My son’s sitting in the family room playing the new Madden NFL 07. His computer-controlled kicker misses two extra points, after which the other team’s computer-controlled kicker makes a 50-yard field goal. “Oh my gosh!” he yells. “Can you say ‘racist’?” He’s a mixed-race kid — his mom is Asian — and he treats every slight as a racial issue. I think he’s kidding most of the time. One feature of Madden 07 is that when there’s a break in the action, it pops up player profiles — photos and career blurbs — of old school players that, for the most part, the boy has never heard of. “Fred Biletnikoff!? Looks like a stuck-up white boy to me! OHHHH! WOOOOOO!” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Kids
Two-Minute Drill (With Your Mom)
My son’s got a fantasy football league with some of his friends and he asked me to join, so I’ve got to think of a team name. I thought about using Two-Minute Drill With Your Mom, except you can see how it might lead to a physical confrontation with one of the other kids’ dads . . . Read more →
My Kid Got a New Drum Set
Fidel Castro Needs to Die Right Now
“Is Fidel Castro dead yet?” my son asks. “No,” I say, “as far as I know he’s still alive. Why do you care?” “Fidel Castro is the most Communistic Communist in the history of Communist Communism. And I have him in a death pool.” “When do you need him to die?” “Like . . . right now.” “Do you have anyone else in your death pool?” “Maurice Clarett.” Read more →
Put ‘er There!
God forbid I ever have to have my arm amputated, but if I do, I hope they let me keep it. I’d like to stick it back up my sleeve and shake hands with children. “That’s some grip you got there!” I’d say, when the arm comes off in their little hands. Read more →
They Call Me The Hammah
My son’s holding a gigantic inflatable mallet that he won at Dave and Buster’s. “They call me The Hammah!” he announces in a loud ghetto drawl. “Do you know why they call me The Hammah? Go on, take a guess . . .” Read more →
The Semi-Gifted Students Academy
I’m driving my son to UCI this morning . . . he’s taking a couple of classes at the Gifted Students Academy. “Only about half the students are gifted,” he informs me. “The rest are stoo-pid.” “How can you tell they’re stupid?” I ask. “I can just tell.” “I mean are they actively doing stupid things, or they can’t answer questions?” “Both.” Then: “Drive faster. Mom dropped me off late yesterday and I almost had to run to get to class on time.” “That’s good. Your years of athletic training are finally paying off for you.” “I said I almost had to run.” “Oh. What happened next? You got to class and almost had to think?” Read more →
I Guess You’ll Do
Let’s begin this typical courtship process, shall we? Read more →
Advice for the Feng Shui Entrepreneur
During a recent trip to Las Vegas, we visited a junk shop, a.k.a. a Feng Shui emporium. My wife sketched out the floor plan of our house, after which the proprietor predicted — correctly — that the orientation of our son’s bed was making him stubborn. See, I thought it was the fact that he’s 13 years old that was making him stubborn. Probably a good tip for the up-and-coming Feng Shui professional would be to always predict that the client’s teenage children are stubborn. You’re not going to be wrong very often. And always predict that the client has frequent disagreements with his or her spouse. Read more →
A Blind Woman Was Driving the Car
The entry gate to our community is kind of screwy. It’s supposed to open and close automatically if you’ve got a transponder in your car, but sometimes it just stays open. Last night, we were driving up to the gate when my wife hunched forward over the steering wheel and asked, “Is the gate open?” Read more →
Conversations with a 7th Grader
I was driving my son to school one day when the following conversation ensued. ME: Do you have any exams today? HIM: No . . . and why do you call them “exams”? We have “tests” and “quizzes,” not [in a dopey voice] “exams” — or whatever they called them back in the 1800s. If he thinks that comments like that are going to put me off my game, he must have me confused with his mom. ME: Do you have any exams tomorrow? Read more →
What Does Merriam Webster Know?
My son picks up a pair of my pants that I’ve tossed on the bed, puts them on, and pulls out the front of the waistband. Because he weighs 60 pounds less than I do, there’s a lot of extra room there. “I lost 60 pounds by eating at Subway,” he announces. Then in a gangsta voice he adds, “You fat. You ain’t got the abdo-min-als like I got.” “The word is pronounced ab-dom-inals,” I say. “That’s in the real dictionary,” he says, still with the gangsta voice. “But what does Merriam Webster know? He a playa hater.” Read more →
How Extortionists Get Their Start
A commercial for You, Me and Dupree — or maybe it was Little Man — comes on the TV and I say to my son, “That looks like a real jackass-o-rama.” “Put a quarter in the swear jar,” he says. We don’t have a swear jar. “OK — first of all,” I say, “‘jackass’ is not a swear word. It’s the name of an animal. And second, where did you get the idea of a swear jar?” “They’re available in catalogs.” “What would we do with the money that goes into the swear jar?” “Give it to me.” Read more →
The Weaker Sex?
My son and I are eating lunch at Subway when a group of teenage girls comes in. I notice that in the process of pushing one another through the door, one of the girls has dropped a hat on the sidewalk. “Hey, girls,” I say. “One of you dropped a hat outside.” “Oh, that’s mine,” one of the girls says. “Thanks.” And she goes out to pick it up. “You see the way I saved those damsels in distress?” I say to the boy, who’s about the same age as the girls. “Try to learn something from that.” “Why?” he says. “Because you’ve got to take care of girls. They’re the weaker sex.” “Mom would kill you if she heard that.” He’s right about that. His mom is extremely volatile and always on high alert for slights, real or perceived. “I’m gonna tell her,” he says, nodding and taking a… Read more →
Why 12-Year-Olds Are Not Allowed to Drive
We’re at a stop sign on 6th St. in San Pedro, waiting to cross Pacific Ave., a busy street with multiple lanes of traffic in both directions. We’ve been waiting for an opening for quite a while when my son says, “You gotta go Tokyo Drift on these pansies.” Read more →
A Modern Stone Age Family
We finally caved in and got my son a new cell phone. The one he had was a very old model where you had to pull the antenna up manually. He used to say things like, “This phone must have been invented by a primitive Stone Age family. ‘Hey, Barney! Come here and look at this new communication device I invented!’” “Actually, the Flintstones were a modern Stone Age family,” I reminded him. “Then it was invented by a normal Stone Age family. Fred Flintstone probably used it as a backup to his regular phone, which was a bird, or a rock with a hole in it.” On the plus side — and this was sort of an unintentional stroke of genius on my part — he didn’t rack up a lot of minutes on the old phone because he was ashamed to be seen with it. Read more →
iCasey
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). Read more →
Father’s Day Secrets
Via PostSecret. Read more →
The Captain Explains His Strategy
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.” Read more →
What Makes Women Happy?
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,… Read more →