work

Off to Monett today since I couldn't go yesterday. Nellie was running quite a bit of fever last night (102) and so Miranda may be staying home today.

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hat.

We were watching "Are You Being Served?" and this came on and Miranda said, "That is your next hat!"

I think I need the whole costume!

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sick.

Nellie is sick today. I was supposed to go to Monett today but it's my turn to stay home. Miranda is still dealing with her ear infection. Things aren't going real well around here.

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rose.

As Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet:

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Well.. How about Bacon Roses! Now that's a Valentine's Day bouquet.

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odd.

Apparently Marseille is now the French national champion. They beat Bordeaux 3-1 in the Coupe de la Ligue. This is despite the fact that they are currently in 5th place in points in Ligue 1. Apparently the Coupe de la Ligue is a tournament and doesn't count on points. Very confusing.

Anyhoo... This is apparently my year for sports. Saints won the Super Bowl as well. Watch out baseball. Cardinals will win the World Series.

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funny.

I love wrestling. Professional wrestling is just too funny to watch. However Miranda hates it because of the violence aspect (no matter how fake it is). So how fake is it? Check this out.

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sick

Miranda is home sick today. Has a bad ear infection.

Patrick has taken a dislike to school for whatever reason. I think it's laziness and he just doesn't want to go. After spring break he didn't want to go back.

Tonight is church but it's going to be quite a bit different. The convention for all the pastors in the church is on so no preachers are available. So I think Charlie is going to stand-in for us.

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Patrick

Patrick wanted a granola bar opened and so he came up to me and asked, "Would you open this for me?". I asked, "Why?". He said "Parce que" (because). I cannot believe he remembered that.

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hmmm...

Just what the world needs... Bacon flavored toothpicks.

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grind.

Back to the usual stuff today.

Whilst in Tulsa, we stopped by Barnes and Nobel and they have a DVD section. They had an entire section of BBC programming. I picked up "Are You Being Served?" Seasons 1-6, and "Vicar of Dibley". I also picked up Get Smart Season 2.

Here's a section of "Vicar of Dibley":

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today.

I didn't work in the tax office today as the roads/weather was awful. Maybe next weekend. Not sure about church tomorrow either.

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weekend.

Made it home this morning. We decided to strike out early for home on Friday night and so instead of spending the night in Tulsa, we spent the night in Bartlesville. Pretty silly but we promised Patrick that we'd spend the night in a hotel and he insisted. We ended up having to drive home at 25-35 mph. Cars were in the ditch all over. Pretty crazy. But we made it fine.

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weekend.

Today is my "Friday". since Miranda is on spring break, I took a day off and we are going to Tulsa to have a short vacation. Very short as I'm still working on Saturday in Vinita. No big plans so far but we are thinking a documentary at the IMAX, the Oklahoma Aquarium, some shopping, et al. Unfortunately the Oilers are in Mississippi so no hockey.

The Zoo was a real disappointment the last time we went there so we probably won't go this trip. Two of the giraffes are dead, the polar bear is dead, the sea lion exhibit is closed for upgrades, two of the buildings were closed for upgrades. Pretty much the only animal to see was the squirrels and various birds flying around. They did have a decent gorilla exhibit but that's not enough to take us back there.

Miranda looked it up on the Internet and Tulsa doesn't have a Brighton store. Fairly odd so that shoots one of her plans down.

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funny

Life in the 21st century is amazing. For those that followed the link, here's a list of the items that you need to know about:

• Second Life
• Furry
  

However you probably don't really want to know about any of them

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funny.

I've been playing The Saboteur which is a game about blowing up Nazis and stuff. There is a song on there that had a beautiful melody but it was in French. I managed to finally find it and it is called "L'homme Que J'Adore" (The Man That I Love). According to the composer/arranger, he wrote the lyrics in English and the translator (to French) translated it without regard to actual meaning and doesn't even make sense. Very cool sounding song though. You can listen to it here.

Here's the English translation:

Open the window, the outside door,
Tell the word that the man I love fall in love with me

I write a poem he'll sing its melody, we'll put it together on the sea, the man I love fall in love with me
The air has never smelt so good, it's going strength and I smile, I felt suddenly so light on my feet, I woke up out of my bed today.
I hear a rumor, can it be? My man take me to an island
The man I love fall in love with me.

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The future.

I was reading about Joseph Schumpeter (economist) and he was very prescient. Here's the wikipedia part:

Schumpeter's theory is that the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism's collapse from within will come about as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and destroy the capitalist structure. Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy

I would say that he is starting to look very correct.

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Saint Patrick's Day

Today is Saint Patrick's day. Patrick (our Patrick) thought it was his birthday when Miranda told him. Interestingly enough, Paddy is a nickname for Patrick and is often used as slang (derogatory) to talk about the Irish. Here are some well know Patrick's. One other well known Patrick (at least well known to readers of this blog) is Patrick Allen.

Happy Your-Day Patrick Allen,

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today.

And today is the Ides of March. For anyone who hasn't read Julius Caesar. Well count yourself lucky.

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today.

Happy Pi day to everyone.

Today is 3.14. Technically it's 3.14.10 but whatevah.

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not good.

Well this can't be good. Greece is having all kinds of financial difficulties and have gotten into a row with Germany. Here's a tip for European countries in the vicinity of Germany... Never make the Germans mad. It's probably about time to reintroduce the word blitzkrieg into our vocabulary.

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weekend.

We went to see the Collinsworth family last night in Ochelata. It had been a long time since I'd been to a concert. The last concert I was at was B.B. King. This one was significantly louder. The room was concrete floor with nothing on the walls with the sound cranked to 11.

Anywho... that reminded me of one of the greatest lyrics of all time.

"Nobody loves me like my mother and she could be jivin' too" - B.B. King

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Antiques Roadshow.

I like watching the Antiques Roadshow but this just blows my mind. The first question I would be asking is "Where are the buyers?!"

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home.

I made it back home and it was uneventful. I did run into some heavy rain about Baxter Springs but nothing too bad.

Today is sort of Friday for Miranda. She has a teacher "in service" tomorrow meaning that she won't have any children. Then next week is spring break. Unfortunately we will not be spending it in Daytona Beach Florida.

It will be nice to have her home for a week though.

Big news in Independence. The Tropical Sno place is open for business. Time for by Bubblegum Sno Cone obsession to rear it's ugly head again.

In politics, a New York City "Health Czar" is trying to keep restaurants from cooking with salt. Better watch out. The "salt tax" or la gabelle du sel was a big cause of the French Revolution. You start messing around with the food in a country where 67% of the people over 20 are overweight and you've got some problems. However this looks good.

Speaking of the French Revolution, this last book is alright but it's not that good or interesting. I'm almost done with it.

Talked to Dad the other night and he's doing well.

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Monett

Off to Monett tomorrow. It's been a tough week so far and going downhill quickly.

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awesome!

Stevie Wonder is on twitter.

For those missing the joke, Stevie Wonder is blind. That is just wrong. Between this and idump4u, something must be wrong with me today.

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idump4u.com

I probably shouldn't post this as it may give Miranda ideas, but there is a web site called idump4u.com that will dump your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse for you.

$10 is the basic breakup
$25 is the engagement breakup
$50 is the divorce call

They record it and may post it on their web site. You can listen to some of them here. I didn't. I am telling the truth. Mostly because I find it quite sad. But it's still funny.

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weekend.

Overall it was a nice weekend. IBS was at Parsons last night. Garrett's birthday party was nice. I hadn't seen that side of the family for awhile and it was nice to see everyone.

53 more days until April 30th. I haven't heard anything from our renters (other than receiving our rent check). Although we are going to have problems finding a house to buy. There aren't many that we would be interested in. Miranda keeps saying "When it's time for us to buy, something will be there".

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funny.

Meet the anti-Friedman. Here's a "smart guy" but everything that he predicts is incorrect. His name is Paul Ehrlich and he's the guy who wrote the book "The Population Bomb" that the theory was billions of people would starve to death because of over crowding. He later stated that “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”

He then moved on to a host of other issues that he was wrong about. You can read about some of them here. He is now on the "Climate Change" bandwagon so I'm pretty sure it's a stupid idea as well.

Here's my favorite story (from the link above):

And after a decade of being attacked or ignored by Ehrlich, Simon resolved to show Ehrlich what a joke the doomsayers were. The two never debated (Ehrlich refused, calling Simon a "fringe character"), rather he put his money were his mouth was. In 1980, when Ehrlich was still predicting imminent scarcity, Simon set up a bet wherein he would sell Ehrlich $1,000 dollars worth of any five commodities that Ehrlich chose. Ehrlich would hold the commodities for ten years. If the prices rose -- meaning scarcity -- Simon would buy the commodities back from Ehrlich at the higher price. If the prices fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Professor Ehrlich jumped at the bet, noting that he wanted to "accept the offer before other greedy people jumped in."

In October of 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $570.07. As Simon predicted, free markets provided lower prices and more options. Simon would have won even if prices weren't adjusted for inflation. He then offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred. The Stanford professor was slightly less bold this time. He refused Simon's offers, mailing him only a check and a table of his calculations, with no note attached. No longer was the bet Ehrlich's way of saving Simon from greedy speculators. Looking back, Ehrlich claimed that he was "goaded into making a bet with Simon on a matter of marginal environmental importance."

What a tool.

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today.

Today is cleanup day. Got to clean the house and my office. My office especially.

Tomorrow Garrett is having a birthday party. Garrett is Angie's boy. So tomorrow afternoon we will go to McCune.

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update:

Out of surgery and back in the room. Doing fine. HOWEVER. Apparently one of the wires really didn't have a good place to go. So if this doesn't work as expected then another surgery will be required to put the wire on the outside of the heart. Of course we are expecting another surgery. I wish they could just get something done.

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update:

Apparently everything is going well. They called and gave us an update and the leads have been installed and they are getting ready to test the device. They said ABOUT 20 minutes longer. In hospital-ese that means 4 more hours.

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update:

Dad finally went in at 1:10 or so. Procedure can take from 1-4 hours.

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dad

Sitting here in the hospital with dad.  He's supposed to go in a 10:00 AM.  It's 9:34 right now.

The trip down here was uneventful.  Nellie is with me but Patrick stayed home.  Nellie listened to the song "Völlig losgelöest" and loved it.  So we listened to it all the way to Tulsa.  I was going bonkers by the time we got here.

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sick

I'm sick.

Nothing else to say. I just wanted to complain.

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last night.

Last night the school called and they were having trouble connecting a teacher's home computer to the network. They are having to do testing with computers for Kansas but they don't have enough computers.

I walked in and the computer was setup for a static IP and DNS. I was thinking this would be easy. The computer would ping other computers but other computers couldn't ping it. 4 hours later I finally tracked the problem down to a corrupted install of Norton Internet Security. Apparently an issue in the proxy and/or firewall.

I may have mentioned this before but I REALLY dislike working on computers.

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interesting.

Here's an interesting article on Milton Friedman called "How Milton Friedman Saved Chile". To make a long article short:
The earthquake in Chile was 8.8 or about 500 times more powerful than Haiti's. About 711 people died in that earthquake compared to 230,000 in Haiti. So what about Milton Friedman?

To quote from the page:

In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina's.

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.

Later on:

Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance.

So of course that begs the question: Is there nothing that Milton Friedman cannot do? Take that Keynesians!

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vacation.

On our cruise we are going to Montreal and Quebec City. When we are there Miranda must try some poutine. I think she'll like it.

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Google tip.

So I'm trying to convert 9.5 centimeters to inches. Google does this really nicely. So I search for 9.5 cm to in. It's approximately 3.74 inches. However the first link is TOO MUCH INFORMATION. I wouldn't suggest you read the page. For those that I've piqued their interest, it's about a Chinese guy who has a particular muscle that is 3.74 inches in length and he's got questions. Just the fact that he asked a random web site that particular question and expects serious answers shows that his IQ is way too low also. The internet is awash in information. A lot of it I don't want to know.

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church

Yesterday at church when we were having prayer, Patrick said that he was "going to pray for Papa and his heart". So he did.

Last night Miranda and I played our instruments but Nellie didn't want to sit with Donna Frazier. So we attempted to let them sit alone. If it's just Patrick then it's fine but I look back there and Nellie is tackling him and he's hitting Nellie over the head. Everyone in the church is really patient with our children and we are very thankful for that. They aren't perfect (which is odd because I am).

Speaking of children. I think I'm going to bring Nellie down when Dad goes to surgery. Patrick freaks out in hospitals so he won't be coming with me but if it's alright I'd like to bring Nellie. She'll at least get to see Rod, Pibs, and Grandma. Dad or Mom - call me and let me know if it's alright.

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