We stayed on Route 66 as much as we could on a recent family drive to Arizona. The Mother Road has long since been bypassed by the interstate highway system, but long stretches of it are still driveable, including hundreds of miles in California and Arizona.
We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . .
Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it?
For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau:
“I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.”
“Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain.
“I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said.
“You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –”
“HEY, LOOK!” my son yells. “IT’S A BUSH!”
“– of the American Southwest.”
I joined my son’s fantasy football league because he asked me to, although the low esteem in which I hold fantasy football leagues is only reinforced by the fact that the league is populated by all of the nerdiest kids he knows. The draft is today.
“Have you given any thought to who you’re taking with the fourth pick?” my son asks me.
“Not really,” I say.
“Are you telling me you haven’t done any preparation at all?” he asks in disbelief. He’s been doing mock drafts for a week.
“Yeah, that’s about right.”
“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!” he informs me.
It’s going to be a long season . . .
My son’s sitting in the family room playing the new Madden NFL 07. His computer-controlled kicker misses two extra points, after which the other team’s computer-controlled kicker makes a 50-yard field goal.
“Oh my gosh!” he yells. “Can you say ‘racist’?”
He’s a mixed-race kid — his mom is Asian — and he treats every slight as a racial issue. I think he’s kidding most of the time.
One feature of Madden 07 is that when there’s a break in the action, it pops up player profiles — photos and career blurbs — of old school players that, for the most part, the boy has never heard of.
“Fred Biletnikoff!? Looks like a stuck-up white boy to me! OHHHH! WOOOOOO!”
My son’s got a fantasy football league with some of his friends and he asked me to join, so I’ve got to think of a team name. I thought about using Two-Minute Drill With Your Mom, except you can see how it might lead to a physical confrontation with one of the other kids’ dads . . .
As for Hitler, he comes in for a lot of criticism — much of it justified, in my opinion — but at least he did something with his life. He didn’t just sit around laughing at pictures of cats, like a simpleton.
Irvine police are investigating a possible hate crime that occurred early Saturday morning in the gated Turtle Ridge community.
Officers arrived around 6:10 a.m. and discovered a car parked on Rose Trellis had been painted with race-related graffiti.
The car belongs to an African-American family that lives there.
Now that’s a shocking piece of news. You mean to say there are black people living in Irvine?!
My wife just read me a news item about a worker who was trapped in a vat of chocolate for two hours.
“Really?!” I said. “Dark, milk or semisweet? Look, you think that’s bad, this guy should try working with some of the morons that I have to work with in the IT industry on a daily basis. In two weeks, he’ll welcome the opportunity to drown in a vat of chocolate. No sympathy here, candy man.
“Now . . . what else is happening in the world? . . .”
Maybe you’ve noticed that most software sucks.
Maybe you’ve wondered — if you work in the software business — why our aspirations are so low compared with the possibilities of our profession.
Maybe you’ve wondered what, if anything, could be done about this.
Here’s a fun story about the benefits of really holding people accountable for the shoddy quality of their work.
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote about King Xerxes, who in the 5th Century BC ordered a bridge of boats to be built across the Hellespont:
A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army and had them beheaded. In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for the bridge. It has been observed by ancient writers that the second bridge was a very good bridge.
Res ipsa loquitor.
Grandma died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
Just kidding; it was yesterday, but I never get tired of that joke.
Grandma was 94 years old. She was quick-witted almost to the end.
She died at St. Jude Medical Center, the same hospital where I was born. She was 47 when I was born, the same age I am now. It’s the circle of life.
Grandma was a Presbyterian. Everyone else in the family, except me, is Catholic. The Catholic chaplain at St. Jude anointed Grandma before she died. I’m not sure what that means, but I know that my mom asked the priests at her parish to do it and they wouldn’t because Grandma was not a Catholic.
“He said he was deeply sorry,” Andrew savagely caricatured the inflection, “but it was simply a rule of the Church.”
“Some church,” he snarled. “And they call themselves Christians. Bury a man who’s a hundred times the man he’ll ever be, in his stinking, swishing black petticoats, and a hundred times as good a man too, and ‘No, there are certain requests and recommendations I cannot make Almighty God for the repose of this soul, for he never stuck his head under a holy-water tap.’ Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs of the Cross, and all that disgusting hocus-pocus, and you come to one simple, single act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He’s not a member of our little club.
“I tell you, Rufus, it’s enough to make a man puke up his soul.”
One of Grandma’s brothers, who died at the age of 21 many, many years ago, is reputed in family circles to have had the highest IQ ever tested. Some family members believe he was the world’s smartest man, with the possible exception of Einstein.
How did he die? He stepped in front of a moving car.
True story.
There’s more to life than a high IQ, you see. I, for example, am a person of average intelligence, but I always look both ways before stepping into the street.
As we were walking out of the hospital last night, my wife, who’s Asian, said, “I’m not much about dying.”
“I’m not sure what that means,” I said.
“Chinese doesn’t like it,” she said.
She insisted on stopping at a restroom on the way out to wash her hands, not because of germs, but to get the spirits off. She made me do the same.
“You can’t bring that into the house,” she explained.
When we got home, she made me take all my clothes off and run them through the washer.
Beware metrics. We are enamored with them from the days of waterfall, when we couldn’t tell what was going on until the end of the project. So, we devised metrics to attempt to read the tea leaves of what might be going on so we could get early warnings. Earned value is a great example of this. Also, we developed metrics to prove that things were improving to our customers even though over 1/2 of our projects failed. See, we are getting better, so leave us alone and please don’t fire us.
We made mistakes. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today: While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version No. 5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan–for months.
This is a picture of me, Lightning Epps, at the Irvine dog park. I love the dog park! Even though I’m not a puppy anymore — I’m almost 3 years old — I still like to chase and play a little bit.
The bigger dogs try to dominate me sometimes. Usually I can stop them with just a look, but not always.
The puggle in this picture, for example, kept blindsiding me and trying to climb on top of me. I chalked that up to youthful exuberance for a few moments, but when he kept doing it, I had to knock him down, leap on top of him, and sink my fangs into his neck. Not hard, just enough to reestablish the natural order of things.
I don’t instigate this stuff, but I don’t put up with a lot of nonsense either. You know what they say — it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, etc. . . .
— Lightning 
“Is Fidel Castro dead yet?” my son asks.
“No,” I say, “as far as I know he’s still alive. Why do you care?”
“Fidel Castro is the most Communistic Communist in the history of Communist Communism. And I have him in a death pool.”
“When do you need him to die?”
“Like . . . right now.”
“Do you have anyone else in your death pool?”
Is it all a dream, yes, perhaps a dream. . . . Death, its closeness. . . . Was I in prison once? I cannot remember. At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.
Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain. We’re not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It’s a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.
According to Brizendine, thoughts about sex enter women’s brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.
Both numbers sound low to me. Sexy sexy sex sex sex . . . (sorry, thinking out loud) . . .
We are so unprofessional it is incredible. The legacy of waterfall is so dominant it is scary.
From Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn:
