Gathering Goat Eggs

It has come to my attention that the contact page has not been working. That is, it appeared to work: an email page pops up, you type a message, and send it. But no email ever gets to me on the other end. Now I have no idea if people have been trying to email me through the form or not. If you have, and were expecting a reply that never came....well, now you know why. I believe I have it fixed now, albeit at the expense of possibly making my email account vulnerable to spambots. If you sent me a mash note, send it again. If you sent me a note explaining that someone with brains the size of a butterbean shouldn't be allowed to run a blog, offer it up.

I hope I can stop snorting long enough to write this. Between the Great Lileks and Dale Price, the satanic Bratz machine has been given a couple dozen well deserved baseball bat whacks to the kneecaps. God, I hate those things. I run a relatively laissez-faire household, allowing the children to choose for themselves within a circle of reason what to watch, play, or read. So far the only ironclad prohibitions I've had to pronounce ex cathedra have been Fairly Oddparents (which Lileks also abominates, proving he's a Minnesota DemiGod of Good Taste) and Bratz.

Trying to add anything to Dale's masterful rant would be superfluous. I only have one personal observation to share. The only day the children at my younger daughter's Catholic school wear dress-up non-uniform clothes is Picture Day. When I went to pick Anne up all the children were lined up, as usual, on the sidewalk. Any other day, they would all be in their navy blue and plaid uniforms and I would be looking at their faces, picking out the ones who know me to give them a wave. Today, they were wearing the clothes they, or their parents, had chosen as their prettiest outfits. Half the girls looked like Laura Ashley mannequins. Half the girls looked like Bratz. It was so astonishing to me to see these little girls dressed so, that I could not have told you an hour later which girls were wearing which outfits, even though I know every single fourth and fifth grader in the school. I was so overwhelmed by their clothes that I couldn't look at their faces. There is some kind of deep cultural divide looming between those who would happily send their daughters out the door looking like that and those like me for whom such a thing is so far beyond out of the question that I became temporarily prosopagnosic.

This is really very exciting news. Ornithologists are now quite sure that they have found an ivory-billed woodpecker.

Long believed to be extinct, a magnificent bird--the Ivory-billed Woodpecker--has been rediscovered in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting of the species in the United States, a research team announced that at least one male ivory-bill still survives in vast areas of bottomland swamp forest

I was thrilled just to see our small group of pileated woodpeckers had returned this past weekend. They hung around all last year, eating carpenter ants out of the many blacklocust trees broken by Hurricane Isabel the previous autumn, but I had not seen them all winter. I can hardly imagine how excited I'd be if no one had seen them for sixty years.

A photograph of Benedictus PP XVI from Sunday's installation Mass shows quite clearly that the Papal Tiara was nowhere to be seen. Toning down the coronation imagery was probably a good idea. But for any of my ultramontane hardline traditionalist readers who are deeply nostalgic for the old days, I suggest: indulge yourself with a Pope Innocent III Action Figure with removable fancy Pope hat.

When I lived in Minneapolis, I listened to Joe Soucheray's Garage Logic radio show on KSTP every afternoon on my drive home from work. Garage Logic was a quirky little show (not nearly as quirky as Tom Mischke, but he's worth a post of his own) that focused on local topics, with recurring gags like parodies of then-governor Jesse Ventura and a fictional hippie-dippie New Age character named Morgan Q.E. Wolfe-Slattery who supported all the moonbat proposals that flowed like water from the Minneapolis City Council.

A recurring feature on GL was the Item Brought Home in a Backpack segment, in which ordinary listeners (as ordinary as Minnesotans get, anyway; they all seemed a bit strange to a Hoosier) would read out loud some idiot missive their kids had brought home from school. I used to laugh and laugh — my kids went to a Catholic elementary school, and never brought home anything wackier than holy cards.

My kids still go to Catholic schools, but I wish there was a Soucheray show in Maryland. Because Anne just brought home a doozy. The guidance counselor led the 4th graders through the moral minefield of "Prejudice and Discrimination" with a multiple-choice test and a Personal Inventory to draw attention to one's own tendency to be a bigot. The test I didn't have so many problems with, but this Personal Inventory is both risible and deeply insulting.

Not all of the questions, of course. Some are reasonable enough:

Do I think that that doctors and lawyers are more important that gas station attendants and waitresses?
Fair enough. I like the anti-utilitarian angle. But I love that un-P.C. waitress. That sure wouldn't have made it through the Minnesota vetting process.

Do I think old people are sickly and physically weak?
Anne has written below this question: My Nana is 90 and still going strong! In fact, her Nana is 97, must be fed at one end and wiped at the other, is completely deaf, and sleeps 20 hours a day. This makes her no less a person than an Olympic athlete or a Nobel scientist, but it is really bigotry to recognize that old people are often frail and needy and require considerable assistance from young people?

It gets better.

Do I think people who live in the "jungles of Africa" are socially backward?
Anne's parenthetical comment: I don't know any. Nice try, kid, but you don't wiggle out of it that easily. I don't know any either, but I read WHO reports. To the extent that people who live in the "jungles of Africa" believe that Ebola virus can be cured by having a shaman burn some cow dung, or that tribal order requires that females have their genitalia mutilated, then yes I not only believe but know they are socially backward. To insist otherwise is to ignore the law written on the hearts of all men.

Do I feel sorry for people who are physically disabled?
This one seems a bit conflicted. If I'm not supposed to feel sorry for them, why are you calling them disabled? Could it be, perhaps, that the writer of the question, despite the trendy differently abled trope, really does recognize that physical infirmity makes life more difficult and painful and those whose bodies are whole are, in fact, more fortunate in this particular area? What is bigoted about compassion? Empathy? A desire to help if one can? What has happened to the redemptive value of suffering if suffering is not bad, just different?

I saved the best for last.

Do I believe that people who prefer a form of government other than democracy are wrong?
Not evil. Not bad. Not stupid. Wrong. It is bigotry and prejudice to notice that nations with popularly elected democratic governments are more peaceful, more secure, more humane, more protective of their citizens' natural rights, and make better neighbors than nations whose leaders came to power by some other route. Or maybe it's bigotry and prejudice to believe that people who don't value peace, security, and justice are wrong? There are so many ways this question is itself evil and wrong that I can't quite pin it down.

Pope Benedict warned us not two weeks ago about the dictatorship of relativism. I wasn't expecting to find the relativism of dictatorship in my daughter's backpack.

Via Kathryn Jean Lopez: two great articles. Michael Novak at NRO on why blind obedience is not only not demanded, but would be a sin against nature. And Pia Solenni in Sunday's Washington Post on women's role in the Catholic church.

I don't know how many people wrote to eBay protesting the sale of the consecrated Host that took place shortly after JPII died. I was one of them, and I also signed an online petition. Therese at Exsultet posts the reply she received when she complained. I think she is too generous when she gives them "points for being polite" — their response is not politeness, it's mealy-mouthed bureaucratic flatulence. But I think maybe they've actually given us an opening. Because they do say:

[E]ven though these listings may be offensive to some, please remember that most of the time the law does not prohibit the items....Due to the fact that eBay's focus is to have a free and diverse community, we are reluctant to interfere with listings that are not illegal.

So they would interfere with listings that were illegal? Well, how on earth does someone obtain a consecrated Host to sell on eBay other than by theft or fraud?

As far as I know, unless you're a priest or a Eucharistic minister taking communion to the homebound, there is no reason you should have a Host in your possession for longer than the second it takes you to move it from your hand to your mouth. (I'm a receive-on-the-tongue reactionary myself.) If you asked for one to take home, you would be refused, would you not? It was quite obvious from the seller's description that he had fraudulently presented himself for communion (twice!) to obtain the Host.

Part of the fault lies with Eucharistic Ministers who do not enforce the guidelines — they're supposed to make sure you put the Host in your mouth. Of course I understand that at a venue like a large Papal mass, it is difficult to be a communion cop, although it may be that this incident will highlight the need for vigilance. But perhaps instead of trying to convince eBay that the essence of the object itself should preclude its sale (which of course it does, but we don't seem to be making headway in convincing eBay of this) we should stress that no one who has one to sell could possibly have come by it legitimately.

Update: Sorry, it was Therese, not Roz. Corrected above.

One of my daughter's friends has been angling for a Coveted Mention on Gathering Goat Eggs. In pursuit of her goal, she's been pulling pranks involving both animate and inanimate objects in my house. I don't know what's wrong with this generation. I think someone just needs to sit her down and say to her, "You know, Miss Brandy Hollins, sophomore at St. Mary's Ryken High School and accomplished musician despite that whole ukulele/Tiny Tim obsession -- hanging bananas on doorknobs and Scotchtaping the dog's head is not the way to achieve fame and eternal glory by earning a Coveted Mention on Gathering Goat Eggs. If you really want to impress Mrs. Hutchins and ensure that you, Brandy Hollins, get mentioned on Gathering Goat Eggs, you should do something like wash her car, or cut her grass, or even just bring the garbage cans up from the end of the driveway. That is if you, Brandy Hollins, really want her to talk about you on her stylish and potentially award-winning blog."

Something like that, I think, delivered firmly but gently, should set that young whippersnapper Brandy Hollins on the right path.

Unlike the rest of the Catholic blogosphere, I have absolutely no comment on the Pope's red shoes, other than they are absolutely fabulous and if I ever see a pair just like that in hunter green my Mastercard will be out of my wallet so fast the frictional energy will melt my driver's license.

When I read through Pope Benedict XVI's first homily as pope yesterday, this phrase in particular engaged my imagination:

The first symbol is the Pallium, woven in pure wool, which will be placed on my shoulders. This ancient sign, which the Bishops of Rome have worn since the fourth century, may be considered an image of the yoke of Christ, which the Bishop of this City, the Servant of the Servants of God, takes upon his shoulders. God’s yoke is God’s will, which we accept. And this will does not weigh down on us, oppressing us and taking away our freedom.

Amy Welborn has a nice roundup of discussions pertaining to the symbolism of the pallium as the lost sheep, which I won't repeat here. My own thoughts are more idiosyncratic.

If you've ever had the pleasure to work wool with your hands, you know how fitting it is that a wool garment should represent the yoke of Christ. Wool is a tactile delight, light and soft and warm. It is a physical comfort to have a ball of wool yarn in your lap as a garment takes form on your needles. It is an even more elemental pleasure to take a rolag of carded wool into your right hand and coax it gently onto the bobbin of a spinning wheel. That is, it is a pleasure once you have spent enough time spinning that the knowledge is located in your hands as well as your head. Before that happens, spinning is tense and worrisome. After that happens, spinning almost inevitably induces a state of semi-hypnotic reverie. I believe the only time I have ever even slightly grasped the detatched contemplation of the mystics is when I was spinning.

I like to imagine the chain of human endeavor that produced the wool pallium that sat on Pope Benedict's left shoulder yesterday morning, the breeding, herding, shearing, washing, spinning, and weaving, which began with the gift of a sheep God bestowed upon man, and ended with a gift of honor man owed to God.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you choose a tag like "Goat Eggs" you'd pretty much have Google all to yourself? I neglected the scope for mischief presented by practitioners of Somatic Cell Nucleus Transfer.

The SCNT goat eggs were cultured in chemically defined medium at 38.5°C

Transgenic goat eggs are also being used to produce goat milk that contains recoverable silk fibers derived from the spider genome, and are the basis of attempts to reproduce, through cloning, an extinct Spanish mountain goat.

Some people might view these uses of goat eggs with alarm; unless cloning involves human genetic material, it doesn't bother me. Search eBay for goat eggs, however, and the results are the stuff of nightmares.

Knight Ridder runs a charming and endearing portrait of Pope Benedict XVI (via Kevin Drum). In particular, our new Pope is a cat lover. That will be welcome news to our six resident felines. (Although I'm not convinced they're all Catholics. They squabble like four Lutheran Synods and a couple of Baptist conventions.) It won't make Old Oligarch happy, though.

Roz proposes a t-shirt design for Pope Benedict XVI. Roz probably already knows this, but that's not a B-16, it's an F-16. I live about five miles southeast of Andrews AFB, and they fly over my house on training runs all the time. Noisy buggers, and fast. If you try to locate them in the sky by looking in the direction of the noise, you've already missed them. The B-16 was a project done for the Army Air Corps by Martin in 1930s. It never went beyond the design stage. Now the B-17 was the WWII-era Flying Fortress. Maybe we could use that somehow, by tweaking the slogan? In the meantime, the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club has some dandy merchandise.

Disputations is such a wet blanket.

One thing that has marred this day on which the Universal Church has been given a new Holy Father is the ugliness of many commenters who gleefully await the insufficiently pure's public repudiation of their membership in that same Church.

That is wickedness. It is the fruit of a sinful heart, and deserves rebuke.

Oh, OK. I swear that I did not cackle and rub my hands while playing a mental movie of a herd of heterodox liberal loudmouths, spooked like neurotic cattle at the announcement of Papa Ratzi, breaking down the fence and running headlong off Chesterton's cliff. Honest. On a stack of Bibles.

But I admit I did savor, both in expectation and fruition, the howls of indignation from all the usual suspects. MoDo whines 'cause the cafeteria's closed? Good, they usually do that when the joint's spreading typhus. I understand it's wicked to desire that Andrew Sullivan finally just shut the eff up already about the existential imperative of the contents of his underpants and just bail for the lace and lavender branch of the Church of England. [I continue to hold out hope, however, that it is not sinful to pray that Andrew might stop misusing his considerable talent.]

It has also occurred to me that those of us who went giddy with excitement and joy when the words following Annuntio vobis audium magnum — habemus Papam were Eminentissium ac Reverendissium Dominum, Dominum Josephum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger might be forgetting something we're supposed to believe about the Church. I don't think it's internally consistent to wish fervently for the election of a particular cardinal and to truly trust that the Vicar of Christ is the Rock upon which is built the church that is promised to prevail against the Gates of Hell. To believe that the true fate of the Church depends on which cardinal is chosen, and furthermore to believe that I would have any valid insight into which cardinal would be the right choice, is probably sinful pride.

However. Although Benedict XVI is not Superpope, I hope he eventually gets his own comic book.

Update:

Those wacky miscreants Ace, Wizbang and Allah have written a handy little Java script to keep track of Sully's hysteria quotient.

Sometimes the day is just not big enough to hold all the good news. I saw this item yesterday, but I was already overflowing with Benedictimus. First they
were forced to admit that that red wine was better than beta-blockers for your cardiovascular system. Then they had to admit that beer was good for you too. And that wine also reduced cancer risk and cured the common cold.

If that weren't upsetting enough, it transpired that chocolate conveyed health benefits as well. But those gloomy gripers couldn't help but caution that even though chocolate compounds promoted heart health and improved glucose metabolics in diabetics, that surely these benefits were outweighed by chocolate's calories and fat and the resulting likelihood it would cause weight gain.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Let me see now: John and I split a bottle of red wine a day. I treat myself to a bittersweet chocolate orange once in a while. I'm what Pope Benedict XVI, since he's a kindly soft-spoken German, would describe as zaftig. And I'm healthier than those underfed Social X-Rays mincing down K Street in their size 2 Valentino suits and Manolo Blahniks.

Good gracious, God created a wonderful world.

I was on my way to my harp lesson in Bowie, driving north on 301 and listening to Rush Limbaugh on WMAL, when the ABC wire reported the smoke was white, and the new pope would be announced at any moment. I was so excited and nervous, I pulled into the parking lot at Rip's Liquor so I could calm down, and also call my husband and be the first to give him some hot news for once. Do they have to say "brothers and sisters" in seventeen languages? I'm having an infarction here — move it! It's Latin now. Oh, OK, he said "habemus papam." Can't be long now. Joseph....are there other cardinals named Joseph? Ratzinger! Bravo! Bravo! Speed dial, speed dial....darn it. John's voice mail. Leave a message. Should I go in and get a couple of bottles of Spaten Pils? Whoops, no time, I'll be late for my lesson.

I played very badly, by the way; my hands were shaking and I was hyperventilating. But my teacher's Catholic too, so at least she didn't think I was crazy. She made me do left-brain music dictation for 45 minutes instead.

So. Having failed to obtain any Bavarian beverages, we will celebrate this joyful day when the Scholar of Munich became our papa with a big dish of sauerbraten und kartoffeln. And to place our lives each day under the care of Benedict XVI, the first German pope in a thousand years, I'm taking the cuckoo clock to the shop tomorrow to be fixed.

Hallowed Ground writes about a currently unsanctified plot of ground he's been tilling over.

For the last couple of days I've been tilling a large patch of ground on the south side of the house. In the process of tilling I've uncovered all kinds of trash - beer cans and bottles, door hinges, ball hitches, heavy gauge wire, rope, sandals, water/whiskey flasks, and many unidentified metal objects. At this point the ground is far from "hallowed". But at some point in the future, when that patch of ground has been cleared, tilled, planted, and harvested by a God-loving Catholic family, and when that same family has been sanctified by its demands and nourished by its produce, and when the ground has been blessed not only by toil but by prayer and contemplation, then that ground will finally be "hallowed" indeed.

Oh man, do I know the feeling. I'm constantly amazed at what just a six-inch till can bring to the surface.

Here in Southern Maryland, the soil is acidic, sandy and loose. My particular slice of heaven spent close to 200 years under tobacco cultivation, and between that, the deer, and my indolent nature, sanctifying my family by nurturing them with the produce of my humble toil has been a pretty iffy proposition. (I'm host to eleven of the fattest deer ever seen in Prince George's County, though.)

The upside to sand is that it tills easily. The downside to sand which used to be a slave-using tobacco plantation is that some of the stuff you till up completely creeps you out. For instance, we dug up an iron chain contraption that I'm fairly certain is a leg shackle. I even know the names of some of the slaves that lived here. The former owner gave me a large notebook full of documentation on the property, including some probate records from before the Civil War. The property bequested included twelve people, two of whom were named Rachel and Anne. These are my own daughters' names. I have a feeling this ground is going to take a lot of hallowing.



Luckily, my daughter and her best friend next door have made a good start, by building a "wheat fort" out of last year's Indian grass.

This grisly little horror tale was making the blogrounds late last week, but I honestly wasn't in the right frame of mind to deal with it seriously. Oh, I thought, Eve Tushnet and Old Oligarch and half of St. Blog's Parish have it covered. Relax and watch the baseball game.

I still don't want to think about it or write about it. I'll just say this. The article appeared in the journal The Lancet. While general medical journals have fallen somewhat out of favor, and most really jawdropping results are now published in more specialized outlets, The Lancet remains the premier journal of general medical research in the world. It has been in continuous publication since 1823. Its name comes from an instrument used to puncture a festering boil; with this name the Lancet's founder, Dr. Thomas Wakley, conveyed that his mission was to drain a corrupt and incompetent medical profession of its pustulence.

In 1823 there was a yet more common use for a lancet. It was the instrument used to bleed patients. If you look at a medical textbook from that era, bleeding was prescribed to both cure and prevent everything from consumption to apoplexy. It, along with vomiting and purging, were the main medical tools of a profession that sought to cure diseases according to the scholarly and sober theory of rectifying the humors. Today, of course, we know better; a colonial physician is an object of fun, and the more pompous and sure of his diagnosis and treatment the funnier he becomes.

So just remember the next time we have a Terri Schiavo on our hands and these know-it-all medical ethics gurus start blathering all over cable TV about "life not worth living" and "the dying process" and how euphoric it is to be killed by dehydration: the doctors shoving lancets into their patients' veins were just as concerned about doing good, and just as sure they were right. And if our culture marshalls the will to throw off our romantic attachment to death, at least enough to survive another 200 years, these doctors will be objects of ridicule, and no one will understand why anyone fell for their bunkum.

I grew up in a little town in Indiana (not so little these days) that was served by the Indianapolis media market. In those days, Indy was firmly a second-tier professional sports town. Our basketball team was a league leader -- but that league was the ABA, not the NBA. The Colts still had a dozen years left in Baltimore. The only pro baseball in town was the the Indians, a triple A club whose affliation bounced among the Reds, White Sox, and Expos. In those days the Tribe played in an old stadium in a blighted heavy industrial neighborhood down by the Speedway on 16th Street, a venue that discouraged the parents of hayseeds like us from attending games with their children.

So if you were a young baseball fan in Indiana in the 60's and 70's you chose another team to root for. This span included the years when Cincinnati had a Big Red Machine, and most of my friends rooted for Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, and Tony Perez. Other friends, with different regional inclinations or family ties, chose St. Louis or the White Sox. But I, then as now, was a contrarian. I was a Cubs fan.

I've stayed a Cubs fan all these years, through stints in cities that had real major league teams. I lived in Dallas during the Rangers' Larry Parrish years. I lived in Minneapolis while the Twinkies put paid to Bud Selig's failed plot to get Carl Pohlad out of his financial mess by contracting the National League. Instead the Twins stayed put and the other target of contraction, the Montreal Expos, ended up moving to my new home town. Which leaves me with a moral dilemma.

I didn't go out to RFK for the home opener last night, but I was glued to the box for most of the game. I haven't felt this warm and fuzzy about major league baseball since about five minutes before Leon Durham let that grounder roll between his feet in 1984. I don't know why I feel differently about the Washington Nationals than I did about those other teams. Maybe it's that I was here first, and so they can be my team from the start, like those other teams couldn't be. Or maybe, after the latest heartbreak in 2003, I finally realized my cardiovascular system was no longer equal to being a Cubs fan.

Or maybe it was the sight of über-gasbag John McCain wearing the losing team's hat.

I am very easily amused. My children are very easily embarrassed. Thus I am, at an age nearing fifty, still prone to public displays of jejune attention-getting. Marry that to my periodic realization that I often have nothing to write about, and Gathering Goat Eggs is proud to announce a new weekly feature: My Childish Undignified Prank (the acroynm is, of course, pronounced See You Pee) of the Week. Commenters are encouraged to record their own infantile episodes of acting out. If your kids blushed, all the better.

C-U-P for the week of April 15, 2005: Every time I go through the McDonald's drive-thru I dial up Mark Knopfler's Boom Like That on the IPod and blast it through my car stereo. The nice Nigerian guy who always hands us the Happy Meals is just baffled, but yesterday the new girl at the money window was snorting through her nose while she handed me the change.

Roz suggests some names for the new Pope. What a perfect time to point out Paddy Power's new prop bet: Next Pope's Papal Name. Benedict is the current favorite at 3 to 1. My handy Saints and Sinners indicates the next Benedict would be number XVI. What surprises me is the number of short bets that have never been used as a papal name: Andrew, James, Matthew, Luke. Taine? Where did that come from?

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table.

Professor Bainbridge links to a New York Times article by John Tierney on information futures markets. Tierney analyzes the accuracy with which Ireland-based Intrade predicted the outcome of the last presidential election at both national and individual state level, and goes on to discuss this week's favorite book, the future pope, a topic I briefly mentioned here.

Until I read the Tierney article I was unfamiliar with Intrade, but I followed Tradesports quite closely during the 2004 election, and I've been interested in the topic of information futures markets for quite some time. From an economist's point of view, information markets are Hayekian facilitators of spontaneous order which bring together people who possess fragments of knowledge. When such individuals are brought together, by the incentive of a monetary reward, the trades generate reliable information that cannot be known by any of the individuals, and indeed could not be adduced by any grouping of the individuals in the absence of the market mechanism.

The "odds" in information markets are determined by the prices demanded and offered by the traders themselves. Suppose I think that Francis Cardinal Arinze will be the next pope. My reasons may be as flimsy as wishful thinking, or an emotionally suspect desire to see a bunch of pro-choice "personally opposed" public Catholics of the left get a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Or maybe I really know something about the conclave -- that some other leading papabilo has a health condition, or a secret reputation for me vexat pede pranks that has made him unpopular with his fellow Princes of the Church. So I open an account on Intrade and place a bid for a contract on Arinze. The price I'm willing to pay for the contract is higher, the more confident I am in my prediction. But my contract is no good until another trader is willing to sell me one -- someone who thinks less of Arinze's chances than I do. So we trade, and we can keep on trading until a new pope is actually chosen, at which time the contract settles. If Arinze is chosen pope, everyone still holding contracts on Arinze receives a 100% payout; everyone still holding contracts on anyone else receives nothing. Intrade makes its profit by charging a small commission for each trade; its position is completely unaffected by the particular outcome of any event on which it has facilitated trading.

Bookmakers also facilitate the exchange of money among those making future predictions, and a book can be thought of as a sort of market in information, I suppose. A bet on the outcome of a single event, such as the identity of the next pope, is a prop (proposition) bet. The bookmakers sets his odds based on his own assessment of the likelihood of the event occurring, and attempts to set them in the range that customers will be betting both sides of the wager in ratios that will permit the bookie to pay the winning bettors what they are owed from the money he has collected from the losing bettors, with something left over for himself. While this market does collect and transmit information, it does so in a less dispersed way than futures markets. For instance: here is an aggregator site showing available books on the papal election. The last time I checked this site there was only one exchange, Paddy Power, accepting papal bets, now there are two with the entry of BetFair. Paddy Power have added new prop bets such as the name the new pope will choose and the length of the conclave (the over/under comes to the Vatican!); they have even bought the domain name popebetting.com.

And holy smoke, Batman! Look at the way the odds have changed since Saturday. Arinze was listed at 7:2, I think; now his odds are 8:1. This means so many bets were coming against Arinze that the bookie couldn't cover the winning bets with the proceeds from the losers. But the people who placed bets on Saturday are stuck with their bets. This is a major difference between bookmaking and information futures -- the holder of a futures contract can vacate his position at any time up to the expiration/settling of the contract. A traditional bettor can, of course, place new bets to offset the ones already made -- "hedging the bet." In fact, the difference in odds offered at Paddy Power and Betfair may make arbitrage betting possible.

The problem for a Catholic in all this is that, as John Tierney pointed out, a Papal Bull issued by in 1591 by Pope Gregory XIV forbade betting on the outcome of a conclave. To understand if this Bull forbids trading in information futures contracts, I think we would have to understand what specific behavior the Bull was attempting to stem, and if futures trading has anything to do with that behavior or not. I will have more thoughts on that in a bit.

Damn, I hope I'm not too late to jump on this bandwagon. Although I think I'll have a tough time topping these or these. Or these. Be that as it may, in the past 46 years I have found time to:

10. Graduate from college before I could legally order a drink in a bar.

9. Watch my little sister tape a television show with David Letterman.

8. Eat a rattlesnake.

7. Honeymoon on Adak Island

6. Shoot a cottonmouth out of a semi-submerged tree with a Ruger .38 revolver while seated in a fifteen foot john boat.

5. Get shooed out of an elevator so Mike Tyson could use it.

4. Unsuccessfully attempt to present the USSR's Embassy with a fake energy conservation award for punitively shutting down a gas pipeline to Lithuania.

3. Watch the sun set over Lake Teslin (133 deg W; 60 deg N) at 11:45 PM. Watch the sun rise over Lake Teslin at 3:30 AM.

2. Drive from Minneapolis to Anchorage to Skagway to Washington DC in a Jeep Cherokee with a husband, two kids, a dog, five cats, and a hedgehog.

1. Live in a house with five dead bodies buried in the backyard. (Still do, in fact.)

I have no idea if this is blasphemous, funny, or just plain stupid: Current UK Bookie Odds on Papabile. Oh, now this is interesting: Tradesports has Tettamanzi at shorter odds. But Arinze's moving up. Actually, someone just bought 200 dollar bets on Arinze at thirteen cents.

To the person who ended up here by Googling: "best kind of chickens to buy to raise eggs": sorry I wasn't more help. However, if you're still interested:

My grandmother and her friends favored Rhode Island Reds. They are a reasonably sturdy dual-purpose breed, and lay brown eggs, which sell at a premium. They are very popular with the Amish and Mennonite farmers here in Southern Maryland.

My neighbors have a small flock of Buff Orpingtons which seem to fit into a semi-suburban environment without much fuss. They're gentle and don't roam much.

Stay away from Leghorns, unless you have a secondary interest in abnormal psychology of domestic fowl. They are the primary breed used on commercial egg farms, but they are loonier than a busload of nutty American nuns.

I am glad beyond glad that I did not succumb to the forces of temptation at 3:45 am, punch the alarm button, and roll over in bed. I really did get up and watch the entire funeral. I don't think I have ever been so grateful that I am a Catholic. This might be the first time I have ever been fully convinced that I finally am a Catholic in my heart, not just my head. Yes, I know there were many non-Catholics watching this funeral, and they loved John Paul II and were touched by his life and some of them know and understand more about his theology and philosophy than I ever will. But to watch the mass and have it feel like the most comfortable shirt I own, to find myself automatically responding, even knowing enough of the Latin to follow and being familiar with the chant tones — I was at home, with a billion other people.

Thank you, Lord, for taking me by the hand and leading me home, while this man was holding the door open. Santo Subito.

And now I find that at my age, even an entire pot of coffee does not cancel out three hours of sleep. I'm going to take a nap.

I see that Bernard Cardinal Law still has the ability to attract snarls and hisses just by raising his head high enough to peek over the Vatican wall. Two local radio talk show hosts, whom I usually quite enjoy, were raking the hierarchy over the coals yesterday for not doing something to prevent Cardinal Law from casting one of 117 votes for the next pope. And SNAP have their knickers in a twist because the Cardinal is celebrating one of nine mourning masses for the pope.

During the playing out of the scandal in Boston that led to Cardinal Law's resignation, I deplored the viciousness, the disrespect, the piling on, the jackassery of the prosecutor. I could feel steam building up behind my eyeballs every time I saw Rod Dreher's byline. But I could understand. It was easy to empathize with the abused, even if I thought they were pursuing the wrong scapegoat in the wrong way. Being a mother, it was way too easy to understand the anguish of parents whose children had mentally collapsed, even committed suicide, while the church authorities seemed to protect their tormentors. I still understand.

But not this. This is just vindictiveness. The man was chased out of his archdiocese after decades of service to the church. They wanted him out, he's out. Boston hasn't heard a peep out of him for three years. But the minute he does reappear, from six time zones away, daring to say a mass, they're baying after him like coondogs on a possum. They didn't want accountability. They didn't want an apology. They wanted a red hat, with his head still in it, on a pike in front of Holy Cross Cathedral. Which is mortgaged to pay the lawsuit settlements.

I'm not offended that a cardinal is doing some cardinally duty during a time of mourning. I am offended, however, that my junior senator, the dogmatically anti-life Barbara Mikulski, is swanning around Rome as Maryland's official Polish Catholic. If I were Polish, instead of just Catholic, I might spontaneously combust.

The American media has an apparently insatiable appetite for critical appraisals of JPII's papacy by disaffected left-wing Catholics -- heterodox professors from Georgetown and Notre Dame, apostate ex-nuns in touch with their inner goddesses, James Carroll. It's like watching a swarm of gnats try to eat a mastadon.

In another venue I responded to a wry comment about this by quoting Walker Percy:

For every Mother Theresa, there seem to be 1,800 nutty American nuns, female Clint Eastwoods who have it in for men and are out to get the Pope.

A Disputatious Catholic countered:

Sure, but then, there's only one Mother Theresa. Which means there are only 1,800 nutty American nuns. The tens of thousands of non-nutty nuns are too busy following their own vocations to write op-ed pieces.

I guess it depends on what the meaning of Mother Theresa is. If you mean a saintly Albanian nun who was brought to the attention of the world by Malcolm Muggeridge and became a universal symbol of Christian charity then sure, there's only one. But I think Percy was using Mother Theresa as synecdoche -- to stand for all saintly, self-effacing, servant daughters of God. And I don't believe there's only one of those.

I have no idea how many nutty American nuns there are, for that matter. Eighteen hundred sounds a little low, but they do get magnified by the television lens. For that matter, you'd think a group called Catholics for a Free Choice would have at least two members, but the only ones I've ever seen are all called Frances Kissling.

The eight days that are called the Octave of Easter in the Western Church are called Bright Week by Eastern Rite Catholics and Orthodox. In Eastern Rite churches, the sanctuary is separated from the nave by an iconostasis: a wall covered with icons, arranged in a specific order. There are four doors in the iconostasis: the Royal Doors in the center, and a Deacon's Door on either side. These doors symbolize the bridge between Heaven and earth. Ordinarily, they are opened only at specific times during Divine Liturgy. However, they are left open for the entirety of Bright Week, demonstrating that Christ has cast open the Gates of Heaven.

It is, I am told, an old pious tradition that anyone who dies during Bright Week gains immediate entrance to Heaven, since its Gates are wide open. Many people, of course, died during Bright Week 2005. Two of them captured the attention of most of the world. May all of them find the pious tradition true.

Back from a spring break vacation with my family, and didn't I miss a lot last week.

God guides me in ways I often do not at the time understand. The last time I spent Sunday in Williamsburg, Virginia, I ended up at one of those dopey-folky flute 'n guitar 'n cute blond with a tambourine Newman Center masses that make my flesh draw away from my bones in protest. So this time the spouse and I made sure it didn't happen again, in the only way a Roman Catholic in a strange town can make absolutely sure such a thing won't happen again: we went to a Byzantine Divine Liturgy instead.

From the moment we walked in, and were greeted by a friendly woman explaining the prayers we would say for the pope after Liturgy, and saw the portrait of JPII in the aisle in the manner of an icon to be venerated, I knew I was exactly where God thought I should be that morning.

Unlike the Roman mass, which offers a prayer for the pontiff only once, there are five separate places in the Byzantine Liturgy where the priest or deacon offer prayers for the current pope. When there is no current pope, those lines are omitted. There is a hole in the liturgy. You could hear the slight halting, the catch in the voices of the priest and deacon, that announced that what had been prayed for so long would now be prayed no longer. Judging from the ages of the celebrants, I doubt very much either one had ever prayed for any other Holy Father. That was the first time I got weepy.

I got weepy again during the homily, when the priest offered a interpretation of that hole in the liturgy, likening it to the empty tomb the women find on Easter Sunday. A person should have been there, but was not -- for He is risen. And so, of course, the only Pope there has been since long before I became a Catholic is no longer where we thought he should be, for he is risen to his new life with the Lord he served so faithfully, so long, through so many frightening and infuriating times.

I got weepy again when I went down the aisle to receive the Eucharist, and along with everyone else, gently touched the hands and face of the Holy Father's picture. And finally, I got weepy when we chanted prayers from the Liturgy of the Resurrection at the end of the service. I had not had much time to feel sad before those prayers, and I had needed to release my sadness.

Christ is risen from the dead!
By death He conquered death,
And to those in the graves, He granted life!

Amen. Godspeed, Papa.