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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I Made a Mistake on the Hockey Jerseys

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OK, I made a mistake on the hockey jerseys . . .

My son’s playing on a new team this season so I had to order new jerseys for him. They asked me what name I wanted to put on the back and I don’t know why, but I gave his first name instead of his last name.

It’s the only thing he talked about all weekend.

“I had my first name on my jersey in second grade!” he said. (He’s in seventh now.) “Does Steve Yzerman have ‘Steve'” — he draws out the “e” sound to make it sound extra ridiculous — “on the back of his jersey? NO! ‘GOAL, NUMBER 19! STEEEEVE!'”

Every time I tried to talk to him about something else, he’d look at me with a goofy blank stare on his face.

“Did you understand what I just said?” I’d ask.

“Does Teemu Selanne have TEEMU on the back of his jersey? . . .”

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Private Military Companies Better Than the UN?

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As the international community dithers over Darfur, private military companies say they’ve got what it takes to stop the carnage, if only someone would hire them.

— The Boston Globe

Why is that not a good idea? Could they possibly do a worse job than the UN?

OK, you could raise objections regarding accountability and the responsibility of the international community, but . . .

”This came up a long time ago. People were saying that if we use private sector in the Congo, the international community will never get its act together,” says industry spokesman Doug Brooks. ”But that was 3 million dead Congolese ago. The international community isn’t going to wake up no matter how many people you kill. I think that it would be a good idea for the international community to get its act together. But we’ve got to find another way.”

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Why God Builds Gated Communities

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I’m looking over this flyer for a church group meeting that my son’s going to next week. It’s being held at a member’s house in a gated community, so the flyer has directions, as well as an entry code for the security gate.

“Jesus wouldn’t like gated communities,” I say. “He was very welcoming to all people. This is racist. They’re trying to keep out blacks and Mexicans.”

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How Homework Gets Done at My House

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Catherine, Called Birdy cover image

My son’s reading Catherine, Called Birdy for his 7th grade Language Arts class. The book is set in medieval England and written in the form of a 14-year-old girl’s diary.

“It’s got no theme, no plot, no flow, no fun, no nothing!” the boy says. “It’s gay!”

I sympathize with him — it reads like a 13th century MySpace blog — but that doesn’t change the fact that he has to read it.

“I refuse to read this book!” he says.

“You can’t,” his mom replies.

“I have a restraining order! Catherine has to stay 10 feet away from me.” And he tosses the book into the middle of the living room.

I look over at my wife . . . her eyes are now closed and she’s biting on her lower lip, accompanied by a slow, dramatic intake of breath, all of which suggests that clowntime is just about over . . .

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