Q: What do a 10-year-old boy and a 4-month-old dog have in common?

A: When you ask them to do something they don’t want to do, they just look at you like they’re unable to understand human language . . .

“Pride goeth before a fall,” my son says, as he stuffs a slice of pizza into his mouth.

“Really?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

Continue reading Phraseology

People my age or a little younger may remember some years ago, when the issue of burning the American flag suddenly became the most important issue in the country.

People were so riled up about it that a constitutional amendment was proposed to make flag burning illegal.

Continue reading Issue of the Day

It’s been pouring rain in Southern California last night and this morning . . .

Why does every local TV news show have to send some poor female reporter out to do live remotes, to stand in the biggest deluge they can find and tell people something they already know?

Do you find that when one person is appointed Leader, other people in the group then expect the Leader to do things that they could do perfectly well for themselves?

That they expect the leader to function as a sort of surrogate parent or playground monitor?

If you are the Leader, what, if anything, do you do to encourage or discourage this?

Thus spoke The Programmer.

The biggest problem I find is that many black people don’t support the gay and lesbian civil rights movement because they don’t see black people as gay. And I think a lot of that comes from what they see on television because there are one or two characters who are both black and gay.

— Jasmyne Cannick, board member of the National Black Justice Coalition, quoted on PlanetOut.com

Now that’s the looniest statement I’ve heard today — although I do think the number of people unable to distinguish television from real life has been trending sharply upward . . .

I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems.

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

I’m looking at the 5-day forecast for Irvine: little rain cloud icons for Wed, Th and Fri.

Rain always puts me in the mood for piping hot chicken noodle soup. Makes me feel like a kid again!

Although I usually get the chicken noodle from Trader Joe’s now, not the old-fashioned Campbell’s Soup . . .

Love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage.

Ha Ha Ha! What a joke!

To young people, gay people, young gay people, I would say this:

Don’t confuse “I love you” with “I want to marry you.”

We lead the puppy to the carefully arranged newspaper. He’s four months old now, and to my way of thinking, he should be starting to get the hang of this by now.

Continue reading Adventures in Housebreaking

My wife was talking to a fellow dog-walker at the park this morning. The woman asked her, among other things, does she work, and my wife said no.

That was good, the woman replied, because it really raises her hackles when people buy a dog and then leave it alone all day while they’re at work.

What an astounding statement!

Continue reading Doggie Love

I was explaining to my boy how to generate a web page from a database, so I can display it different ways, add new stuff, and not have to rewrite the HTML . . .

“I can see why you’re excited about that,” he said, “but I can’t really get excited about it myself because I’m not a computer gee—genius.”

“Did you just say ‘computer geek’?”

“Almost.”

Italian police seek huge breasted woman

— Ananova

I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

I am better now.

Word of honor: I am better now.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions

What do you seek, so pensive and silent?
What do you need, Camerado?
Dear son! do you think it is love?

— Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”

In the military, when I was in tank warfare and I was actually fighting in tanks, there was nothing more soothing than people constantly hearing their commander’s voice come across the airwaves. Somebody’s in charge, even though all shit is breaking loose. . . . When you don’t hear [the commander's voice] for more than fifteen minutes to half an hour, what’s happened? Has he been shot? Has he gone out of control? Does he know what’s going on? You worry. And this is what Microsoft is. These little offices, hidden away with the doors closed. And unless you have the constant voice of authority going across the e-mail the whole time, it doesn’t work. . . . You can’t do anything that’s complex unless you have structure. . . . And what you have to do is make that structure as unseen as possible and build up the image for all these prima donnas to think that they can do what they like. Who cares if a guy walks around without shoes all day? Who cares if the guy has got his teddy bear in his office? I don’t care. I just want to know . . . [if] somebody hasn’t checked in his code by five o’clock. Then that guy knows that I am going to get into his office.

— Dave Maritz, former Israeli tank commander and former Microsoft Test Manager, MS-DOS and Windows, quoted in Microsoft Secrets

For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under. Okay. So did Edgar Allan Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”

— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

Then there were the Romans — whose greatness was probably due to the wholesome authority exercised by the head of a family over all its members. Some Romans had even killed their children; this was going too far, but then the Romans were not Christians and knew no better.

— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Most Favorite

• Annie Hall
• Casablanca
• The Graduate
• Lost in Translation
• The Music Man

Least Favorite

• An Affair to Remember
• Ghost
• An Officer and a Gentleman
• Titanic
• When Harry Met Sally . . .
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Dr. Robert Atkins, who died last year, made a nice living promoting the effects of diet — specifically, a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet — on health.

According to his widow, however, Atkins’ own history of heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension was “completely unrelated to his diet.”

Go figure . . .