Sun Microsystems Inc. said co-founder Scott McNealy will give up the job of chief executive to the No. 2 person at the company, Jonathan Schwartz, a historic transition for a computer maker facing stiff pressure to cut costs and boost revenue.
So long, funny man!
My kid’s explaining World of Warcraft to me . . . if I understand it correctly, it’s like an old-fashioned game of Capture the Flag, but with some killing. And yet as I’m watching him play it, it looks more like World of Running Pointlessly Through a Forest. There’s no warcraft, no nothing.
“Dude,” he says, “that’s because I’m at Level 6. When you get to, like, Level 19, there’s more warfare.”
“Maybe it should be called World of Jogging Aimlessly Through the Fields Picking Flowers Like a Girl Until You Get to Level 19,” I suggest.
“You don’t pick flowers, stupid. You quest.”
My kid had a deck of cards in my car last night and lost the king of hearts. Today, he searched the car and found it, but in the meantime, he’s lost the rest of the deck.
“Know any card games you can play with one card?” he asks. “How about Go Fish? ‘Got any kings?’ ‘Crap!'”
Here’s how my wife describes me and the pug: an old man and a boring dog. But the dog doesn’t insult the old man, and that’s why the old man likes the dog . . .
One of my son’s friends is over and all of a sudden he says out of nowhere, to no one in particular: “Kids say the darnedest things!”
“They certainly do!” I say. “I wish they’d knock that off. In fact, at the top of my list of kids who say the darndest things and should really just shut up is you.”
“I pity the fool who talks calumny about me,” my son informs me.
I question his pronunciation of the word “calumny.”
“I pronounced it right,” he says, “but I’m down wid it either way. I’m apathetic about it.”
OK . . . call me Kreskin, but I’m predicting that a new list of vocabulary words just came out at school.
My boy repeats something he just heard on the Angels-Twins telecast: “The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.”
Sensing a teaching moment, I ask him, “Do you know who Hubert H. Humphrey is?”
“No,” he says. “But you do, so it’s all right.”
My son’s looking over a Guy Kawasaki blog post that I printed out . . .
“What’s this gay Kawasaki stuff?” he asks.
“It’s Guy Kawasaki,” I say. “It’s somebody’s name.”
“Guy Kawasaki is someone’s name?! What a loser! Hey, Guy! How’s it going, Guy? That guy over there is a pretty cool guy, don’t you think so, Guy? His parents must be losers too. Who names a kid Guy? Congratulations, it’s a guy!”
My son’s got a seemingly endless number of ways to answer no to the question “Are you done with your homework yet?”
Some recent examples:
— Pretty much all done, yeah.
— Yes I am! (Long pause) Except for a little reading…
— What?
We’re having dinner at the Irvine Souplantation when my kid notices a posted sign: We Cannot be Responsible for Lost or Stolen Items.
“Oh really?” he says. “What if they’re your items? Can I walk out of here with this cup? How about some plates and silverware?”
“I see your point,” I say. “That soft-serve yogurt machine would look great in our kitchen . . .”
“Give me money or give me death! And if you give me death, I’m going to give you death, so I recommend giving me money.
“And if you kill me, when Mom gets home you’re going to have to make up some lame excuse like ‘Somebody broke into the house and killed him.’ So again, I recommend just giving me the money.”
Two men within a mast length of Rick Hedrick’s homemade 32-foot sailboat have toiled away on their boats for 30 years each. Another for 25 years. Another recently died before his life’s work saw the briny sea.
By comparison, Hedrick, 61, of San Clemente, has practically set a land-speed record. He only had to give up 17 years – working every weekend and two or three nights a week after work to complete his life’s dream. . . .
“Yes, I’m anxious,” Hedrick said last week at the Boat Yard, where men dream of water, sometimes for half their lives. “The only thing I have ever wanted to do is go sailing. But now that I’m here, I’m reflecting on everything. I’ve spent so much of my life here. I haven’t lived a normal life. I’m never home. I’m 61. I wonder, did I pay too great a price?”
I took my son to the new Landscape Confection exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art today. I don’t know much about art, but I do have a couple rules of thumb:
My wife is a sales agent for Auto Club insurance. She’s using a little after-dinner quiet time to review the monthly Top Producers document. She’s always around the top, but because she took a two-week vacation recently, she dropped down the list this month to around number 30 — still not bad out of hundreds of agents.
Our son, however, is not impressed.
My 12-year-old son just got out of the shower and settled into his bed for a few games of Solitaire on his iPod. His mom is not happy that he didn’t bother to put any clothes on.
“Wear some pants,” she says to him.
“No pants!” he yells. “I’m free!”
…Let me get this straight, we sent how many tanks and planes over there, it’s already been one full day and they still haven’t made it off of those beaches.
Give me a break. How much money is being spent on that army again? Well I know I won’t be cheering for the abolition of fascism in Europe if this continues…
There is one bright spot at the back, at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more rapidly—in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from death.
This pug, Ch Kendoric’s Riversong Mulroney, won the toy group at the Westminster Dog Show. He has won 65 Best in Shows.
