As we’re driving home from a hockey tournament, my son and I see a car with a license plate frame that reads

“Is that the kind of thing they teach you at Dartmouth?” he asks.

“Apparently,” I say.

“Doesn’t seem very useful.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I have to admit.

For a guy who’s supposed to be the most dominant, unstoppable player of his generation, Shaq has certainly been on the wrong side of some lopsided playoff losses:

• 1994: Indiana def. Orlando, 3-0
• 1995: Houston def. Orlando, 4-0
• 1996: Chicago def. Orlando, 4-0
• 1997: Utah def. Los Angeles, 4-1
• 1998: Utah def. Los Angeles, 4-0
• 1999: San Antonio def. Los Angeles, 4-0
• 2004: Detroit def. Los Angeles, 4-1
• 2007: Chicago def. Miami, 4-0

To be fair about it, he did win NBA championships in 2000, 2001 and 2002 with the Lakers, and in 2006 with Miami.

Even if you’re not a fan of the “young woman with a weak heart” plot — and who is? — “On the Gulls’ Road” by Willa Cather is a splendid short story.

My son’s having some trouble with 8th grade Algebra. When I work with him on it, I can see that he knows the material and he can do the calculations . . . his biggest problem is a fatalistic, let’s-get-it-over-with, I’m-no-good-at-math attitude, which leads to careless errors, and frustration if his first approach to a problem doesn’t work.

I encourage him to take a more positive attitude, to go into the next test saying positive things to himself, like “I know this material” and “I can handle these questions.”

“But I don’t know it,” he says. “Mrs. Bryant [his math teacher] throws the gyroball every pitch! And sometimes she hits me with it!”

What we have here is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy . . .

Slate has some advice.

Here’s how it’s done at USC.

Fight On!

After winning 11 state primaries in a field of 16 contenders, I won the Democratic presidential nomination. I then lost the general election to President Nixon. Indeed, the entrenched incumbent president, with a campaign budget 10 times the size of mine, the power of the White House behind him and a highly negative and unethical campaign, defeated me overwhelmingly. But lest [Dick] Cheney has forgotten, a few months after the election, investigations by the Senate and an impeachment proceeding in the House forced Nixon to become the only president in American history to resign the presidency in disgrace.

Who was the real loser of ‘72?

— George McGovern

Wow, that is a provocative question. It really made us wonder if we’ve been wrong all these years. Accordingly, we went back and checked. Turns out the real loser was McGovern, just as we had thought!

— Best of the Web Today

Pictures from my son’s 8th grade trip to Washington, DC.

This photo somehow escaped my attention over the year or so since The M Zone first published it.

One of the subjects in the photo is a large, flightless bird with shaggy plumage.

The other is an emu.

(Actually, the chap on the right is incoming Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen.)

More details are emerging on the crazy naked woman with a gun case . . .

Not surprisingly, despite a neighbor’s assertion that Kevin and Joni Park “were not violent or crazy,” it turns out that they were in fact violent and crazy.

Continue reading OK, So They Were Violent and Crazy

Here’s an offbeat local item as reported in the Orange County Register:

Kevin and Joni Park were shot and killed in an oceanfront bungalow at the Montage [a Laguna Beach hotel where bungalows start at $2,200 a night] on Sunday where they had checked in with a semiautomatic handgun and a bag of extra ammunition.

The Parks were killed in a confrontation with police after officers were summoned to the hotel at 7:40 a.m. by several 911 callers, who reported a naked, “crazy woman” with a gun who was threatening them in Treasure Island Park, at the southern end of the five-star resort.

Mrs. Park appears to be naked in the accompanying photo as well. Was she a nudist? The Register is silent on this point.

One of the Parks’ neighbors says that “they were not violent or crazy.”

No, they were not violent or crazy. I ask you: who doesn’t enjoy an occasional weekend getaway at a five-star resort, running naked through the lush green lawns, and threatening the patrons with a loaded handgun?

The neighbors next door have twin toddlers and these kids look exactly alike.

Yesterday, they were in the front yard with Grandpa when I drove up so I asked him, “How do you tell these boys apart? Help me out with that.”

He pointed to one boy and said, “This one has a red shirt, and this one” — pointing to the other boy — “has a green shirt.”

Oh, this is rich . . .

Michael Strahan’s ex-wife held a garage sale on Saturday. How often do you see a garage sale outside a $3.6 million mansion?

Among the items on sale was a set of cassette tapes on how to make relationships succeed.

One diehard Giants fan walked away with two television sets for the bargain price of $100.

“I get to cheer for Mike on his TV,” he said.

Ireland Baldwin is very lucky to have a dad like Alec Baldwin who can “straighten her ass out on issues” on a regular basis. He can even fly to wherever she is to straighten her out in person!

It’s what he does!

The rest of us only have Alec Baldwin to straighten us out on issues on an irregular, ad hoc basis.

[UPDATE: A family law judge was so alarmed after hearing Baldwin's phone message that she has barred him from having any contact with his child pending a May 4 hearing, so he will be limited to long-distance ass-straightening, er, parenting, at least temporarily.]

Parents get what they deserve from their kids. It’s not easy to snuff out the natural affection that a child has for a parent, but if you perservere, you can do it!

UPDATE: Alec Baldwin Calls Dora the Explorer

“People don’t stop killers,” writes the Instapundit. “People with guns do.”

The idea is that if one of the Virginia Tech students had had a gun with him, he could have come to the rescue like Dick Dauntless, and shot the Korean.

Well that’s true. But what if 300 students had guns, and they were all on the look-out for a student with a gun? I’m failing to see the genius of this plan, though no doubt I’ve overlooked something obvious.

— Harry Hutton

I wish I’d thought of that.

I was just going to say that if you base public policy decisions on extreme, unrepresentative events, you may wind up with a cure that’s worse than the disease . . .

From an American Cancer Society email:

While minorities have made great social strides in the United States in recent decades, many still experience disproportionately higher incidences of disease — especially cancer. The American Cancer Society is working to eliminate cancer disparities among minority populations and the medically underserved, a fact underscored by National Multicultural Cancer Awareness Week, which is April 15-21, 2007.

Sounds like more white people need to get cancer . . .

The competitors: Windows Live Search, Yahoo! and Google.

I was looking at some really nice maps of Washington, DC, last night on Live Search. I’m not totally up to speed on the latest advances in mapping technology, so I wondered if Live Search had totally leapfrogged the competition with this stuff, or if I could do the same thing on the other map sites.

Here’s what I found:

This is the best view I could get of the Jefferson Memorial on Yahoo!

Google is able to zoom in quite a bit closer.

But Live Search can do this!

Thank you, Bill Gates!

The killer feature (obviously) is that Live Search gives you an oblique view into the scene, instead of just a flat, looking-straight-down view. Plus the image resolution is a lot better.

Final Ranking:

1. Live Search
2. Google
3. Yahoo!

An ironclad but widely ignored law of software development — you could probably substitute “product development” as well:

Customers never understand how something is going to work until they see it in action.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

I heard one of our salesmen on the phone this morning telling a customer that “we underpromise and overdeliver.”

I understand the strategy, but doesn’t telling a customer that you underpromise and overdeliver neutralize the whole game plan? Haven’t you now promised to overdeliver?

And if you do overdeliver, you haven’t really overdelivered because you promised to overdeliver in the first place . . .

On the heels of my kid’s discovery that his tour group will not be break dancing their way across our nation’s capital, comes another disappointment — his tyrannical math teacher has been added to the list of chaperones.

“She’ll probably say, ‘Oh, Casey, I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you calculate the volume of the White House?’”

My son’s going to Washington, DC, next week with a group from his junior high school. Once there, they’ll hook up with a group from Martin Luther King High School for a 5 day, 4 night Discover DC educational tour.

Despite the name, MLK High School is not a predominantly black school, a big disappointment to my kid, who was looking forward to his travel companions “breaking out the cardboard mats and spinning on their heads.”

I Have a Dream, indeed!