Day 570 of 1000
Kelly is starting to practice for her new daily comic strip. You can see her old one here. Kelly will reconstitute her old blog at KellyJeanChapman.com to complement her comic strip. We are not sure where we will put that yet, but will keep you posted. We will send out an email to the old mailing list so people can sign up again if they would like.
Day 568 of 1000
I talked to my buddy Eric last night. He described some very interesting ideas about the internet and blogging that has me thinking I might be able to improve my efforts. He gave me some homework and I plan to do that, but it also got me to thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to spin back up my comic book aggregation and web publishing software (BleAx). Kelly really would like to spin up her comic strip efforts again this summer. She is not sure she wants to continue with Betty Blonde even though she has two years of strips under her belt. I would like to have a side project I can do from my hotel room and this sounds like a good one. It will take me awhile to get back in the saddle, but I think it will be a lot of fun, especially if Kelly is wanting to publish strips again.
Day 342 of 1000
Yesterday Kelly and I had lunch at the Wendys over by Wake Technical Community College. We ate there a lot when the kids were going to Wake Tech because it was so convenient. While we were sitting there waiting for our food, it dawned on my that this was no longer the official “on the way to school” eating place because the kids have moved on to NCSU. For some reason that seemed pretty weird. Then today, a lady wrote a very nice comment about some of the stuff we did with CLEP and homeschool that I have written about in a series of blog posts several years ago. It got me to thinking.
I miss homeschool, but not nearly as much as I thought I would miss it. Lorena, the kids, and I really did the very best we knew to do in our homeschooling. The same is true for the community college. Maybe that is why I feel a little nostalgic about those times, but even better to have moved on. Sure, there are a lot of things we think we could have done better, but we really do not know how we would have known we should do them at the time–if you know what I mean.
Now that we have a new school to support, we need a new “on the way to school” eating place. Even though the closest Chick-fil-A is not really on the way to NCSU, in light of recent events, I think it will be worth it to make the detour–a double reason to eat Chikin.
Day 338 of 1000
We had major thunderstorms in a lot of North Carolina today with high wind. I was very sad to see some huge branches of our persimmon tree broke. It seems like a metaphor for something, but I cannot think of what it might be right now. I took a picture and decided it looked so much better than the picture of Grandpa Lauro and I that I would use it as the header for this blog. It is probably not that good of a picture, but anything is better than a picture of two old fat guys with glasses on their noses putting a puzzle together in a messy house. My thinking is that if I just improve the header a little bit each time I change it, in about ten years I might have something pretty good.
Day 317 of 1000
Kelly drew this picture of our wonderful friend Jon the other day and put it up on Facebook. I thought it was good enough that I did not just want to put it up there, so I put it here. Jon writes a blog (a little bit sporadically, but well worth a daily visit to see if there is something new). He writes very, very well has some great pictures of Chile and Brazil.
Day 107 of 1000 (213.7 lbs.)
I still say The Other McCain is a trainwreck, but he really nails one of my pet peeves today. His description of how Jesus dealt with religious authorities seems to be spot on. The upshot is that Jesus was quite aggressive with religious authorities who were out of line in their admonishments and spirit. He was also very kind to sinners who knew they were sinners and wanted to repent. McCain is truly a gonzo journalist for our time. Now if he would just dump that Rule 5 thing…
Update: Oops! I just saw this post came from Smitty, not Stacy. He is The Other McCain’s trusty, gonzo journalist sidekick. And he is a conservative Oregonian, so that pretty much doubles his credibility in as much as survival as a conservative in Oregon is not an easy trick.
Day 88 of 1000
I subscribe to Hillsdale College‘s free monthly speech digest, Imprimis. It is a pamphlet size publication that advocates for conservative principles. I think I must have signed up for a periodic email titled “In the News” from them because one of them shows up in my email box every now and then. The last one featured an article titled Occupy Wallstreet Crowd Blind to Benefits of Capitalism by Gary Wolfram that was reprinted from the Media Research Center‘s Business and Media Institute blog. It made reference to a funny Monty Python bit about how the Romans had not given the people they conquered anything but sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, and peace.
Wolfram goes on to explain the reason that capitalism works so much better than socialism and why so many people are confused about capitalism in similar way to the Monty Python skit:
The Occupy Wall Street movement has shown a lack of understanding of how the market capitalist system works. They appear to think that the cell phones they use, food they eat, hotels they stay in, cars they drive, gasoline that powers the cars they drive and all the myriad goods and services they consume every day would be there under a different system, perhaps in more abundance.
But there is no evidence this could be or ever has been the case. The reason is that only market capitalism solves the two major problems that face any economy-how to provide an incentive to innovate and how to solve the problem of decentralized information. The reason there is so much innovation in a market system compared to socialism or other forms of central planning is that profit provides the incentive for innovators to take the risk needed to come up with new products.
My mother never once complained that we did not have access to the latest Soviet washing machine. We never desired a new Soviet car. The socialist system relies on what Adam Smith referred to as the benevolent butcher and while there will undoubtedly be benevolent butchers out there, clearly a system that provides monetary rewards for innovators is much more dynamic and successful. The profit that the Occupy Wall Street protesters decry is the reason the world has access to clean water and anti-viral drugs.
My thought was that capitalism came out of a Christian worldview as did so many other incredible innovations and inventions. I want my kids to understand that.
Troy and Youngin mentioned on their blog that they have taken to publishing each year of their blog in a book to give as a keepsake for their young daughter Lucia. It is a great idea that I am sad I did not think of first (because it is all about me and I want to get the credit for the idea). Still, even though I am a Johnny Come Lately and have to give the credit for the idea (and implementation to someone else), I have decided I will copy TY&L and I try this out myself. I looked around on the web and found several sites to do this, but Troy sent me one this morning nambed Blurb that looks better than all the ones I found. I will keep you posted on how it goes and the costs and that sort of stuff.
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