Friday Four

1. My summer has now been bookended with the births of two nephews and a niece! The older of my younger brothers (and the last of us not to have kids) greeted a son and a daughter this week. The earlier arrival was the son of my wife's sister.

2. Thanks to an interesting article with good illustrations, the ice caves at the summit of Mount Rainer now beckon the armchair explorer/scientist:

During 1970s expeditions called Project Crater, Lokey and a cast of young mountaineers and scientists camped on the summit for weeks at a time. They used tape measures and compasses to size up passages, crunching the data on a slide rule. On the cave floors they found dead birds, trash and 19th-century climbing gear, proof that anything left on the summit would eventually work its way down. One cave contains the mangled wreckage of a Piper Cub that crashed on the summit in 1990. [link in original]

The unique geological formation is the result of volcanic heat melting the base of the mountain's ice cap.

3. Your email-printing boss has nothing on this guy:

I created a simple web banner for a client and sent it off a .jpg via email for approval.

The client printed out the .jpg, took that paper and put it in a typewriter. Yes, an honest-to-goodness typewriter, and penned a short approval note and a query of "when would this be printed?"

The client then scanned the paper with the printed .jpg and typed note before they emailed me back a PDF as an attachment to an email that just stated, "Please see attached."

From the comment thread of this freelancer war story came an amusing description of this as, "a creative, steam-punk way to approve the ad banner" [link added].

4. I must say that I enjoyed seeing Arsenal's new signing, Danny Welbeck, score a hat trick in a Champion's League fixture against Galatasaray this week. While it's still too early in his North London career to say how successful he'll be, he's off to a good start.

After languishing at Manchester United over the past couple of years, as a reserve player who was usually played out of position when he was used at all, he is leading the line in every game thanks to an injury to Olivier Giroud. I hope the following proves to be true:

Maybe this is what he needed after all - a run in the first team so that every half-chance wasn't an audition. He certainly appears more confident in front of goal than he was for United, and his team-mates have faith in him too. If Welbeck is on, they do not go it alone, they seek him out, they fancy him to score. Already he looks more suited to this group of players than he did to those at United. Self-belief is key for goalscorers: Welbeck has it and suddenly he looks like one.

Oh, and let me be the first to thank his former coach, Louis van Gaal, for making sure Welbeck felt he had a point or three to prove.

-- CAV