Metablogging: March 2005 Archives

I'm off shortly to Dallas for a convention. In addition to the routine dozen and a half vendor meetings and meet and greet with all and sundry, my days will be considerable lightened by a lunch meeting on Saturday in which I will meet two of the three Summa Mamas (I hope) and Julie Davis of Happy Catholic. I can't begin to say how thrilled I am that this can happen.

And yes, TSO, eventually I will make it back to Columbus and we'll have to have a gathering of the Columbus bloggers. (It may even be this year--who knows?)

I'll keep you all informed as to my future jaunts. I'm always looking to meet the people from St. Blogs.

But I'm especially pleased about this trip because I get to meet three ladies from Texas--and as we all know, Texas practically defines what it means to be a lady!

I had lined up in my head a post detailing all of my opinions about matters such as school prayer, gay marriage, and other items of the day. Then I realized several things.

(1) Who cares?

(2) Who am I trying to convince?

(3) While I enjoy discussion and controversy, I am not a controversialist. I don't really kick up a fuss, largely because my opinions on matters are not really hard and fast for the most part. I'm willing to be persuaded and my mind changes as quickly as the Florida weather--so I'm not really a candidate for posting these sorts of things.

(4) In many ways I'm really too ignorant of the salient facts to make pronouncements on policies of any sort. I have a muddle of opinions gathered together that spew forth with little rhyme or reason only to be changed by the first commenter who makes a reasonable point. The only matters on which I am thoroughly convinced and intractable (or at least can hold my own) are matters of literature and the arts. I'm less confident in the arts, but still can hold my own in theory, philosophy, and practice.

(5) No one really wants to read yet another set of opinions on the same issues. Or if they do, they would get far better bang for their buck reading the comments on the major channels of St. Blogs.

So, what happens is that I'm left without much to say this morning. I aplogize for that and will try to do better around lunchtime or later this evening. Certainly by tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll post some of the delights from the truly insightful and wonderful novel Helena.

In the past two days I have received notes from two different readers correcting or adjusting my view on two different matters. I am deeply appreciative that both people took the time to write. One gentleman spent some time talking about the Center for Economic and Social Justice and the ideas thereon. As a quiz I took this morning put me at the extreme left of the economic scale (calling me, in fact, a socialist, which I think rather strong and not really representative of my views), I thought I might need to give the site an overview and arrive at a course correction in my economic understandings.

The second gentleman corrected an erroneous post I had made some time ago. Gavin Douglas did not translate The Aeneid into English, he translated it into Scots. My mistake was that I had no background material with the excerpt and so I read the text and found nothing out of the ordinary for Middle English dialects and leapt to an incorrect assumption. This of course is an unjust attribution, and I hasten to correct it here.

There is almost nothing in the world more wonderful than learning something new. My sincere appreciation and thanks to the two gentlemen who took the time to write to me.

You were probably wondering whether or not I would ever shut up today. This is it! Quite a day--quite a number of posts. God was very generous with inspiration today.