Our boy is home for winter break . . . he’s been driving the car that I usually drive. When I drove that car today, the second thing I noticed was that he’d run the gas tank down to empty.
The first thing I noticed like a bomb detonation is that he’d left the radio turned on at full volume . . .
To expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour . . .
Someone asks one of the Hearst Castle tour guides, “What’s the difference between the evening tour and the regular tour?”
“Oh, it’s night and day,” he replies.
We had a few friends over to celebrate. Nothing fancy . . .
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.”
“Here’s your wristband for the tour.”
“What do I do with it?”
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
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 hiring a former NFL defensive coordinator with a spotty record as a head coach, most recently in Seattle, where he was fired and replaced by — Pete Carroll!
Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard Have Separated
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?!
If something is worth doing, it’s worth taking to an extreme . . .
Why is it good for chocolate to be “velvety”? Do you really want a mouth full of velvet?
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:
Andreas Schleicher, a member of the PISA research team, says that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
Another recent study, by the Center for Public Education, found that parent actions such as monitoring homework, making sure children get to school, rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college.
Doesn’t this seem way too obvious for funded research?
To be sure, the Epps family doesn’t live in a poverty zone, but neither does it cost anything to teach a kid how to incorporate academics into his daily routine, or to review homework every night, or to read a book together.
I don’t think Helen and Ed have any kids of their own. They’re both white, in their 60s, maybe 70s. They’re true believers, ignoring reality and misrepresenting research findings to stake out what they imagine to be the moral high ground.
Listen, Helen and Ed, Ed and Helen: The only thing that matters in education is parents. Kids can be good at anything if that thing is important to them. And since kids are not born knowing what’s important and what isn’t, it’s up to their parents to teach them.
Are low-income parents going to focus their lives on teaching their children the importance of education? Of course not. They’re going to amuse themselves to death with the television. That’s why they’re impoverished in the first place.
Bad parenting is an epidemic in America. That’s okay. Failure is a part of life, even in America. School is a good place to learn that.
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.
Jaime Flinchbaugh: 4 myths about the principle of “Respect for People”
States should ban all driver use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices, except in emergencies, the National Transportation Board said Tuesday.
The recommendation, unanimously agreed to by the five-member board, applies to both hands-free and hand-held phones and significantly exceeds any existing state laws restricting texting and cellphone use behind the wheel.
DISLIKE!
Busy, productive people need to talk and text while driving in order to jumpstart this economy!
Yes, some of them will die, but it’s a net win because the benefits outweigh the costs.
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
