G as in Good H as in Happy

Weird, Weird, Weird Pt II

October 31, 2005

please The Powers That Be there need not be a Part III...

The recent bookmark to Good&Happy in Firefox is no longer working. Its version seems to terminate with a very recent post but terminate nonetheless, having stopped posting postings sometime yesterday.

We discovered a new simpler URL, apparently in fine working order, showing up because of experiments we made with Explorer to see if new posts were "taking"  there. There was no bookmark on Explorer, so Google found the new URL conformation.

Of course, this post is like certain clueless preachers, complaining in sermons about people lolling in bed on Sunday morning. I.e., anyone reading this is not having the problem. Does a sudden halt of your TypePad-bound favorites seem widespread? If so, will some of you blogger.com and independent bloggers get the word out to re-Google fave TypePad blogs? And even suggest changing blogrolls when some have been  dear'n'sweet enough to have listed the likes of us?

And -- this is rich!-- at least in Firefox the "view weblog" button takes the user from the draft to the old, dead URL of his blog.

Amateurs!

If this is as it appears, Typepad has just blown-to-bits its implicit contract with bloggers, and some of the value of its franchise. This in the wake of a shameless e-mail to paying customers, saying they had oversold their capacity and weeks of helpless blundering may be expected.

Fortunately, our self-esteem, and even our motivation occasionally to blog, is unaffected. A posture of gesticulating solipsism is where we began and where, possibly, we may end. But we've enjoyed the playground, and the other toddling bloggers scooping up dumped sand in bright discarded plastic cups.

Signed/ Disappointed & Unamused Indeed Frosted, Dilys

Turf Alert

October 30, 2005

Will Wilkinson, of CATO and the Fly Bottle, has just announced his establishment of a single-issue blog devoted to happiness and public policy, called, well, Happiness and Public Policy.

All the easier to pluck goodies from, my dear, said the Virtues-Wolf to the Libertarian.

Update: Another sign of compatibility is this WW description of his Happiness Blog: possibly entertaining, though not so intellectually challenging.

Yup, that's our happiness crowd. Sometimes.

Let Them Have and Eat Cake

October 29, 2005

Can'o'worms' recent Phrase of the Day was transcend not optimize. Excellent reminder, circling around formulations like false dilemma, either/or close, and You either sell them, or they sell you -- that is, they either buy your product, or you buy their reasons for not wanting / needing it, their applied worldview. It's useful to re-visit any important concessions, to back away and see just how much must be traded off, or not. And imagine, in negotiation, giving your adversary everything he wants and getting more yourself, too. Not always impossible, it is the fruit of Value-Added Thinking.

Weird, Weird, Weird

Typepad services for a brief while are off the rails. Please check the permalink on recent posts, since that is where edited and expanded versions of the post appear, the Main Page being stuck on stupid for a while.

See you off the front pages!

Poetry Trumps Theology...

..even, or perhaps especially, for a world-class theologian who cites with appreciation e. e. cummings'

wherelings whenlings,
(daughters of if but offsprings of hopefear
sons of unless and children of almost)
never shall guess the dimension of
him whose
each
foot likes the
here of this earth
whose both
eyes
love
this now of the sky.

Funny, we think the Others are the wherelings, the whenlings, the oblivious were-folk callously, inadvertently drinking living blood and tearing innocent flesh in egoistical inattention. But Fr. Alexander Schmemann observes that enlightenment may not be wheeee, so much as despair at our own condition upon awakening, even though the rain still has small hands.

Courtesy the inspiring reading of James Nee.

Tol'ja Tol'ja Tol'ja So

October 28, 2005

Raymond Arroyo's book on Mother Angelica of EWTN is taking off.

There are a lot of great anecdotes in the book.

The Way of Shame

October 27, 2005

Shelby Steele wrote an essay on racial politics in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that, if we have ears to hear, is a silent implosion that clears the channels and cleanses the wells. 

Living in an Orchard; and Being

October 24, 3005

J.V. Cunningham on the fading of ambition, not to be confused with moral or artistic collapse.

If I Can't Help, It's Not My Business

October 23, 2005

Thanks to Dr. Sanity and The Headmistress for Charlotte M. Mason, who wrote a series of treatises on schooling children, and, as is always the case, ourselves. Here she addresses "Idle Pity" (and "Self-Pity," because Victim Identity Syndrome creates the same heart of stone, the sentimentality of a tyrant).

I Have Seen Straw Transformed into Silk

Long colorful commentary on Juan Diego, the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and These Times, from Clueless Christian, the blog of a Sri Lankan-born physician who traveled to Mexico this summer, and tells the story well, locating Luther, the Aztecs, and all of us, in sacred history.

The Aztecs were finally defeated in 1531, a few months before Henry the Eight formally initiated the Anglican schism with the Roman church. Seventy four percent of the Aztec people died in war, famine, slavery, and of European diseases for which they had no immunity. The end of the world had come indeed. Yet, in the midst of the world’s ending, the Resurrection was proclaimed to Juan Diego, a 57 year old Nahuatl peasant convert. The same year that the Aztec defeat was completed, the impoverished and (by the standards of the time) elderly peasant was on Tepeyac hill...