Reblogged: Friday Four

[Gus Van Horn blog]

1. Recounting a brown toad I caught at the park and showed my kids, my four-year-old daughter likened it to "a jumping wood chip", since it "bwended in wif ye wood chips" on the ground of the play area. The description made me laugh, and I saw that she intended it as a joke.

2. As much as I despise racial quotas, on principle as an individual, and through experience, as both victim and unwilling target, I could not help but laugh at the following, from a recent Michelle Malkin column:

"I told Harvard I was an undocumented immigrant," Dario Guerrero bragged in

The Washington Post

last fall. "They gave me a full scholarship."

Think about this: The geniuses at Harvard offer a scholarship to individuals who have broken the law -- not that I agree with that law -- and implicitly reject normal means of vetting applicants. This is an open invitation for exactly this sort of thing. Not that I condone the fraud, but these elitist fools got exactly what they deserved.

3. I see that David Harsanyi shares my opinions of Rush and of Neil Peart, not to mention my past amusement with how discomfiting they were to rock critics:

... I happen to think Rush's music is terrible. But the critics' aversion to their Objectivist-laden science fiction rock operas was always a point in their favor. Finding out that the drummer, Neil Peart, wrote those grandiose lyrics, and that he was some sort of libertarian, didn't hurt either...

The whole piece is worth a read regarding Peart's apparent 180 on Ayn Rand and Rolling Stone's 180 on Rush.

4. I look forward to installing and using the FlowerChecker app on my phone for plant ID:

"The goal of FlowerChecker was not to make money we did not need. We wanted data. All three of us are postgraduate students and the aim of our service is to examine a hypothesis according to which plants can be recognized automatically. We believe the reason why nobody is doing this right now is only that nobody has enough data. Moreover, we currently cooperate with one of the best specialist in the field of automatic recognition, and I mean worldwide," explains Ondřej Veselý.

The app has, incidentally earned enough money for the three that they had to form a company to keep receiving payments from Google.

-- CAV

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