• Art Buchwald - columnist
• Mike Douglas - TV talk show host
• Lena Horne - singer
• E. Howard Hunt - Watergate conspirator
• Bil Keane - cartoonist, “The Family Circus”
• Deborah Kerr - actress
• Jack Klugman - actor
• Lyndon LaRouche - U.S. presidential candidate
• Claude Levi-Strauss - anthropologist
• Herbert Lom - actor, “The Pink Panther”
• Rose Marie - actress/game show panelist
• Dick Martin - TV host, “Laugh-In”
• George Martin - music producer, The Beatles
• Harry Morgan - actor
• Edwin Newman - newscaster
• Maureen O’Hara - actress
• Jane Russell - actress
• Gloria Vanderbilt - fashion designer
• Kurt Waldheim - U.N. secretary-general
• Esther Williams - swimmer
• Efrem Zimbalist Jr. - actor

Updates

• Art Buchwald - died 1/17/2007, age 81
• Mike Douglas - died 8/11/2006, age 81
• E. Howard Hunt - died 1/23/2007, age 88
• Deborah Kerr - died 10/16/2007, age 86
• Dick Martin - died 5/24/2008, age 86
• Kurt Waldheim - died 6/15/2007, age 88

A guy at work — let’s call him “Steve” — has been wearing what looks like the same shirt, shorts and sandals for weeks.

Another coworker says to “Steve”: “These new Superman ads remind me of you. He wears the same friggin’ outfit every day too.”

My wife calls me at work. “How do you spell ‘Casablanca’? she asks. “Like the movie.”

“C-a-s-a-b-l-a-n-c-a.”

“I am so good!” she says. “I just need more self-confidence.”

This essay by Turing Award-winner Fred Brooks is almost 20 years old now. Sadly, the ideas on incremental development are still considered outside the mainstream in IT, which continues to favor the widely-discredited waterfall approach.

Continue reading Respect the Classics, Man: No Silver Bullet

A true sport is where athletes get broken legs and limp gamely off the field. A phony baloney sport is where athletes skin their knees and fall down, waving their arms as if they’ve been stabbed, and flop around like fish on a boat deck.

— Jim Bouton

Ruby Jones, 67, worked in the hospice unit at Lindy Boggs Medical Center in New Orleans. Last August, as Hurricane Katrina was zeroing in on the city, she elected not to evacuate, but to stay with the eight dying patients under her care.

She has been recognized by Newsweek as one of “15 People Who Make America Great”:

Continue reading 15 People Who Make America Great

The educated coastal public thinks that evangelical Christianity is America’s number one religion. They are wrong. It is the Worship of Unearned Riches, and Las Vegas is its holy city. The belief that it is possible to get something for nothing is more potent in our land than the belief that the Son of God will return to rescue mankind. The Religion of Unearned Riches was established here in the desert by organized crime. It has turned us into a nation of slobs, clowns, patsies, and cravens. Las Vegas is what we have become. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world despises us?

— James Howard Kuntsler

I live a few hours’ drive from Las Vegas. I share the author’s contempt for the place, right up until the last sentence where he suggests that there’s something uniquely American about irrational greed. Other countries don’t have casinos and lotteries?

Continue reading Nobody Likes Us

Souplantation is our favorite family restaurant, but it really does give me the creeps watching fat people at all-you-can-eat buffets.

Tonight there’s a fat guy plodding through the bakery section, loading up on pizza, muffins, etc. He takes one of everything, except the things he takes two of. An obese woman decides that the bowls provided at the dessert bar aren’t big enough, so she brings over a soup tureen and loads it up with frozen yogurt, before slathering on the chocolate chips, peanuts and syrup.

Have you ever wondered why fat people are fat? Neither have I. But for everyone who’s ever said, “I don’t know why I can’t lose weight,” it’s because you’re eating everything that’s not nailed down.

In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: ‘Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!’

— Javier Marias, Written Lives

Antonio Villaraigosa, UCLA graduate and mayor of Los Angeles, gave a commencement speech at USC last month, at which time USC generously awarded him an honorary doctorate.

This week, Villaraigosa delivered a commencement speech at UCLA, in which he made the point that UCLA, unlike USC, does not confer honorary degrees.

“You’ve got to earn your diploma from UCLA!” he said.

HA HA HA! Good one, Mr. Mayor!

Why don’t you go flunk the bar exam a few more times, genius? They don’t give that away either.

My wife, a non-native English speaker, is explaining her philosophy to me . . .

“Life is a journal,” she says.

“It is?”

“You take a trip,” she says.

Avoid swimming in sewer overflow

— Houston Chronicle headline

Congressional Democrats, hoping to bridge party divides before the important midterm elections, have decided to call for withdrawal, sort of, but not really, from Iraq, as soon as possible, or maybe after we win, which we will, but maybe not. They are calling for a Senate vote on an as-of-yet imaginary bill that may or may not request politely that American troops start leaving Iraq this year, or at least consider it very strongly.

The Senate proposal, a nonbinding resolution, calls on Americans to please please please vote for Democrats. It also has the same old bullshit about troop-supporting.

— Wonkette

Every time one of those iPod silhouette ads comes on, my son asks can we make something like that with him in it. This weekend we tried it with Paint Shop Pro and this is the result (click to enlarge).

Via PostSecret.

“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.

[Read more . . .]

“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold

[Read more . . .]

“In Dreams” by Kim Addonizio

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left
for the man who was my father.

[Read more . . .]

My son’s doing a team project in 7th grade social studies. He was selected as team captain, and he’s explaining his strategy to me:

“For each part of the project, we try to have a good guy paired with an off-task guy,” he says. “Or actually, I secretly tried to do that because I’m the captain. The worst guy on the team is Kevin. Whenever he asks, “Why do we have to do it this way?” I ask him, “Why are you getting a C in this class?”

I say, “Wow, that’s pretty harsh.”

“I’m trying to make a point that if we do it his way, we’re going to get a bad grade. That’s why I was nominated as captain.”

It’s not so much that [women] have to make a million choices; more that, having chosen, we are haunted by the possibility that our choices might be wrong. If we stay at home to care for our children, we worry about wasting education and dissipating talent and that no one takes us seriously. If we commit ourselves to careers, we’re tormented that our children are suffering because we’re not there to help them learn to read and we’re late for the nativity play.

As a result, we frequently try to avoid choosing at all, as if it might be possible somehow to have a full-time job, and children, and a good relationship, and friends, and a tidy house, and be thin, and wear the right clothes, and eat in the right restaurants, and possibly be having a really sexy affair as well, complete with suitable underwear… the more we achieve, the more the horizons of achievement stretch away. And we’re completely strung out and not actually doing anything properly.

— Geraldine Bedell

Related Links

• Having it All!
  Working moms are destroying the nation

My son asks for help with a homework problem in math. The main point of contention with math homework is that when he asks for help, he’d like me to just do the problem for him, while I prefer to try and steer his thinking in the right direction, even though it takes a lot longer.

“This is like the problem you helped me with last night,” he says. “Let’s try not to have a one-hour conversation about it this time.”

Somebody was retelling a Margaret Cho joke about getting a boyfriend to help out around the house. The punch line:

Continue reading My New Dream Girl