Think Outside the Bun? No Thanks.

This may come as a shocker to many of you, but apparently, Taco Bell has been using some Less Than Top Notch ingredients.

The number of possible E. coli cases related to Taco Bell restaurants has passed 200 and has ranged across several states, causing many people to think twice before making a “run for the border”, and the share price of parent company Yum! to fall 5.6% over a three-day period.

Jeff Omohundro, a Wachovia analyst in Richmond, Virginia suggested that the E. coli outbreak could lead to a “short-term, although potentially significant negative sales impact at Taco Bell.”

Although Mr. Omohundro is certainly more qualified to give an opinion on this than I am, I agree with him: people do generally try to avoid ingesting potentially lethal bacteria.

On top of the bad publicity and the drop in stock prices, Taco Bell will also undoubtedly suffer from legal expenses as well, as many of the victims have already filed lawsuits.

I might personally feel some sympathy for Taco Bell, if it wasn’t for the fact that they tried to bump me off last week with a tainted chicken quesadilla. I’m virtually certain that my week-long illness had nothing to do with the E. coli cases, but I’m still bitter. After all, I felt so bad that I haven’t been able to update my blog.*


*For those of you about to mention that I rarely update anyway, bite your tongues.

It's (Past) Time to Make a Change

From the very beginning of the Razorbacks’ surprisingly good season, I’ve been a big Mitch Mustain fan. Sometimes when he plays, he looks like an 18 year old kid (which he is) but every now and then you see the flashes of brilliance that made him the top high school quarterback in the nation last year and the biggest recruit Arkansas has landed in a long time.

Despite having a record of 7-0 as a starter, Mustain was inconsistent, and after a bad game against Louisiana-Monroe, was pulled after throwing an INT on his first passing attempt against South Carolina.

Casey Dick, who went 2-2 as a freshman starter at the end of last season, came in to replace Mustain, and had a big game, throwing for 228 yards and a touchdown, as Arkansas held on to win the game. Dick played well, and Mustain had been struggling, but I thought pulling Mustain, undefeated as a starter, after one pass (albeit an INT), was possibly premature.

Although, Arkansas won the next two games under Dick, who played well against Tennessee and poorly against Mississippi St, they lost to LSU today, thanks in no small part to an absolutely inept performance by Dick. Dick started bad and got worse as the game went on, but was left in for the entire game, despite proving time after time a complete inability to throw to his intended receiver. For the game, Dick was 3-17 for 29 yards, 1 TD (on a remarkable catch and run by Marcus Monk) and one back-breaking INT.

When you compare the two quarterbacks, it seems clear to me that it’s time to go back to Mustain:

1. Experience: This has always been one of the main reasons given as to why Dick replaced Mustain as a starter. What kind of experience are we talking about here? Most college games watched? Because if we're talking about starts, Mustain actually has more, and certainly had more at the time when he was pulled for Dick. Besides, most of Dick’s starts were last season, and while they were all against SEC opponents, they weren’t exactly in pressure situations, as Arkansas was 2-5 when Dick took over the helm, with no real expectations for the end of the season.

That being said, Dick has had more practice reps than Mustain, and since he did play last year, is more familiar with the Arkansas offense than is Mustain.

Even if Dick was much more experienced than Mustain (which he really isn’t), in some ways this is a stupid argument. After all, the older guy will always have more experience until the younger guy actually gets to play.

2. Performance: As a starter, Mustain is 8-0. Dick is 4-3. Even if you take away the South Carolina game (which is fair; Mustain started but Dick was the one who helped win the game), Mustain is 7-0 and Dick is 5-3 (3-1 this season).

Their season statistics are fairly similar. Both are completing just over 50% of their passes (Dick has completed 51.7%, Mustain 52.5%). Neither is amassing a great deal of yardage: Dick is averaging 8.37 yards per pass attempt while Mustain is at 6.99. Dick has a better ratio of touchdowns to interceptions (he has 8 TDs and 3 INTs, Mustain has 10 and 8), but none of Mustain's picks on the season was as bad as the one thrown by Dick today.

When at their best, the two are similar, though Mustain is a little better. In the Hogs’ SEC opener on the road at Vanderbilt, Mustain earned National Freshman of the Week Honors by completing 13 of 20 passes for 224 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 21-19 victory over the Commodores. In Dick's breakout game in the 26-20 victory over South Carolina, he completed 11 of 19 passes for 228 yards and a touchdown. Both of these were big SEC road victories for the Razorbacks, but Mustain's performance was really the more impressive of the two, as Heisman candidate Darren McFadden ran for 219 yards in Dick's big game against the Gamecocks, but he had one of his worst games of the season against Vandy, running for just 71 yards on 19 carries. This means that Mustain had his biggest game at a time when he needed to, while Arkansas’ top player was struggling.

Both have big wins on their season resumés; Mustain played solidly, running the team well in a 27-10 upset at #2 ranked Auburn, and Dick had a good performance in a 31-14 trouncing of Tennessee.

Both Mustain and Dick have been inconsistent, and when they’ve been bad, they’ve been really bad. Against Alabama, Mustain was 7-22 for 97 yards, with one touchdown and three interceptions. Dick’s worst game was today against LSU, when he was 3-17 for 29 yards and one touchdown and one interception. Of course the big difference here is that during his worst game, Mustain still played his best when the game was on the line, giving the Hogs the win with a touchdown pass on 4th down in double OT. On the other hand, Dick eliminated any chance of winning that Arkansas had against LSU by throwing four consecutive incomplete passes to end the game.

It seems that Mustain has performed better over the course of the season, and this is even more impressive when you realize that he is running an offense which is completely different from the no huddle, pass-oriented offense he ran last year at Springdale High School. On the other hand, Dick is running a very similar offense to what he ran last year; why isn't his “experience” paying off?

3. Potential: This area goes to Mustain, pretty much hands-down. Picked by some publications as last year’s High School Player of the Year, for Mustain, the sky is the limit. Dick is a solid back-up quarterback, and has done some good things for Arkansas over the last two seasons, but anyone who thinks that he is more of a talent than Mustain in the long term is just plain nuts.

4. Intangibles: I saved this area for last, because I think it is the most important. When it comes down to it, Mustain is simply a winner. Since he was in 8th grade, Mustain has a record of 60-2 as a starter. 60-2. He is a guy who finds a way to win, and as I mentioned before, even in his worst game of the season when he couldn’t complete a pass to anyone, he throws the big touchdown in OT to win the game.

Dick has shown himself to be a gritty player and really helped out Arkansas last year by giving up a year of eligibility and taking the helm from an overwhelmed Robert Johnson, but as a starter, he has lost more games over the last 13 months than Mustain has since he was 13 years old.

Conclusion: Mustain should have replaced Dick during the 3rd quarter today; Dick certainly was given more leeway than Mustain ever got. Arkansas deserved to lose today, because Casey Dick couldn’t run the offense, and Houston Nutt refused to do anything about it. Houston, it's (past) time to make a change.

Turn up the Volume

I enjoy editing and creating digital videos. I have used several different programs, but the one I use most often is iMovie. iMovie has its limitations, but if you have a Mac, it comes free, and for a free program, it's pretty cool.

A problem that I run into sometimes when working with digital video is low sound volume. Video cameras usually don't capture sound too well, especially if there's a lot of background noise going on, and when you import video onto your computer, sometimes you can barely hear what you want to hear. You can also run into this issue if you are trying to create your own audio, but don't have a very sensitive microphone on your computer (a problem I ran into earlier this week).

Now, you can always turn up the volume of the sound clip, but usually there is a limit to how high you can turn it (with iMovie, you can only turn the volume up to 150%), and sometimes that just isn't enough. Here's a screenshot with a sample audio file turned up as high as it can go:

One easy way to get around this problem is to duplicate the sound clip itself, which effectively doubles your sound volume. If your sound is still combined with the video clip, you will first have to extract the audio from it (use cmd-J). After you have the audio extracted from the video, select it, copy it, and then paste it at the same playhead (if you don't place it exactly at the same playhead, the clips will echo each other and it will sound terrible). Here's a screenshot after the sound clip has been copied and pasted at the same playhead:

You can repeat this process over and over until you get the volume as loud as you want it (you can place one sound clip over another), but the more sound clips you have, the more difficult they are to keep track of.

Probably the neatest thing about this little trick is that you can do several creative things with it once you get it figured out. For example, if you have some mp3 files that are quieter (or louder) than others, you can import them into a video editor, tweak the volume of the sound clip like you want them, then export them back out and re-insert them into your library. That way, you won't have to risk hearing loss everytime you listen to your iPod and you have very quiet and very loud songs back to back.

This is not the Gospel

Several days ago, I was flipping through TV channels late one night, and I stopped to listen to televangelist Mike Murdock. I had never heard of him, but there wasn’t really anything on TV and I thought he had an intriguing voice, so I stopped to listen to him.

Now at this point, I’ll admit that I don’t usually watch televangelists, and didn’t really know what to expect, but I knew that he claimed to be a Christian of some sort, and so I expected his message to be about, well, Christ.

Yeah, not so much. I listened to him for several minutes, but his message didn’t focus on telling others about Jesus, or the problem of sin, or even any doctrinal issue. Instead, he talked about money. See, according to Mr. Murdock, God intends for His people to be financially prosperous in this life.

I kept expecting him to qualify his message by adding that while being wealthy might be a great blessing from God, this life and material possessions were not what was really important.

But he never did. Instead, he went on to basically guarantee that anyone who had enough faith would be blessed with prosperity and riches.

All of this seemed a little crazy to me, but apparently this “Prosperity Gospel” message is pretty common among televangelists like Murdock, Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland.

I didn’t think too much about it until last week, when it was brought a little closer to home while I was at a luncheon for local ministers. An idea very similar to Mr. Murdock's was presented, but this time it was not by some unknown evangelist on late night TV; the guest speaker was from a church of Christ.

Though he called it by a different name and clothed it with quotes from Jesus and ideas from Proverbs, his message was the same: that God wants us to be happy now, and that by following principles from the Bible, we can be financially successful. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Before I give anyone the wrong impression, let me make a disclaimer: I do believe that God wants us to be happy (or at least, content) in this life, I don’t believe that it is wrong to be wealthy, and I believe that God blesses some people with the ability to make money easily. However, I don’t think that how much money we make is a big priority with God, and I think any teaching that says God wants us all to be wealthy and explains how to be so is completely wrong. It is not God's will that all Christians be rich.

Otherwise, Jesus wouldn’t have told His disciples in Matthew 19.23-24, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Jesus came to earth to bridge the gulf that sin had placed between God and man. As Christians, our job is to tell others about what Jesus did for us, and why.

It is not to unlock Biblical secrets on how to get rich quick or to tell people that if they will serve God, He will make them rich. This is not the Gospel.