We had a few friends over to celebrate. Nothing fancy . . . Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
Hearst Castle is Really a Lot Like Our House
As we’re touring the gardens at Hearst Castle, my wife points out a plant that’s just like one we have at home. “Yeah, this place a has a lot of similarities to our house,” I say. “We have a plant, we have a pool . . .” “We don’t have a pool,” the boy says. “Well, we have access to a pool.” Read more →
Overheard at Hearst Castle
“Here’s your wristband for the tour.” “What do I do with it?” Read more →
Turbinado Sugar = Crack Cocaine
Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before unknown men. — Proverbs 22:29
UCLA Hires Jim Mora
ROSE Bowl?! Are you kiddin’ me? ROSE Bowl? We’re just trying to win a GAME! Okay, I know it’s not that Jim Mora. First I want to say for the record that the firing of Rick Neuheisel was a bad move. Despite the naysayers, he had the program moving in the right direction. Pac-12 Southern Division champions. He closed the gap with USC. Yeah, I know they lost to USC 50-0 but just imagine what the score would have been if he hadn’t closed the gap. I heard Coach Mora on the radio this afternoon. I wasn’t impressed. I’m not as elated as I was about the Neuheisel or Karl Dorrell hirings, but I just don’t think UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero has any idea about how to hire a football coach. He’s tried to copy the Pete Carroll model, first by hiring Carroll assistants as coordinators, and now by… Read more →
Celebrity Breakups
Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard Have Separated — msn.com, Dec. 19, 2011 The story was posted this week but it turns out they actually separated two years ago. Normally, with celebrity breakups, the couple sends out a press release asking for privacy “in this difficult time.” That always seemed to me like one of the stupidest ideas in a world full of stupid ideas: sending out a press release requesting privacy. It turns out if you just keep your mouth shut about it, you can split up and no one will know or care. You can have all the privacy you want . . . P.S. Why do people split up in their late 60s after 30 years together? DO THEY WANT TO DIE ALONE?! Read more →
Aside
If something is worth doing, it’s worth taking to an extreme . . .
Velvety
Why is it good for chocolate to be “velvety”? Do you really want a mouth full of velvet? Read more →
We Need Better Parents
Kids can’t do well in school unless their family has a lot of money, according to an op-ed in the New York Times, which goes on to argue that massive intervention by “policy makers” is needed to confront this issue head-on. The authors, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, are a husband-and-wife team of academic researchers. Education reform in a nutshell: First thing, let’s kill all the academic researchers. Helen and Ed cherry-picked the results of a Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study to show that students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts. But they didn’t actually link to the PISA results, because if they had, people would see that Helen and Ed just ignored the three main findings, which are: Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher… Read more →
Airline Pilots No Longer Know How to Fly the Planes
Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers. — Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript – What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 – Popular… Read more →
Aside
Jaime Flinchbaugh: 4 myths about the principle of “Respect for People”
A Christmas Tree Made With Books
Christmas Pug
25 Focus Areas
You can take a piece of wood that you brought back from your garden, and each day present it with a flower. At the end of a month you will adore it, and the idea of not giving it an offering will be a sin. — Krishnamurti
A Pile of Mammals
Aside
How will the recent Virginia Tech shooting deaths affect football recruiting, ESPN?
Beware of Chest Physicians Bearing Gifts
I work for a healthcare organization. In the lunch room today was one of those cylinders full of caramel corn and cheese corn that turn up everywhere around the holidays. This one had a note attached: Compliments of your colleagues at the American College of Chest Physicians. Are caramel corn and cheese corn good for cardiac health? They’ve gotta be terrible, right? Beware of chest physicians bearing gifts! CARDIOLOGIST: Who referred you to our office? PATIENT: I saw your name on a container of cheese corn. CARDIOLOGIST: Ha ha, yeah, those things pay for themselves a million times over in stents and angioplasties. Read more →