Friday Four

1. I sometimes write parts of future blog posts while holding my son, 2, just after he wakes, but before I put my computer away for the day. I am doing this now (yesterday, at time of publication). Little Man, who loves puppets and discovered high-fiving last week, just held up the hand of the Mickey Mouse he takes to bed and said, "High five!" making me smile and writing a quarter of this post in the process.

Or was that an eighth?

On an amusing/frustrating note, he has been a "slow adopter" of solid food or, in the words of his pediatrician, a "picky eater". My mother-in-law, here to help while my wife is away for her boards, called him "persnickety," a description he immediately lived up to by picking the pimientos out of some olives I had given him as a snack. On the bright side, he ate the olives themselves and said, "More olives." He ate those, too, which is not something I have necessarily come to expect after such requests.

2. How much of your email does Google have copies of? Quite possibly, most of it, even if you try to hide on your own email server, if lots of your friends and associates use GMail:

Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I've replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010. On the upside, there is some indication that the proportion is going down. So far this year, only 51% of the emails I've replied to arrived from Google.

In the past, I have sometimes half-considered moving off of GMail for other reasons. I now see that I can pretty much discount improved privacy as a benefit from making that move, at least without also taking other measures.

3. Via HBL comes a bit of good news for student activists at government schools:

Several months after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote to the University of California-Davis to protest its punishment of a student club on trademark grounds, the school has backed down, FIRE said today.

What was the cardinal sin of the Ayn Rand Society at UC Davis? Identifying where it was based...

As The College Fix notes, this cute way of threatening faculty and students with unconventional views has been seen before.

4. Were there not a serious chance of her being elected President, I'd find this description of Hillary Clinton more amusing:

... It's tempting to take pity on the former First Lady. She so nakedly lusts for power and is so ill-equipped to compete in terms of personality that it's obvious she expected a coronation. She lost in 2008 to Obama for the same reason. Her tacit entitlement mentality premise that she paid her dues and it's her rightful place to become the first woman president may again make way for an upstart from the left. This woman's whole undistinguished career is based on grafting herself onto the names, works and lives of others, like a parasite, and all it adds up to is a brittle legacy of one who blindly stood by her man, whether it was Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, making her 1992 assertion ("I'm not Tammy Wynette ... ") to the contrary a projection of the blank woman she really is.

On a more serious note, I found this post, with its descriptions of all the major presidential candidates, edifying.

-- CAV