Daily Archives: May 8, 2006

The end of the confounding contango?

Posted on by
Reply

oil_well21.jpgThis post from a couple of weeks ago noted the rise of crude oil prices to over $70 per barrel, and this subsequent post examined the unusually long contango period that has existed in the oil trading markets during the current run-up in crude oil prices.
Well, crude oil prices have now fallen below $70 per barrel again. Thus, Clear Thinkers favorite James Hamilton is wondering whether oil prices have peaked for the time being. One interesting observation in the post is about the impact of $3 a gallon gasoline prices:

These data seem to suggest that the April gasoline price increases may have been sufficient to reverse the usual tendency for the U.S. public to use more gasoline each year than the previous year. Certainly that’s what we observed last fall when gas prices were around their current values, and I see no reason not to expect to see the same thing to be repeated now.

The next troubled Texas PGA Tour event

Posted on by
Reply

byron nelson.jpgThis earlier post reviewed the problems that continue to plague the Shell Houston Open Golf Tournament on the PGA Tour schedule. However, to the north of Houston, the EDS Byron Nelson Open — which begins Thursday in Dallas — is facing many of the same problems that the Shell Houston Open is experiencing.
Due to its current spot on the PGA Tour schedule a month or so after The Masters, “the Nelson” has generally enjoyed one of the stronger “non-major” tournament fields — including Tiger Woods — because most players view it as a timely tune-up for The Memorial Tournament later in the month and then the U.S. Open in June. However, Woods is not participating this year because of the death of his father last week and my sense is that Dallas — as with Houston — may not see Woods again for a very long time.
Not only did Woods’ consecutive-cut streak on the PGA Tour end at last year’s Nelson, but the Nelson is played on two mediocre courses, Cottonwood Valley (for only the first two rounds) and the TPC Four Seasons, neither of which are particularly favored tracts among PGA Tour players. Moreover, next year, when the Players Championship moves to the second week of May, the Nelson will be moved up to the final week of April, just three weeks after the Masters. Thus, the Nelson will be followed by the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte and then the Players Championship the following week.
Notwithstanding Byron Nelson’s drawing power, it’s not likely that Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and other top Tour players will cut their post-Masters layoff to two weeks to play in the Nelson when many of them will be playing the pre-Players tuneup the next week at Wachovia and all of them the following week at the Players. In short, the Nelson is about to begin experiencing the type of fields that the Shell Houston Open has endured over the past several years.
With San Antonio’s Texas Open already relegated to an afterthought during football season in the fall, and Ft. Worth’s Colonial Invitational gradually losing the best players because of the tight layout that is not conducive to the floggers, the PGA Tour better sit up and take notice — its four tournaments in the one of nation’s premier golfing states are suffering from serious neglect. How much longer will the thousands of Texans who volunteer their time to run those tournaments — and the tens of thousands who fund them — continue to do so in the face the subpar fields that the PGA Tour is serving up in Texas?

Self-help dentistry

Posted on by
1

dentist.gifThis NY Sunday Times article explores Britain’s state-financed dental system and finds that the lines for treatment are so long that some citizens simply opt to treating themselves:

Britain has too few public dentists for too many people. At the beginning of the year, just 49 percent of the adults and 63 percent of the children in England and Wales were registered with public dentists.
And now, discouraged by what they say is the assembly-line nature of the job and by a new contract that pays them to perform a set number of “units of dental activity” per year, even more dentists are abandoning the health service and going into private practice รณ some 2,000 in April alone, the British Dental Association says.
How does this affect the teeth of the nation? [ . . .]
“I snapped it out myself,” said William Kelly, 43, describing his most recent dental procedure, the autoextraction of one of his upper teeth.
Now it is a jagged black stump, and the pain gnawing at Mr. Kelly’s mouth has transferred itself to a different tooth, mottled and rickety, on the other side of his mouth. “I’m in the middle of pulling that one out, too,” he said. [ . . .]
A recent Guardian newspaper article about the company titled “D.I.Y. Dentistry” (meaning Do It Yourself) said that the previous week British drugstores had sold 6,000 jars of the filling replacement, and 6,000 of the crown-and-cap replacement.

Keep this article handy to show to the next person who advocates a state-funded health care finance system for the U.S.