EppsNet

OK, but I’m more of a college football fan so here’s a picture of Reggie Bush at USC:

Thanks to the annual Super Bowl Sunday Buy One Get One Free sale at Books Etc. in Laguna Hills, the works of Bellow, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cheever, Eco, Grace Paley, Dennis Potter, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe have found their way onto my bookshelf for a capital outlay of only 32 dollars American.

If I had a Toyota, I’d drive it to work one morning, crash it right into the front lobby of the building, get out, say good morning to everyone, and blame the whole thing on a faulty accelerator, just to break up the monotony of daily living . . .

• RT @sportsguy33: To honor the Mike Dunleavy era, I just botched my drive-thru order at Arby's, then blamed House and the drive thru lady. #

Sharks kill man kite-surfing off south Florida

— Reuters

Some people say life is too short. I say if you’ve got time for inane activities like kite-surfing, your life has already gone on way too long . . .

• Does this city make my butt look big? – http://goo.gl/N72i #
• Sign of the times: I noticed this morning that the newspaper racks (LA Times, OC Register) in front of LA Fitness have been removed #

As my son comes downstairs for dinner, he says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune –”

I finish it with him: “– must be in want of a wife.”

“We spent 45 minutes in class today analyzing that one sentence,” he says.

“It’s a very famous sentence,” I say. “The next sentence will probably go faster.”

A Columbus man has been charged with killing a teen who was out with friends throwing eggs at cars on the Hilltop three years ago.

— The Columbus Dispatch

In other news, Columbus police report a significant decrease in the number of people throwing eggs at cars.

Do we hear about Mozart playing kickball? I know, there wasn’t kickball. But if there had been, he wouldn’t have played it. Because you give up stuff.

So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality.

— Penelope Trunk

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works . . . A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.

— John Gall

At Northwood High School, Honors Euro Lit is known by its acronym — HEL (pronounced hell) — and widely regarded as the hardest class at the school.

In order to get an A in the class for the first semester, my son needed a very high score — around a 98 — on the final exam, didn’t get it, and finished with a semester grade of 89.27 — a high B.

If he’d had at least an 89.5, the teacher would have rounded it up to an A. So out of 1,000+ possible points over the course of the semester, an 89.27 means you missed an A by only three or four points.

I’ve always encouraged the boy to be proactive with his teachers. Some people call this “sucking up” but I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. When there’s a close call on a grade, those students may get the benefit of the doubt.

Being a public school teacher is unrewarding in many ways. You’re not going to get rich, for one thing. And you’re not going to be held in high esteem because the conventional wisdom is that public education in America is a disaster.

The only real attraction of the job is that every day you have an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. And even there, in most cases you will fail.

“Make sure the teachers know that you want to do well in their class,” I tell my kid. “Ask them what you need to do and they’ll tell you. They want to help you.”

After his final score was posted in HEL, he went in after school to talk to the teacher about his grade. They went over some previous assignments and exams, including a Macbeth exam where the teacher found a question that he felt he “didn’t teach very well.” He gave the boy four points back on the question, which gave him an 89.55 for the semester. That’s an A.

Father knows best, suckas! Academic success is not (just) about academics.

As design thinkers, the problems we are trying to solve are rarely our own—they are those of a particular user; in order to design for the user, we must build empathy for who they are and what is important to them. . . .

The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. . . .

We engage to…

• Uncover needs that people have which they may or may not be aware of
• Guide innovation efforts
• Identify someone to design for
• Discover the emotions that guide behavior

— D.School Bootcamp Bootleg

I’m getting some coffee in the lunch room . . . no one else is present.

One of my colleagues walks in and says, “Are you talking to yourself, Paul?”

“No, actually I wasn’t saying anything.” Which I wasn’t. “Maybe you’re hearing voices,” I suggest. “And ironically, you were just insinuating that I was nuts.”

ME: In the future it is neither necessary nor desirable for you to greet me every single time I walk in the door. Unless a minimum of two hours has passed, the previous greeting is still in effect. In other words, if I come IN the door, and you greet me, and then several minutes later I go OUT the door, only to return in a matter of seconds, you do NOT have to greet me again.

LEWIS: Ha-ha. Good one.

— Merrill Markoe, How to Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.

— Virginia Woolf (Jan 25, 1882 – Mar 28, 1941)

Fun for Poor People

1. Eat sweet things.
2. Run up credit card then kill everyone where you work.
3. Love the wrong people.

Fun for Rich People

1. Follow foibles of the poor on the local news.
2. Wave to the poor.
3. Talk about the plight of the poor at parties.

— @eddiepepitone

History painting, what a joke! There is only one authentic thing: to paint what you see.

— Édouard Manet (Jan 23, 1832 – Apr 30, 1883)

Security fears dog online banking

— Yahoo! News

Now that’s what I call lazy reporting. If they’d bothered to interview an actual dog, they would have found out that we don’t keep our money in banks because banks are run by Wall Street fat cats and we don’t trust Wall Street fat cats. Actually, we don’t trust any kind of cats.

There may be dogs online barking but there are no dogs online banking.

— Lightning

• RT @capricecrane: T.S. Eliot: "The world ends not with a bang, but a whimper."
  Sadly, so do most of my dates. #