When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.
“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.
“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”
At these words Banzan became enlightened.
Ambidextrous
My wife, a non-native English speaker, asks, “What does ‘ambidextrous’ mean?”
My son says, “It means you’re just as comfortable with one side as the other.”
“So it means gay,” she says.
Boring in a Good Way
A friend of a friend has started dating a guy with a history of mental problems, including an in-patient hospitalization.
That should be exciting.
Some guys are boring. Me, for example. My wife tells me all the time how boring I am . . .
I remember a few years ago, a woman came over to clean our house — a white woman, which is unusual in Southern California. She was telling my wife that her alcoholic ex-husband was in jail, as a result of which, she wasn’t getting any financial support from him and had to take up house cleaning to make some money.
Now that’s excitement! You hook up with a guy who you don’t know if or when he’s going to be home, how drunk he’s going to be when he gets there . . . maybe he’ll end up in jail and you can spend your life cleaning other people’s toilets to keep your head and your kids’ heads above water.
Me on the other hand — like I said, I’m boring. I roll my ass out of bed every morning in a very predictable manner and head off to work. I come home directly afterwards without stopping off at any of the local watering holes. I provide a predictable income stream. On evenings and weekends, I’m available for family activities.
So I’m boring, but I like to think of myself as boring in a good way. Boring is not always bad, and exciting is not always good, particularly if it involves being institutionalized in some fashion . . .
Yin and Yang
Yang never drops its sword until death has made its decision who to take. Yin hopes that the other guy will die of a heart attack while he’s stabbing you.
Conversations with a 7th Grader
I was driving my son to school one day when the following conversation ensued.
ME: Do you have any exams today?
HIM: No . . . and why do you call them “exams”? We have “tests” and “quizzes,” not [in a dopey voice] “exams” — or whatever they called them back in the 1800s.
If he thinks that comments like that are going to put me off my game, he must have me confused with his mom.
ME: Do you have any exams tomorrow?
Orange County Fair
[UPDATE: Macphoto1 has a better set of OC Fair photos than mine.]
Why Good Projects Fail Anyway
A September 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Projects Fail Anyway” by Nadim Matta and Ronald Ashkenas (free summary here), says that the high failure rate of major projects — not just IT projects — suggests that either these projects are inherently unmanageable or else something is wrong with the standard approach to project management.
Matta and Ashkenas argue that the standard project management model is designed to control “execution risk” — the risk that designated activities won’t be carried out properly — by means of project plans, timelines, and budgets, but ignores two other equally important risks:
Mulholland Drive
What Does Merriam Webster Know?
My son picks up a pair of my pants that I’ve tossed on the bed, puts them on, and pulls out the front of the waistband. Because he weighs 60 pounds less than I do, there’s a lot of extra room there.
“I lost 60 pounds by eating at Subway,” he announces. Then in a gangsta voice he adds, “You fat. You ain’t got the abdo-min-als like I got.”
“The word is pronounced ab-dom-inals,” I say.
“That’s in the real dictionary,” he says, still with the gangsta voice. “But what does Merriam Webster know? He a playa hater.”
How Extortionists Get Their Start
A commercial for You, Me and Dupree — or maybe it was Little Man — comes on the TV and I say to my son, “That looks like a real jackass-o-rama.”
“Put a quarter in the swear jar,” he says.
We don’t have a swear jar.
“OK — first of all,” I say, “‘jackass’ is not a swear word. It’s the name of an animal. And second, where did you get the idea of a swear jar?”
“They’re available in catalogs.”
“What would we do with the money that goes into the swear jar?”
“Give it to me.”
Safe is Risky, Risky is Safe
Via Kathy Sierra, an illustration of Seth Godin‘s “safe is risky, risky is safe” maxim.
A guy in Colorado goes rock climbing. Meanwhile, his parked car gets crushed by a gigantic — and I mean gigantic (you’ve got to see the picture) — boulder.
Administrivia
So much of our developers’ time is wasted by managerial fiat that some days they can’t get a damn thing done. One manager asked me in exasperation “Why can’t my people ever get through their work on time?” And my answer, after observing his organization for a while was that they couldn’t get through their work because most days they never even got to their work. They were too busy doing all the administrivia that he and the organization had imposed upon them.
Hot Diggety Dog
I urge Nathan’s to allow canines to enter next year’s contest; then the world will see some real eating.
Pug Puppy with Beer
Via Cute Overload:
The Weaker Sex?
My son and I are eating lunch at Subway when a group of teenage girls comes in. I notice that in the process of pushing one another through the door, one of the girls has dropped a hat on the sidewalk.
“Hey, girls,” I say. “One of you dropped a hat outside.”
“Oh, that’s mine,” one of the girls says. “Thanks.” And she goes out to pick it up.
“You see the way I saved those damsels in distress?” I say to the boy, who’s about the same age as the girls. “Try to learn something from that.”
“Why?” he says.
“Because you’ve got to take care of girls. They’re the weaker sex.”
“Mom would kill you if she heard that.”
He’s right about that. His mom is extremely volatile and always on high alert for slights, real or perceived.
“I’m gonna tell her,” he says, nodding and taking a bite of his sandwich. “Then we’ll see who’s weaker . . .”
Why 12-Year-Olds Are Not Allowed to Drive
We’re at a stop sign on 6th St. in San Pedro, waiting to cross Pacific Ave., a busy street with multiple lanes of traffic in both directions.
We’ve been waiting for an opening for quite a while when my son says, “You gotta go Tokyo Drift on these pansies.”
I Am 90 Percent Confident!
If by “90 percent confident” you mean “30 percent confident.”
Key takeaway:
We are conditioned to believe that estimates expressed as narrow ranges are more accurate than estimates expressed as wider ranges. We believe that wide ranges make us appear ignorant or incompetent. The opposite is usually the case.
No Solicitators
My wife sells insurance products to businesses, which sometimes requires in-person “cold calls.”
She stopped in to a business today and asked the woman at the desk if she might speak with the manager.
“Didn’t you see the sign?” the woman asked.
“No. What did it say?”
“‘No Solicitators.'”
Did I mention that at least one of the people in this conversation is not a native English speaker?
“I’m not a solicitator,” my wife said. “I’m here to help your business.”
Happy ending: She did get an appointment to speak with the manager, but she was still unhappy about one thing.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe she called me a solicitator . . .”
A Modern Stone Age Family
We finally caved in and got my son a new cell phone. The one he had was a very old model where you had to pull the antenna up manually.
He used to say things like, “This phone must have been invented by a primitive Stone Age family. ‘Hey, Barney! Come here and look at this new communication device I invented!'”
“Actually, the Flintstones were a modern Stone Age family,” I reminded him.
“Then it was invented by a normal Stone Age family. Fred Flintstone probably used it as a backup to his regular phone, which was a bird, or a rock with a hole in it.”
On the plus side — and this was sort of an unintentional stroke of genius on my part — he didn’t rack up a lot of minutes on the old phone because he was ashamed to be seen with it.
Sweet Land of Liberty
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.