Friday Four

1. Just before dropping Pumpkin off for daycare last week, I sat down with her on a couch near the front of the school to comb her tangle-prone hair. A teacher walked by, smiled, and said, "Not bad, Dad!"

Pumpkin, registering only the adjective, frowned and shouted, "My Dad's not bad!"

I thanked her and then explained that it was okay: The teacher was actually telling me I was doing a good job.

2. I'll call my latest beer discovery a "sipping beer" since I like to pour out about half at a time and stopper the rest of the bottle until later. Quoth the brew master at Evil Twin Brewing:

[I]n a sense this stout is like a metaphor for freedom - the sum of all the beauty that surrounds me and my perfect contemporary existence.

Poetic, but will it help you decide to try the oddly-named "I Love You With My Stout"? Probably not, but a commenter at Beer Advocate gives a pretty decent description of this imperial stout:

Pours pitch black and silky thick. Aroma of big roast and lots of chocolate. Flavor follows as expected with a nice balance of sweet cocoa nibs and roasty grains to bitter up the sweetness. Thick bodied with medium carbonation.

The only downside is that I'll face a dilemma whenever I am in the mood for an imperial stout since this is on the same shelf as Old Rasputin at my beer emporium.

3. Choose your hyperinflationary wallpaper now!

Perhaps a better headline might be: "Incipient cultural change collides with political inertia". Despite Ayn Rand's opposition to fiat currency and the remote likelihood of seeing the suggestion acted upon, I think she would be pleased: Time magazine is polling readers (HT: HBL) on which woman they would like to see on the dollar bill. As of this writing, the leader, by a huge margin, is the Russian-born novelist-philosopher, with 4,457 votes, for 55.11%  of the total.

Despite what it would take to see Ayn Rand on currency of any kind, I do harbor hope of her portrait gracing notes issued by a private bank some day.

4. A victim of identity theft comes up with a creative and amusing way to get the unknown perpetrator to stop:

You can only use another man's e-mail address for so long before he starts canceling your car appointments and insulting your gym buddies. Or so I came to learn as I sank into a joyfully vindictive mood that overwhelmed me for more than a week. This is the story of how one man's laziness became my justification for being a total jerk.

Once the victim realized that the perpetrator had actually put him into a position of power, he was able to solve the problem.

-- CAV