Apparently this is the worst book ever written . . . I looked at the Amazon page for the book . . . out of 76 reviews, 70 give the book one star. And they’re coming in so fast, you can actually refresh the page and watch the one-star reviews arrive in real time! Hang on a sec — ok, I just checked again . . . there are now nine more reviews posted — all one-star — so we’re up to 79 out of 85. That’s even worse than the abysmal 9 percent approval rating currently enjoyed by the U.S. Congress. Read more →
July 2008
Cheech and Chong Reunion
Cheech and Chong plan reunion tour — UPI.com When you’ve only got one joke — and that one joke isn’t funny — maybe it’s best to stay retired. Who’s their opening act? Foster Brooks? Read more →
Ashley Harkleroad Nude!
The Ashley Harkleroad Playboy photos, while tastefully done by modern standards, are more daring (think pubic hair) than the recent Amanda Beard Playboy photos, which were so tastefully done they were actually boring . . . Read more →
Milestones
Today is my son’s 15th birthday. He’s six feet tall, same as me. I actually have to look up at him a little bit . . . his eyes are higher than mine but I make up the difference with an improbably large forehead, so the tops of our heads are at the same height . . . Read more →
Randy Pausch, 1960-2008
Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. — Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘All the time.’ — Ibid. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. — Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” Randy Pausch was lucky in that, thanks to the worldwide fame he achieved from his lecture and book, he died knowing that things he did and said would not be forgotten after he was gone. Without the pancreatic cancer, he couldn’t have achieved that. Let’s face it, you can’t peddle the kind of pabulum cited above as “wisdom” in the absence of a terminal illness. We own this book because my mom sent… Read more →
Father-Son Wisdom
I tell my son, “If people see you as being arrogant or kind of an a-hole, it’s going to be hard for you to accomplish things that you want to accomplish in life.” “How did you accomplish anything?” the boy replies. “It was hard.” Read more →
Why I Don’t Tell Jokes to My Wife
I say to my wife, “I saw a cartoon today . . . a husband and wife are standing in their living room looking at a huge painting on the wall, a portrait of an elderly man in an armchair, and the wife says to the husband, ‘I thought he was your grandfather.’” My wife says, “Who was the guy?” “The wife thought he was the husband’s grandfather and the husband thought he was the wife’s grandfather.” “So why was his picture in the house?” Read more →
Never Wait in Buffet Lines Again
We went to Souplantation for dinner tonight. I was really hungry but when we got there, there was already a line of people at the salad bar. I hate when that happens. Let me tell you what I did: I grabbed a tray and came in swinging, cracked a few people in the cranium, then finished them off with a serrated-edge knife from the silverware station. It’s a crude plan, but let me tell you why it works: the element of surprise. No one goes to Souplantation expecting to be knocked over the head and stabbed . . . Read more →
Mother-Son Advice
. . . and one thing you don’t want to be is annoying like Dad. Read more →
Eliminate Unnecessary Paperwork
If you need to explain something, try mocking it up and prototyping it rather than writing a longwinded document. An actual interface or prototype is on its way to becoming a real product. A piece of paper, on the other hand, is only on its way to the garbage can. — Getting Real, 37Signals Read more →
Depression 2.0
Mr. Obama is proposing to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends by a staggering two-thirds, moving the rate up 10 percentage points to 25%, which could curtail investment and business on Wall Street, a backbone of the city’s and state’s economy. — New York Sun OK, let me get this straight . . . the stock market’s dropping, banks are failing from lack of liquidity, no one wants to invest in American companies, and Obama’s solution is to raise the capital gains tax?! In the event of an Obama presidency, I will taking a long position in blankets, canned goods and shotgun shells . . . Read more →
HW’s Movie Reviews: The Dark Knight
It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit. — Charles Bukowski, Hollywood Haven’t seen it. Might see it . . . not sure yet. I’ve seen the trailer though and I’ll tell you something: Heath Ledger is TERRIBLE! That’s not acting! Put the same makeup on somebody else, give ’em a script, let ’em read the same lines . . . there’s a million people who could do the same thing. You don’t think so? You don’t think Heath Ledger knew that? Why do you think he’s dead of an overdose? Read more →
Me Too!
From PostSecret: Read more →
The Forgotten Man, Ted Kennedy and Warren Buffett
As Ted Kennedy has spent virtually all of his personal wealth on personal consumption of mansions, private jets, women, booze, etc., any help that he has provided to Americans has come at the expense of the “forgotten man” paying taxes. Ted’s own contributions to charity have been minimal (source). Let’s compare to Warren Buffett. . . . Buffett has spent a negligible portion of his $60+ billion in personal wealth on personal consumption, giving almost all of it away to charity. Perhaps Buffet is “the forgotten man.” He creates jobs by the thousands. He pays taxes by the $billions. He consumes very modestly considering his means. Yet Buffett is not considered a hero here in Massachusetts, at least. — Philip Greenspun Read more →
“The Scenery Was Disappointing”
My Dog Calls a Press Conference
I just want to say to the American people: I am not a vicious dog, but I don’t put up with a lot of nonsense either. — Lightning Read more →
One More Thing on IndyMac
One thing I forgot to mention: When I was let go from IndyMac a year ago — and in each subsequent round of layoffs shrinking the workforce from 10,000 to 7,200 — it was called a “right-sizing.” God, I hate that word. I noticed they finally dispensed with the bullshit last week . . . when they cut another 3,800 people from the remaining 7,200, just before failing completely, the word “right-sizing” was not used . . . Read more →
Chuck Schumer Can Blow Me
Disclaimer: I used to work at IndyMac. It was poorly run and deserved to fail. They got way too much credit for their success when times were good. Look — in a housing bubble, a monkey with a sign can sell mortgages. Then when things started to turn ugly, they took the approach of trying to manage the stock price rather than managing the company. They started up a blog called The IMB Report, the purpose of which was to provide timely spin control on all the bad news about the company. The title — The IMB Report — gives away the game. The IndyMac Report would be a much more obvious choice; IMB is the stock ticker symbol. In shutting down the bank, the Office of Thrift Supervision said this: The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of… Read more →
Spanning the Globe
Because EppsNet is sweeping the globe like nuclear fallout, I sometimes get comments like this one, where it’s hard to tell what’s spam and what isn’t. Often it comes down to this — if the person is a native English speaker, I think they must be putting me on. One clue is to check the IP address. For example, the above comment was posted from Mauritius, an small island nation off the coast of Madagascar. While English is the official language and French predominates in media and business, the most widely spoken language is Mauritian Creole, considered the lingua franca, or native tongue, of the country. Verdict: Valid comment. Read more →
Mowing the Lawn
A co-worker tells me that when she was growing up in Seattle, people did their own yardwork . . . not like here in Southern California where that work is done by Mexicans for hire. I told her we used to mow our own lawns in SoCal too. In fact, if you like A Christmas Story, you would have loved our neighbor next door. He was like Darren McGavin, but instead of the furnace, he’d curse at his beaten-down jalopy of a lawn mower. And not in the basement — right out on his front lawn. I mowed my own lawn at the first house I ever owned. Pride of ownership! And this was not in Irvine, where I live now and the lawns are the size of postage stamps, it was on a large lot in La Verne. Of course, I soon tired of it and paid a Mexican… Read more →