Chick’s vs. Dick’s

 

Last year, Dick’s Sporting Goods bought Chick’s Sporting Goods. According to the Orange County Register, the four Chick’s locations in Orange County, including the one in Tustin that I shop at, will all be replaced by Dick’s by the second half of 2009.

I’m not happy about this. Oh, I know there are people who like Dick’s, and there are people who are 50-50 on the matter and can go either way, but there are also a lot of people like me who really prefer Chick’s.

In fact, I’ve been doing Chick’s for so long that I don’t see how I’m ever going to get used to Dick’s.

Sarah Palin

 
Sarah Palin

As Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street:

You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!

Finally, a breath of fresh Alaskan air!

Not yet another Ivy League lawyer, yet another warmed-over political hack, yet another condescending, posturing, preening, pandering, pontificating blowhard who’s lost sight of the fact that politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them trillions of dollars to spend any way they want to . . . if we didn’t hold them to such ridiculously low standards of accountability, it might be easier to remember who works for whom.

And hockey moms are hot! Why? Because hockey’s an expensive sport, so hockey dads have to knock down a pretty good income, which in our materialistic society allows them to be more selective in the spouse department.

My wife is sort of a hockey mom, in that she has a kid who plays hockey, even though she hardly ever goes to the games or the practices.

But she supports McCain-Palin! And she’s looking forward to seeing Mrs. Palin kick Joe Biden’s ass in the vice-presidential debate.

“Argue with a woman?!” she shouts, shaking both fists in the air. “HA HA HA! You are just going to lose and lose!”

What We Choose

 

I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.

Little-Known College Football Fact of the Week

 

Kentucky and Louisville play each other for the Governor’s Cup.

Why the governor needs to wear a cup I don’t know, nor can I figure out why anybody else would want it.

“Congratulations, boys!” the governor says, reaching into his trousers. “I’ve got a little something for you. And it ain’t fried chicken!”

How I Met Your Mother

 

From Michelle “There is no safety net for anybody” Obama’s DNC speech:

You know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he’d grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working class folks just like my parents, and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did.

Well . . . if you take all that at face value — and why wouldn’t you? — it only goes to show how shallow I am, because what struck me when I first met my wife was what a nice ass she had.

Thoughts on the DNC

 

I never have been able to buy into the whole liberal worldview — as expressed by Michelle “Our souls are broken in this nation” Obama and James “We are an 80 percent wrong-track country” Carville — where nobody ever has a nice day, everything is always wrong, vote for us and we’ll fix it all immediately . . . then not only do they not fix anything, they actually make everything worse, taking away another batch of precious freedoms and hard-earned dollars in the process . . .

I Love Money

 

As my kid and I were watching Beverly Hills Cop on VH1 last night, we kept seeing ads for a show called I Love Money, in which fat, unattractive people are having a spitting contest for distance.

Two questions: What is the target market for this — fat, ugly spitters and the people who love them? And a question I wonder about a lot: Were people this stupid before television?

A Business Model for Selling Crack

 

My wife loves to keep bags from the grocery store. Why does she love to keep bags from the grocery store? Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better if you haven’t been drinking tequila all afternoon like I have.

My son walks into the kitchen . . .

He says, “We’ve got enough bags here to open our own store.”

“Good idea!” I reply. “You know what we’re going to sell? All the crap laying around in your room.”

“For a second,” he says, “I thought you said ‘crack.'”

“Crack . . . hey, that’s a good idea too! Ordinarily, you want to buy crack, you’ve got to go hang out on a street corner in some undesirable location. We’ll bring upscale ambiance to the crack business. ‘Paper or plastic?’ Who would suspect you’re toting crack around in that Trader Joe’s bag?”

You Gotta Have Heart

 

My son’s going into 10th grade and he’s started to go out in boy-girl groups . . .

“Whoever he has for a girlfriend,” my wife says, “has to have a good heart. Has to be very giving. Because he’s an only child so he’s used to it being all about him.”

“Do you think you have a good heart?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“You don’t think you’re a little bit too aggressively angry pretty much every day?”

“That’s not about heart.”

“What is it?”

“You don’t think you’re a little too annoying? Same thing.”

Watching Olympic Women’s Weightlifting with a 10th Grader

 

“These women look worse than the Australian basketball team,” the boy says.

“Some of them would be cute,” I say, “if they lost about 150 pounds.”

An eHarmony commercial comes on . . .

We prescreen candidates for compatibility . . .

“Good,” the boy says, “because I don’t want to date any women weightlifters.”

Turn the Demands Around

 

Managers will often demand proof that questing for quality will have some measurable “return on investment.” That’s an easy one. Just agree to provide ROI numbers using the same system they currently use. No such system exists.

When a manager demands that you justify your efforts, simply ask her the same in reverse. How does she justify her current methods?

You Have to Explain Something to a Computer

 

When you’re doing programming, you have to explain something to a computer, which is dumb. When you’re writing a document for a human being to understand, the human being will look at it and nod his head and say, “Yeah, this makes sense.” But there are all kinds of ambiguities and vagueness that you don’t realize until you try to put it into a computer. Then all of a sudden, almost every five minutes as you’re writing the code, a question comes up that wasn’t addressed in the specification. “What if this combination occurs?” It just didn’t occur to the person writing the design specification. When you’re faced with doing the implementation, a person who has been delegated the job of working from a design would have to say, “Well, hmm, I don’t know what the designer meant by this.”

It’s so hard to do the design unless you’re faced with the low-level aspects of it, explaining it to a machine instead of to another person.

— Donald Knuth, Communications of the ACM 58, 8 (Aug. 2008)

The Most Famous Person I Ever Met

 

I was at Juice It Up again today and the same girl was at the register.

“That was Sugar Ray Leonard yesterday,” she said.

“How do you know,” I asked.

“He came back in later. I asked him, ‘Are you famous?’ and he said, ‘I was.’ I said, ‘Do you mind if I ask your name?’ and he said ‘Sugar Ray Leonard.'”

So Olympic gold medalist and American icon Sugar Ray Leonard is now officially the most famous person I ever “met” — even if college girls and suburban hausfraus have no idea who he is.

(I saw Rod Stewart having dinner once at the Hotel Bel-Air but he’s not even a real American . . .)