our neighbors into the center of our hearts. To pray for others means to allow their pains and sufferings, their anxieties and loneliness, their confusion and fears to resound in our innermost selves….It is in and through us that God’s Spirit touches them with his healing presence.” — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Are you like me? Do you wish prayer to me more pro-active? I don't pray to win the lottery, I don't even pray for world peace, or that a friend may be healed, but I like to think that in praying for others, I can ask God to send them grace, grace being in my lexicon an enabling gift. A gift of faith, a gift of comfort, a gift of wisdom. As we pray in the requiem, let the perpetual light shine upon them.

But these wise and holy contemporaries seem to be telling us that only we will be affected by our prayer, and that through our changed selves will God reach others.
Not much of a fast track, there, since I, at least, am able and willing to reach out to so few and not as generously as is needed.

But then we are reminded:
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

Perhaps, I should try a little harder.
.

Is it appropriate to talk about

2010-02-23T16:31:00.000-08:00

family on Blogger? I guess so.

Daughter Kim is moving to Las Vegas. So much is loaded into that simple statement. Excitement and happiness for her and husband Ross. The move is in order for Ross to take advantage of a very attractive job offer. (We'd all had our fingers crossed following an interview in Chicago last week, but Chicago did't pull the trigger and the Las Vegas firm did). And they'll probably get a ton of house cheap in Vegas these says, and the hot dry weather will probably ameliorate the symptoms of Kim's fybroid myalgia. I even imagine Kim completing her degree at UNLV as a day student, attending classes with little Remy strapped to her back.

Kim and Ross's moving away will leave a big hole in our lives, and little Remy won't even be born as of their departure date. I don't know how they expect to raise a child without my proximate support. I will so miss being involved. Although, that makes me consider another positive aspect: Ross's new insurance will cover any medical costs involved with the little one's arrival.

As I've mentioned here before Kim is the source of a lot of guidance for me. She can be disapproving in such a thoughtful way I can never take offense.

I always say, and really believe that Kim, of all the children, was destined to make her own way in the world, sometimes I expected with hardly a glance back. I rely on that sense to keep me from pining away, but that's not to say she is not a very loving child, and we'll miss her very much.

And I'll sure miss being able to suggest to Janett on those occasions when I've badly upset her, that maybe she should call Kim and talk to her about it.

My third post of the day

2010-02-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

Tonight I watched the last three episodes of Friday Night Lights. It was a pleasant diversion with a happy ending, and I was lifted up a little bit. I was taking a break from worrying about all the things I worry about, largely at Kim's recomendation that I distract myself from my concerns.

As I enjoyed watching the show, the characters I've gotten to like over the last few years dealt with some pretty serious stuff, didn't handle things too badly and never once referred to politics or the economy. We all deal with the crises and rejoice at the beauty in our own lives, and ultimately trust in God that whatever happens, we'll find our way through with His help and guidance.

So then I pondered upon my inclination to grapple with the most portentious problems of our time, and decided that it was a touch maniacal. Maybe, driven by a need to understand forces way beyond my control, maybe to divine the root of evil that causes injustice and unhappiness in our world, but ultimately a symptom of an ego that has become unbalanced, and tilts at windmills that may be dragons. Even if they be dragons, there should be more productive ways for me to spend my energies.

And even if I felt that my insights were somehow special and needed to be shared, was I trying to give a helpful caution to those around me, or just being a self- important Cassandra? In any case I've spelled out sufficient dark scenarios that my family, friends, and acquaintances are well aware of my concerns. and now I'll try to relax a little, and maybe focus on more postive endeavors.

Quants

2010-02-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

Quants; another 21st century vocabulary word you may have wondered about.
An article with passing reference to Purcell vs Mack at Morgan Stanley
And a post to move my previous post into obscurity further down the page :O)

'The Quants' Review: When the Money Grid Went Dark 1 comment
by: Sydney Williams February 15, 2010 | about: GS / MS / FIG Sydney Williams 13

Complex algorithms targeting minute market inefficiencies minted billions in profits, until the math no longer worked.

In June 2005, John Mack returned to Morgan Stanley (MS) as CEO, replacing his bitter rival, the staid Philip Purcell, a one-time McKinsey consultant and the boss of Dean Witter. Since his departure four years earlier, the firm's shares had collapsed 40 percent.

Shareholders—and many of the firm's directors—wanted a more aggressive leader. Goldman Sachs (GS), Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (LEHMQ.PK) now followed a new market paradigm, and Morgan was not keeping pace.

Mack, a former bond trader, had been serving as chairman of the hedge fund giant Pequot Management. He acted swiftly, committing billions in risk capital to proprietary investing and trading. His objective: double revenues in five years while keeping costs flat.

By 2007, own-account trading was dominating the big Wall Street banks' banner profits. Morgan, like its competitors, was leveraged at more than 30 to 1, borrowing $30 for every dollar it owned.

Life was great. Mack and other Wall Street bosses were earning tens of millions of dollars, while their gargantuan firms controlled the world's capital flows.

And then the lights dimmed. It was August, and the party was ending.

In little more than a year, Bear, Lehman and Merrill Lynch would disappear. Morgan would come within days of collapse, and even mighty Goldman could not guarantee a certain future.

Scott Patterson's fascinating new book, The Quants [Crown Business, February 2, 2010], describes the extraordinary paradigm that catapulted Wall Street into the stratosphere, and ushered its sudden descent. "Quant" is Wall Street lingo for a mathematical whiz-kid, the nerd with the PhD from MIT or the University of Chicago.

For years, brokerage firms confined quants to backrooms, building models supporting front-line traders and research analysts. By the early 90s, quants were proving that their skills were much more valuable, though mostly at small hedge funds.

The big firms noticed, but did not commit completely to their labyrinthine models until after the dot-com meltdown. They were feasting just fine, thank you.

For all their size, Wall Street's mighty banks tend to focus their gambling on a handful of market activities, whether technology banking or proprietary trading—an ironic contrast to the mantra of diversification preached as they peddle their different products and services.

The tech bubble boosted profits, and bankers controlled Wall Street. Quantitative investing exploded from the ashes of the stock market collapse. Its breathtakingly complex strategies and their uncanny success lured billions of dollars from pension funds and endowments, not just wealthy individuals.

Wall Street's new titans were traders, wholly confident in the ability of black-box strategies to mint massive profits.

Character sketches
Using vivid character sketches, Mr. Patterson offers his reader a fast-paced narrative focused on quantdom's central figures. The godfather is Ed Thorp, a math genius whose books Beat the Dealer and Beat the Market became must-reads for the legions who followed him. Thorp devised a mathematical formula for card-counting, which he later applied to the markets as the pioneer of covertible bond arbitrage. Perhaps most important, he perfected a business model to sustain his strategy.

Other characters include Ken Griffin, the imperious founder of Citadel, with whom Thorp shared his trading strategy and business model; Cliff Asness, the hot-tempered founder of AQR; Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of Renaissance Capital; and Peter Muller and Boaz Weinstein, who orchestrated in-house hedge funds at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank (DB).

Sometimes friends, sometimes rivals, these kingpins share an obsession for poker, and would live well as professional players, if not for the enticement of Wall Street's billion dollar payoffs.

They work behind glass doors, travel in private jets and pursue the Truth.

The Truth was the universal secret about the way the market worked that could only be discovered through mathematics. Revealed through the study of obscure patterns in the market, the Truth was the key to unlocking billions in profits.

—The Quants

Another one of Mr. Patterson's core characters is Eugene Fama, who, he writes, "connected the dots and put the efficient-market hypothesis on the map as the central feature of modern portfolio theory". Professor Fama's hypothesis presents the notion of market equilibrium, where the market's various participants in hunting for inefficiency collectively create efficiency and balance.

As the market bounces around, its returns fall along a bell-shaped curve. For quants, the Truth occurs in detecting small price variances caused by market participants continuously working towards an equilibrium, and knowing that small moves are more likely than large ones.

Their mainframe computers deploy rapid-fire, complex algorithms that hunt for microscopic price discrepancies. Leverage allows them to expand small gains into massive gains. For years, they sourced (borrowed) cheap (low-interest rate) Yen-denominated capital, paying it back with their outsized returns and keeping the profits, the so-called carry trade.

Mr. Patterson explains how each of the quants was becoming "part of and helping create a massive electronic network, a digitized, computerized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe in the blink of an eye, at the click of mouse". He defines this network as the "Money Grid", a machine with "octopuslike tentacles reaching to the farthest corners of civilization, yet it is also practically invisible".

Complex algorithms, the quants would learn, do not account for irrational human behavior, and once-in-every-10,000-years events can occur once every few years—or, even, every few days. The black swan—a term coined by quant-doubter Nassim Nicholas Tabel to describe unexpected events—does not just exist in Australia, it exists in every country on every continent.

Nor do they account for the dangerous concentrations of capital that form when copycat funds plow into similar positions.

New governance
Patterson avoids direct finger pointing, and does not portray quants as nefarious wrong-doers: rather as victims of miscalculated self-confidence. And while it's tempting to blame "hedgies" for collapsing the financial system, it would be wrong to do so.

The system itself allowed hedge funds to emerge and flourish. The irony of Mr. Mack concentrating and leveraging his firm's capital is that he nearly destroyed Morgan Stanley at the behest of his shareholders—or, rather, the core group which brought him back in 2005 to compete with Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

Mr. Mack and his CEO cohorts bear a considerable portion of the blame, as they lorded over the system that fed aggressive risk-taking. But they weren't alone. Government contributed directly to the financial collapse, with poorly crafted legislation and insufficient regulation, in particular rules creating and fostering the sub-prime mortgage market and poor oversight of mounting system-wide risks.

Patterson's book reminds us that Wall Street governance needs to change. Financial innovation is too smart and happens too quickly for any government regulatory body to keep pace. The only way for the system to find balance is for its participants to regulate their own risk-taking.

Clearly, the publicly-traded investment bank model does not work, at least not as scripted. Take basic accounting rules. Even though a firm possesses considerable "intellectual capital"—and, in fact, could not exist without this capital—accounting rules don't force it capitalize this expense and place it on the balance sheet.

Instead bonuses appear as an expense item on the firm's P&L, inflating returns. If firms capitalized employee bonuses, shareholders would view risk-taking much differently.

Ideally, a firm would seek to align itself more closely with shareholders, or government would encourage this. The simplest means for this to happen would be for the firm to scrap its shareholder structure altogether, and return to its original partnership model. Goldman only listed in 1999, and arguably has performed best for having lasted the longest as a private partnership.

Once risk-capital becomes owners' capital the dynamic changes. The dollar you gamble isn't just someone else's dollar, it's mine. So be careful.

For all their perfection, black box models are not perfect. They had survived various currency and debt crises, the spectacular blow-up of Long-Term Capital Management, and numerous other market spasms. The hubris of the narrow cadre of individuals controlling capital flows—investment bankers, central bankers, and government officials—was their belief that the models were indomitable risk-reduction tools.

No doubt, new models will emerge, likely featuring behavioral finance and more "qualitative" elements. Already, many experts are concerned that quant-driven strategies targeting dark pools and flash trading could destabilize the financial system once again.

Until the system itself gets smarter, don't expect smart models to abate volatility anytime soon.

Political crisis, or just a bad dream

2010-02-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

While Senator Evan Bayh's announcement this morning prompts this post, I don't regret the withdrawal of Bayh as candidate for the Senate from Indiana, since I felt he had succeeded his father as a very biased supporter of the state of Israel in the senate. But I do refer readers back to my post of a couple months ago, half-heartedly defending President Obama as attempting to be a centrist, and apprehensively quoting the Yeat's line about the widening gyre.

I caution adherents of the extreme right and their corporate sponsors not to celebrate their successes too soon. The disintegration of the political center amd the inefficacy of political institutions eliminate the hope for solutions of critical questions of social and economic justice.

Federal subsidies will be employed at the local level to support police forces and teachers salaries, as bulwarks against social upheaval, but tens of millions of impoverished and disenfranchised will eventually react outside of traditional channels. As I've noted before, the most desperate of our population are comprised of racial and ethnic minorities, and as those minority peoples act out in anger and frustration, the white middle class will tend toward a reactionary response. Some students and intelligentia will allign with the minorities as civil rights are violated. Whether poor whites allign with the frightened middle class, or with the rioting mob will be a significant factor in this breakdown of social order. Conservative theorists may rely on a white backlash in support of social order, but I'm not sure that poor whites, outside the South, won't also join in violent confrontations against the power structure, due to their recent (over the last thirty years) social and economic deprivation. Neither organized labor nor the Democratic Party have identified in the last twenty years with the interests of the traditional working class, leaving the white working class without meaningful representation during this time of economic deterioration, leading to a diminution of hope that now approaches despair.

A couple of years ago, I posted a number of blogs beginning to explain my concerns about the development in our republic of a revolutionary environment. I didn't complete that analysis, hoping that the then growing tendency toward repudiation of the Bush administration would lead to a reappraisal of socio-economic trends, and maybe to a positive denouement. Obama's election was a hopeful sign, but subsequent developments, and Obama's own vaccilation have dissipated the energy of that moment, leaving me not very hopeful.

I do not consider myself a survivalist or a revolutionary, just a concerned observer.

Happy Valentines Day

2010-02-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

Most of all to my beautiful wife Janett, in whom, from the first moment I met her has shone grace and dignity and wisdom and charm. How lucky I was she saw something in me worth holding onto. What a tragedy it would have been if either of us had let that coincedental moment slip away instead of resolving at that moment to be together forever.

Also to the other wonderful women in my life, my daughters and sisters, who, if not always keeping me on the straight and narrow, have kept me from sliding down the slippery slopes on either side of the path. And to my mother, who on earth and in heaven has protected me from the consequences of my own silliness.

Stephie emailed me a brief account of my grandmother DKT's earliest years which I'll copy below, which reminds us of how many devoted courageous women have preceded us to bring us to where we are today:

This is the story of Dean Knowlton Traynors parents Cecelia Adelaide Knowlton and Bernard Pitcher Featherly

Bernard Pitcher Featherly, married at Belgiun N.Y. Cecelia Adelaide Knowlton on Nov. 4 1860. Cecelia was 17 when they married and Bernard was 38. Bernard took his young wife to Albion N.Y., where he left her with his sister, Eliza Bailey, and he went at the earrnest solicitation of his brother in law, James H Thorn, who married Catherine Feathers, to Owosso Michigan, where he built a log cabin.

When their first child, Eliza Emily, born in the home of Eliza Bailey was 2 months old, Cecelia Adelaide followed her husband to Owosso taking with her, besides her infant, one son of her husband, Henri (10 years old). The other children had been taken by Bernards relatives and relatives of their mother, Cynthia. Bernard and Cecelia lived in the small log cabin until the summer of 1864. It was there that Bertie and Frank were born.

Bernard walked 20 miles to try and enlist in the Civil War. He was refused because he had 2 handicaps/ When he was a boy he had chopped a toe which had drawn under while healing, and that, he was told would prevent him from going on long marches. Also, he had lost the first finger of his right hand (the trigger finger) in a sawmill.

The parents of Cecelia Adelaide had moved in 1861, to Milwaukee, and Cecelia Adelaide being very lonely , and much afraid of the Indians that roamed the woods around Owosso and longing to be near her parents, early in the summer of 1864 took three babies and crossed the state of Michigan, from Owosso to Grand Haven, and took a boat to Milwaukee. She was only 21 but said that the journey was not difficult because fellow passnagers were kind and had helped her with the children. Henri (or Heri) had remained in Michigan. Lydie (Eliza Emily), then almost 3 years old, had been ill with malaria and was too weak to walk. Bertie, 16 months old, was sickly and could not walk; Frank was 3 months old.

About this time the cousin of James Monroe Knowlton visited Milwaukee and persuaded Bernard that Illinos was a better farming country than Wisconsin. Cecelia Adelaidewith her 3 babies, remained with her parents, and there Bertie died. Bernard built a small house in Crystal Lake Il, or Nunda as it was called then, and sent for his family. In that house was born Lillie, Cora, Charley, and Dean. The family moved from there to a larger home on 20 acres near Paynes Corner, towards McHenry. Four children, Nettie, Bernie (Bernard), Ollie (Olive) and Addie were born in this home.

From there the family moved to Kansas. After 2 years on a government claim in Kansas, during one summer in which there had been in invasion of grasshoppers and the other year a drought, destroying the crops both years, with little Ollie and Addie laid to rest under the sod, and the little blue eyed baby, Daisy, in Cecelia Adelaides arms, a return journey to Crystal Lake was under taken, one team driven by Bernard and the other by his wife

A couple of positive thoughts

2010-02-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

"When I look back on all of the these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of troubles in his life, most of which had never happened." Winston Churchhill

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." -Jer 29:11 (Courtesy of Kim)

Kim facebooked a review of the Road

2010-01-31T12:03:00.000-08:00

which she said made her think of me. I must protest, I did not buy a huntihg rifle in anticipation of Y2k, nor did I start wearing a hard hat during Kahotek's run at earth. Someone as disorganised and whimsical as I could never be a survivalist. Too many contingincies to plan upon. I'd get dizzy just thinking about them.

But I am an alarmist, about the economy and the markets. Leaving aside references to ethnicity (excepting this disclaimer) it is incredible to me and should be to you that responsibility for so much of the wealth and well being of our republic has been given over to a small criminal clique euphemistically referred to as "Wall Street bankers". Up to thirty years ago, tycoons made their money on holdings; today they make their money on bonuses, and leave the holding to the suckers.

But I know so many nice and interesting people, if 3 posts in a row are about my market misgivings, something is wrong with me. I decided that I was annoyed about not getting to play in the marketplace. So I bought a put on CAR (Avis car rental). I plan on making or losing a couple hundred bucks. preferrably the former, but will feel better, in any case, because I'm getting to do what I like to do. Besides there are worse ways to spend a couple hundred bucks.

So, now I have five digital recreation options, facebooking, blogging, reading about ND football. playing the market on line - and playing RISK offline. The other four just weren't enough. I was becoming surly and argumentative. Hopefully, my disposition will improve, and I will comment here on other matters more often.

But, all that bad stuff is still true.

I just posted a blog and then deleted it,

2010-01-24T20:54:00.000-08:00

I was having trouble deciding which comments and illustrations to carry from an article, so I decided to link the article I recommend you read it.

The author of this article has a great record for being right about the markets, and I would be better off today if I'd been taking his advise over the last ten months.

PS I dont consider this or the previous post as being rants. or even venting. More like comforting for those of us who were sure either we or the market was behaving insanely.

A more reasoned tone

2010-01-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

Since I posted my diatribe the other day the market hasw fallen a little, but it's hard for me to rrust the market. Here's some insiders' comments.

Is the Government Manipulating Stock Prices?

By Jeff Clark (www.growthstockwire.com)

After a 20-year career trading S&P 500 futures contracts on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, my friend Charlie suddenly retired last November.

"There was no way to protect yourself," Charlie said to me over lunch a couple weeks ago when I asked him about his unexpected decision. "This guy would walk into the pits and just start buying. It was unconventional. He'd buy at times when it really didn't make any sense – at least not to those of us who'd been around for a while. And he'd buy HUGE."

"It got to the point," Charlie continued, "that we'd have a bunch of our interns just watching the guy when he was off the floor. We'd know if he took a phone call. We'd know if he'd gone outside for a smoke. And we'd know if he started walking in the direction of the pit. That was our cue to start buying futures contracts ourselves – just to get in front of the guy.

"I knew it was time to retire," Charlie sighed, "when I started planning my trading day around this guy's bathroom breaks."

For the past 20 years, conspiracy theorists have engaged in stories about the "Plunge Protection Team" – a group of traders funded by the Fed whose sole purpose is to prop up the stock market. I never really bought into the argument, though. After all, an awful lot of people "in the know" have to stay quiet in order to keep the conspiracy going. And it's unlikely any group of people can maintain that sort of silence for two decades.

But Charlie's story got me thinking.

Then, last week, Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs – one of the most respected and widely read financial research organizations – published a report that raised the possibility that the Fed is actively involved in boosting stock prices.
In the article, Mr. Biderman suggests it would only take $5 billion to $15 billion each month to buy enough S&P 500 futures contracts to boost the market 70%. Surely, with all the hundreds of billions of dollars used to prop up the real estate, auto, and banking industries, it's reasonable to suspect the Fed might use a few bucks to prop up stock prices, too.

At least it's something to think about.

I'm still not sure if I can completely buy into the whole conspiracy theory just yet. There is, however, one thing I do know for sure...

If the Fed has been actively engaged in manipulating stock prices higher, then it can manipulate them lower as well. You won't want to be the one left holding the bag when that happens.

Best regards and good trading,

Jeff Clark

I'm not happy

2010-01-18T20:19:00.000-08:00

I mean personally I'm pretty happy, but things are getting on my nerves, like the senatorial election in Massachusets and, like Obama's faltering leadership. I am such a skeptic when it comes to politics, why should I care if the Democrats do the impossible and surrender the Kennedy senate seat two months after his passing? Or if Obama fritters away his administration's initiative amd momentum negotiating with Snowe and Lieberman on health care. Maybe because I am still apprehensive about the coming of the REAL economic shit storm, and am impatient and annoyed with Fox News, the Tea-baggers, and Pat Robertson for their self obsessed rants. Don't they know, don't they care? And I guess my disenchantment with Obama has little to do with Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo or health care, and everything to do with Geithner, Bernanke and Goldman Sachs,

I haven't been actively trading for a few months, but lost money on almost all my bearish trades in the past year, and finally realized that the Treasury's Plunge Protection Team had given participating memberships to the Fed and the major investment banks, and that securities will not trade downward untill something so cataclysmic happens that the Fed will be unable to paper it over. We'll later learn that Goldman got massively short just before the real crash, and they will pat themselves on the back and award big bomuses all around because at the "critical moment" they recognized the onset of a Black Swan (rare and unpredictable) event and ferociously shorted the markets.

Thank you for allowing me to express myself. I feel a little better now. But not because anything has gotten better in the real world, only because I'm not stumbling around muttering misgivings under my breath, but actually saying what I think right out loud.

What will the event be? Could be the popping of the China bubble, causing commodity prices to plummet and dashing hopes that China would spend the world out of recession. Could be Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland sequentially defaulting on debt, wrecking the Euro and plunging Europe to the depths. Could be that someone will force an audit on the Fed revealing that the US central bank has been bankrupted by purchasing all the crappy bank loans they had to buy to fund the banks' stock market spree.

In any event, who holds a senate seat from Massachusets isn't going to make a lot of difference, and who pays your doctor bill or whether it gets paid at all won't matter much.

i know I'm a downer, but just want you all to know that when the bad things happen, it's not your fault.

Just a quick note on spelling

2010-01-17T10:56:00.000-08:00

Homonyms are the worst, they're, their, and there for instance. Pretty smart people mix these words up and I think any such error should be considered a typographical error rather than a mispelling. With this in mind I googled "it's" and was sent to smartgeek to see whether it was a possesive or a contraction. Here's what I found out:

"A common mistake, and one that drives teachers of all levels crazy, is the mix-up between the words "its" and "it's." While the difference may not seem significant to the average writer, using the words correctly can help you appear more intelligent and educated. Many people form first impressions simply by reading someone's writing, so you want your writing to be as accurate as possible.

"Its" is a possessive pronoun, meaning "belonging to it." The confusion arises because if you don't substitute the pronoun "it" for the noun, an apostrophe is used. For example, the bone belonging to the dog is "the dog's bone." The eraser on the pencil is "the pencil's eraser." Both examples use an apostrophe plus an "s" in order to attribute ownership.

However, when a noun is changed to a pronoun, an apostrophe is no longer used. Instead of "a rabbit's cage," you might say "its cage." Instead of "the house's window," you would say "its window." This tends to confuse people who are used to apostrophes denoting possessives. Other examples of the possessive "its" could include the dog burying its bone in its backyard and the table which has its leg broken off and its tablecloth in need of ironing.

"It's" is a contraction. A contraction is when a new word is formed from two or more separate words. In English, an apostrophe is used to acknowledge the missing letters. "Don't" is a contraction of "do not," and "shouldn't" is a contraction of "should not." "It's" is short for "it is," or less frequently, for "it has."

Any time "it's" includes an apostrophe, the writer should be able to substitute "it is" or "it has" and have the sentence still make sense. "It's going to be my birthday tomorrow," is correct because it can be changed to "It is going to be my birthday tomorrow." "It's been two hours since I've eaten," can be verified since changing it to "It has been two hours since I've eaten," is still correct.

Therefore, it's easy to get the two words mixed up, because English does not always follow its own rules!"

My other spelling shortcoming? Putting an "h" in week, or leaving the "h" out of wheek, whichever one is wrong.

Just a quick PS re coaching conundrum

2010-01-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I was writing about Notre Dame's quest for a new football coach. There was much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth on Irish fans' boards, but aside from those sites, I think the concensus was generally that Notre Dame hired a better than good coach, and that the process was carried out in an orderly way, and that the school was not embarassed by events.

Subsequent events have made ND look even better. Urban Meyer's Greta Garbo impersonation down in Talahassee made everybody involved look foolish, and while Meyer and the U of Fl admin have tried to pour oil on the water down there, things remain unresolved. Strangely, Meyer's "I'm gone, I'm back" two step doesn't appear to have cost the school significantly in the recruiting area. Also, assistant coaches and coordinators with successful programs are usually ready to acccept promotions to positions of greater responsibility at other schools, but Urban has kind of a no-name staff and we haven't heard of a lot of poaching efforts directed their way. Still the situation remains unsettled, and coaches, players, fans and sports writers will be keeping a nervous eye on Urban Meyer in the next year.

Mike Leach being fired at Texas Tech was the next goofy story, The coach told a player who showed up for practice in a baseball cap and shades and claimed to be recovering from a concussion to get off the practice field and spend the practice time in the equipment shed. Apparently the player was a long time annoyance to the coach, performing indifferently and behaving too casually to suit the coach who likes to see a lot of intensity and desire in his players. Unfortunately for the coach, the players dad is a commentator for ESPN. Also unfortunately for the coach, the school admin felt he had secured a better contract last year than they were able or wanted to pay. By firing the coach a week before their bowl game they probably hoped to save the $800,000 bonus they were due to pay him on January 1st. Something tells me Leach's attorney will get a lot bigger settlement than that before this is over. Oh, by the way, for Friday Night Lights fans Mike Leach was the dark haired fellow who ran into Coach Taylor at a gas station and told the coach to keep swinging his sword and that the recent adversity might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Also for those who care, Coach Leach's players were achieving graduation at the highest rate of any state school in the country.

The third story getting a lot of attention is Pete Carroll's leaving USC. A very successful coach who ran a pretty thuggish program and turned a blind eye on agents and boosters throwing a lot of cash at his playwers (and probably other violations, eg academics), the coach is hitting the trail before the NCAA announces findings in its investigations at USC. Equally amusing is the fact that the school was turned down by the first four candidates it approached to replace Coach Carroll, and finally gave job to a twenty-something coach with a very bad record on as well as off the field. They apparently expected this non-entity to assemle a star studded cast of assistants who would maintain the school's high standards, um I mean for wins vs losses. So far he has enlisted one respected assistant, who also happened to be his dad.

Two other fairly big-tine coaches come to mind who were terminated in the last month, one for choking a player, another for making allegedly racist comments to black players.

All in all, looking back now ND seems to have handled the transition pretty well.

OK, this is serious, even though it starts with -

2010-01-07T16:20:00.000-08:00

I was watching the Opra Winfrey show today, and she was visiting with ladies in different countries via skype. There were probably others but I saw conversation with the women from Denmark, Kuwait City, and Rio de Janeiro. As you might expect, I was most impressed with the Danes, and not based too much on their appearance, although they were pretty, and looked slender and healthy. They lived with husbands and 2 or 3 children in modern smallish apartments or townhouses and space was well utilized, and decor was minimal. Everything was immaculate but looked comfortable. They acknowledged paying income taxes of 50% to 60% but all three interviewees agreed it was well worth the price in living in a society where medical care, education, and economic security were assured. Apparently if you lose your job the state pays you 90% of your wages for up to 4 years. Professionals presumably earn more than bus boys, but not at the multiples we observe in the US. Generally, the free education and equitable income levels encourages people to do what they value doing and they value creativity and job satisfaction more than incrementally higher income levels. When Oprah asked how they felt about living in a socialized state they seemed perplexed for a moment before responding they would call it a civilized state.

The ladies in Kuwait and Brazil appeared upper middle class and very comfortable. They disclaimed any awareness of poverty in their societies. The Kuwaiti lady mentioned having an abundance of domestic help and introduced her Philippine cook. Apparently they don't bring in desperately poor Palestinians to their enclave because of potential political dissonance, but bring in Indians and Philippinos.
The Brazilian lady seemed surprised to hear that Oprah's film crew had had to pay the local street gang hundreds of dollars to be permitted to enter the favella (slum)where the lady's servants live.

I attribute the egalitarian nature of the Danish society largely to the ethnic homogeneity; when everyone else is just like you it's probably easier to implement the golden rule. I'm sure the sense of fairness is cultivated by educational, social, and political infrastructures, but the interviewees bore no resemblance to the east bloc workers who used to extol the virtues of the glorious workers republics.

This program provided a jumping off point for a discussion of my concern that ethnic diversity in the United States impedes progress toward social justice. More on that another time. One caveat, the Danish ladies said the churches were empty and none expressed any inclination toward religion.

The history channel

2010-01-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

is annoying me lately. Every time I turn it on lately they're talking about Nostradamus, and often tying in his end time forecasts with the Book of Revelation or the Mayan calendar. Today they rolled out Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would end before 2060. The Nostradamus and Newton end of the world musings were both recorded in "recently discovered, long lost" volumes. Three phrases are repeated ad nauseam. "It is an intriguing possibility that..." "Some believe that..." and "Only time will tell...". I thought anything would be more interesting than Ice Road Truckers, just goes to show how wrong you can be. On the other hand certitude that the world will end in 2012 would certainly simplify our retirement planning. Hmmmm, maybe the mind control guys at the CIA have taken over the History Channel. and it's part of a sophisticated scheme to reinforce the population's senses of futility and indifference.

Janett and I are feeling really happy after the last month. Christmas was very nice and all our children are lovely, and our grandchildren are lovely, too.

Lauren and baby John

2010-01-02T19:11:00.000-08:00

The boy is a rambler, born on the 22nd and on the road visiting family on the 27th.

Urban Meyer, on a slow news day

2009-12-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

announced that he's been afflicted with an erratic heart and very severe head pain for 20 years, and while he remains selflessly devoted to the Gator nation, the time has come to honor his true priorities of family and faith and resign as head coach at the University of Florida. A day later he announced that he was actually going to take a leave of absence and wouldn't rule out returning to coach the team as early as next season. Speculation as to the causes of this erratic behavior:

a)Not being in contention for a national championship and playing second fiddle to Alabama in the SEC, he had to do something dramatic to elicit a lot of man love from the guys at ESPN.

b)The impending severance of his very close relationship with graduating quarterback Tim Tebow has resulted in a total emotional breakdown, and he simply doesn't know how to face life going forward.

c)One night at home with wife Shelley convinced him maybe the family thing wasn't such a priority after all, especially once she found out the 5 million a year didn't keep coming in if he resigned.

d) In keeping with his long established tradition of lying to recruits, he'll call all the kids comitted to Florida to reassure them he'll be back as head coach, then reannounce his resignation after the kids have signed their letters of intent.

e) all of the above

next day edit:

Entre nous, as my mother used to say, which I think means "between us" and implies a certain confidentiality, I think maybe Urban has been self medicating for these stress "symptoms" for a few years and his wife, a shrink specializing in addiction problems, had a little one on one with the coach. He blamed his habit on the demands of the job, so she told him the job had to go. Certainly they have all the money they could hope to spend in several lifetimes, and sacrificing their family and future happiness to a growing dependency would not be the right thing to do. Hence her announcement that he would definitely not be returning to coaching just a couple hours before he announced that he would. There's something a little dysfunctional going on. If I'm wrong it won't be the first time.

Bloging on Facebook

2009-12-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

Andy Traynor Janett, Kim, Stephie and I went to Betsy's for a nice family party. Sisters Dean, Ann and Mary were there, Ann's John and Aidan, Brother Bill's whole crew, including 4 beautiful little girls (and special appearance - Katies's fiancee John) NY mogul John, Brother Tim and wife Billy. Betsy's Bill, Christie and little ...Bill with wife Courtney and daughter Sophia. Mary's Tom and Tim. Cousin Dee Dee
See More
about an hour ago

Only Friends · Comment ·LikeUnlike
Molly Traynor likes this.

Andy Traynor . Missing only Dean's Jim due to health problem, Mary's Ann and Tim's Betsy who reportedly preferred the attention of young men and Mike and Molly who were keeping the slopes safe in CO. Never enough time. Janett drove to and back with heavy snow falling. Hoorah for all.
about an hour ago ·

Andy Traynor John let us know son Mike was headed for the duty station today. Best wishes Mike. We'll be missing you.
about an hour ago ·

Andy Traynor And while Stephie was partying, Mark moved the family to new digs in Dundee. See why I still prefer blogging?
about an hour ago ·

Andy Traynor PS Everyone happy and excited for Noah, Lauren, and little three cheeks.
about an hour ago ·

Andy Traynor And where was Ross? After slipping and sliding home from Strphie's last night, our Southern Man decided he'd done enough winter driving for this year, pulled the covers up and put his head under the piilow. I admire a man of conviction.
about a minute ago ·

Something happened yesterday

2009-12-23T21:48:00.000-08:00

Lauren presented Noah with a beautiful son. John Reginald came into the world 22 inches tall and weighing ten and a half pounds with hefty little arms and big hands. His arrival really brightened our Christmas week, and we're so happy for Lauren and Noah.
But now, somehow, Noah's not my baby boy any more. Neither of us changed, nor did our loving relationship. But, it's as though he got a foot taller overnight. I'll still treat him with the same familiarity and affectiom, but with responsibility comes dignity, and respectability. Obviously, Noah's already a grown up and experienced and mature, a married veteran, working and continuing school, but having a son of his own is a pretty big deal. It's late, and I'm sleepy. Maybe I'm over-reacting. We'll see.

Here's a picture of my grandson, John Reginald.

I am so weird.

2009-12-21T21:18:00.000-08:00

Haven't posted for a couple of weeks, maybe a little distracted by advent. I would usually be thinking of posting the image of the Infant of Prague with a copy of a little prayer, but spending happy time with Owen, anticipating the birth of grandson J.R. any day now, and Kimmy and Ross's baby in 4 or 5 months has reminded me of how joyful babies are.

So, I found this photo, and invite you to imagine with me Mary's happiness as she went to Jesus' little crib and was greeted by a face like this.

Sounds like Brian Kelly is the guy.

2009-12-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

I've commented in the last couple weeks about the ND coaching search. I mentioned Brian Kelly and Bob Stoops as candidates. I think Stoops was interested but for any one of a number reasons wouldn't take the plunge. (big money at Oklohoma, family and being in the middle of building a "dream house", less academic demands on players, lower standards for recruits). Most of all, though, ND lately seems like an imperfect opportunity.

I also referred to my annoyance with a lot of posters at Rock's House who insisted that Meyers, Stoops, and Saban were the acceptable candidates and hiring anyone else would represent a failure on the part of the administation. They're still going at it over there. From what little I know of Brian kelly he's a feisty, resourceful coach who works his players hard and adjusts his schemes to give his team the best chance to win with the talent available. His record at smaller schools is extremely impressive. He may be a turn around coach for ND.

If Kelly turns ND down, maybe Allsted, the Conneticut coach, or Lou Holts's son, Skip. They'd be OK, but I hope Kelly accepts the job.

PS Here's a link to an article about Brian Kelly and Notre Dame.

In case you're interested

2009-12-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to a couple of histories of Elgin IL written by the same fellow for the Elgin Historical Society.

The town has a colorful past, and reading the anecdotal writing brings on a nostalgia for the robust America of a cebtury ago.

Naming contest

2009-12-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

From a recent NPR feature:

Illinois State Senator Mike Jacobs also wants to expand the market for Asian carp. For one thing, he'd like to see it on the menu in state prisons.

"Some people say that smoked, it's better than salmon," Jacobs says of Asian carp's taste. But the name "carp" is likely putting non-ethnic Americans off trying the fish, he says.

Aside from objections to the possibly offensive "ethnic" reference, and the possibly offensive state prison reference, the State Senator might have found a silver lining in the dark cloud of the Asia carp invasion. From You Tube clips. these things appear easy to catch, and there's a lot of them.

How does Heartland Halibut sound? No? Well, how about Lockport Lox? Hmmm, we'll keep trying.

A historical tid-bit and an interesting villain

2009-12-03T18:28:00.000-08:00

Warlord's death evokes CIA's Golden days in the heroin trade

The death of Burmese warlord Khun Sa severs one of the few remaining links between Washington's Central Intelligence Agency and the trafficking of heroin out of Southeast Asia's famed Golden Triangle.

By The Vancouver SunOctober 31, 2007

The death of Burmese warlord Khun Sa severs one of the few remaining links between Washington's Central Intelligence Agency and the trafficking of heroin out of Southeast Asia's famed Golden Triangle.

Khun Sa apparently died last Friday in the Burmese commercial centre and former capital, Rangoon, aged 73 and after a peaceful retirement since he surrendered to the country's ruling junta in 1996.

Many believe he got amnesty in return for handing over to Burma's ruling generals his opium poppy growing and drug production empire that at one time provided 60 per cent of the heroin sold on United States streets.

But Khun Sa never considered himself a drug lord.

He thought himself a liberation fighter for the freedom of his people, the Shan of the forest-covered mountains of northeastern Burma. Poppy growing and drug trafficking were unfortunate necessities, he held, to feed and clothe his people, and buy arms necessary to fight Burma's military regime.

He even wrote directly to several U.S. presidents offering to sell the Golden Triangle's entire crop of heroin to them to keep it off American streets while still sustaining his liberation struggle. He never received a reply.

Khun Sa was a much loved by his people as a great nationalist hero. He was loathed with equal ferocity by successive U.S. administrations and in the late 1980s a $2-million US reward was offered for his capture.

It was not always so. Back in the 1960s and '70s, Khun Sa's empire fitted neatly into a CIA operation to fund Southeast Asian hill tribe militias to attack North Vietnamese supply routes to the war in South Vietnam.

In one of the CIA's more foul operations, its agents used its Air America airline to fly out Golden Triangle heroin. The drug was sold to corrupt South Vietnamese and Thai politicians who then peddled it to GIs in South Vietnam and a booming population of addicts in America.

There are some credible reports that, because of Khun Sa's access to southern China, the CIA continued supporting him well after the war in Southeast Asia had ended and even after the U.S. government had put a price on his head.

Khun Sa, meaning "Prince of Wealth," became the nom de guerre of a boy born in 1934 to a Chinese father and a Shan princess mother. His name was Zhang Qifu and he came of age in the tempestuous years after the Second World War when the Chinese Communists ousted the last troops of the old Kuomintang nationalist government from Yunnan province.

The Kuomintang's 8th and 26th Armies established themselves in northern Burma where they carved out a principality financed by opium production and supplied by regular air drops of arms from American planes.

As a youth Khun Sa joined the Kuomintang military, but then switched sides to Burmese government militias charged with halting the opium trade.

Once he had gathered an army of about 800 followers, Khun Sa declared himself a Shan nationalist and set up his own drug-producing principality. This brought him into collision with and defeat by the Kuomintang, as a result of which he was captured and imprisoned by the Burmese government in 1969.

Khun Sa was released in 1976 when his followers kidnapped two Russian doctors and demanded their leader's freedom in exchange.

He moved to the wilds of northern Thailand where he established his base in the town of Baan Hin Taek where he was protected by his well-armed Shan United Army of about 10,000 men.

This began the glory days of his control of the Golden Triangle drug trade. But in 1982, after a long and arduous campaign, the Thai army and airforce pushed the Shan United Army back into Burma.

Khun Sa simply set up a new headquarters just inside Burma at Ho Mong from where he controlled the world's heroin trade for nearly two decades.

My friend, Bertil Linter, who is the great expert on the Golden Triangle and who interviewed Khun Sa several times, says the warlord was basically an illiterate thug.

But Khun Sa told another friend, Denis Gray of the Associated Press Bangkok bureau, "They say I have horns and fangs. Actually, I am a king without a crown."

Sun International Affairs Columnist

I'm getting disoriented

2009-12-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

reading about candidates for Notre Dame's head football coaching position over at Rock's House. The board moderators counsel against speculation, at the same time subtly hinting that they have a pretty good idea who the likely candidate is and whether that candidate will accept an offer.

Bob Stoops, currently the head coach at Oklohoma has been issuing more strongly worded denials, but some fans parse his syntax and continue to hope last week's hands down favorite is still in the running. Other fans have turned their attention from the loser of three of the last six national championship games to the winner of two of the last three. That's right Urban Meyer, a coach Irish fan's loved to hate after they felt he left them at the altar when he accepted the Florida job five years ago. And why do they think he might be considering the opportunity? Searching the tea leaves they come up with clues like Athletic Director Swarbrick warning it will be a while before the new head coach is named. They infer this timing would allow the new coach to appear in this year's championship game before announcing his move to ND.

And then today Kent Nix, a top Florida high school defensive tackle announced he was accepting a scholarship to Notre Dame. With all the trouble ND has had recruiting really good defensive tackles why would a top candidate from Florida commit to a team that doesn't even have a head coach, unless he know's something.

Well, this kind of speculation seems as unhealthy as it is inescapable. But why do the fan's short lists have to include the most successful major college coaches of the day and insist noone else will do? Frank Leahy came from Boston College, Lou Holtz from Minnesota and Ara Parseghian from Northwestern; good coaches but not the brightest stars in the coaching firmament until their success at ND. And they found Knute Rockne in the chemistry lab.

Did I post this before?

2009-11-26T09:31:00.000-08:00

I think Christie O'Brien posted it on Facebook and I saved it 'cause I like it!

Yesterday's post was not what I intended when

2009-11-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

I started. I was actually thinking of the opening lines:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

and I was thinking of them in connection to Barrack Obama.

I was thinking he is the center trying to hold. His eloquence is labored, as though it is straining to express truths that most can accept while provoking as few as possible at either extreme.

With humility he conveys that he cannot devise a simple solution for Afghanistan, or the correct answer for Wall Street and Main Street. Like other presidents he's found that his freedom of action is limited by preexisting circumstances and commitments, but more than others he must try to build consensus at a critical moment. Like a shepherd, he really wants to find the greener pastures, but now must concentrate on getting his flock safely down the icy slope.

Something I've observed is that one might question his personal loyalties. Those who have helped him in the past can be left aside as he presses onward and brings into the fold former adversaries. A very risky tactic, except that it isn't a tactic, it is the mission. The former adherents must be counted upon to remain committed in spite of being displaced. Why? Because they share the vision, not a Utopian vision, but a pragmatic appreciation that this is what must be done.

The attempt at consensus slows, if not impedes, progress, as has been the case with health care reform. We barely seem to be inching forward. Perhaps, he sees that it is not the measure of the progress that it is critical, but the directional shift.

From Wikipedeia re Yeats' Second Coming

2009-11-25T18:41:00.000-08:00

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" can be read as a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

In each human heart terror survives
The raven it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

I worry, but not too much, about being a cynical and embittered old man. Web surfing, tv watching, and news reading have led me to feel near to despair. Our brothers and sisters suffer intensely at the hands of the most rapacious few and statesmen do not intervene or even seem to notice, as they rely on the diversion of a small fraction of a percent of those greedy few's annual income to fund their public relations efforts. And the public relations effort, does it serve to inform or educate the electorate? Only so far as to convince thirty plus per-cent of the voters that this candidate is, at worst, the best of a sorry lot.

But I won't despair, because it was a simple accident that I was born to be a person who was given the time and education to ponder our situation. I've asked myself why was I not born an indentured slave in an Indian stone quarry, a Chinese peasant farmer, an Ethiopian goat herder or a Bolivian miner? If we strip away the accident of birth and I lived a life of hard labor and desperate poverty, I would know that despair is a luxury I can not afford, and that given nothing else I have only God. If I could not provide welfare or even assure the survival of my chidren, I would stare into the eyes of God every day and learn that He expects me to know that what matters is my relationship to Him, and that I need be a humble supplicant.

The human comforts we enjoy in our time and place are a pleasant distraction, but should we not be staring into the eyes of God and receiving the same message? Does the accident of our birth really alter the metaphysics? If the four horsemen crash down upon us and we lose all that separated us from the others, would we lose ourselves, would we lose our God?

I remind myself not to worry over what to require from this broken world, or from broken people. And I remind myself that in God's eye my fretful pondering is another self-indulgence and another distraction. I'll try to elevate myself to humble supplication.

A nugget

2009-11-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

Amidst the angst over Coach Weis' travails at ND, there have been a lot of comments posted on the boards. An interesting one observed how closely coaches' percentage of wins and losses at a school in the coaches' first three years predicted their career percentage at that school.

Personally, I appreciate what Coach Weis has done. By recruiting a lot of talented kids he dispelled premature reports of the school's demise as a factor on the collegiate stage. Also, I think he emphasised character in promoting the program and his players can be proud of how they've conducted themselves on the field as well as off. I also liked the way he seemed to promote the school's unique identity to the players. Hopefully, even after disappointing careers for some, his players will love the school and will have participated in a way that will benefit them for years to come.

After the losses of the last couple weeks, I accept the evidence that Coach Weis is unable to solve the problems that have hurt the team's performance. No point in enumerating those problems here, or postulating on why Coach Weis could not correct them. We now have to conclude the head coaching position at ND is not a good fit for Coach Weis.

Toward the end of Coach Willinghams's tenure I expressed anger that he was not engaged in a way that made the ND experience beneficial to his players. I don't feel that way about Coach Weis, but I fear that if he continues in his position harmful effects will occur for the coach as well as for the young men. Just as I felt that terminating Coach Ditka from his position with the Chicago Bears probably saved his sanity if not his life, T think the same is now true for Coach Weis and ND.

This past week on TV

2009-11-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Channel 11, our national public affiliate presented "World War II on HD". I kind of thought it would be edited from the Ken Burns series which I haven't seen. I don't think it was. I hope not. It was OK for the historical content, and the personal accounts were interesting, but how many charred bloated corpses does it take to convey the war is hell message?

I remember my mother telling me that people couldn't believe in 1943 and 1944, that ten thousand American casualties would be suffered in a couple of days on some little (a couple of square miles) atoll that no one had ever heard of before and would not here of again. Apparently several little islands were desired because they provided air strips to support the bombing campaign against Japan. I've also heard it said or read that some of these little fortresses could have been bypassed.

We all know that our enemies in World War II, specifically Japan and Germany engaged in cruelty that was worse than barbarism. Germany seems to have behaved most grotesquely against civilians in their own country and in countries they overran.
The Japanese were inhumanly savage and sadistic toward military prisoners as well as to subjugated civilians. Even though the Japanese suffered tragic consequences of their military madness, one feels they never were adequately humiliated for their their insane criminality, and that their national hubris emerged unscathed. After the war both of these countries were transformed in the diplomatic game into "bulwarks" against encroaching communism, and both played their hands skillfully. Germany suffered more from the occupation, especially by Stalin's minions, and also from the worldwide revulsion at the horrors of the concentration camps. Japanese crimes against humanity have never been appropriately addressed. Maybe someone should do a thoughtful series on the Cold War.

At any rate, after a couple of evenings of viewing I stopped watching, feeling physically ill and psychologically distressed from what I had seen.

More gold shenanigans, but worse

2009-11-16T07:20:00.000-08:00

I have to go to work and don't have time to break this article down for you, but the author's contention is that fake gold bars (over a million 400 oz bars) have been minted with US Treaury connivance (during the Rubin-Clinton days). Half those bars are at Fort Knox and the other half have been sold in world market.

People who brought GLD, an exchange traded fund which theoretically was buying gold bars on behalf of it's shareholders, may need to be concerned that GLD's vault is filled with tungsten, not gold, and that their GLD shares are going to plummet.

Thee "real" gold market might fall initially as everyone who is uncertain tries to unload, but presumably the revelation of this counterfeiting will increase the value of actual gold.

"Gld ETF Warning, Tungsten Filled Fake Gold Bars
Commodities / Gold & Silver 2009
Nov 12, 2009 - 12:22 PM

By: Rob_Kirby

“Gold Finger - A New Take On Operation Grand Slam With A Tungsten Twist”

I’ve already reported on irregular physical gold settlements which occurred in London, England back in the first week of October, 2009. Specifically, these settlements involved the intermediation of at least one Central Bank [The Bank of England] to resolve allocated settlements on behalf of J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank – who DID NOT have the gold bullion that they had sold short and were contracted to deliver. At the same time I reported on two other unusual occurrences:

1] - irregularities in the publication of the gold ETF - GLD’s bar list from Sept. 25 – Oct.14 where the length of the bar list went from 1,381 pages to under 200 pages and then back up to 800 or so pages.

2] - reports of 400 oz. “good delivery” bricks of gold found gutted and filled with tungsten within the confines of LBMA approved vaults in Hong Kong.

Why Tungsten?

If anyone were contemplating creating “fake” gold bars, tungsten [at roughly $10 per pound] would be the metal of choice since it has the exact same density as gold making a fake bar salted with tungsten indistinguishable from a solid gold bar by simply weighing it.

Unfortunately, there are now more sordid details to report.

When the news of tungsten “salted” gold bars in Hong Kong first surfaced, many people

who I am acquainted with automatically assumed that these bars were manufactured in

China – because China is generally viewed as “the knock-off capital of the world”.

Here’s what I now understand really happened:

The amount of “salted tungsten” gold bars in question was allegedly between 5,600 and 5,700 – 400 oz – good delivery bars [roughly 60 metric tonnes].

This was apparently all highly orchestrated by an extremely well financed criminal operation.

Within mere hours of this scam being identified – Chinese officials had many of the perpetrators in custody.

And here’s what the Chinese allegedly uncovered:

Roughly 15 years ago – during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] – between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes]. Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day. I know folks who have copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of “tungsten” bars shipped to Ft. Knox.

The balance of this 1.3 million – 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten cache was also plated and then allegedly “sold” into the international market.

Apparently, the global market is literally “stuffed full of 400 oz salted bars”.

Makes one wonder if the Indians were smart enough to assay their 200 tonne haul from the IMF?"

Also makes me wonder if the timing of this discovery by the Chinese just coincidentally occurred while President Obama was in Japan on his way to China. If there's any truth to these reports the president could be extremely embarassed in meetings with the Chinese. Those clever devils.

John Gagliardi

2009-11-15T12:24:00.001-08:00

I googled to see how Bobby Bowden and joe Paterno were doing in their death match struggle to retire (or die) with the most career coaching wins and came across an article about Joe Gagliardi, coach at St Johns College in Minnesota, who actually holds the record, but since St Johns is a Div III school, he's not competing with the big boys. Still, he's an interesting guy. You can read the article here.

Here's an excerpt:

Gagliardi, 76, began his coaching career at age 16 when his high school coach left to serve in World War II. With no one else available, Gagliardi took over the team and guided it to its first conference championship. A couple years later, he was coaching at Carroll College in Montana. He interviewed for the job at St. John's in 1953.

"They asked me if we needed scholarships to win. I had never had them, so I said, 'No, I don't think so'," Gagliardi says. "Well, I could see the reaction of the 10 priests in the room and I could tell by their faces that I had the job then and there.

"Then one monk says, 'I have one more question. Can you beat St. Thomas and St. Augustine without scholarships?' I had never heard of either team, but I said, 'Sure, I don't see why not'."

Athletic scholarships aren't allowed in Division III sports, so Gagliardi is nothing special there. It's his own rules that separates him from everyone else. When he took over as coach in high school, he did away with every rule that seemed stupid or unpleasant -- "We even drank water during practice" -- and he's been adding to them ever since. The list of 'no's is over 100 by now.

In addition to the no-tackling-during-practice rule, there are no coaches' whistles and no playbooks. No roster cuts. No mandatory weight-lifting. No use of words such as "kill," "hit" or "Coach" (players call him John). There are no long practices. There are no calisthenics. Well, there arecalisthenics, but they include such drills as laying on the ground, looking up at the sky and saying, "It's a nice day."

Fast Food

2009-11-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

I saw an article this morning on Burger Kings new value menu item, a double burger for $1. It's reported that the franchisees are suing over being required to offer this product because using $.55 as ingredient costs and $.45 as service and overhead cost they compute they lose a dime on every one they sell.

The comments posted below the article were interesting. Apparently a lot of people think Burger Kings are dirty and the food gives you diahrea. One commentor pointed out that profits are made on soft drink and fries, not on the burgers. Another said he drove through a BK and ordered two of the new doubles and a water to be sure they lost money. Personally, I go to BK every couple of months and next time I'm going to try the new double because they keep making the Whopper Jr smaller.

I googled "fast food survey results" and found results of a Zagat survey posted.
I copied some of the results below.

But first, allow to me to say our new favorite is Sonic. That's where Janett takes me when we go for rides. (The nearest two Sonics to our home are each more than five miles away) The food is good with a varied menu, including a wide range of soda fountain specialities. The burgers have an old fashioned drive-in taste, and I guess that's good. Prices are competitive, but they're not afraid to charge $3 for Mozzarella sticks. You can park to walk in or park at a speaker to order and a car-hop, sometimes a young lady on roller skates, brings you your meal.

PS If Subway is the favorite, how come they're always empty? Maybe because they sold too many franchises and tho stores are too close together?

Fast Food – Mega Chains
1.Subway
2.Wendy's
3.McDonald's
4.Taco Bell
5.Burger King

Fast Food – Large Chains
1.Panera Bread
2.Chipotle
3.In-N-Out Burger
4.Chick-fil-A
5.Au Bon Pain

Quick-Refreshment Chains
1.Starbucks Coffee
2.Dunkin' Donuts
3.Cold Stone Creamery
4.Jamba Juice
5.Ben & Jerry's Scoop Shops

Full-Service Chains
1.P.F. Chang's China Bistro
2.Cheesecake Factory
3.California Pizza Kitchen
4.Outback Steakhouse
5.Carrabba's Italian Grill

Best Value:
1.McDonalds
2.Wendy's
3.In-N-Out Burger
4.Subway
5.Chipotle / Taco Bell (tied)

Best Value Menu:
1.McDonald's
2.Wendy's
3.Taco Bell
4.Burger King
5.Arby's

Vita, Dulcedo, Spes

2009-11-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

I was given a rosary at my first Knights of Columbus meeting Monday night. Most people know praying the rosary consists primarily of saying Hail Mary's. (There is less familiarity with the contemplation of the mysteries suggested to accompany the prayers.) Commonly, folks question Catholic's veneration of Mary, in the same tone with which they refer to Catholics as praying to statues. As usual my daughter Kim is a source of wisdom. On this topic she questioned why Catholics seek the intercession of the Blessed Virgin or other saints, when the relationship with Jesus is the source of salvation, quoting Jesus, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me." Jesus does not seem to suggest we distract ourselves with middle men. Perhaps some Christians see the Church's promotion of the Virgin and Saints as intercessors to be reflective of the Church's seeming to position itself between the followers and God, as the definer of orthodoxy and custodian of the sacremental graces.

On the other hand, can we not acknowlege that Jesus may wish His Mother to be venerated? First because He loved her for her exquisite goodness. But more, from the day the Archangel came to her, she participated in Jesus' redemptive mission, and more than any other person offered herself to the Father and shared in Christ's suffering.

The words from the cross, "Woman, behold thy son. Son, behold thy mother." are taken by Catholics to indicate Jesus bestowed on the faithful the maternity of Mary. Also, her appearances at Lourdes and Fatima, would seem to be evidence that Christ views Mary as emmisary and as intercessor.

We could do a little reading, pray on it, and discuss this issue further, but today I just wanted to share a couple of prayers remembered fondly from my childhood also addressed to Mary.

Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly to thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; to thee do I come; before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Amen.

Salve Regina

Hail holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us. And after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. Amen.

The Salve Regina referring to Mary as our life, our sweetness, and our hope, does seem to supplant Christ. Since the phrase appears on the crest on my university, I'm accustomed to it, but I can understand why critics object. The prayer has been a hymn in lyturgy and in common usage for a thousand years, and when church authorities are asked to explain this quasi heresy they say "the language of devotion is not that of dogma"
.

On the ND board, they've quit complaining about

2009-11-07T19:32:00.000-08:00

Coach Weis and started evaluating replacement candidates. I guess we're done paying Willingham for his buyout, so we can start paying Weis for his. I really like Coach Weis. He runs a classy program and is bringing in great talent. But he isn't a very good head coach.

Kabong posts a lot and seems knowlegable, but I feel that talking to Urban Mayer would be fruitless and more importantly, a betrayal of principle.

Brian Kelly from Cincinatti? Well, he has an Irish name and a pretty good record.

Brian Kelly
by El Kabong (2009-11-07 21:21:27)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ cannot delete ] [ Edit ] [ Return to Board ] [ Ignore Poster ] [ Report Post ] [ Highlight Poster ] [ Reply ]

I'm not nearly as down on Kelly as some other folks are. I realize he's not the high-profile hire we'd want, but it's very difficult to argue with results. The guy takes low-tier talent and wins with it. No, his schedule doesn't set the world on fire, but I think he's something like 26-8 at Cincinnati right now, and since he's in his third year, it's difficult to say he did it all with the previous guy's players. In comparison, Dantonio was close to .500, and isn't raising eyebrows at MSU.

What gives me pause on Kelly, though, is that he's low-hanging fruit. I could probably walk into his office today and convince him to be the coach at ND, so I imagine Jack Swarbrick and Fr. Jenkins would have an even easier time.

I'd like to believe ND's admin is as interested in winning as I am, and doesn't want to do the least amount of work and just "get by". Getting Brian Kelly, while possibly a solution, smacks of the latter.

There's no reason not to make a run at Meyer and Stoops this year. Meyer's losing Tebow and a lot of other talent, and should at least get a phone call. Stoops may be feeling unappreciated at OK these days, with people grumbling about how it's been a while since the last title. I also think Gruden should get a call. If they go right to Kelly, that'll disappoint me.

Maybe I bit off more than I can chew.

2009-11-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

I finally got Europe Central by William Vollmann from the library. The reviews tell me he's a really acclaimed author (like the best in 30 years?). Other novels by him on the shelf seemed to focus on North American Indians, in different situations, but it seems his fascination is with violence and how people come to engage in violence. Well I guess the war between Hitler and Stalin is as good a case study for exploring that topic as any one could imagine.

The first chapter was about Nanya Krupskaya, Lenin's wife and Fanya Kaplan, the Social Dewmocrat who tried to assasinate Lenin. Some kabaalistic references I couldn't relate to, but interesting characters.

The next chapter was about Kathe Kollwitz, German painter. sculptor, printmaker, and socialist whose life was touched with tragedies common to her era, but burdened even before personal losses with sympathy for the suffering of the working class. Interestingly she was never imprisoned by the Nazi's, maybe because her art was in the tradition of naturalism, and she wasn't an expressionist creating what Hitler referred to as gutter art. She died in '45 a couple of months before the Russians overran Germany. Thank goodness she was at least spared that spectacle of suffering.

I think the next chapter may focus on Shostakovich. Am I ready for that? I've become so accustomed to perusing electronic journalism that I'd forgotten how challenging reading could be. Wish me luck.

PS I took the night off and watched High Noon.

Halloween

2009-10-31T22:35:00.001-07:00

This is Owen. Mally was too scary to post.

Here's a weird story

2009-10-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

Choose a hero. Michael Collins or Eamon De Valera. This writer doesn't vote for DeValera

‘De Valera was a British spy’
Filed under: an príomhbhóthar
Book claims national hero was ‘turned’ after 1916

By John Spain Books Editor
Independent.ie
Monday October 26 2009

A NEW book to be published next month makes the shocking claim that Eamon de Valera, the founding father of the nation, was under the control of the British.

The book, provocatively titled ‘England’s Greatest Spy: Eamon de Valera’, suggests that Dev was terrified of being executed after the Rising and was “turned” in exchange for his life. For some years afterwards, the book claims, Dev was under British control.

The 470-page hardback is published by Stacey International, a London publisher specialising in politics and history.

The author is retired US naval officer and historian John Turi from Princeton, New Jersey. He developed an interest in Irish history through his wife, who was born in Ireland. Turi has been researching his controversial book for a decade.

The case against de Valera by Turi is based firstly on a detailed analysis of Dev’s emotionally stunted formative years.

He claims Dev was rejected by everyone in his early life — his mysterious father in New York (in fact, Dev was probably illegitimate), his mother, his uncle in Ireland, who treated him coldly, even the Church, which rejected his ambitions for the priesthood because of his probable illegitimacy.

His miserable upbringing left Dev with an inadequate personality, Turi suggests, which made him susceptible to being influenced later on.

Turi is scathing about Dev’s erratic behaviour during the Rising, when he was in charge of the men at Boland’s Mill.

He stayed awake for days, became disorientated and issued confused, sometimes ridiculous, orders. “It was not just his tactics the men questioned,” Turi writes, “they questioned his sanity as well.”

Dev kept his men “sitting on their heels” while a short distance away at Mount Street Bridge eight Volunteers were trying to hold off hundreds of British soldiers.

In fact the men at Boland’s Mill played little or no part in the Easter Week fighting, Turi says, because Dev was so exhausted and fearful.

At the end of the week, when word reached Boland’s Mill of the surrender, Turi writes that de Valera “abandoned his men and slipped out of Boland’s at noon on the Sunday, taking with him a British prisoner . . . as his insurance against being shot before he could surrender”.

Cowardly

“De Valera the cowardly, incompetent, mentally unstable officer who deserted his troops was (later) repackaged as de Valera the lonely hero fighting valiantly against overwhelming odds.”

What followed was also suspicious, Turi says.

Dev later claimed that he was tried with a number of other men and sentenced to death.

Turi writes: “Not one of the men allegedly tried with de Valera ever confirmed that such a trial took place, and there is no trace in the British Public Record Office of any trial.”

He also quotes the flat denial by the army prosecuting officer, William Wylie, that de Valera had been tried.

Turi also considers Dev’s fragile mental state and tearful collapse at Richmond Barracks the night before he was taken to Kilmainham, to where condemned prisoners were sent.

All the events indicate that Dev was terrified of dying, Turi suggests, and that it would have been easy for the British intelligence officer Ivor Price to turn Dev into a British collaborator. Major Price was “skilled at manipulating weakness”.

Turi notes that Dev was the only one of four Dublin commandants not to be tried and executed.

He dismisses theories that Dev was spared because he was born in America or because the British realised that further executions would be a mistake; as others were executed later.

The only reasonable explanation, Turi claims, is that Dev was “turned”. In all, Turi sets forth a dozen instances of what he calls “de Valera’s machinations that aided and abetted British interests” to support this claim.

Collins

Some of this ‘evidence’ concerns Dev’s activities in the US after he was released from prison — which split the powerful Irish-American lobby.

Turi also says the British feared what Michael Collins might do in the North and used de Valera to engineer the situation that resulted in Collins’s death.

Turi also calls Irish neutrality during the World War II “a hoax on the Irish people and a major boon for English interests”.

His book, which ends with a call for a posthumous trial of de Valera, will be published in Ireland and Britain on November 30 and in the US next year.

Just dropping in to say hi.

2009-10-22T19:47:00.000-07:00

It's been a weird week.

Joel still hadn't got back to me about the car, so I called again Monday. Turns out he was in the hospital all last week. I picked up the car yesterday and drove over for a visit. He's doing OK, but I must have been a little discombobulated. I failed to recognise a client who spoke to me in the hallway there.

Today, mom and I dropped off the laundrey at the laundromat, backsliding on a semi-resolution to do it ourselves this week. Maybe the change in the weather is tiring us out.

Tonight, for the first time I saw 30 Rock. It was very weird. And I had just watched the Office, so I should have been ready for anything. Then I went to the ND site, Rock's House, hoping the dump Weis crowd might be taking the night off and there would be interesting commentary about the upcoming Boston College game.
It was more acrimonious there than ever. Apparently ND announced today we'd be playing a game against Western Michigan next year.

One fan pointed out that we'd played Western Michigan before, in 1919 and 1920 and said perhaps they could promote it as a traditional rivalry. Another said he just felt sorry for Eastern Michigan and Central Michigan who must feel left out. It's all too much and I'm going to bed.

Mally's birthday party is Sunday. I don't know about warm but they say it'll be sunny.

I apologise

2009-10-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

to Duval Kamara, the Notre Dame receiver who slipped, running a simple cut at the goal line last night on Notre Dame's final play. I said, on Facebook, that I blamed him for the loss. It's my dark irish side to single out some one to blame for my disappointment. Perhaps, the manager gave him cleets shorter than needed. Besides to single out the last play of the game, and forget all the miscues by other players earlier really isn't fair. And as Kim often has to remind me, how can I be so judgmental and hope to ask for God's forgiveness. And I'm sure he feels bad enough already, though maybe not as bsd as Clausen, Tate, Allen, Rudolph, and Parris who desperately sacrifices their bodies in a quest for victory. And we must remember Kamara wouldn't even have been in the game, hadn't Parris come out injured a couple of plays earlier.

So Duval. don't worry about it. I'm going to forget about that dumb ass play amd just remenber you as the disappointing receiver who frequently got illegal procedure calls for lining up behind the line of scrimmage. Duhhh.

And all respect and gratitude to the five mentioned and others who gave us a great game last night. And a silent moment and short prayer for recovery from injuries, especially for Clausen and Parris.

Words fail me

2009-10-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

so here's a post from Rock's House

"It's crazy at ND.
by torontoparent (2009-10-16 17:13:31)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ cannot delete ] [ Edit ] [ Return to Board ] [ Ignore Poster ] [ Report Post ] [ Highlight Poster ] [ Reply ]

My son '05, just phoned from Chicago. Friends called from ND to say he had to get there it is crazy, great. He is leaving in 5 minutes. When I asked where he is staying he said "I don't know". I would love to be there. I sense a spirit that just doesn't exist elsewhere.

It will help the team."

And I found this inspirational video

Good One

2009-10-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

Nate Heklman posted this link to Facebook and Stephie commented on it which brought the link up on my facebook page.

Statement of Lynne and Bill Hybels
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees

For the Thursday, October 8, 2009 Hearing on Faith-Based Community Perspectives on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Everybody should read it. One method the elite use to prevail over us is to divide and conquer. Besides a sense working class solidarity, Christian sensibilities also advise us not to fall victim to biases that divide us.

When blacks or latinos demonstrate, or even when they resort to mob action, will you vote for greater social justice or more armored cars for the police? If you chose armored cars you have fallen victim to the exploiters' manipulations.

I confess that I am prone to think blacks are "different from us" when in the same evening news I see clips of grotesque black on black violence first in Zimbabwe then in some US ghetto. I always have to recall the news clips of first day at school in Chicago, the hope and happiness expressed in those little black faces. What happens to that hope and happiness over the next seven or eight years? What despair and dehumanization occurs? If you don't take a moment to feel concern for them it probably wont occur to you to worry about your childrens' grandchildren being consigned to the same conditions.

I feel the same repugnance for the juvenile thugs attaching no value to human life or virtue that most readers do, but remember, they weren't born that way, something happened, something went wrong. And in the prevailing economic system things are going to go wrong for a lot more people. Those little black kindergardners are the canaries in our coal mines.

PS As a token of my appreciation for Christians who identify with Christ more strongly than with Glen Beck, I'm restoring the link to Sojourners which Kim initially installed here, but I must have deleted at some unecumenical moment.
.

Corporate Debt

2009-10-05T11:02:00.001-07:00

Here I go again but not on a topic I've covered too extensively. I have mentioned corporate debt along with mortgage debt, consumer debt, and government debt as big money that's not going to get paid back. I think I mentioned private equity firms buying companies shares with borrowed money, taking the firms private, paying their own company excessive management fees, and paying banks and lawyers tens of millions dollars to manage the deals. All these shysters paying themselves first, taking the money from the businesses, and perfectly good companies are being bled dry.
Here's a sadly illustrative story from the New York Times.

Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared
JULIE CRESWELL
Published: October 4, 2009

For most of the 133 years since its founding in a small city in Wisconsin, the Simmons Bedding Company enjoyed an illustrious history.
Noble Rogers worked at Simmons for 22 years, mostly at a factory outside Atlanta. When the plant closed last year, he was left with a bitter taste.

Presidents have slumbered on its mattresses aboard Air Force One. Dignitaries have slept on them in the Lincoln Bedroom. Its advertisements have featured Henry Ford and H. G. Wells. Eleanor Roosevelt extolled the virtues of the Simmons Beautyrest mattress, and the brand was immortalized on Broadway in Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes.”

Its recent history has been notable, too, but for a different reason.

Simmons says it will soon file for bankruptcy protection, as part of an agreement by its current owners to sell the company — the seventh time it has been sold in a little more than two decades — all after being owned for short periods by a parade of different investment groups, known as private equity firms, which try to buy undervalued companies, mostly with borrowed money.

For many of the company’s investors, the sale will be a disaster. Its bondholders alone stand to lose more than $575 million. The company’s downfall has also devastated employees like Noble Rogers, who worked for 22 years at Simmons, most of that time at a factory outside Atlanta. He is one of 1,000 employees — more than one-quarter of the work force — laid off last year.

But Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston has not only escaped unscathed, it has made a profit. The investment firm, which bought Simmons in 2003, has pocketed around $77 million in profit, even as the company’s fortunes have declined. THL collected hundreds of millions of dollars from the company in the form of special dividends. It also paid itself millions more in fees, first for buying the company, then for helping run it. Last year, the firm even gave itself a small raise.

Wall Street investment banks also cashed in. They collected millions for helping to arrange the takeovers and for selling the bonds that made those deals possible. All told, the various private equity owners have made around $750 million in profits from Simmons over the years.

How so many people could make so much money on a company that has been driven into bankruptcy is a tale of these financial times and an example of a growing phenomenon in corporate America.

Every step along the way, the buyers put Simmons deeper into debt. The financiers borrowed more and more money to pay ever higher prices for the company, enabling each previous owner to cash out profitably.

But the load weighed down an otherwise healthy company. Today, Simmons owes $1.3 billion, compared with just $164 million in 1991, when it began to become a Wall Street version of “Flip This House.”

In many ways, what private equity firms did at Simmons, and scores of other companies like it, mimicked the subprime mortgage boom. Fueled by easy money, not only from banks but also endowments and pension funds, buyout kings like THL upended the old order on Wall Street. It was, they said, the Golden Age of private equity — nothing less than a new era of capitalism.

The rest of the article may be found here.

Deefense

2009-10-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

The Irish defensive players must feel good today.

Two goalline stands forcing Washinton's Huskies to settle for one field goal yesterday enabled ND to take the game into overtime, and ND eventually won. The second goalline stand, in the fourth quarter, was extended to eight plays by a "roughing the snapper" penalty on a field goal attempt, which gave Washington the ball first and one on the one yard line. Since the Washington running game had been very successful yesterday, those defensive stops were a pleasant surprise to ND fans, and a real disappointment to Washington and especially to Washington quarterback Jake Locker. This dispassionate account, of course, understates the emotional content of those minutes.

I'm attaching a write up below, but I want first to complement our new defensive line coach, Randy Hart, on his contribution to this success story, and question how the new Washington coach, Steve Sarkisian, and his players must feel about having fired Coach Hart at the end of last season.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – When a defense makes one goal-line stand in a game, it typically becomes cause for celebration, especially when the stop preserves any shot at winning the game.

But for Notre Dame it wasn’t one goal-line stand that led to the latest miracle win, actually it was three such stands that helped the Irish complete a third-straight comeback in a 37-30 overtime win over Washington, in what was the miraculous of the three.

When asked the secret of the success in those three difficult goal-line situations, defensive lineman Kapron Lewis-Moore simply said, “confidence and heart, that’s what pulls you through.”

The first stand came late in the third quarter with the Huskies leading 24-19. The Irish kept Washington out of the end zone on three straight plays inside the five-yard line, and made a fourth-down stop to hold the Huskies scoreless on the drive, and kept this from becoming a two-possession game

“With each stop we just felt like we were just getting more momentum and momentum,” Lewis-Moore said. “And by the time the fourth down came, we just felt like it was all out.”

The first stand helped to save the game. The second and third stands essentially won the game.

In what turned out to be a “double” goal-line stand, Washington ran eight plays inside Notre Dame’s 8-yard line and came away with just a field goal. The Irish made one goal line stand, but a strange roughing the center penalty during a field goal attempt gave the Huskies new life and a first down on the 1-yard line.

Irish head coach Charlie Weis said he expected his defense to be deflated after the penalty and the fresh set of downs for Washington.

“But there were no signs of it,” he said.

Notre Dame dug in and held again, and Washington settled for a field goal and a 27-22 lead instead of what could have been a 31-22 lead.

“The odds of us winning right there, really aren’t very high,” Weis said of the importance of the stand. “We’re in big trouble.”

Instead, the goal-line stands set the table for the Irish offense to take over and complete another miracle drive.

“I was scared but our defense showed a lot of heart and got us the ball back,” said Irish junior receiver Golden Tate. “It’s scary when the defense is on the field because I can’t do anything about that but cheer them on.”

We're cool

2009-10-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Louie and I are going to South Bend Saturday for the Washington game. Could be a big win, ya never know. The weatherman says rain for Saturday, so I asked Janett for a ride to the thrift store so I could buy a hooded sweatshirt to sit in the rain in. (Joel at VP Automotive has had my car for a week and isn't returning my calls). Janett doesn't think it's cool to brag about my thrift store adventures, but I can't help it. I found this over the top, off the hook, whatever, Notre Dame jacket for $39. Now as you all know, I'm usually conservative when it comes to ND gear, preferring the crest to the monogram, the monogram to "Irish" and "Irish" to the leprechaun, but this jacket has a pugnacious leprechaun 10 inches tall and a foot wide on the back, a smaller one on the right chest, and NOTRE DAME around the right sleeve. I couldn't pass it up. It's what we used to call a car coat, comes over the hips, and appears to be new, even still having the little plastic thing on the cuff of the sleeve where the tags were attached. It might be a little heavy for a nice day but should be good for 50's in the rain. OK, so we'll be rocking, win or lose.

Speaking of which, the market was down again today, and so I'm about back to where I was last Friday on my puts. I hope today's drop on the bad employment numbers puts a little "let's wait and see" into the bulls. I also hope this week's up days were just a result of fund managers buying stocks to list in their quarterly reports, to show their investors they're really earning their money, and that they'll be easing back out of a lot of those positions tomorrow.

Oh, and I haven't posted since my birthday party Tuesday night at Stephie's Lots of fun and good food (soft and hard taco's and funfetti cake). Kim and Ross were there. After dinner Mark couldn't find the Yatzi game and Malachy persuaded us to play Mousetrap, a came involving the construction of a Rube Goldberg kind of mousetrap. (Mally likes the word contraption). Owen was delightful, except for his fascination with my cigarette's which makes Daddy Mark a little uncomfortable.

Then yesterday, while Stephie and Janett were on a shopping excursion, Mally hung out with me down in the office, in his customary supervisory role, including keeping a sheet of paper with Jose and my names on it, scoring our performances with checks or x's. He was great, but I think the experience was tiring for him. He suffered a meltdown when Stephie and Janett returned and it was time to go home. The tiring part was probably mostly having to correct Jose's rude and offensive behavior toward me without becoming rude or offensive himself. Little Mally's officious manner brings out the tease in Jose. At one point the little fellow had to hold up his hand, fingers extended and say "Jose, I'm going to give you this many more chances and then if you're still being bad, I'll have to fire you." A lot of responsibility for a four year old.

This one seemed simpler

2009-09-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

While shaking one fist at the sky about yesterday's "merger and aquisition rally" which took back my CAR gains, I patted myself on the back with the other hand because I checked volumes reports last night and saw that it wasn't really a strong rally in spite of the gains. Maybe the bad consumer (lack of) confidence report this morning will spark downward movement.

I saw an article today about treasury manipulation of the gold price. It was lengthy and a little tedious, and since we discussed this ad nauseum acouple of years ago, I decided not to copy or link it...but it's still out there, and in some analysts' minds represent a cataclysmic event waiting to happen. Yawn.

Instead, I'm copying this funner article which touches on my incredulity at the strength of certain retailer's stock prices.

There are 215 Starbucks within 5 Miles of my Office
By Barry Ritholtz - September 29th, 2009, 9:30AM

Over at kottke.org, jason started a thread about the maximum Starbucks density and Starbucks center of gravity of Manhattan.

It seemed that 165 was the maximum # of SBUX found within 5 miles of your location.

On a lark, I punched in my street address — 535 5th — and BOOM! We have a new winner — there are 215 Starbucks within 5 Miles of my office.

PS Darden Restaurants releases earnings report today. I'll be interested to see.

Another Day

2009-09-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

Somehow the Knights of Columbus at the West Dundee parish got their hooks into our friend, Louie and appointed him treasurer. He's had a busy month, selling corned beef sandwiches at Irish fest at St Catherines, then selling roasted ears of corn at Dundee's tradition fest. This weekend it was Tootsie roll sales. Louie's been calling members to line up volunteers, making sandwiches, nursing the corn roasting machine through a long weekend, and hitting the street with boxes of vintage tootsie rolls. I called him last night and he was happy to report a very successful day which concluded at the toll booth with a captive market of homeward bound commuters. Standing there in the rain, he said, he had the sympathy thing working for him. What a guy.

He's the kind of small businessman that we've relied on in the past to keep plugging away with enery, inventiveness, and courage fed by desperation to begin to turn the economy around when things were most dire. I hope Louie and guys like him can do it again. But with banks continuing to cut credit to small businesses these fellows are growing more discouraged.

The news in general, and the financial news in particular has been "optimistic" about our economy. It invokes the mood of survivors in a lifeboat pulling away from the sinking Titanic, with people floundering in the freezing water all around, and hearing the orchestra still playing on the ship's deck.

As I've said before, my greatest disappointment in Obama has been that he's left the Goldman Sach cabal members in hight positions at the Fed and Treasury. I guess in preinauguration briefings they levelled with him about now bad things really are, and persuaded him that to avoid a cataclysmic melt-down he should leave the banking system in their expert hands and give them trillions of dollars to try to cover their losses and generate some market profits which would reestablish confidence in the banking system - hopefully for a period sufficient to allow other stimulative measure to begin to generates some positive results. Anyone who has had their confidence in the banking system restored in the last six months hasn't been doing any banking. On a happier note, the big Jamokes are still getting their seven figure bonuses

I wonder what they told him about UFO's.

I bought a CAR (Avis) put the other day, and the stock dropped about 6% the next day. ISLE is down a lttle bit each day. I said earlier in the week that the index (DJIA,S&P) charts dont appear to be alarming, but a lot of stocks are dropping after approaching the high end of their trading ranges, so I'll try to make few bucks short term, while waiting to see if the market keeps falling.