Serendipity

Serendipity

–noun
1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2. good fortune; luck:

It’s been a serendipitous day. This morning I was visiting James Fallows’ blog. I bumped into Mr. Fallows in cyberspace (he’s a pilot, I was a controller) and found him to be an unusually thoughtful fellow. Much to my chagrin, I didn’t really know who he was. (or is that “is” ?) I, of course, checked him out and went “Whoa !” That led me to his blog and I’ve been reading him ever since. But back to today.

Mr. Fallows’ blog today was about a graph that appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The economist crowd is having a field day pointing out the error of the WSJ’s ways. Mr. Fallows points his readers to the same site I’ve been pointing you towards; the Economist’s View.

If you take the time to look at the chart, take the time to compare it with this chart that I tried to steer you towards a while back. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Ireland. An interesting correlation.

Later in the day, I went to get a haircut. I thought it strange, but the girl cutting my hair wanted to talk politics. Fine by me. She let on that she no longer considered herself a Republican (that’s saying something in my county of Georgia) and I told her about about my quote from George Burns in this morning’s post. “Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair." She thought that was hilarious. I don’t get many laughs, especially when I’m talking politics. It was nice.

When I got home, I had a nice “thank you” waiting for me from my friend John Carr over at The Main Bang. To be honest, I had to go read his blog entry to see what he was going on about. John has a lot more connections than I do and he obviously knows something else that I don’t. I’m used to that. And I can live with serendipity.

Don Brown
July 17, 2006