My wife and I went out for dinner . . . I took our picture with the cell phone and sent it to my son at home.
In return, he sent a picture of the dog.
Picture Exchange
Happy Birthday, Anne Frank
On her 13th birthday — June 12, 1942 — she received a diary . . .
The Girl in the Fishbowl Sunglasses
I suppose there’s a part of me that still wants the girl in the fishbowl sunglasses and Ramones T-shirt she got from an eBay vendor to invite me to a roof-deck party where a DJ is remixing music that I never heard originally, if for no other reason than it would somehow signify that the faint bags I’m beginning to notice under my eyes even after a good night’s sleep are imaginary. But they aren’t.
Who Says Creativity is Dead in Tinseltown?
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.
I keep seeing commercials during the NBA Finals for The Incredible Hulk.
Wasn’t there an Incredible Hulk movie out just a few years ago?
Why do we have to keep making Incredible Hulk movies?
Way to reach for the stars, thespians.
Shit . . .
The Price of Gas
I can remember the first time I paid $20 for a tank of gas.
I can remember the first time I paid $30.
And $40.
But I’ve recently blown through the $50, $60 and $70 barriers so fast that they don’t even seem like milestones anymore . . .
The Boneheads Who Camp Out for Apple WWDC
Our motto is “Think Different.” Not “Stand in line like a bunch of friggin sheep.”
Overheard
A 9th Grader Reviews the World Literature Canon
For his English class this year, my son read Antigone, A Doll’s House, Romeo and Juliet, Things Fall Apart, and just finished All Quiet on the Western Front.
“Everybody died,” he said. “I knew that was going to happen. All the books we read this year, everybody died. Except A Doll’s House, and that sucked more than kids in a lollipop factory.”
Our Kids Are Smarter Than Your Kids
A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . .
In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000.
Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much.
Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings.
Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students.
What is a Trans Fat?
According to the Krispy Kreme box on the receptionist’s desk this morning, they’re now making their doughnuts with zero trans fats. I read the other day that McDonald’s is serving zero trans fat french fries.
What the heck is a trans fat anyway?
This has got to be the biggest nutritional scam in history. Everyone’s advertising “zero trans fats” and yet I look around and people are fatter than ever, because this trans fat scam lets them convince themselves that eating french fries and doughnuts is actually healthy . . .
No trans fats in the doughnuts?! In that case, I’ll eat six of them!
A Wish Come True
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
Leading Horses to Water
Here’s an idea: Try leading a thirsty horse to water and see what it does. If the horse is tired, lead it to shade and a soft place to lie down. If the horse is hungry, offer it hay and oats. If the horse doesn’t need anything, maybe leave it alone.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
“If we shortened our showers by one minute, we’d save $100 a year,” my son informs me, pausing for a moment to let the news sink in. “And if we shortened our showers by two minutes, we’d save $200 a year. If we didn’t take showers at all, we could be rich!
“As for the AC, we leave it off and everybody gets one of those personal fans and points it at their face.”
“Why don’t we get the old-fashioned fold-out fans and wave them back and forth?” I ask.
“Now that’s just stupid,” he says.
Scrum Doesn’t Do Anything
In the end it doesn’t matter what names you use for your processes, good people will do good work and continuously improve what they do. So much of the discussion around Lean versus Scrum (etc.) is about marketing hype, selling consulting and training services, and cornering the market with new name-brands. . . .
Scrum is not a methodology, it is not a process. It is a simple framework underpinned by some common sense principles. Scrum offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to continuously improve the way they work. It provides a space for people to behave like human beings, with trust, respect and passion. That’s about it. But that is huge.
Another Reason I Like to Just Stay Home
ROME – Italian railway police say an American tourist was hit and killed by a train at a Rome station as he was walking on the tracks in a daze after being drugged and robbed.
Police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said Monday that 74-year-old Frank Phel from California died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station.
Arrivederci Roma!
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of
Serial Entrepreneur — I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.” What the heck is the difference between an entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur? I suppose Bill Gates is an entrepreneur and e.e. cummings’ Uncle Sol was a serial entrepreneur — farmer, chicken farmer, skunk farmer, worm farmer.
Length — For some reason, people who talk about basketball now describe players as having “great length.” Nobody says, “He’s very tall.” They say, “He’s got great length.”
News flash: People don’t have length. They have height. They even have width. But they don’t have length — except at birth and shortly thereafter, when we measure them lying down because they can’t stand up yet.
Describing a basketball player as having “great length” is as uninformative as saying, “He’s a tall black guy with long arms.”
Hockey Practice
I was watching my son’s roller hockey practice last weekend . . . during a scrimmage, he skated the puck up the rink, faked the goalie to the right, then snapped a shot into the top left corner of the net.
“Oh my gosh!” I yelled to anyone within earshot. “Just like I taught him!”
A few minutes later, he got a pass in front of the net and one-timed it so high and hard that if not for the protective netting around the top of the rink, I don’t know where it would have come down.
“I didn’t teach him that,” I said.
Go Ask Alice
One pill makes you larger . . .
A musclehead co-worker is talking to someone on the phone about nutritional supplements:
“It changes the metabolism of the . . . en-DOC-rine? . . . EN-do-CREEN? . . . system, so it releases more testosterone.”
Yeah, you should definitely take some of that. A product that claims to alter the function of bodily organs you can’t even pronounce. What could possibly go wrong?
In fact, you should go to the vitamin store right now and just gobble up everything they’ve got.
Did you ever read Alice in Wonderland? She finds a cake that says EAT ME so she eats it. Next thing you know she’s nine feet tall. Draw your own parallels . . .
Political Analysis from a 9th Grader
“It’s too bad Hillary Rodham Clinton’s name isn’t Hillary Rodman Clinton,” my son says. “Maybe she could rebound from her current situation.”
Scrum Cheat Sheet
Read this doc on Scribd: Scrum Cheat Sheet