The biggest local issue this year, here in Flagstaff, is "affordable housing" and the disparity between what you make and what you have to pay for a house. I'd be the first to agree that there's a problem here -- it's very difficult for the average working stiff to afford a house. Almost all the candidates for mayor and city council agree that "something needs to be done" about this. But the problem is that all of the suggested solutions would end up making the problem worse, not better, increasing the cost of housing instead of decreasing it -- just as all the suggested "solutions" to the problem of high gas prices, at least those suggested by politicians in Washington, would cause prices to go higher, not lower.

I'm studying for finals, so there isn't time to elaborate at great length here -- but for those of you who, for some reason, have followed the drift of my political views over the years and are wondering if I'm just getting old and cranky, well, no; I am not getting old and cranky. But it's starting to seem more and more as though well-meaning legislation is not the solution to our problems. Neither is the answer to undo all the laws we have. If politicians would just throw up their hands and agree to do nothing, we'd muddle through better than we will if they continue mucking things up.

There is a problem that needs to be addressed -- but it has nothing to do with obscene profits. Let's start by taking a look at those profits. If you take a look at Exxon-Mobil's income statement for 2005, the company's net income worked out to about 9.7 cents for every dollar in sales. This was up a healthy 15% from 2004. But how does Exxon-Mobil compare with other companies? How "obscene" are the company's profits, by this yardstick?

Not too great, it turns out. Motorola earned 12.4 cents for every revenue dollar on its most recent income statement. 3M earned 15 cents. Harley-Davidson took in 16.9 cents for every dollar of sales. And Google made 23.8 cents. These profits are much greater than Big Oil's -- does that mean they're also "obscene?"

OK, I admit that filling my pickup truck with gas is a painful proposition, at this point, costing upwards of $50.00. But how does this constitute "price gouging?" Am I being physically forced to drive into a gas station and fill up? Am I entirely incapable of selling the truck and buying a beater econobox for the same money? How, exactly, am I being "gouged" here?

What's even more ludicrous is that every measure being suggested by Congress to "alleviate" the problem will make the situation worse, not better. A tax on "windfall" profits (whatever those might be -- anything over 8 cents, perhaps)? All that does is give the companies less incentive to go out and explore for more oil -- or to build refineries, or to do anything else they normally do during the course of a business day. This would further reduce the supply of oil -- causing pump prices to go up, not down.

Restrictions on what gas stations can charge for a gallon of gas? Get serious -- price controls were what caused the "gas crisis" of 1973. (The Arab oil embargo caused prices to go up -- but it was the price controls that caused stations to run out of gas.)

Huge government subsidies to encourage companies to produce ethanol? That would be the biggest boondoggle yet -- the total cost of such a program would make $3.00 gas look like the bargain of a lifetime. And it would also force you to make modifications to your car and to stop to refuel more often (ethanol contains a lot less energy per gallon than gas).

Gasoline is a commodity. The price fluctuates. When the price is high, as it is right now, it's tough to take. But there are no "obscene" profits being made, and there is no "price gouging" going on. If we don't like the price of gas, the only solution is to buy less of it.

It has become popular to claim that at this point, "the debate is over" regarding global climate and that "no serious scientist" disputes the alarmists' predictions that disasters of Biblical proportions await us because of our fossil-fuel burning habits. Well, as I've explained before, there is a tremendous unanimity in the popular press on this issue. However, opinion in the scientific community is nowhere near as unanimous as we're led to believe. For instance, here's a serious scientist who teaches at MIT and has published quite a few articles that throw cold water on global warming. Here's a respected meteorologist and hurricane expert who -- although he specializes in the area of hurricane prediction -- does not agree that recent hurricane activity over the last year or two is evidence of horrific global warming. (Hint: it has more to do with a phenomenon called Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a recently-discovered long-term series of sea surface temperature changes.)

Having studied climatology as part of my first college degree, I am not comfortable dismissing global warming out of hand. One thing that "no serious scientist" would disagree with is that carbon dioxide does affect the atmosphere's behavior in terms of how it absorbs infrared radiation. But it's just plain wrong to assume that CO2 is the only factor affecting climate. There are many other forces at work. It's also a gross error to assume that the Earth is, in fact, undergoing a drastic warming. Climate researchers Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have called into question the conventional statistical analysis of global temperature over the past century or so; see their blog for details (and I mean details -- these guys are major math geeks).

The Vanity Fair scare issue shows some pictures that are, admittedly, pretty scary -- they depict what cities like Washington and New York would look like if the sea level rose 20 feet, which they say is going to happen in the next century. But this is balderdash -- the forecasts I've seen, even from the politically tainted United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, only estimate a sea-level rise of one foot over the next century or so. Meanwhile, such widely publicized phenomena as arctic ice melting can be deceiving, to the untrained observer. Every climate model in existence will confirm that the polar regions are highly sensitive to climate changes -- a tiny change in global average temperature will cause ice either to grow or to melt. That it's been melting (in some areas) merely indicates that the temperature has gone up slightly. And this in no way proves that it's on account of CO2 -- even the Chicken Littles concede that most of the slight warming we've seen, over the past 150 years, is closely correlated with increases in solar output during that time. They argue that the past 20-30 years aren't easily explained by "solar forcing" -- but in astronomical and climatological terms, a couple of decades is the blink of an eye; too short a period to use as the basis for much of anything.

When I decided to go back to school, I thought about getting an advanced degree in geography -- as an undergrad the first time, I found it a fascinating field of study, and I'd still entertained some hopes of making a career out of it. But the problem is that in most areas of geography -- climatology being one of the most glaring examples -- you end up working in the public sector, for government agencies subject to the political winds of the time. That -- along with the fact that I'd like to make a good salary again -- was why I decided to go to business school instead. As I've argued in other contexts, legislatures are not so much interested in enacting good legislation as in seeming to enact good legislation. And public policymakers are not able to make good policy -- political pressure forces them to merely seem to make good policy.

None of this is to say that human activity doesn't affect climate. It most likely does -- but not as much as Julia Roberts and Al Gore think it does. The idea that we can control the Earth's climate is largely an illusion. It would, for several reasons, be a good thing to burn less gas, pollute the air less, and generally reduce our consumption of natural resources. The longer we stretch out our fossil fuel supplies, the more time researchers have to come up with what we'll use next. (Some argue, however, that by using up oil, we hasten the day when economic forces will make alternative energy sources cost-competitive with oil -- I'd be the first to agree with that.) But simply saying "The debate is over" does not make it so. What's "obvious" is not always true.

This was my first outing of the year at Elden, and because the course just opened this past week, the greens were, uncharacteristically, quite slow. The grass hasn't really started to grow this spring, so I'm not sure if they've been cut at all, although they've been fertilized. So lag putting was a challenge -- not so much in executing putts, but in mustering up the necessary resolve to hit the ball hard enough, from 30 or 40 feet, to get it to the hole. In-season, Elden's greens are normally quite a bit faster than the other courses in the publinks rotation around here -- so playing them slow is a challenge. However, the slow speed also presented an opportunity to make some aggressive chips and putts -- this resulted in a one-putt bogey at the first and an up-and-down par at the 2nd, both short par-4s. I was also able to take advantage of #14 for a one-putt par -- actually, a two-putt from just over the back of the green. Normally, a downhill lag putt on #14 is a treacherous affair, but yesterday, it was a matter of pounding the ball hard enough to get it to the hole.

My recently acquired hybrid 3-5 irons are going to prove very useful at Elden, as evidenced in yesterday's round. It's a tight course (with lots of real-estate OB, which I hate), so hitting the ball straight is mandatory -- on most of the holes, taking a driver or fairway wood out of the bag involves taking a deep breath as well, as the OB is always in the back of one's mind. So the hybrids will come in handy -- they work just like long irons, except that they're more consistent and a little longer.

Back to the subject at hand, though. Preserving the 7-free card was an issue on a few holes. On the par-5 9th (a 501-yard hole playing directly into a strong wind), my tee shot, although solidly struck, was so far short of the fairway pond that a layup second shot was required. A 7-wood third over the pond left me about 100 yards short of the green, from which point I punched an 8-iron onto the green, about 21 feet directly above the hole. As on the 14th, the 9th green is normally extremely treacherous if you're above the hole -- but today, it was a matter of gauging how much slower than normal a putt would roll. I didn't do a bad job in this regard, but still rolled the ball some four feet by the hole. This required some steely resolve on the bogey putt -- but using my technique of keeping my gaze focused down, while listening for the sound of the ball hitting the bottom of the cup, I drained the putt for a 6.

On the 11th, I reaped the benefits of having gone to church in the morning -- on my second shot, from the left rough, I double-crossed it and yanked the ball way out-of-bounds into the trees on the left. However, divine intervention gave me a lucky bounce (possibly off a new, as yet unoccupied house) back out into the fairway. From there, I chunked my third shot short of the green, chipped on, and left my lag putt about 3-1/2 feet short of the cup. However, once again, I was able to make the short putt for 6.

That was about it for drama. A string of pars on holes 14-17, and a decently-played 18th for a bogey-6 got me in the house at 88, but more important, notched my 4th straight 7-free card. It has now been 87 straight holes since I recorded anything worse than 6 -- shattering all previous records (which I haven't even kept, but I'm fairly certain I've never come close to that long a string before).

So Phil Mickelson wasn't the only one who had a good day yesterday!

(Here in the Kafalas.com household, we avoid this issue entirely, by not having a common source of funds that we both have access to. Meg has her stash, I have mine, and although certain purchases, such as real-estate, are made in common -- to some degree -- all the mixing occurs downstream from where the money is kept. I think that's the best way to do it, because it avoids the constant arguing about money that most couples spend their lives doing. But I digress.)

One detail jumped out at me, though, in Zaslow's column. That was his discussion of the practice of getting cash back when you buy groceries at the supermarket. Call me a dim bulb, but this one had always mystified me. I've been in the checkout line countless times behind someone who buys $86.03 worth of groceries but writes the store a check (or drafts a debit card) for $136.03 and pockets the extra $50. Whenever a cashier asked me, "Do you want cash back?," I'd always wondered why she'd be asking if I wanted such a thing. It's a supermarket, I reasoned, not a bank, and in any case, why bother, since I've already got some cash in my pocket -- and since I go by at least a couple of ATMs on my way to work.

Well, as Zaslow explains -- and as is probably obvious to most people other than yours truly -- getting cash back at the supermarket is a form of money laundering. It's a way of extracting funds from a joint checking account without generating an ATM receipt or a check written to a suspicious or verboten merchant, such as a fancy shoe store, a clothier, or -- just to be gender-neutral -- the Golfsmith store. When you get cash back, that's free money, which you can spend any way you like, and your spouse is none the wiser.

Somehow, this subtlety of modern behavior had escaped me -- probably because I've never had a joint checking account (see above). Anyone who has one (and who regularly gets cash back to avoid leaving a paper trail) is undoubtedly saying, "Urb, you dolt, how can it not have been obvious what was going on?" Oh, well... for whatever reason, it wasn't. Thanks to Zaslow, however, I am no longer in the dark! Light dawns on Marblehead, as we used to say back east.

This horrible "scandal?" A single e-mail message, sent to parliament member Hisayasu Nagata, which alleged that the son of a senior official of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had taken money from Takafumi Horie, an Internet entrepreneur who was supposed to have manipulated the stock price of his Livedoor Internet portal. Nagata used the e-mail to make a public accusation before the parliament that the Liberal Democratic Party official had accepted the money.

The e-mail sent to Nagata turned out to be fake and the accusation groundless. So -- after much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in the Diet -- Nagata and the leaders of his Democratic Party all resigned.

Can you imagine that? The rough equivalent, in American politics, would be if Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, and Dick Cheney (or Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Nancy Pelosi) all resigned from Congress on the basis of "taking responsibility," as Maehara said was the reason for his resignation.

But no -- American politicians and government officials do not do that. They do not take responsibility for their mistakes. Instead, they stonewall, cover up, blame the media, and insist that they "have no regrets" over their actions, even when they break the law. Tortured captives at Abu Ghraib? No regrets. Warrantless wiretaps? No regrets. Whitewater? No regrets.

Not to belabor the point, but our leaders could learn from the examples of Messrs. Maehara and Nagata and friends. 'Fess up when you mess up (to quote the title of a favorite blues tune). I'd say the Japanese parliamentarians were a little over the top, in resigning their jobs over a bogus e-mail message -- but that's a cultural difference, reflecting the Japanese obsession with honor and face-saving. In substance, they haven't gone over the top at all -- they've simply done the right thing.

It's a shame American politicians don't do that.

When it comes to scorekeeping, I'm a little obsessive. My card tracks strokes, putts, fairways hit, club usage, greens in regulation, up-and-downs made and missed from inside 60 yards, length of first and last putt on each hole, and total length of putts made. (In reality, that should read "total length of shots holed," since I count hole-outs from off the green in this last stat.)

In my unending efforts to come up with more yardsticks to evaluate my game, I decided, a year or so ago, that a 7-free card was an indication of a consistent, well-played round -- even if the score itself wasn't remarkably low. Looking over my scores for the past few years, I noticed very few 7-free cards -- in one recent year, I think I only had two of them.

So by that measure, it's no small feat that with yesterday's round of 82 at Beaver Creek, I am now riding a string of three consecutive 7-free rounds. What's more, in the fourth round back, I finished with 15 holes of 6 strokes or better, the third hole of the day having been a whopper -- a 10 on the par-5 12th hole (I started on the back nine that day).

Yesterday's round equalled my personal course record at Beaver Creek and was the 13th time I've broken 85 on a regulation (par-70 or more) course. Toward the end of last year, and in a few rounds this year, I've been knocking on the door of breaking 80 -- I mentioned this to the guy at the desk (once a 4-handicapper, he said, but since breaking 80 in the age department, his game has slipped a bit -- at that age, he's entitled, I'd say), and he said, "Breaking 80 is one of those things that just happen. One day, you'll be playing well, and you'll just break 80 -- not by 'trying to do it,' but everything will just fall into place."

Obviously, someone who used to hold down a 4 handicap knows a thing or two about shooting low scores. I don't place a great deal of importance on shooting in the 70s, although it's a goal. For now, I'll take the 7-free scorecards as evidence that I'm heading in the right direction.

Obviously, you know where I stand on this one. But I think the antisocial nature of cell phones wouldn't be so bad if the manufacturers would shift their focus. Instead of adding more bells, whistles, cameras, ringtones, text-messaging features, and other doodads, they should stop further development in those areas and assign all of their engineers to the task of making their products work better as telephones.

This might sound like a strange idea, but if you think about it, why is it that cell phone users are so obnoxious? It's because they find it necessary to SHOUT into the phone. When you're walking down the street, it's easy to tell, without looking, who's having a conversation with someone walking next to them and who's having a phone conversation: the one on the phone is talking at twice the decibel level of the in-person talker.

I'm not entirely sure why this is. I myself tend to talk louder on the cell phone than I have to, so it's not as though I'm getting on my high horse here. It may have something to do with the lack of feedback you get from a cell phone. With an old-fashioned telephone, you always got a certain amount of sound -- your own voice -- coming back at you through the earpiece, and there was always a certain amount of ambient sound coming from the other end; what's called "hall noise" in the recording industry.

With a cell phone, you don't get that feedback -- you can't hear yourself, and you don't hear anything from the other end except when the other person is speaking. I think that's why people yell into their cell phones (which does not improve -- and, in fact, reduces -- how well the caller's voice comes through on the other end). I've tried talking softly on the cell phone myself, and it tends to work fine -- I don't think there's any real correlation between talking louder and being heard. Yet almost everyone does it.

If Motorola, Nokia, and other cell phone manufacturers would devote a year or two of their engineers' undivided attention to figuring out how to make phones provide better feedback -- and provide better error correction so that calls wouldn't be dropped and words would get through more reliably -- you'd find that people would no longer shout into the phone all the time. I'd still like to have airplanes be phone-free zones -- but if the guy in the next seat wanted to make a phone call and could do so in a normal voice, it might not be so bad.

As has been documented, I'm in the midst of a rematch with Accounting 455 (Financial Reporting III), last semester's Waterloo. This semester has been a somewhat different story -- through sheer force of having enough free hours in a week to sit at my desk and grind out problems upon problems upon problems, I've got a much better grasp of the material than I had last fall. As a result, on the first midterm (just over a month ago), I hit the ball... not quite out of the park, but over the center-fielder's head for a triple, at least. The second midterm, this past Thursday, was probably the toughest one of the semester, and I'm not that confident I did well, but I'm sure my score was better than the one I recorded last fall. So I'm fairly certain that I'll get a passing grade of one sort or another this time around.

I remain at loggerheads with my instructor, but I think we just have some irreconcilable differences and I'm going to have to live with them. She lectures at such a breathless pace that I can't get a handle on what she's talking about, unless I've already got the material down cold from studying here at my desk beforehand. Which begs the question: if I've got the stuff down cold, what's the point of going to the lecture? Well, the point of going to the lecture is that we get automatic points for having done our homework (regardless of whether or not the answers are entirely correct), and there are in-class points to be earned through team quizzes. The latter are an excruciating exercise, but they put points on the scorecard.

At Thursday's exam, my instructor made a snide comment to the effect that "You people need to work on your time-management skills. I've had other faculty complain that you're skipping their classes to study for my test; well, maybe you need to use your time better." I thought that remark was entirely uncalled for -- what does she know about my time-management skills? Truth be told, I did miss my earlier class that day, so I could spend some time collecting my thoughts and getting into the proper frame of mind for her exam. That is hardly an indication of poor time management, though -- essentially, I spend five days a week studying ACC 455. How much better am I supposed to "manage my time?"

In any case, irreconcilable differences or no, I will persevere, and I will not be run out of business school!

Meanwhile, my other two classes are ACC 480 (Auditing) and BA 305 (Business Law II). Neither of these involves a lot of heavy lifting, but they both cover some ground that will probably be useful, if I end up in the accounting profession.

So that's where things stand. The 2005-6 academic year has not produced a lot of highlight-film material, but I continue to plod along toward receiving a BS in accounting (which may, a friend suggested, be a redundancy).

At first, I found the idea a little bit creepy and Big Brotherish. So I didn't sign up for a GMail address for a few months after it came out. But I finally decided to try it, once the pre-release buzz died down and Google loosened up the entry barriers a little bit (officially, you still need an "invitation" to sign up, but there are plenty of ways around that).

And after a few weeks, I decided I liked the user interface much better than that of any previous Web mail product -- maybe even better than an e-mail client. This became especially true a few months ago, when our remote neighborhood finally got DSL. (Can you believe it? Out here in the wilds of unincorporated Coconino County, we were still dialing up, until last fall!)

So I've been using GMail as my primary address since then. And what's more, I actually like the targeted ads that appear to the right of the message (as well as the non-ad links they serve up).

But what's really amusing is their relatively recent top link -- the one that appears above the message or inbox listing. It serves up a general-interest link (as far as I can tell) when you're in your Inbox... but when you go to your Spam folder, what you invariably get is a recipe for Spam (the Hormel canned-meat food product), from recipesource.com.

I had no idea there were so many things you could do with Spam. They've got recipes for Spam Fajitas, Ginger Spam Salad, Spam Primavera, a Spam Skillet Casserole, a French Fry Spam Casserole, and, perhaps the pièce de resistance, a Spam Hashbrown Bake. (As far as I can tell, however, there is no recipe for Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam.)

Who knew that Spam was such a versatile food product? Is there no end to what can be done with spiced pork, chopped up fine and crammed into a can? And who could have imagined that junk e-mail would prove to be a vehicle for such wholesome amusement?

We got Bix in May of 2003, when we were living on the other side of Highway 89 in a small stone house that was next to an open field -- and an open field meant field mice, as we found out. After Bix's arrival, no more mice were seen in the house -- he may or may not have had anything to do with their departure, but in any case, he certainly seemed inclined to take the credit.

That's what passes for news around here, these days. That is not an entirely bad thing, as I plod along toward (I hope) a successful conclusion to the semester, and Meg gets used to her new career in the legal profession. Onward and upward!

Apparently, I'm not the only one annoyed by Federal agencies' idiotic land-closure policies. Here's the letter, in its entirety:

I live in Las Vegas; I have lived here almost my entire life. When we were growing up, we had giant, wide open spaces to ride [dirt bikes] wherever we felt like it, and there were no environment protection Nazis screaming at us to get off the land.

Kerrie Anne
Las Vegas, Nevada

My favorite part of curling is the match-play aspect -- it's like a golf match, in that each team's strategy is dictated by what the other team is doing. It's like golf, where if your opponent busts a tee shot down the middle, you're obligated to try to do the same, but if he hits it out of bounds, you're advised to pull a long iron out of the bag and make a conservative shot.

Another aspect of curling that appeals is that it is not a judged sport. Debates over biased judges and strange rules allowing do-overs are not an issue -- curling is all about putting rocks in the house; no judgment calls needed. I didn't see the figure skating pairs competition the other night, where one team took a bad spill, but under the rules, was allowed a mulligan and took full advantage, to the tune of a silver medal -- but there's none of that nonsense in curling; whoever's on the button at the end of each... well, each end, scores, and whoever isn't, ain't.

But who knew curling was such a cool sport, until the TV executives decided to start giving it big-time airplay four years ago? Myself, I'm regretting that despite there being a curling club in my home town of Wayland, MA, I never took advantage of the opportunity to get involved. When the happy day arrives that Kafalas.com relocates back east, there may be chances to remedy that oversight -- but in the meantime, I'll be glued to the set whenever the curlers take to the ice over the next week or so.

I realize it's considered blasphemous, in Islam, to draw the image of the prophet Muhammad. Punishable by death, in some jurisdictions. But what these people seem to have a hard time grasping is that someone outside your religion can't blaspheme one of your prophets -- the very idea is absurd.

And it's not as if Muslims themselves don't do the same thing all the time. Anyone who regularly reads the Middle East Media Research Institute's news releases, which translate the Arabic press into English, knows how frequently radical Islamic writers and clerics ridicule other religions (primarily Christianity and Judaism). But because we live in a civilized country with a free press, we shrug it off.

The other concept these protesters are unclear on, when they sack embassies and throw rocks at people, is that it's not France, Denmark, and Norway -- the countries -- that published the cartoons; it's the independent press inside those countries. And, while we're at it, Web sites like this one. (Just in case anyone is offended, I'm sorry -- but it's Wikipedia, it's world-wide, and you can't get rid of it.)

I guess the one bright spot here is that it's not primarily the United States they're bashing, for once -- France and Norway aren't exactly the most aggressive, intolerant, anti-Islamic countries out there. By having a fit over the cartoons, the protesters are not exactly helping the cause of Islam as a civilized religion.