if anything we can take the fact that he died doing what he loved.

This is the first verse of a poem by S. Hall Young

Let me die, working. Still tackling plans unfinished, tasks undone! Clean to its end, swift may my race be run. No laggard steps, no faltering, no shirking; Let me die, working!

Fare thee well Steve.

Sad news today about the death of the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin.  His death in  a freak incident with a stingray spine has silenced a unique individual.  A post on the Corner at National Review noted that Irwin was  a strong conservative, though he never injected politics into his shows.  A commenter at  www.biglizards.net/blog put it well--

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2006/08/were_much_wealt.html

I ran across a great post by Don Boudreaux at the above blog.  He discusses another in the interminable cavalcade of NY Times editorials "proving" that people are poorer now on average than we were in 1967.  Being of my current advanced age, I recall fairly well what life was actually like back then. Boudreaux concludes that he would rather have the median  1967 income [$35K or so] today than today's median income [$46K] then.  In 1967, I was a grad student renting a room on the 4th floor of a rooming house in East Lansing, MI. Obviously, a grad student on fellowship has a low income.  I had no car, travelling by bike.  I also had no air conditioning, which led me to wander down to the airconditioned police station to study in the cooled waiting room. Only a handful of the newest apartment buildings in East Lansing had airconditioning. Consider also the medical care available today, and the electronics.  Life today in material terms is way richer than 38 years ago.

http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/
OK,my first blog post.  This is an amazing story of the re-discovery of the jade deposits worked by the Olmec culture in Guatemala.  Even in this "jaded age," sometimes buried treasures emerge.