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Reblogged: Friday Four

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Editor's Note: Due to family obligations, comment moderation will be very slow or, possibly, delayed until after the holiday weekend.

1. Word from HBL is that the Wall Street Journal has published an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released Ideal, by Ayn Rand:

Ideal

tells the story of a screen actress who is accused of murder and visits six of her most devoted fans to ask for help. In 1934, when she was in her late 20s, Rand first wrote "Ideal" as a work of fiction.

But Rand was dissatisfied with it and set it aside. The same year, she rewrote it as a play. The play didn't have its
New York premiere
until 2010 -- 66 years after she wrote it.

The original version was rediscovered in 2012 by Richard Ralston, publishing manager at the Ayn Rand Institute. (At 135 pages, it's been called a novelette and a novella. The publisher is now billing it as a "short novel.")

I am pretty sure I have the play, but since I don't really enjoy reading plays, I have not read it. I look forward to the novelette/novella/short novel.

2. Petr Cech, widely regarded as one of the five best goalkeepers in the world, has signed for Arsenal. Former Chelsea Captain John Terry had this to say about his former teammate when speculation about the move mounted:

Terry, who also praised Cech's "unbelievable" professionalism after he was relegated to the bench, believes the Czech would bring a dramatic improvement to their league rivals. "If they do get him, he will strengthen them for sure," Terry told TalkSport. "He will save them 12 or 15 points a season. Petr was an unbelievable professional last year. When you get left out of the team it can be hard to accept but when he came in he was exceptional.

"He deserves a lot of credit for that. We understand he wants to play first-team football but nobody wants to see him leave the club. He's going to be sorely missed and will improve any side he goes to." [link dropped]

12-15 points is, by the way, like winning four or five games of the 38-game season. Cech, still at the peak of his powers, wanted to start and wished to keep his family in London. Chelsea's owner permitted the move out of gratitude for his many past contributions to Chelsea's success, and against the wishes of manager Jose Mourinho.

3. Attempting to make sense of some strange pricing at McDonald's, a blogger tipped me off to the existence of a "Chicken McNuggets Theorem":

It turns out, there's a general purpose method of solving
problems like these
. The
Chicken McNuggets theorem
states that you can replace 9 and 20 with any two coprime numbers
a
and
b
, and the solution to the question is defined by
ab - a - b
.

I was a math major and worked at McDonald's back when this name for the theorem made sense, but had not heard of it.

4. From another article featuring the Golden Arches comes the following interesting fact about today's beer drinkers:

... The ominous fact is that 44 percent of 21- to 27-year-old drinkers have never tasted Budweiser. They prefer craft beers from microbreweries. A craft brewer is one that ships 6 million or fewer barrels a year. In 2013, craft brewers shipped more than Bud did...

The college kid I mentioned in the preceding item had tasted Budweiser and decided beer wasn't for him. He changed his mind about beer after visiting Germany during the semester abroad he was saving for. Perhaps that kid was ahead of his time.

-- CAV

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