The Chinese delegation visiting the White House squared off against the Americans in a game of softball.
The President of China played first base.
Twitter: 2011-01-20
- RT @MrsRupertPupkin: My cat tried to knock over my TV this morning. WHY ARE MY BEST FRIENDS FIGHTING?! #
Joyeux Anniversaire, Paul Cézanne
Today is Paul Cézanne’s 172nd birthday!
Did you know that Cézanne sometimes spent hours positioning objects before painting a still life? He did!
My Kid Needs to Learn to Set an Alarm Clock
“I’m taking a nap,” the boy says. “I need to wake up at five.”
“Okay,” I reply.
“Five o’clock,” he says.
“Okay.”
“What time do I need to wake up?”
“Five.”
“That’s right.”
The Cats of War
Decapitations: Another Reason I Prefer to Just Stay Home
27 deaths, including 14 decapitated, rock Acapulco
Welcome to Mexico!
Ask for Help
This is the first, and most important, lesson of teams: ask for help.
So we live by this lesson. If they don’t ask us for help, they never learn who we are and what we have to give. It can be frustrating for us, and hard for them, but not as frustrating and hard for both as us wasting ourselves upon people who do not want what we urge upon them.
Twitter: 2011-01-07
- RT @sockelganger: hello table hello rug hello lamp hello window i am lucky to have so many friends #
Welcome to Hell
Gerry Rafferty, 1947-2011
Just one more year and then you’ll be happy . . .
If that doesn’t sum up what life is all about, I don’t know what does.
Just one more year till I lose some weight, gain some weight, get married, get divorced, get out of school, go back to school, get pregnant, get the kids out of the house, get a job, quit my job, etc., etc., etc.
Then I’m really going to start living!
Twitter: 2011-01-04
All in the Waiting
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
It’s Kittens
EppsNet at the Movies: Tender Mercies
I don’t know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk, and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out, marry me. Why? Why did that happen? Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny’s Daddy died in the war, my daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why? See, I don’t trust happiness. I never did; I never will.
Christmas in Las Vegas
My son makes the observation that there are no balconies in Las Vegas hotels. We’ve got a room on the 24th floor of Bellagio, overlooking the fountains, which allows me to visually scan other hotels up and down the strip, and by god I think the boy is right.
Am I the only person who didn’t know that?
Of course it makes perfect sense once someone points it out.
The Vegas mindset requires that a disproportionate amount of attention be directed to winners . . . lights flashing, bells ringing, people screaming with glee . . . meanwhile, 99 other people are silently losing their ass.
Clearly it’s going to put a damper on things to have the losers flinging themselves off the balconies of high-rise hotels.
If Stieg Larsson Wrote Don Quixote
The last two novels I’ve read are Don Quixote and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Don Quixote has no plot. Event follows event but it all grows naturally out of character and conditions. The characters are immortal, independent of time and place.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but plot. It’s a good plot but none of the characters are interesting outside the confines of the story. They certainly have no sense of humor.
Cervantes takes 900 pages to allow his two principal characters to reveal themselves through their words and actions. Larsson just blurts everything out:
Erika was an organizer who could handle employees with warmth and trust but who at the same time wasn’t afraid of confrontation and could be very tough when necessary. She and Mikael often had differing views and could have healthy arguments, but they also had unwavering confidence in each other, and together they made an unbeatable team.
That’s the difference between a masterpiece and a potboiler. One difference, anyway.
It occurred to me that with his explanatory style, Larsson could have written Don Quixote in one short paragraph:
Don Quixote, in his dignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotion to them, was always heroic and beautiful. Sancho Panza was a fat little man who saw very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. They often had differing views and could have healthy arguments, but they also had unwavering confidence in each other, and together they made an unbeatable team. THE END.
A Sherlock Holmes Christmas
My kid comes home and sees three newly wrapped Christmas presents . . .
“That’s a book,” he says, pointing at one of the presents. Then moving on to the other two: “I don’t know what that is, and I don’t know what that is. I’m on to you guys.”
“What are you on to?” I ask. “The fact that you don’t know what’s going on? You only got one thing out of three. Nice work, Sherlock Holmes.”
“The clues don’t always come all at once,” he says. “I’m a third of the way there.”
Twitter: 2010-12-22
Overheard
My Family’s Guide to Failure
At a recent family gathering, someone whom I won’t name here recommended to my son, a high school senior, that he start looking for a community college to attend for a couple of years before transferring to a four-year school.
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Do you have any more good ideas? Maybe he should punch himself in the face really hard.”
One of the things I love about my boy is that when he does something, he puts his heart into it. He takes on the risk of failure.
The safe approach — and historically the preferred method in my family — is to do things indifferently, fail, then announce that you weren’t really trying and that you could have succeeded if you’d wanted to.”
We have family members who — despite, to my knowledge, having never done or said an intelligent thing in their lives — never seem to lose their reputation as untapped geniuses who could have done great things if they’d ever set their mind to it.
“You apparently haven’t been paying attention the last 17 years,” I continued. “You’re not there every night when he’s up late working on honors classes and AP classes, trying to accomplish the goals that he’s set for himself, which as far as I know, don’t include community college. Why don’t you ask him if he wants to go to community college? Or is that not relevant to your recommendation?”
“Community college is a lot less expensive and he’ll take the same classes the first two years anyway.”
“They’re really not the same classes,” I said. “You have to teach a class to the level of the students.
“If you’re teaching a general ed class at a highly selective university where every kid came out of high school with a 4.3 GPA and 10 AP classes under their belt, then you can conduct the class at a very challenging level and expect that the kids will get it.
“If you’re teaching the ‘same’ class at a community college, where the only prerequisites for being there are opposable thumbs and a pulse, then you’re going to have to dumb it way, way down.
“Throw in the fact that the students will add no value to the teacher’s ideas, no one will ask an interesting question and no one will answer a question with an interesting answer and you’ll find that the ‘same’ classes are not the same classes at all.”
To summarize the Epps Family Guide to Failure:
- Aim low.
- Revel in mediocrity.
- Hide your light under a bushel.
- Hide it under a bushel of idiots at the local community college.