IRVINE — A mentally disturbed man wielding a samurai-style sword killed two workers and slashed three other people at an Albertsons before police shot and killed him Sunday. — Orange County Register, June 30, 2003 Banzai! Read more →
June 2003
The Joys of Retirement
It looks like Dominik Hasek may be ending his retirement. That’s big news at my house because he’s my son’s favorite goalie, but also another blow to the theory — held by my wife and others — that lots of money plus lots of free time equals major satisfaction, even if your life lacks any real direction or purpose. Now you might say that Hasek loves to play hockey and that’s why he’s getting back into it. And I say: If he was having so much fun, why did he retire in the first place? Read more →
Three Short Arguments Against Affirmative Action
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that race can be a factor for universities shaping their admissions programs, saying a broad social value may be gained from diversity in the classroom. The Fairness Argument If it was unfair when we used to discriminate against blacks and Jews, don’t tell me it’s fair now to discriminate against whites and Jews. Read more →
Runaway Train
Railroad workers in a Montclair switching yard lost control of 30 freight cars loaded with lumber yesterday. The cars rolled out of the yard in the general direction of Los Angeles, which is about 30 miles westbound and downhill from Montclair. The cars eventually reached a speed of about 50 miles an hour, so rather than let them rocket into the downtown area, Union Pacific decided to derail them into a Mexican neighborhood in Commerce. Read more →
Something Sad About Parenting
I see things around the house, like a bike that’s too small now, and think about the kid who used to ride it, and how I loved that kid, and now he’s gone . . . Read more →
Brain Teaser
This was posed to me in an interview. I don’t know if there’s a “right” answer, or whether it’s just intended to probe the thinking process of the applicant. You have 50 white marbles, 50 black marbles and two bags. Your task is to arrange the marbles in the bags so as to maximize the probability that a person making a blind selection from one of the bags will select a black marble. Read more →
Yowzah!
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world! O to return to paradise! O bashful and feminine! O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d man! — Walt Whitman, “One Hour to Madness and Joy” Read more →
Stuff They Don’t Teach You in School
A client I’m working with is rewarding the top 20 percent of its sales force by flying them to Lake Tahoe for a 3-day weekend. An enterprising competitor might say to himself, “Hmmm . . . what if something were to happen to that plane?” Now there’s something they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. Read more →
Useless Reports
A client is paying me to streamline its reporting system. Like many companies, they produce a lot of reports, most of them not very useful. So far, my choice for the least useful, or most useless, is one titled “All Sales Data in Database.” Guess what it prints? If you said all the sales data in the database, you’re right! It’s a big report . . . Read more →
First Library Card Discovered
Something I found around the house this weekend: my son’s first library card. It’s four or five years old now, it’s expired, but I still remember how proud I was when he got it. It’s hard to say why . . . I knew he could read a little bit, write his name — not very well, but still . . . I think at the time I was feeling that, for better or worse, he wasn’t a baby anymore, and here was the proof . . . Read more →
Introducing a 9-Year-Old to Yoga
“You learn to breathe with your whole body. So you breeeeathe in from the bottom of your feet up to the top of your head, and you breeeeathe out from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet . . .” “Can’t you just use your nose or mouth?” Read more →
HW’s Video Game Reviews
NBA Street The most racially insensitive video game I’ve ever seen. Every black character is a prancing, jive-talking buffoon, there’s a 7-foot-6 Japanese guy with a four-word English vocabulary — “Not in my house” — delivered with an accent straight out of a Godzilla movie, and followed by inscrutable grunting and mumbling . . . And so on. My kid loves it. Read more →
Overheard at Bob Hope’s 100th Birthday Party
“I wanna tell ya, this Bob Hope is really funny.” “You are Bob Hope.” “I am?! Am I still alive?” Read more →