Slate summarizes an article from the American Journal of Cardiology (emphasis added): Transcendental meditation may prevent death from hypertension. In a study, hypertensive elderly people who used TM were 23 percent to 30 percent less likely to die than those who relied on other relaxation methods or drugs. What is the difference between transcendental meditation and regular meditation? It must be pretty good if it makes people “less likely to die.” Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
I Know Lots of Different Languages
My son is looking over my résumé, including the part where it says I’ve worked with lots of different languages. “You don’t know a lot of languages,” he says. Read more →
OC Real Estate Report
I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre. — Warren Buffett Read more →
My Son Points Out Something . . .
. . . that I’d already noticed: You know, nobody really cares what you have to say about anything. Read more →
You Asked For It
My wife wants a massage . . . “Moderate pressure or deep?” I ask. “Deep . . . AAAAHHH! Moderate!” Read more →
Evidence?!
Explanations of daily changes in aggregate stock market indices are among the most ridiculous, speculative, and uncertain causal inferences made by journalists . . . Read more →
Meet the Writers
Please welcome . . . Anton Chekov! Read more →
Dropoffs Through the Years
When I used to drop my son off for a half day of pre-school, he’d try every trick in the book — Dad, I need someone to push me on the swings! — to get me to stay just a few more minutes . . . Read more →
I Feel This Guy’s Pain
Misspellings are in the original document: I am not the most organised person in the world. I have a poor short-term memory, so I write things down. But because I have a poor short-term memory, I loose the paper. I tried to become more organised — I brought Getting Things Done. Then I lost it. I feel I might be more organised if I stop loosing my organisational aids. Read more →
Bush vs. Kerry
A photographic comparison Read more →
A Way of Life
Of course it is only a game, but somehow the Trojans, bursting out of that stadium tunnel, have come to stand for a way of life. The sight of those USC teams rolling across the Coliseum grass, dominating their opponents — and without a single penny of government aid that the UCLA’s and Oklahomas and Nebraskas depend on, damn it. All of it happened, year after year, because the school annually turned out a phalanx of new achievers, men who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and went on to become the cream of their crops and the captains of their industries, men who started companies and expanded businesses that created jobs and took people off the welfare rolls, men who took care to plow back their superabundance into the institution that launched them, so that the Trojan tradition of independence and excellence would go on and on. Yes, the… Read more →
St. Patrick in Action
A little-known sketch of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland . . . Read more →
Love Hurts — So Does Frostbite
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — A Los Angeles man who sneaked into Canada in February to see his Internet girlfriend will be deported — minus all his fingers and some of his toes, the Winnipeg Sun newspaper reported Tuesday. Read more →
Homework Follies
“How did you multiply this times 2.5 and get this?” I ask. He looks at the problem for a while. “I multiplied it a different way,” he says. ME: Shouldn’t this answer be 41 instead of 71? HIM: No, Alex. ME: Why are you calling me Alex? HIM: What is “no”? He’s reading a word problem aloud: “Maggie was traveling with her family on the Oregon Trail. The first day, they traveled 11 miles, the second day they traveled 9 miles, and the third day they traveled 14 miles.” Pause. “Now that was a good story!” Read more →
Popstrology
See what song was #1 on your birth date and pretend it’s the theme song for your whole life! Makes as much sense as anything else! Mine is “To Know Him is to Love Him.” Here’s another idea: Go back nine months from your birth date and see what your parents might have been listening to when . . . you know . . . Read more →
Patrick Henry’s Crazy Wife in the Basement
My boy is doing a school report on Patrick Henry. Something I didn’t know about Patrick Henry is that his wife went insane in 1771 and was subsequently kept in a straitjacket in the basement of the family home. Read more →
Negative Milestones
I buy my first pair of reading glasses. My wife almost weeps when she sees them. “You’re getting old,” she says. Read more →
Ontological Tangents
I can’t figure out why it’s so hard to get my kid to take a shower every night. We ask him to take a shower, he leaves the room like he’s going to do it, but he doesn’t do it. Read more →
The Ephemeral Beauty of the World
Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world? — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Read more →
Dark, Ironic Frost
My son was asked to memorize “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost for a 6th grade assignment: Read more →