Four Good Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

I will be taking Memorial Day off, and may post irregularly next week. I wish everyone a happy Memorial Day, and thank all current and past members of the United States military for helping defend our freedom.

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1. Although Alex Epstein's classic column is about Veteran's Day, its message applies equally well to Memorial Day:

Soldiers know that in entering the military, they are risking their lives in the event of war. But this risk is not, as it is often described, a "sacrifice" for a "higher cause." When there is a true threat to America, it is a threat to all of our lives and loved ones, soldiers included. Many become soldiers for precisely this reason; it was, for instance, the realization of the threat of Islamic terrorism after September 11 -- when 3,000 innocent Americans were slaughtered in cold blood on a random Tuesday morning -- that prompted so many to join the military.

For an American soldier, to fight for freedom is not to fight for a "higher cause," separate from or superior to his own life -- it is to fight for his own life and happiness. He is willing to risk his life in time of war because he is unwilling to live as anything other than a free man. He does not want or expect to die, but he would rather die than live in slavery or perpetual fear. His attitude is epitomized by the words of John Stark, New Hampshire's most famous soldier in the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die."

I highly recommend reading (or re-reading) the whole thing.

2. On my to-do list is trying out the latest interesting bookmarklet I've run across. This one sends the current web page to your Kindle for future reading. Push to Kindle offers (or plans to offer) phone apps and browser extensions.

Image by Alex Brogan, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

3. One of many things I missed when I moved from Houston back in '09 was my favorite local brewery there, St. Arnold. I expected the goodbye to be permanent barring the occasional visit, or eventually returning, because in those days, they didn't sell out of state.

One of the first pleasant surprises of my recent move to nearby-ish New Orleans is that now they do distribute outside Texas. This I learned by my eye falling on a colorful can of Art Car IPA at the beer emporium on my first visit.

Here's the description at Beer Advocate, and I generally agree with the ratings and reviews:

The nose is a blend of apricot and tropical fruit and mango. The taste starts with a big bitter blood orange that morphs into mangos and sweet tropical fruits. There is a lightly sweet malt body that allows the hops to shine while maintaining a nice complexity to the flavors.

I love the fact that they got around to paying homage to another quirky Houston institution, the art car parade.

I look forward to sharing a few of these with my brothers the next time we congregate to "be idiots on the beach together" as my wife once lovingly put it.

As a bonus, I'll have a new place to visit the next time I'm in Houston: I see that the brewery has relocated, and now has a full-blown beer garden.

4. Curious as to why someone at Hacker News called a website I've found useful several times a "genius scam," I looked into the matter and learned that Down Detector uses customer complaints as a part of a proxy for service outages:

It is common for users to want to generate multiple reports when they are experiencing problems, especially over an extended service interruption. To prevent a single user from skewing incident detection evaluations, Downdetector only accepts a user’s first report for a specific company each day.

Genius yes, scam, no.

-- CAV