A friend explains to me why he and his wife argue all the time:

Unfortunately, Paul, a lot of married people argue like this, particularly when there’s a large discrepancy in IQ.

We had Papa John’s pizza brought in at work today . . .

Continue reading Pizza Flashback

I was trying to get my son to think ahead a little in Bejeweled instead of just clicking on the first match he sees.

Result: He clicks as fast as ever, but he now adds a running commentary in a dopey voice whenever I’m in the room:

Continue reading Bejeweled

I saw the new Jackie Chan movie today . . . it was pretty bad, but the thing that resonated with me was that the movie, like all movies of this type, had an evil villain, and the villain would gather his evil henchmen and say things like

“Which one of you would like to explain this latest failure?”

He sounded just like one of the managers I work with . . .

A boy en route to Amarillo, holding a camera . . .

“You want waffles?” asks Mom.

“Bacon,” the boy replies, without looking up from his GameBoy.

“How about bacon, and I’ll cut up an apple for you?”

“Bacon.”

“You have to have fruit with it. How about grapes?”

“Bacon.”

“Bacon and fruit.”

Pause. “Is bacon a fruit?”

Blender magazine has named Insane Clown Posse as the worst band of all time, although I personally think this does a great disservice to Rush — the band, not the radio guy.

According to the British Journal of Ophthalmology, wearing a too-tight necktie may increase the risk of glaucoma by boosting blood pressure inside the eyes.

Ouch!

Who volunteers for this kind of thing? Choked blind with your own necktie!?

I was buying movie tickets with my 10-year-old boy when a woman with her 20-something daughter smiled at us and said, “When you get older, your kids will take you to the movies.”

Later, in the snack bar line, I asked him, “So are you going to take me to a movie when I get older?”

Continue reading EppsNet Goes to the Movies

Me: (reading aloud from syllabus for UC Irvine Young Writers class, in which my kid is enrolled) “We are going to be doing a variety of activities, including a facade poem, a four season poem, journal writing, and a memory snapshot story.”

Him: Poems blow.

Primate Programming Inc.

Diversity on television

White and black characters are overrepresented, while Latino and Asian characters are underrepresented on prime-time TV, according to a recent UCLA study tracking diversity on television.

(I would say first of all that if you want to know anything about diversity, you should definitely ask someone at UCLA. They are all about diversity over there, and here’s what it leads to — “researchers” watching sitcoms with a stopwatch.)

Continue reading Goldilocks and the Three Networks

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average child care worker earns $9.57 an hour. This is less than we pay people to cut our hair ($10.40 an hour), shine our shoes ($9.95 an hour) and park our cars ($9.87 an hour).

Repeat: Kids in America are being raised by people earning $9.57 an hour.

That explains a lot . . .