Friday Four

1. My ancient grad school fantasy football league doesn't hold a candle to this twenty-three year old game of tag:

What they didn't know was Sean Raftis, who was "It," had flown in from Seattle and was folded in the trunk of the Honda Accord. When the trunk was opened he leapt out and tagged Mr. Tombari, whose wife was so startled she fell backward off the curb and tore a ligament in her knee.

"I still feel bad about it," says Father Raftis, who is now a priest in Montana. "But I got Joe."

The legal agreement governing the game is amusing to read, too.

2. Credentials or credentialism: you decide. One Steven Spielberg returned to college many years after dropping out to fulfill the requirements for his degree. According to Futility Closet, "He placed out of FEA 309, the advanced filmmaking class. To demonstrate his proficiency, he submitted Schindler's List."

3. It is a common temptation to dismiss innovation as mere luck, but the story of how the late Andre Cassagnes dreamed up the idea of the Etch-A-Sketch might form part of a straightforward counterargument:

[H]e peeled a translucent decal from a light switch plate and found pencil mark images transferred to the opposite face...

How many people have done a similar thing and made a similar observation -- but left it at that rather than wondering how to make that happen on purpose?

4. This seems way optimistic, but Canonical is saying that the first Ubuntu phones will come as early as this October. Naturally, that means that I could switch to full-fledged Linux on my own phone by April of next year. The sooner, the better, if that's worth doing!

-- CAV