From Scott Wolf Inside USC:
In 1926, MGM called USC and sent actress Greta Garbo down to pose for some publicity photos with the track team.
Garbo initially refused until MGM deducted $25 from her salary, which convinced her to head to campus and don a USC track singlet.
From xkcd:
The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
Bob Kerrey’s WSJ opinion piece is the best thinking I’ve seen lately by a Democratic politician on the war in Iraq . . .
Puggles are cute, but a puggle is still not as good as a pug . . .
A day care worker in Tulsa, Okla., was looking after eight children ages 7 and younger.
One of the kids, a 2-year-old boy, would not be quiet for nap time, so she bound his hands and covered his mouth with masking tape.
That silenced him — permanently. The boy died after several days on life support.
I never did trust people enough to have them raise my kid. Never did.
Now if you were to respond that the average day care worker is no less capable than the average American mom of raising a child without killing it, I’d say — you’re probably right!
I’m just talking about my kid . . .
I thought the corniest thing I’d ever heard when I got here was when they kept talking about this family that we had and I’d been at several other universities and I said, look they’re all the same. But they really believe it, they mean it and they live it and I’ve gotten caught up in that and the traditions and the band and I really don’t want to coach anyplace else. This is where I’d like to finish my career.
Fight On!
We’re having dinner at Chili’s, and long before the food arrives, my kid has already informed me that I should have ordered meat instead of a salad, and that he can’t believe how quickly I ordered a refill on my soda.
“Are you going to micromanage the whole meal for me?” I ask. “I can’t see how it makes any difference to you what I order or how fast I drink my soda, but somehow it does.”
“It shows how much I care,” he says.
My son and I are watching a Citibank commercial in which a woman in Japan drops her son off for his first day of school.
As his mom starts to walk away, the boy looks back anxiously . . .
“What’s the Asian kid nervous about?” my son says. “He’s going to get better grades than the rest of the kids anyway. Oh wait, all the other kids are Asian too. Ouch.”
My primary complaint about scheduling is simple: that people are willing to proceed as if they can look into a crystal ball about the future. They act as if they can plan out the future. As if they can control the future. It’s the control part that really gets to me. It bugs me because it’s a false belief. It’s simply not true. You can not control the future, and the belief you can is just so destructive of creativity, teamwork, spontaneity and interaction among one another. This false belief is just a complete energy zapper, an unwholesome energy sink.
This transcript of a Jim and Michele McCarthy podcast is the best discussion of scheduling I’ve read today, maybe ever . . .
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.
A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It’s called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn’t blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.
At the time the book [Brave New World] was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.
In memory of the Rev. Falwell, here’s one of my favorite Woody Allen quotes, from Hannah and Her Sisters
But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third-rate con men telling the poor suckers that they speak with Jesus. And to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what is going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.
Farewell, Falwell!
I was telling my son about a woman in Arkansas who’s about to give birth to her 17th child. Her oldest is 19.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” the boy asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “but it can’t hurt that much if you’re willing to do it 17 times. It can’t hurt as much as, say, a kick in the groin, because after I took one kick in the groin, I wouldn’t sign up to take 16 more.”
“The pain goes away, you know.”
“Are you suggesting that I would be willing to take 17 kicks in the groin?”
“Over a 19-year period, yeah.”
“Agree to disagree.”
Originally uploaded by david888lee.
One challenge we’re facing is that some high level executives are now concerned over how the project is progressing and want regular updates–they are used to Microsoft Project GANTT charts, excel charts with deadlines and stop lighting (e.g. yellow light, we’re behind schedule but it’s not critical).
How do we map our agile process into the traditional project plans used by upper management for their corporate planning?
At the Deep Agile seminar he and I did, Jeff Sutherland told of being asked for a GANTT chart or such. He asked the execs in question how accurate those charts were. They replied that they were never accurate. He declined to do them.
Originally uploaded by laputa.
Last weekend, we had dinner at a Chinese place with some of my in-laws. As usual, my son and I were left at one end of the table to entertain ourselves while the rest of the group chatted with each other in Thai.
Near the end of the meal, the boy started reading through the fortune cookies and ad libbing the messages: “‘If you’re reading this, you’re most likely Asian, which means your mom will yell at you a lot.’ ‘This fortune cookie is stale. You’re not going to like it.’ ‘You will fulminate in 10 seconds.'”
“Fulminate?!” I said.
“It was one of my vocabulary words.”
