‘Deadliest Catch’ captain Phil Harris dies at age 53
Never saw his TV show but he was great as the voice of Baloo in The Jungle Book!
♫ Look for the (clap) Bare Ne-cess-ities . . . ♫
Say hi to Bing Crosby in hell!
Sharks kill man kite-surfing off south Florida
Some people say life is too short. I say if you’ve got time for inane activities like kite-surfing, your life has already gone on way too long . . .
Most of us at work have offices with doors. People close the door sometimes for privacy, but mostly when they just want to work uninterrupted for a while.
So today I had a brainstorm of an idea: I could just close my door and go home!
People would marvel at my new work ethic! “He’s in there working all day and night,” they’d say. “He doesn’t even come out to use the bathroom!”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler says he has entered a rehab clinic to treat an addiction to pain killers he has taken to cope with 10 years of performance injuries.
I hate to say I told you so . . . well, okay, I don’t hate it . . .
As my son and I were driving past South Coast Plaza, we saw a woman holding a cardboard sign that read “UNEMPLOYED AND DESTITUTE. Any Help is Appreciated.”
“She’s got a good vocabulary,” I said to the boy. “Someone should hire her.”
Tiger Woods and Chris Henry are just the latest examples.
“Your role model,” I say to my son, “should be that guy in the Miller Lite commercial who saves his beer and lets his girlfriend drop off a cliff.”
I was somewhat drunk and somewhat belligerent — although in my defense, I’m somewhat belligerent even when sober — but I did not get so drunk that I wound up vomiting on the host’s front lawn like some people I could mention because really — aren’t we all getting a little too old for that kind of thing?
Five years ago, I wrote a post about Anne Frank.
Today a young lady named Max added a comment:
In my 8th grade language class we just finished watching the Anne Frank movie, and we have also been studying Anne Frank and the Holocaust for about 2 weeks now. The story made about 3 girls cry. Me, my friend Jade, and my friend Kierra. There may have been more but i didn’t see.
There are now over 400 comments on this post, many of them very poignant, and I’ve enjoyed reading them. Thank you to everyone who’s contributed.
It has continued to amaze me how many people around the world have been touched by the life of this one girl.
R.I.P. Anne Frank
This is how “diversity” works in practice: Intellectual contention is drowned out in a sea of emotion, much of it phony. Members of designated victim groups respond to a serious argument with “pain” and “shock” and accusations of “hate,” and university administrators make a show of pretending to care.
Sometimes I’ll say something to my son, who’s 16 now, ask him a question . . . I know he’s heard me but he doesn’t answer. So I wait or I ask him again, and when I do get an answer, I can’t understand it because he’s mumbling.
Someone was telling me that she works with a boy whose mother shot all of his siblings. Why didn’t she shoot him too, you ask? I don’t know — out of ammo?
To be sure, killing your own children is taking things too far, but I’ll bet you that boy answers up promptly when his mom says something to him . . .
My son and I are watching a TV commercial for Love Happens, which seems to be about a man forced to choose between financial gain and the love of a woman.
This is one of those “teachable moments,” because the boy, who’s 15 now, may someday find himself facing the same choice as the guy in the movie, so I look at him with love and hard-earned wisdom and with a voice of great sincerity, I say:
“Take the money.”
Here’s a simple presentation tip that would help a lot of people: Get to the fucking point.
At a meeting this morning, the company sick time policy was explained to 100 people over the course of 30 minutes time via two PowerPoint presentations by two different people.
I’ll summarize it here:
If you’re well enough to work, you should come to work. If not, stay home. BUT — if you stay home too much, it may negatively affect your annual performance review.
That’s the policy. Let’s open it up for questions.
Don’t take 15 minutes to say something you can say in 15 seconds. Don’t feel like you have to include a historical introduction to the topic, charts, graphs, trends, industry comparisons.
Other people are not in love with the sound of your voice the way you are . . .
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — Iran confirmed Tuesday the arrest of three American hikers who crossed into the country from neighboring Iraq and said they have been charged with “illegal entry,” a semi-official news agency reported.
When you hear about people doing something pointless and stupid — and not just pointless and stupid but elaborately pointless and stupid — like traveling halfway around the world to take a frigging hike along the border of a totalitarian regime that hates Americans, don’t you secretly hope that something bad will happen to them?
So do I . . .
Very sad news. Love him or hate him, you had to admire his originality as a filmmaker.
An openly gay man known for his pencil-thin mustache . . . wait, what?! John Hughes died? Oh, he was TERR-ible! Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — worst movie I ever saw!
For a moment there I thought you said John Waters had died . . .
RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) — Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was airlifted to a hospital after falling from stage during a concert at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in western South Dakota.
Hey Steve — maybe life is trying to tell you something. Let’s listen closely and see if we can hear what it is . . .
YOU’RE OLD!
Stop trying to suck every last dollar out of your former glory and retire, you geriatric bastard . . .
The two American journalists imprisoned for five months by North Korea came home to a tear-filled airport reunion with their families Wednesday morning following a dramatic rescue mission led by former President Bill Clinton.
In June, the North Korean government sentenced the journalists, who work for former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV cable channel, to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering the country.
I don’t know . . . these gals look very emotional to me. Emotional women are hard to live with. Or so I’ve heard.
I’m sure the husbands are happy to have them back though . . .
It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America’s most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it’s not just another episode of profiling — it’s a signpost on the nation’s bumpy road to equality.
If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009?
[In Jim Mora voice]: Profiling??? You kidding me? PRO-filing?!??!
“Profiling” implies an absence of facts or evidence. It means “I’m targeting you for suspicion simply because you’re black and therefore more likely to be engaged in criminal activity.”
That’s not what happened here.
A police officer responded to a 911 call reporting two black males breaking into a house. When he arrived, he found a black man in the house. You don’t have to be Dick Tracy to identify the man as a potential suspect.
Police pulling over black drivers just because they’re black? That would be profiling. But why do they pull over white drivers? Why do they keep pulling me over?
What’s the theory on this — white drivers get pulled over for cause and black drivers get pulled over just because they’re black? Black drivers never commit a traffic infraction?
The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass., home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.
Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next.
No they didn’t. Gates was uncooperative and he was arrested. Everyone agrees on that.
But for many people, that doesn’t matter. All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.
“Many people”? How many? And why wouldn’t it matter? Because a white cop can’t be trusted? I’m seeing racial profiling here, but not on the part of the cops.
Here’s Gates on his porch in a photo taken by one of his neighbors. He’s yelling something at a black officer, who’s ignoring him, while two white officers trying to calm him down.
What’s your badge number? You don’t know who you’re messing with! I’ll make a documentary about this!
I know lots of people who’ve had unpleasant run-ins with cops over the years, including arrests and beatings, but not because they’re black. In fact, all of them are white. The common denominator is that, like Gates, they all have attitude problems.
Cops have to deal with the situations that nobody else wants to deal with. They’re the agency of last resort. I’ve only called in the police twice in my life — once when the guy next door was shooting off a rifle in his driveway in the middle of the night, and once when a person went berserk in my home. Everything else I felt like I could handle myself.
I’ll tell you right now, if your neighbor is shooting off a rifle or someone’s going nuts at your house, don’t call me because I’m not coming over. Call the police.
I have no problem being deferential to cops. It makes sense to me that when your job is dealing with volatile, high-risk situations, you want to establish control and you don’t want to put up with a lot of nonsense.
I wonder how Gates would handle a similar situation. Probably the exact same way. Let’s say he’s teaching a class and one of the students is a disruptive wiseass. How long is he going to put up with that — the whole semester? My guess is he’s going to shut it down pretty quickly. Nobody likes a wiseass interfering with his ability to do his job.
President Obama weighs in: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry.”
Really? Why? I wouldn’t be angry. I’d be glad that someone was willing to stop by and investigate a report that someone was breaking into my house.
And when they got there and found someone in the house, I’d like them to check that person out thoroughly, even if it turns out to be me.
“It’s okay, officer,” I’d say. “It’s my house.” Of course, an intruder might say the same thing. What’s the cop supposed to do? Turn around and go back to the station? It’s all right, the guy said it was his house. No — get the guy out of the house and figure out who he is, even if it’s me.
Make them pay for two seats. If they’re in a middle seat, make them pay for three seats.
Then let other passengers have those seats for free if they want them, keeping in mind that the fat guy is going to spill over into your seat, invading your personal space, pinning you in awkward positions and stabbing you with his bristling arm hair.
He may even listen to music on his iPod and do a little fat man dance in his — and your — seat, wobbling around like fat hairy jello.
But you’re flying for free! You still want it?
Some of the hockey moms here at the tournament went to see The Proposal and are giving it rave reviews — “Classic Sandra Bullock!” Blah blah blah . . .
“Sandra Bullock used to be pretty cute,” I say, “but now she looks like a guy, don’t you think?”
“Are you kidding?! For 45, she looks amazing!“
When I unscrunch my hard-earned dollar bills to see a movie, I want more than “looks good for 45.” I can get “looks good for 45″ at home . . .
Jonny Copp, a well-known mountain climber and adventurer who grew up in Fullerton, has been found dead on the side of Mount Edgar, China, the apparent victim of an avalanche, according to a variety of websites, including his own.
Three words that come to mind when I hear someone introduced as an “adventurer”: Die, die, die . . .
