Friday Four

1. I see that I'm not the only one nonplussed by Disney's fetish for royalty. None other than John Stossel notes in his column something that has bugged me, as the parent of an American, for quite some time:

We call the men who fought the British "heroes." But we no longer consider the British "villains." We don't even seem to hate monarchs anymore. Disney princesses and royal babies are all the rage.

I am not going to make a big deal of this, but it has made me more alert to opportunities to note that we don't have royalty here, such as when we passed a cathedral and my daughter asked whether it was a castle. Part of my answer was something like, "No, Pumpkin. We got rid of kings and queens in America after we had a very bad king a long time ago."

2. According to the Washington Post, reports of the death of the honeybee are greatly exaggerated:

[R]ising prices for fruit and nuts hardly constitute the "beepocalypse" that we've all been worried about. [Randal R.] Tucker and [Walter N.] Thurman , the economists, call this a victory for the free market: "Not only was there not a failure of bee-related markets," they conclude in their paper, "but they adapted quickly and effectively to the changes induced by the appearance of Colony Collapse Disorder."

We can thank beekeepers for the continued pollination of our crops, and foreign sources for some of our honey.

3. We're moving from a nearly century old house soon. Among other things, I look forward to is, perhaps, having my own closet again. And if that pans out, I'll use this clever idea of occasionally sending some of my clothes to "purgatory."

4. If you need a quick, easy, unobtrusive way to obtain word counts for web documents, let me recommend the Word Count Tool plug-in.

-- CAV

Updates:

Fixed a formatting error.