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.
Of course you know this means war.
Muslims are offended by cartoons portraying them as violent fanatics. Naturally, they’ve responded with violent fanatacism. I’ll say one thing for these people, they know how to stage a lively protest. Yesterday, a few protestors got so enthusiastic that they had to be killed.
Hamshahri, a prominent Iranian newspaper, has launched a cartoon counter-offensive: a competition for Holocaust cartoons.
Hey, I’ve got an idea! You have a drawing of Hitler standing at a podium, big swastika behind him, addressing a packed hall of Nazis, and he says
“I think I may say, without fear of contradiction . . .”
HA HA HA HA HA!
(Okay, I stole that from an old New Yorker cartoon, but how many people in Iran take the New Yorker?)
A colleague of mine had a vacation planned, visiting some friends out of state. Then a psychic told her that an earthquake would strike California during that week, so she cancelled the vacation to stay home with her family.
If I really believed that an earthquake was going to hit on a certain date, I’d make sure that I was out of town.
Of course, I’d hope that my child made it through okay.
And my dog.
As for my wife, there’s nothing wrong with our relationship that a couple tons of rubble wouldn’t fix.
My son is dancing around the family room with a football in his hand, some sort of wild, extended touchdown celebration for no reason at all that I can see.
“Shouldn’t you be using this time to study for your social studies test?” I suggest helpfully.
I’m in the processing of converting all the old content here into WordPress, which among other things, lets me assign categories to each item.
I filed one item, principally about a woman who ran over her husband with a car, under several categories, including Murder and Kids.
My son, who’s sitting next to me on the sofa doing homework, says, “You’re posting stuff about murdering kids?!”
I say, “No, it’s about murdering husbands.”
“You’re posting stuff about kids murdering husbands?!”
“No, it’s about wives murdering husbands, which happens a lot, unfortunately.”
“It would happen around here if Mom had a hatchet or a gun.”
“That’s exactly why we don’t have those things.”
