Chuck Grimmett

I have been posting lots of photos and thoughts lately, and I have neglected to post about what is going on in my life, so I will do that today.

Hillsdale was in the Wall Street Journal today! Read the article.

Tonight, Amanda and I ate at Fat Fish Blue in downtown Cleveland, and then went to the concert at the House of Blues that I won tickets for. (Pete Yorn and Ryan Humbert) The music was alright, but not something I would have paid for. Amanda liked it a lot, though, so that was good. Fat Fish Blue was definitely the best part of the evening. Our food was excellent, and we actually left the concert a little early so we could go back to FFB for dessert before it closed. We ate the famous Carpetbagger for dessert. For those who don’t know what it is, here is the description on the menu: “the amazing chocolate sack, loaded with sponge cake, fresh fruit and Godiva white chocolate mousse.” Excellent. Since I did not take my SLR with me, here is a shot of FFB from their website:

I thought a little bit this evening about how much Hillsdale has challenged and changed my ideas, just over the last year. What started this tonight was that I read a note from my friend Matt Stone, who is interning in DC this summer. He went to a lecture hosted by the Leadership Institute, and the speaker, Ian Ivey, stated that Bastiat’s The Law was the greatest book written in the history of mankind. When I read this, I immediately thought, “how absurd!”. I like The Law, but is it the greatest book in the history of mankind? Of course not!

I took photos at Amherst Marion L. Steele High School’s graduation ceremony tonight. Here is a shot of graduate Josh Gonzalez shaking the Superintendent’s hand after receiving his diploma. View the Steele HS website for three more photos.

Today was my second day at FEE (but the first full day). The seminars have been great so far! A few of my friends from Hillsdale are here, so I have enjoyed catching up with them in between seminars. Here is a shot from the room that the seminars are in:

The lectures and discussions at FEE ended a little earlier than normal today (we did not have any lectures or discussion after dinner), so 5 of us decided to take the train up to NYC for the evening. We wandered all around Manhattan and had a lot of fun. We didn’t know each other before Monday, so it was nice to get to know each other.

Yesterday during one of the question and answer sessions at FEE, one of the professors, Gene Callahan, brought up this hypothetical situation for the students to think about and attempt to answer, then he revealed the actual answer to us. So, since I occasionally ask questions on here for people to answer, I am going to post this one. Also, I will make it a contest. The first person to post the correct answer and valid explanation will receive a copy of Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People.

Unfortunately, Chuck is MIA today, so the Nonarchist will be filling in for him today and tomorrow in order to keep Project 365 alive.

Hey, it’s Joe again posting in the place of Chuck, who is out of town probably shoving his camera in the faces of unsuspecting strangers. Thanks again for letting me post the last 2 days, thereby making my contribution .547945% of Project 365!

First of all, thank you Joe Teets (nonarchist) for doing my updates for the past two days on such short notice. I flew home from New York on Friday, come home for 20 minutes to repack, then drove south to Ohio University for the weekend for my cousin’s graduation. We stayed in a cabin, which I assumed was going to have internet access. On the way down, I found out it was not going to, so I called Joe and asked him if he could do two guest updates while I was gone. Thanks, Joe!

Here is a shot of the Sosnowski family (my aunt, uncle, and cousins) at OU’s graduation:

A week from when I am writing this, I will be standing in line waiting to get in to the midnight showing of Transformers 2 – Revenge of the Fallen. In order to celebrate this and get everyone excited about the upcoming movie, here are two desktop wallpapers that my friend Sean Nelson made last year when Michael Bay released high quality images of Optimus Prime and Ironhide on his website. Sean laid them overtop of Apple Aqua backgrounds. I currently have Optimus Prime as my desktop background. You can download the two backgrounds in a .zip file right now.

This summer, the Amherst Rotary Club is sponsoring live music on Thursdays at 7 p.m. in the park that it maintains in front of Amherst Hospital on Cleveland Ave. Tonight the LCCC Jazz Band was playing. I took the opportunity to go out and take some photos. Let me know what you think.

Today, I worked in the morning, then went to visit David Wagner. We decided to go canoeing on the Huron River, which was quite an adventure. The weather was excellent when we started out, but by the time we got about a mile and a half up the river, a huge thunderstorm rolled in. Around that same time, the river was blocked by about 5 fallen trees, so we were out of the river searching for a way around when the lightning started, so we stayed on shore during the storm (which, lucky for us, passed quickly). We got soaked, but we managed to keep David’s camera dry, so there are a few photos of me below.

Today was a day of cleaning for me. Amanda came over and helped me clean out my room and we took a few bags of trash out and reorganized things significantly. Then, after she left, I helped my parents take the cover off of the pool and start the cleaning process to get the big in-ground pool, which is up the street at my grandma’s house, ready for swimming. I estimate that by next weekend it will be ready! We usually open it up earlier than this, but the weather has been unusually cool for this time of year, so we held off.

First of all, Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I love you!

I took photos at the Amherst Youth Soccer Camp this morning for the Amherst school system. Here is a nice shot I took of a boy leaning up against the goal net. View the rest of the gallery.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article about an anti-war protestor renouncing his U.S. citizenship in New Delhi. The man, Jeff Knaebel, declared independence from not just the U.S. government, but all governments, and made a speech about how non-voluntary citizenship is forced slavery. He afterwards destroyed his passport, birth certificate, and all other forms of government-issued identification. The local police then carried him out of the Ghandi national monument area and directed him to turn himself into the local police officials, which he did. Jeff Knaebel voluntarily walked three blocks and informed the police that he was trespassing and did not have a passport. His current status is unknown.

I came across a PDF version of Aesop’s Fables today, and I spent a while reading them. While reading them, I was struck by the economic principles his fables contained! Though the principles were not named until long after his time, some of his fables definitely contained some ideas that modern economics uses. I suspect that this is because Aesop, much like economists, tried to understand human action. Obviously the two differ immensely, I think the same foundation is there for both. By the way, don’t fall into the trap of thinking economics is all about numbers and money; it is, at its core, trying to understand human action.

A few of my friends played at Peabody’s in Cleveland tonight, so I went out to take some photos of them and another band. As always, click on the photos to view them at a larger size.

Today, my parents and I went to the Huron Herb Fair at the Mulberry Creek Herb Farm in Huron. I am not all that interested in herbs, so I wandered around and took photos.

I bought a kayak today! My parents, Amanda, and I took it up the the Oberlin above-ground reservoir to try it out. Here are photos of Amanda, my Mom, my Dad, and me trying it out. As always, click on the photos to view them at a larger size.

The wonderful dorm I lived in this year at Hillsdale was Niedfeldt, at 86 E. College St. Here is a dorm photo, taken by William Clayton. Click on the photo to view it at a larger size.

To celebrate Independence Day (coming this Saturday), it is Secession Week over at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. Here is a blurb from their intro post about why they are calling it secession rather than independence: