NMSC

This came in the mail today:



Tim is a National Merit Scholar! He took the PSAT last year and scored high enough to be a semi-finalist. For the next level, he needed, among other things, a letter from his school (our umbrella school principal) and he had to write an essay. And he advanced to the final level!

(His full name is on the certificate - but, for privacy, I blurred all but the Tim part.)

Sometimes parents wonder if Ambleside Online or a Charlotte Mason education will provide what it takes to prepare a student to get into college. Tim is a good student, self-sufficient, organized, disciplined and able to manage his time, motivated. But his only schooling since fourth grade has been Ambleside Online (we did Sonlight for his first three years). He's had no formal creative writing, language arts, no math tutoring, no supplemental courses or projects to boost his knowledge of history or anything. So I think that a CM/AO education is enough for any student. Not that a CM education can guarantee the same results, but no education, not even a public school education (since that's the standard that homeschooling is held up to!), can make that kind of guarantee.

White Stag Sighted in Scotland

News link.

"And one year it fell out that Tumnus (who was a middle-aged Faun by now and beginning to be stout) came down river and brought them news that the White Stag had once more appeared in his parts--the White Stag who would give you wishes if you caught him. So these two Kings and Queens with the principal members of their court, rode a-hunting with horns and hounds in the Western Woods to follow the White Stag."

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

No wonder Britain is in trouble

The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".
...
Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.
...
He says Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".

Goodness, no, we wouldn't want to make them do that. Where do they think this is, England or something?

The BBC has the full article.

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Update: There has been a considerable backlash against the Archbishop's statement, both from the Anglican clergy and the community at large. The Times has a selection of blogs.

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Update, February 10: The Archbishop has now tried to retract his original statement, saying in a statement on his website that he "made no proposals for sharia" and "did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law."

At the same time he argues that "the very term sharia is not only misunderstood, but is the focus of much fear and anxiety deriving from its 'primitivist' application in some contexts."

The Gates of Vienna continues to blog on this topic here and here:

I admit to being surprised at the depth of the antagonism towards the Archdhimmi, especially from within the Anglican hierarchy. Is it possible that they have been roused from slumber?

Blogging Without Obligation

I saw this first on Beth's blog. She found it here, with an explanation of what it's all about. To be honest, that's been the way I've always blogged - if I have something to say, I post it. If three weeks go by and nothing strikes me, then I don't. My desire to say something has always gone in spurts, even before blogging. Blog lags never bothered me because, over the long haul, it all evens out. Now I'm part of a movement and it has a name. :)

I've been a bit saddened recently to see a few friends say goodbye to blogging. They have great reasons - wanting more time with family, etc. - but I haven't felt any nudging or desire to follow suit. Blogging Without Obligation allows me to blog when I want, and take breaks when I want, without a nagging sense that I should be posting something.

More of the Day

Already?

The calendar may say February, but we've had warm weather and thunderstorms the last few days, and the air smells suspiciously of spring.

Fun Stuff

57
Found via a post at the Common Room.

Sense and Sensibility

My friend Ginger and I are reading Sense and Sensibility together - about two chapters a day. She plans to summarize chapters to help her remember them (narration?)

I've seen the movie with Emma Thompson (the guy who played Willoughby is her real-life husband) but never read the book. It's helping to fill in some things - such as why the dying father couldn't leave the house to his dependent wife and daughters. The property wasn't actually his to begin with. It had been left to his little boy when the little boy was a four-year-old who charmed and won the heart of the rich uncle, and he willed it to the little boy - and that little boy grew up to be the man with the stingy wife who pressures him to be less generous with the half-sisters and stepmother he promised his dying father he would care for.

I thought this was interesting about the youngest sister: 'Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humoured, well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne's romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.' I wonder whatever happened to Margaret?

The scene where Hugh Grant pretends not to know where the Nile River is in order to lure Margaret from her hiding place - that's not in the book.

Linux Progress

Edited: I've found a way to sync my Palm TX using a DOS-looking program called pilot-xfer! I have to type in a CI (command line interface) but I think I understand just enough to be able to copy or even copy/paste to install what I need.

I'm still working on the text editing end-of-line replace, but I'm certain that it can be done and it's just a matter of time until I learn how to do it. Thanks to Jon's comments, I'm coming closer to understanding. I need to unravel something called "regular expressions," and I've found that box in KWord.

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I said a few weeks ago that my New Year's resolution was to take the year learning enough about Linux to replace Windows, with a tentative goal of installing by spring.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 7.10 a few days ago and it's so much like Windows that it's not going to take a year to learn it. I'm already editing html pages and uploading them (I installed gFTP), listening to my favorite radio station (it actually seems to work better with less cutting out on Linux!), and doing just about everything I was doing before. I was already familiar with the browser (Firefox), word processor (OpenOffice) and photo editor (Gimp).

Just a couple of glitches - I'm having trouble getting new files, documents and programs loaded onto my Palm TX PDA, and I have yet to find a text editor or word processor that removes line breaks (although I found an online program that does that!) While testing different editors, I found a replacement for Notepad, which is what I mostly used in Windows. It's called Leafpad, it's super simple, no bells or whistles, and opens and works pretty fast. I still plan to find something like Total Recorder, and I haven't yet tried burning a CD, although the system should be ready to do that. I just haven't done it yet.

Installation was easier than Windows - you install one CD (and even that's a free download) and everything is right on the screen - you click for your language preference, time, and keyboard layout preference. And after the single CD is installed, you don't have to install a bunch of programs because it comes with OpenOffice, Gimp, media players, Firefox, almost everything, already installed as part of the system.

Did I mention that all of this is free? The only thing I've spent is what I used to buy a couple of Ubuntu for Dummies types of books, but, really, with the forums (I've seen three) and Wiki's and how-to pages, the books weren't necessary. They just helped to lay out the information in sequence.

Prince Caspian: Can Hollywood Be Restrained?

The article over at Hollywood Jesus talks about the problems of storytelling in a society used to instant gratification, and worries how Prince Caspian will be adapted.

I think the the article is spot-on. I'm looking forward to PC (despite its already-obvious deviance from the book) because I think it looks like a fun film in the swashbuckling fantasy vein. But I'm also kind of waiting to get past it so we can get to VDT, which I have hopes will be a more serious adaptation. Michael Apted (director, Amazing Grace) will be at the helm and the franchise should be established firmly enough by that time that they won't have to turn it into a summer money-maker. (Not that they won't, but I'm hoping.)

*sigh* Yes, I'm a cynic. It's hard not to be after seeing so many books butchered. The movies don't mean to murder them, but they so often succeed in completely missing the point.