I say to my wife, “I saw a cartoon today . . . a husband and wife are standing in their living room looking at a huge painting on the wall, a portrait of an elderly man in an armchair, and the wife says to the husband, ‘I thought he was your grandfather.'”
My wife says, “Who was the guy?”
“The wife thought he was the husband’s grandfather and the husband thought he was the wife’s grandfather.”
“So why was his picture in the house?”
We went to Souplantation for dinner tonight. I was really hungry but when we got there, there was already a line of people at the salad bar.
I hate when that happens.
Let me tell you what I did: I grabbed a tray and came in swinging, cracked a few people in the cranium, then finished them off with a serrated-edge knife from the silverware station.
It’s a crude plan, but let me tell you why it works: the element of surprise. No one goes to Souplantation expecting to be knocked over the head and stabbed . . .
. . . and one thing you don’t want to be is annoying like Dad.
If you need to explain something, try mocking it up and prototyping it rather than writing a longwinded document. An actual interface or prototype is on its way to becoming a real product. A piece of paper, on the other hand, is only on its way to the garbage can.
Mr. Obama is proposing to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends by a staggering two-thirds, moving the rate up 10 percentage points to 25%, which could curtail investment and business on Wall Street, a backbone of the city’s and state’s economy.
OK, let me get this straight . . . the stock market’s dropping, banks are failing from lack of liquidity, no one wants to invest in American companies, and Obama’s solution is to raise the capital gains tax?!
In the event of an Obama presidency, I will taking a long position in blankets, canned goods and shotgun shells . . .
It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.
Haven’t seen it. Might see it . . . not sure yet. I’ve seen the trailer though and I’ll tell you something: Heath Ledger is TERRIBLE!
That’s not acting! Put the same makeup on somebody else, give ’em a script, let ’em read the same lines . . . there’s a million people who could do the same thing.
You don’t think so? You don’t think Heath Ledger knew that? Why do you think he’s dead of an overdose?
From PostSecret:
As Ted Kennedy has spent virtually all of his personal wealth on personal consumption of mansions, private jets, women, booze, etc., any help that he has provided to Americans has come at the expense of the “forgotten man” paying taxes. Ted’s own contributions to charity have been minimal (source).
Let’s compare to Warren Buffett. . . . Buffett has spent a negligible portion of his $60+ billion in personal wealth on personal consumption, giving almost all of it away to charity.
Perhaps Buffet is “the forgotten man.” He creates jobs by the thousands. He pays taxes by the $billions. He consumes very modestly considering his means. Yet Buffett is not considered a hero here in Massachusetts, at least.
I just want to say to the American people: I am not a vicious dog, but I don’t put up with a lot of nonsense either.
— Lightning 
One thing I forgot to mention: When I was let go from IndyMac a year ago — and in each subsequent round of layoffs shrinking the workforce from 10,000 to 7,200 — it was called a “right-sizing.”
God, I hate that word.
I noticed they finally dispensed with the bullshit last week . . . when they cut another 3,800 people from the remaining 7,200, just before failing completely, the word “right-sizing” was not used . . .
Disclaimer: I used to work at IndyMac. It was poorly run and deserved to fail. They got way too much credit for their success when times were good.
Look — in a housing bubble, a monkey with a sign can sell mortgages.
Then when things started to turn ugly, they took the approach of trying to manage the stock price rather than managing the company. They started up a blog called The IMB Report, the purpose of which was to provide timely spin control on all the bad news about the company.
The title — The IMB Report — gives away the game. The IndyMac Report would be a much more obvious choice; IMB is the stock ticker symbol.
In shutting down the bank, the Office of Thrift Supervision said this:
The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York. The letter expressed concerns about IndyMac’s viability. In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.
“This institution failed today due to a liquidity crisis,” OTS Director John Reich said. “Although this institution was already in distress, I am troubled by any interference in the regulatory process.”
Here’s Schumer’s response:
If OTS had done its job as regulator and not let IndyMac’s poor and loose lending practices continue, we wouldn’t be where we are today … Instead of pointing false fingers of blame, OTS should start doing its job to prevent future IndyMacs.
What a smug prick. Other than grandstanding, there was no reason to make those letters public.
Let’s say you’re concerned about the health of your elderly uncle, who has a weak heart.
Do you:
Because EppsNet is sweeping the globe like nuclear fallout, I sometimes get comments like this one, where it’s hard to tell what’s spam and what isn’t.
Often it comes down to this — if the person is a native English speaker, I think they must be putting me on. One clue is to check the IP address.
For example, the above comment was posted from Mauritius, an small island nation off the coast of Madagascar. While English is the official language and French predominates in media and business, the most widely spoken language is Mauritian Creole, considered the lingua franca, or native tongue, of the country.
Verdict: Valid comment.
A co-worker tells me that when she was growing up in Seattle, people did their own yardwork . . . not like here in Southern California where that work is done by Mexicans for hire.
I told her we used to mow our own lawns in SoCal too. In fact, if you like A Christmas Story, you would have loved our neighbor next door. He was like Darren McGavin, but instead of the furnace, he’d curse at his beaten-down jalopy of a lawn mower. And not in the basement — right out on his front lawn.
I mowed my own lawn at the first house I ever owned. Pride of ownership! And this was not in Irvine, where I live now and the lawns are the size of postage stamps, it was on a large lot in La Verne.
Of course, I soon tired of it and paid a Mexican to do it while I sipped a refreshing iced tea . . .
My owner’s wife and son were gone for a week, so he and I got to spend a lot of quality time together. We are closer than ever!
I even got to sleep on the bed at night, which is usually not allowed.
Don’t tell anyone!
— Lightning
Fed to crack down on shady lending practices
IndyMac, my former employer, laid off another 3,800 people this week, more than half the remaining work force. I got the axe myself almost exactly a year ago.
Prediction — at job interviews, these people will hear something I heard a lot during my own interviews: “We’re seeing a lot of applicants from the mortgage industry.”
Yeah . . . tell me something I didn’t know.
The Elite Mortgage Daily Blog has helpfully provided a brief history of IndyMac stock:
My family is back from Thailand . . .
At 6:30 this morning, I’m awakened by the dog pawing on my bedroom door. I get up to see what’s going on and find my son — who is never up at 6:30 in the morning but is still operating on Thailand time — playing a video game in the family room.
“Rise and shine, parental!” he says. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?”
“I was up till 1 a.m. getting you home from the airport so I was planning to sleep until 7.”
Meanwhile, the dog is trying to get someone’s attention by jumping around next to his food bowl.
“Why is he jumping around like that?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” the boy says.
“Has he eaten?”
“No.”
“Mystery solved, Encyclopedia Brown. I’m going back to bed.”
A few minutes later, the boy inexplicably shows up in my room.
“Mom,” he says, “when the clothes are done in the washer, do you just put them in the dryer?”
“Did I mention I wanted to sleep till 7?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “Don’t set it on High though. Set it on Normal.”
A minute later, he’s back.
“There is no Normal,” he says.
“You’re telling me,” I say.
Outer-space sex carries complications
Hey NASA, I’m no aeronautical engineer but what I’d do is to tether the woman to a stationary object so she can’t move, just like I do here on Earth.
Uh . . . with her consent, of course . . .
Simplify, simplify, simplify!
Thoreau’s Walden had a profound impact on my thinking. It’s hard to achieve the kind of transcendent simplicity he describes when you live with other people, as I do, but if your family is out of town for a week, as mine is, here are some things you might want to try.
When my wife is here, we have to sort and bag bottles, cans and plastic separately. Later on that noise! Everything goes straight into the garbage! Simplify, simplify, simplify!
Drink liquids from the container and eat food straight out of whatever you cooked it in. If you have to clean an eating utensil, put it in your mouth, press your lips together, and pull it back out.
Why walk all the way to the bathroom if there’s a bottle, can or sink close at hand? A real time-saver!
