In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: ‘Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!’
Glass Houses, Stones, Etc.
Antonio Villaraigosa, UCLA graduate and mayor of Los Angeles, gave a commencement speech at USC last month, at which time USC generously awarded him an honorary doctorate.
This week, Villaraigosa delivered a commencement speech at UCLA, in which he made the point that UCLA, unlike USC, does not confer honorary degrees.
“You’ve got to earn your diploma from UCLA!” he said.
HA HA HA! Good one, Mr. Mayor!
Why don’t you go flunk the bar exam a few more times, genius? They don’t give that away either.
What is Life?
My wife, a non-native English speaker, is explaining her philosophy to me . . .
“Life is a journal,” she says.
“It is?”
“You take a trip,” she says.
This Just In
Avoid swimming in sewer overflow
Cut and Jog
Congressional Democrats, hoping to bridge party divides before the important midterm elections, have decided to call for withdrawal, sort of, but not really, from Iraq, as soon as possible, or maybe after we win, which we will, but maybe not. They are calling for a Senate vote on an as-of-yet imaginary bill that may or may not request politely that American troops start leaving Iraq this year, or at least consider it very strongly.
The Senate proposal, a nonbinding resolution, calls on Americans to please please please vote for Democrats. It also has the same old bullshit about troop-supporting.
iCasey
Every time one of those iPod silhouette ads comes on, my son asks can we make something like that with him in it. This weekend we tried it with Paint Shop Pro and this is the result (click to enlarge).
Father’s Day Secrets
Via PostSecret.
Father’s Day Poems
“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
“In Dreams” by Kim Addonizio
After eighteen years there’s no real grief left
for the man who was my father.
The Captain Explains His Strategy
My son’s doing a team project in 7th grade social studies. He was selected as team captain, and he’s explaining his strategy to me:
“For each part of the project, we try to have a good guy paired with an off-task guy,” he says. “Or actually, I secretly tried to do that because I’m the captain. The worst guy on the team is Kevin. Whenever he asks, “Why do we have to do it this way?” I ask him, “Why are you getting a C in this class?”
I say, “Wow, that’s pretty harsh.”
“I’m trying to make a point that if we do it his way, we’re going to get a bad grade. That’s why I was nominated as captain.”
What Makes Women Happy?
It’s not so much that [women] have to make a million choices; more that, having chosen, we are haunted by the possibility that our choices might be wrong. If we stay at home to care for our children, we worry about wasting education and dissipating talent and that no one takes us seriously. If we commit ourselves to careers, we’re tormented that our children are suffering because we’re not there to help them learn to read and we’re late for the nativity play.
As a result, we frequently try to avoid choosing at all, as if it might be possible somehow to have a full-time job, and children, and a good relationship, and friends, and a tidy house, and be thin, and wear the right clothes, and eat in the right restaurants, and possibly be having a really sexy affair as well, complete with suitable underwear… the more we achieve, the more the horizons of achievement stretch away. And we’re completely strung out and not actually doing anything properly.
Related Links
- Having it All!
Working moms are destroying the nation
Homework Follies
My son asks for help with a homework problem in math. The main point of contention with math homework is that when he asks for help, he’d like me to just do the problem for him, while I prefer to try and steer his thinking in the right direction, even though it takes a lot longer.
“This is like the problem you helped me with last night,” he says. “Let’s try not to have a one-hour conversation about it this time.”
My New Dream Girl
Somebody was retelling a Margaret Cho joke about getting a boyfriend to help out around the house. The punch line:
California Adventure
Why I Don’t Own a Cadillac Escalade
Smush Parker of the L.A. Lakers has a custom Cadillac Escalade that says SMUSHCALADE on the tailgate where it usually says ESCALADE.
I say to my son, “I wonder if I could get an Escalade with EPPSCALADE on the back.”
“You can’t even afford an Escalade and still have a good financial condition,” he says.
“I can’t?”
“No, ’cause you ain’t representin’.”
“I’m not representin’?”
“No, you ain’t wheelin’ and dealin’. You sittin’ on the block while others are out gettin’ their bling.”
Zarqawi Killed: “A Good Day’s Work”
Zarqawi . . . was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage.
If we had withdrawn from Iraq already, as the “peace” movement has been demanding, then one of the most revolting criminals of all time would have been able to claim that he forced us to do it. That would have catapulted Iraq into Stone Age collapse and instated a psychopathic killer as the greatest Muslim soldier since Saladin. As it is, the man is ignominiously dead and his dirty connections a lot closer to being fully exposed. This seems like a good day’s work to me.
People I Thought Were Dead
- George McGovern – U.S. Congressman, Senator, and Democratic presidential nominee.
Updates
- George McGovern – died 10/21/2012, age 90
The Disenchanted Forest
Somewhere at the top of the Hundred Acre Wood a little boy and his bear play. On the surface it is an innocent world, but on closer examination by our group of experts we find a forest where neurodevelopmental and psychosocial problems go unrecognized and untreated.
The authors recommend, for example, that Winnie-the-Pooh be medicated for ADHD, inattentive subtype:
I take a
PILL-tiddley pom
It keeps me
STILL-tiddley pom,
It keeps me
STILL-tiddley pom
Not
fiddling.
Additional diagnoses and treatments are offered for Pooh’s fellow forest denizens, most of whom meet DSM-IV criteria for serious mental disorders.
Antiwar Myths About Iraq Debunked
A lie told often enough becomes truth.
OH YEAH!? Not if I have anything to say about it, comrade!
Not only do lying liars rely on Lenin’s repetition principle, they rely on people being generally inattentive, uniformed and eager to believe anything consistent with their existing opinions.
I say that as someone who’s as inattentive and uninformed as anyone on most topics. But I do know a couple of things, and I set them forth herewith.
Caulfield on Books
What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. … What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
Zero-Tolerance Watch
My son informs me that we have to buy one of those old-fashioned telescoping pointers because he needs it for a presentation at school.
“Can you use a laser pointer?” I ask. “Because we actually have one of those.”
“They’re not allowed at school,” he says.