What Makes Women Happy?

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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.

— Geraldine Bedell

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Homework Follies

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Boy doing math problems

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.”

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Why I Don’t Own a Cadillac Escalade

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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.”

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Zarqawi Killed: “A Good Day’s Work”

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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.

— Christopher Hitchens

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The Disenchanted Forest

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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.

— “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne”

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.

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Antiwar Myths About Iraq Debunked

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A lie told often enough becomes truth.
— Lenin

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.

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Caulfield on Books

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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.

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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Best Place to Hide an International Thug?

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UNITED NATIONS, May 19 — A U.N. anti-torture panel Friday called on the United States to close its prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to expressly ban controversial interrogation techniques, and to halt the transfer of detainees to countries with a history of abuse and torture.

— The Washington Post

Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon is considering a plan to transfer its 460 ‘Gitmo’ detainees to the U.N., “where a group of international thugs, still awaiting charges, would not attract so much attention.”

— ScrappleFace

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Antipattern: Bore People to Death With Your Job Ads

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A common piece of advice to job seekers is: Don’t focus your resume and cover letter on what you want; focus on how you offer what the hiring company wants. This advice also applies in reverse to a hiring company writing a job ad, but in practice, it’s almost never followed, which is why this ad for a position at the Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF) jumped out at me:

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My Dog Sends a Bark Out to His Mom for Mother’s Day

by  on Lightning
 
Lightning on the Sofa

Hi Mom!

Happy Mothers Day!

I can’t believe another whole year has gone by already! Seven dog years! LOL!

My owners take really good care of me. They take me to the dog park here in Irvine almost every day. I am very loving, but when some dog at the park runs up on me and tries to get all dominant, I use my illegal ninja moves on him, especially if it’s a big dog, like a Great Dane.

You would be proud of me! Thanks for teaching me to always stand up for myself.

Miss you . . .

Love, Lightning

P.S. I wrote this post myself, but my owner helped me with the HTML.

P.P.S. Say hi to Dad.

— Lightning paw

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Meet my New Stockbroker

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I’m looking at my brokerage account on the laptop, with my son, age 12, watching over my shoulder.

“I know your account number,” he says, reading it off the screen.

“I’m not sure how that’s going to help you,” I say.

“I can hack in and trade stocks,” he says. “‘It’s going up! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! Now it’s going down! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! It’s going down some more! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL!’ It’s a trading frenzy! . . .”

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The Cat in the Hat as a Management Consultant

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The Cat in the Hat cover image

This little tale, which appears to be a book for children, is actually a clever evocation of what happens to a corporation when a management consultant is hired by absent, clueless senior management to evaluate its organizational structure and to effect change. Beginning slowly, the Cat proceeds to take everything apart, make a total mess and get everybody in potentially the worst trouble in the world — all at no personal cost to itself. By the time the Cat leaves, it has frightened everybody, and very little has changed except the mind-set of the protagonists, which has been forever disrupted and rattled.

— Stanley Bing, reviewing The Cat in the Hat

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Better, Faster and Cheaper?

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Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.

— Guy Kawasaki

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My Hair is Too Short

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The girl at Fantastic Sam’s cut my hair too short. She was telling me about a car accident she had yesterday and I asked her, “Were you drunk at the time?”

“In the morning?!” she yelled. “Hel-lo!? I was drinking coffee!”

O-kay, like, overreaction! Probably in major denial mode, and does in fact have a serious drinking problem. And like I said, she took it out on my hair.

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