Friday Four

1. The kids keep on cracking me up. This week, Little Man has taken to grabbing adults by the hand and leading them to things he wants or places he want to play. Pumpkin, on the other hand, continues speaking her mind, although not using my own words against me for a change. Her latest complaint about something she doesn't want to hear from me: "You're being a bad boy!" I couldn't help but laugh the first time she used that one.

2. FDR is famous for saying, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." One subject of a scientific study, "The Woman Who Can't Feel Fear", might beg to differ. "SM", as she is known in the literature, does not have a functioning amygdala:

"It's a little bit as if you would go to this region and literally scoop it out," Antonio Damasio, another neuroscientist who studies SM, told Invisibilia hosts Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel. [minor format edits]

At least one close brush with a thug might tempt you to see an advantage to her condition -- but for the fact that it got her into that encounter in the first place.

3. No sooner do I write about overcoming the limitations of blogging with a virtual keyboard than I hear about TextBlade, by WayTools, "a folding QWERTY keyboard the size of a pack of gum". For ninety nine bucks, you, too can have one by March.

4. Speaking again of time management for writers, a commenter pointed me to a post on the subject that I found to be both practical and encouraging.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Fixed a formatting glitch.