Friday Four

1. My kids turn three and five this month. In some respects, it seems like an eternity since the time before fatherhood, and in others, it seems to have whizzed by. And yes, it is a singularity-like event.

My latest cute kid story comes from my son, the younger of the two, who has decided to help me find things lately: A week or so ago, he came across Mrs Van Horn's keys and told me. When I reached for them, he refused to hand them over, informing me that they are "Mommie's keys."

2. I'll mark the passing of Cassius Clay with an excerpt of an excerpt of a response by Leonard Peikoff to a question regarding Ayn Rand's positive view of the boxer:

Ayn Rand didn't marry [Mohammed] Ali, she took him as a symbol of self-confidence. He did it in the form of humor: teasing Frasier and the others. He was at ease doing it, and he was confident, because he knew he could and did deliver.

Follow the link for an apt comparison to Tim Tebow.

3. I don't play time-sucking computer games, but if I did, I'd probably play the recently-released Duskers:

The game's signature feature -- and the thing that's kept me enthralled for more than a week -- is that you mostly control your drones via commands typed into a bash-like console (it's even got tab completion and command aliasing!). This isn't an optional gameplay mechanic, either. You can take overhead control of a single drone and navigate it around obstacles with the arrow keys, but you have to use the console to make your drones do anything. You also have to use the console to open doors, power up or down portions of the derelict you're currently docked with, and lots of other things -- including executing a panicked all-drones escape when everything comes tumbling down around your ears.

Aspects of the game, reviewed at Ars Technica, remind me of Myst and Empire. Yes. It's been a while since I played such games.

4. I like the following idea for making the ends of soccer games more interesting during certain tournament scenarios:

Here's my simple idea: Play the penalties before extra time. If one team outscores the other in the subsequent 30 minutes of open play, then that result will trump the outcome of the penalty kicks. If extra time ends in a draw, then the game goes to the penalty winner.

I have never been a fan of the penalty shootout, but this would make it more palatable, killing two birds with one stone as far as I'm concerned.

-- CAV