Sure, they just absorbed their worst defeat in 75 years, but at least they’re not suffering through the kind of mortifying off-the-field incidents that characterized the Bob Toledo era!
Well, except for placekicker Justin Medlock driving around drunk at 3 A.M., rolling his car over on the 405 freeway, and walking away from the wreckage with a seriously injured girl still inside.
Texas QB Vince Young was visibly unhappy about finishing second to Reggie Bush in the Heisman balloting.
“I’m just basically emotionally upset about that,” Young said.
News flash: Everyone who doesn’t win is upset about it, but the protocol is this: Congratulate the winner and move on. Have some class. Grow up. You’re not in third grade anymore.
I’m Vince Young. I’m upset because I didn’t win. Boo-hoo-hoo!
Man, I hope the Trojans kick his ass in the Rose Bowl.
I’m glad it was a blowout. Most of the season, I had to listen to “what a great job Karl Dorrell, Drew Olson and the Bruins are doing.” I didn’t think they were doing a great job at all. They were 9-1, but given all the last-minute, come-from-behind wins over bad teams, they were pretty close to being 5-5. Hence the lack of respect in the polls and the 21-point spread on this game, which turned out to be way too low.
Over Thanksgiving dinner, my dad is explaining how he’s trying to count up all his assets and figure out if he’s got enough to retire.
“But,” he says, “you know what’s missing from all this retirement planning? The one thing you really need to know but you don’t know?”
E = mc2, the world’s most famous equation, is 100 years old. According to this BBC article:
Einstein showed in a handful of lines that as you accelerate an object, it not only gets faster, it also gets heavier.
That in turn makes further pushing less fruitful so that eventually nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light.
My wife’s car has preference settings for each driver. When I drive it, I get in, push a button, and the seat moves into position automatically — no manual effort required.
“In the future, people are going to be really fat,” my son says.
“People are pretty fat now,” I point out.
“They’re going to be fatter because they don’t have to do anything.”
“George Jetson isn’t fat.”
“He’s kind of fat.”
“He’s not fat.”
“Maybe I’m thinking of Fred Flintstone.”
“Fred Flintstone is fat, but he’s from the past — which kind of discredits your theory, if you think about it.”
My boss’s boss resigned yesterday.
If I had to sum him up in one sentence, I would say — and I think he would take this as a compliment — that he made Machiavelli look like a goddamn amateur . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.
Our son turned 12 in July . . .
“I almost cried today,” my wife says. “Every year, I take Casey to the pumpkin patch and I take the best photo, but when we drove by today, he didn’t want to go . . .”
Today is our dog’s second birthday, my son informs me.
“Every day is a birthday for that dog,” I say.
“We didn’t get him any gifts,” the boy says.
I was happy to see the USC business school get a Top 10 national ranking in the Wall Street Journal Guide to Top Business Schools, ahead of Stanford, ahead of Harvard and, of course, ahead of UCLA.
There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a ‘peace’ movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as ‘progressive.’
. . . for anyone thinking of handcuffing themselves to a tree:
If you handcuff yourself to a tree you would die fairly quickly but maybe not as quickly as you would like.
I can’t really hear what my son is holding forth on downstairs — just snippets about tyranny, racism, slavery, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, civil rights and child abuse — which means his mom must have asked him to turn off the TV and get started on homework . . .
Someone sent me a link to Dogster. OK . . . I just looked at the doggie diaries a little bit. Some people are waaaay too into their dogs.
Now, don’t get me wrong . . . I love my dog, but anyone referring to pets as “kids” or to themselves as the “mommy” or “daddy” of an animal should be euthanized.
Rolling Stone magazine has published Hunter Thompson’s suicide note, which he titled “Football Season is Over.” Thompson wrote the note last February, four days before fatally shooting himself in his kitchen.
Douglas Brinkley, Thompson’s official biographer, writes,
February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time.
I don’t understand “avid” sports fans — they depress and frighten me — but I’d certainly encourage other sports enthusiasts to consider Thompson’s high-caliber doldrum-buster . . .
A core value of American liberals is the importance of redistributing wealth from the prosperous to others, through highly progressive taxes and transfer payments. Which leads to a question: If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right?
. . . the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a ‘controversy’ to teach.
My son is standing in the kitchen like he’s about to make an announcement. Suddenly . . .
“Ah-CHOO!”
“Geez, man,” I say, “you just sneeze like that without making any effort to lift your hand up and block it?”
“Did the people in New Orleans make an effort to block Hurricane Katrina?” he asks in a loud voice. “NO! They just let it happen and blamed President Bush!”
The job ads on the right were dropped into a business article I was reading last weekend. Evidently the job titles get truncated after 24 characters, which is probably a bad idea, given the unintended consequences . . .
If poetry is reduced to an algebraic equation with one meaning, and only a teacher has the meaning, and you can’t figure it out without the teacher, it’s no fun. And when you become an adult, when you see a poem in The New Yorker, you’ll turn the page and look for a cartoon. You’ll say, ‘I don’t have to work for a good grade anymore.’
