If you’ll permit us a moment or so of navel-gazing, we’d like to point out that Three Wise Men has been online for six years now as of today. That’s six blog years, which translates to about twenty-five human years given the way things have changed in the blogosphere since we first started this project of ours (in fact, I don’t believe the term blogosphere existed yet, but don’t quote me on that. We were still “surfing the Web” back in those days.) Given that this is an extremely part-time endeavor for all of us, you might be surprised at how productive we’ve been. According to our technical staff (me that is, reviewing our stats) we’ve written 3,948 posts in that time. That’s roughly 1.8 posts a day, which is pretty remarkable since all of us have at some point or another gone pretty long stretches posting either irregularly, or not at all. That’s especially true over the last year or so, as all of us have to some degree been distracted by the demands of of the real word. Also, none of us have much time these days to network and connect with other bloggers, so as to get our own unique take on the world out to the wider blogosphere. And without question, each of us has experienced periods of something approaching blog ennui, where we just don’t feel like we have much to contribute in the way of original thinking, or the time it would take to express such thoughts seems to hardly be worth the effort.

Still, the three of us keep coming back to this endeavor. Why? Well for one, it’s hard to be completely disengaged from the online world. We’re of a generation that quickly became accustomed to having a digital outlet for our thoughts. Even if we do grow tired of the effort of regularly blogging and staying abreast of the news, we’re still bound to have a moment of inspiration that we think belongs online. Granted it’s a lot easier these days to get your ideas out there via social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. But sometimes the ideas are a little too big or complicated to be expressed in a few hundred characters, and there the blog sits just waiting for you to compose an opus of whatever length you desire.

Two, this blog is our stake in the vast world of online opinion. Granted there are literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blogs that garner more attention than ours, but there actually aren’t a hell of a lot of political blogs that have been around for six years, steadily cataloging the historic changes in our country over that time period. We’ve accumulated a body of work, one blog post at a time, and it’s something we’re rightfully proud of and would have difficulty walking away from permanently even if we go through periods when we take a break  from it. To some extent this blog serves as our collective identity online; when I visit another blog and leave a comment, I inevitably leave a link to this blog as well, which stands for my body of work and my place online. We may roam the internet tossing out comments and opinions left and right, but inevitably we return here.

Three, we’ve met a lot of great people this way. Of course in the way of the online world, a lot of these people we’ve “met” are not people we’ve actually encountered in real life. But that hardly seems to matter for as much these days, when ideas can be exchanged in incredible length and detail by digital media alone. As you’re probably aware, all three of us are members of the Texas Progressive Alliance, a network of bloggers who are affecting change in the real world, and not just sitting around in stained t-shirts and pajama pants banging out their latest rants. But beyond that, we’ve made connections to other bloggers, and other commentators here and on other blogs, some of whom share our political leanings and some of whom don’t quite. Some of those connections are fleeting, and some are a little more permanent (if anything defined by digital interaction can be said to be permanent) but all of them have been valuable. The people alone make this hobby worth it.

Lastly, for us anyway, this is largely our outlet to make a difference in the world. Each of us have real lives that are mostly disconnected from the issues that we care so much about. Of course we vote, and make donations, and sign petitions, and do all of the various miscellaneous things that people who are “engaged in the issues” do. But in none of that are we asked what we think should be done, how we think the world should be run. We read a lot, we care a lot about a wide variety of issues both large and small, and we spend a lot of time thinking about the things that really matter to us. So naturally we feel we’re as qualified as any other amateurs to offer our opinions on how things ought to be. I don’t know if anybody of any significance has ever read anything we wrote and thought “Yeah, that is the way it should go!” and then turned around to tell other influential people that they really ought to be trying out something these three anonymous bloggers in Texas thought of. But that doesn’t really matter. What matter is that we can make our contribution to the wide world of ideas, and have them tested by people both smarter (and dumber, if some comments and links are any indication) than us. This is the small part we take in making the world a better place, and who would really want to give up something like that?

Anyway, those are a few thoughts on why we do this. Thanks for hanging around, and hopefully we’ll have many more years of this to celebrate in the future.

If you visit our blog regularly, you’ve probably noticed some changes here and there. We’re still in the process of settling down here, which means testing formats and adding widgets. There may also be another major overhaul to the look of the page in the near future…or maybe not, depending on how much free time I have in the next few days or so. But as always, the goal is a more attractive and pleasurable reading experience for you dear visitor.

We all are in our individual capacities, but now the blog collective has planted a flag in Facebook country. I don’t entirely know what to do with it yet but it appears to be the thing all the cool kids are doing, so go be our fan here.

I don’t know what the hell is up with the Twitter feed gadget, but I’m taking it down until they fix it. If you want to see my tweets first hand, follow me here.

Apologies for the sparse blogging as of late. Hopefully things will be back up to speed this week.

If you’ve noticed the changes in our blog format, know that it’s because we are in the process of moving our blog to our own domain. So there might be some changes here and there, and then eventually we’ll have a new address to re-direct you too. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the new look, and we’ll enjoy the new functionality.

UPDATE: And, I now see that Nat-Wu posted essentially the same message about an hour before me. But that’s how we roll around here.

As you can see, I’ve temporarily added a widget to our blog which will permit you to easily keep track of election results. The widget comes courtesy of MSNBC, but our use of it should not be considered an endorsement of MSNBC or their election coverage; they were just the only ones with a neat, free widget.

Posting will be light today (if I or anyone posts at all) mostly because, well, I just don’t feel like it. I think I mostly shot my blogging wad these past few days and it’s time for an early start on the weekend.

One note, the Mavericks (no, the REAL Mavericks) opened the season against Houston last night. They kept it close until Houston went on a 16-2 run in the 4th, and they simply weren’t able to rally back in classic Mavs late-rally fashion. At some point I was going to do a round-up of previews and predictions by various sports pundits for the season, but there’s just too much going on in the world of politics to get to everything. I can tell you that the general consensus (at least of what I’ve seen) is that they are probably the 2nd or 3rd or even 4th best team in the Southwest Division and that while a playoff spot is likely the Finals are not. If there are any outliers to that consensus they’re negative, predicting even less success than that; nobody is predicting a Finals appearance, let alone a championship. So, the window may have closed for this team, but being as I watching and listening to games when they were barely notching double digit win totals in a season, I suppose I won’t be going anywhere.

FYI: We’ve shifted from using Blogger’s inherent comment architecture to HaloScan, which I find to be faster and more flexible. However, because the “comments” link at the bottom of the post no longer links to comments posted under the old Blogger system, it appears that there are no comments for a post unless they are under the new HaloScan system. Don’t fret though. Comments posted under Blogger are still there, but you’ll need to click on the post’s permanent link to see them. So if you’re browsing old posts from the main page and you’re curious to know what comments have been left on a particular post, simply click on the permanent link to see them. As you might imagine the vast majority of our posts have few (or none, more likely) comments but some, such as the “What’s Really Going on in Irving, TX” post is at 40+ comments and counting as people keep stumbling across the post and using it to report on new developments in apartment closings and whatnot in Irving. 

Apologies for the lack of blogging as of late. Our blog appears to have gone into a sort of hibernation, awakening only for a moment here and there to scratch oneself and belch out a short post. That mostly has to do with the fact that my personal and professional circumstances at the moment leave me little time to blog, and that my co-bloggers have about as much time to blog as they ever have. So we’re sorry to our readers who find themselves without much to read these days, but hopefully circumstances will permit more comprehensive blogging at some point in the not-too-distant future.