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My Son Gets a Haircut
That’s my son getting a haircut to start the new year.
I told the stylist to make him look like the boy in the photo.
He doesn’t know it yet.
Shhhhhhh!
Danica’s Speeding Ticket
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Danica Patrick paid a $196 fine to settle a speeding ticket after the star racecar driver was caught going 54 mph in a 35-mph zone last month.
Was she in a hurry to obtain oral sex? Because that would be hot . . .
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
My son sees a book I’m reading lying on a table . . .
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” he says. “What kind of a title is that?”
I say, “It’s hard to explain.”
“Life,” he says in a mystical voice, “is like a motorcycle. You must maintain your motorcyle.”
He makes a gong sound . . .
I am in an enormous vault, dead, and they are paying their last respects.
It’s kind of them to come and do this. They didn’t have to do this. I feel grateful.
Now [my son] motions for me to open the glass door of the vault. I see he wants to talk to me. He wants me to tell him, perhaps, what death is like. I feel a desire to do this, to tell him. It was so good of him to come and wave I will tell him it’s not so bad. It’s just lonely.
I reach to push the door open but a dark figure in a shadow beside the door motions for me not to touch it. A single finger is raised to lips I cannot see. The dead aren’t permitted to speak.
But they want me to talk. I’m still needed! Doesn’t he see this? There must be some kind of mistake. Doesn’t he see that they need me? I plead with the figure that I have to speak to them. It’s not finished yet. I have to tell them things. But the figure in the shadows makes no sign that he has even heard.
These Are My Kids
We’re getting snacks and sodas at AM/PM — me, my son and two of his friends.
I know the girl at the register because I stop here for a soda most days on my way to work and she’s always here.
“Hi,” I say to her. “These are my kids.”
She looks at the kids, who are all the same age and look nothing like each other — a tall Wasian kid, a stocky Asian and an Indian boy.
“Different moms,” I explain.
Afterward, the group was evenly divided on whether or not she believed me . . .
One Mint Julep
After we struck out at Black Angus, we wound up at Lucille’s Smokehouse Bar-B-Que on my son’s recommendation.
Not only does it turn out to be better than Black Angus, they’ve got — mint juleps!
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have an alcoholic beverage at a family lunch, but I love mint juleps and it’s rare to find a place that advertises their ability to make one.
“What kind would you like?” the waiter asks.
“There are kinds of mint juleps?” I ask.
“We have seven different brands of bourbon.”
“Oh. Let’s go with the Wild Turkey.”
Ahhh, I’m in heaven . . .
[audio:one-mint-julep]The Lunch Coupon
We’re on our way to Black Angus for a family lunch.
My wife is driving . . . she pulls a huge stack of coupons out of the glove compartment and hands them to our son in the back seat.
“Find the Black Angus coupon in there,” she says.
After a while, he says, “Why do we have ten 20% off coupons for Bed, Bath and Beyond?”
“Your job is to find the Black Angus coupon,” she says, “not to criticize people.”
I say, “If you combine all those coupons, they actually wind up paying you to take the merchandise out of the store.”
A while later, he says, “I can’t find a Black Angus coupon.”
I say, “Let me take a look.”
He hands me the coupon stack, which I look through and find it.
“Pwned,” I say. “Why couldn’t you find it?”
“It looks just like the Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons.”
“Do the Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons have a big picture of a steak on them?”
“It’s exactly the same size and the same cardboard and it was mixed in together with them.”
About this time, we pull into the empty parking lot in front of Black Angus to find out that they’re not open for lunch . . .
Owen 16
You can go to the NFL Shop and buy a custom Detroit Lions jersey like the one shown here for $99.99.
Well, not exactly like the one shown here, which I Photoshopped, because the NFL anticipated the joke. If you try to order an Owen 16 jersey, you get this message:
Your current entry cannot be processed. Some entries are prohibited due to guidelines for past and present player names. Please create a new entry.
A Box of Pears
We’re having an extended family holiday get-together today, including a gift exchange.
My wife did the gift shopping. She’s passive-aggressive about it because she really believes that other family members, especially my mom, use the holidays to clean unwanted items out of their closets, wrap them up and give them to us as Christmas presents.
I’ve explained to her that these people simply don’t have any style or taste, so even those these are items that you would stuff in the back of a closet, they actually see them as pretty nice gifts.
Here’s a rundown on what she bought this year: My ex-sister-in-law is getting a box of Harry & David pears, normally $40 but obtained at a deep discount. My great uncle is getting a box of pears. My parents and my sister’s family — a box of pears.
“And the best thing,” she says, “is it says $39.99 right on the box.”
“I assume you’re going to take that off.”
“I don’t think I can. It’s right on the box.”
“Uh . . .”
“Don’t complain. Lucky enough they’re getting anything in this economy.”
Happy New Year
And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
Best wishes to everyone who’s taken the time to read this site over the past year.
Free Samples
I’ve got my son and one of his friends with me at Trader Joe’s. They start off by grabbing some roast beef and panini at the free sample stand.
Later, when I’m in the checkout line, they wander off, I assume to go outside, but it turns out they went back for seconds on the free samples.
“You guys are an embarrassment!” I say. “The free samples are supposed to be one to a customer, not all you can eat!”
“I don’t think she saw us the first time,” my son says. “So it’s okay.”
“Jesus, I can’t take you guys anywhere.”
NFL Week 17 Recap: You Can’t Win With Knuckleheads
My son is 15, he’s played competitive roller hockey for a number of years — including winning a 12-and-under national championship — and the main thing I’ve learned in that time is that a player’s individual skills are not nearly as important as his ability to play as part of a team.
We know lots of kids with terrific skills but if they just want to do their own thing out there, you put them on a team and they actually make the team worse.
Or to put it in a nutshell: You can’t win with knuckleheads.
I was reminded of that last weekend as I watched Dallas, with talented knuckleheads like Terrell Owens and Pacman Jones, get knocked out of the playoffs with a 44-6 loss to the Eagles, who cut Owens in 2005, and the Jets, who cut Chad Pennington to make room for drama queen Brett Favre, get eliminated with a loss to the Dolphins, who signed Pennington and went from 1-15 to 11-5.
Teamwork always beats individual talent. You can’t win with knuckleheads.
A Consulting Axiom
I’ve been downgraded from an ear infection to a “full-blown” ear infection. Last week, the doctor at walk-in urgent care gave me an Amoxicillin prescription and told me to come back if the symptoms didn’t improve in four or five days.
They didn’t, but I went to a different walk-in clinic this afternoon to work a second opinion into the process. The doctor gave me a prescription for Levaquin to replace the Amoxicillin.
I know, nobody cares about this. I only mention it because it reminded me of something important.
I was a consultant for many years and I’m going to share with you now one of the axioms of consulting:
Whatever the client is doing, advise them to do something else.
If whatever they’ve been doing was working, they wouldn’t need a consultant, right?
Is Levaquin “better” than Amoxicillin for ear infections? No, but you see what I’m getting at.
The Renaissance Man
I’m looking at these last few posts where I’ve strung together W.H. Auden, John Dewey, Meat Loaf and Franz Kafka, not with any sense of purpose, just things I’ve read or listened to on my winter break.
What a renaissance man I am!
Why, if you were here, we could talk about poetry, education, philosophy, sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, existentialism . . . and we’d have a good time too, considering we’re all going to die . . .
Lullaby
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Experience and Education
How many students, for example, were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them? How many acquired special skills by means of automatic drill so that their power of judgment and capacity to act intelligently in new situations was limited? How many came to associate the learning process with ennui and boredom? How many found what they did learn so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power of control over the latter? How many came to associate books with dull drudgery, so that they were “conditioned” to all but flashy reading matter?
Bat Out of Hell
And I ran up the stairs to my parents’ bedroom
Mommy and Daddy was sleeping in the moonlight
Slowly I opened the door, creeping in the shadows
Right up to the foot of their bed
I raised the guitar high above my head
And just as I was about to bring the guitar
Crashing down upon the center of the bed,
My father woke up, screaming
“Stop! Wait a minute! Stop it boy!
What do ya think you’re doin’?
That’s no way to treat an expensive musical instrument!”
“God Dammit Daddy! You know I love you, But you got a hell of a lot to learn about Rock ‘n Roll”
Couriers
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other — since there are no kings — messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.
Another Way Computers Are Making Life Better for Everyone
His mom took the boy’s laptop computer away because she didn’t like his attitude about something or other, and now he’s trying to involve me in a secret plan to get it back.
I ask him, “Why don’t you forget about the computer and do something else tonight? Read a book or something?”
He says, “I need the computer so my friends and I can talk to each other.”
“Use text messages. Or a phone. There’s an idea.”
“We need video.”
“Video? What do you need video for?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Exactly. So you don’t really need the computer.”
“‘Don’t worry about it’ doesn’t mean I don’t need it. It means don’t worry about it.”
“What are you going to do? Have a biggest dick contest?”
“Is that what you used to do?”
“We didn’t have webcams when I was your age. We had to take ’em out and do a side-by-side comparison. Everything’s easier nowadays thanks to computers.”
EppsNet Movie Reviews: Gran Torino
It’s sad to see Clint Eastwood get old but somebody’s got to do it.
It seemed to me as far back as Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire that while other actors were trying to stay artificially young forever, no one else was putting on screen an honest portrayal of what it’s like to be an old man, what it’s like to feel yourself diminished.
And that was 15 years ago, when Eastwood was in his early 60s. He’s now 78 and looks it.
I was trying to think of another leading actor who’s doing roles where the central fact about the character is that he’s gotten old and tired and scared . . .
Robert De Niro? No, he’s still doing the same cops and mobsters roles he’s been doing for decades.
Al Pacino? Dustin Hoffman? No. Same roles, plus they’re both around 70 years old with absurd fake pompadours piled on top of their heads. In order to do these roles, you can’t be someone with cosmetic surgery and fake hair who has to use makeup effects to look his own age.
I once read where Michael Douglas is proud of the fact that he has taken on “challenging” roles. You want a challenge? Knock it off with the facelifts and the young wife and show people what it’s really like to get old.
They can’t even admit it to themselves, these guys.
Jack Nicholson? He looks his age, but he’s doing wacky old guy roles in Rob Reiner and Adam Sandler movies. Eccentrics. Not the same thing.
Sylvester Stallone? He’s only 60 but you can tell already that he’s not going to do it. He’s still making Rocky and Rambo movies, for god’s sake.
Rating: Four stars (out of five). I added one star for Clint Eastwood being the only man brave enough to get old in front of a camera.