DAD: What are you reading?
10-YEAR-OLD: It’s a book I rented from the library.
DAD: You don’t rent books from the library, you check them out.
10-YEAR-OLD: Whatever.
Welcome to Southern California
An affordable housing advocate has given up on finding an affordable house in Los Angeles and is moving to Connecticut.
“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived in and the weather is fantastic,” he said. “It’s paradise. I just can’t afford to live here.”
His annual salary is $80,000.
Best Explanation of the Spanish Election Results
Even the mere threat of Islamic terrorism has for several decades been very effective at steering European nations’ foreign policy. Going back further consider the Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s. A small minority of people living in Europe had an ideology and the will to use violence to back up that ideology. Without a whole lot of effort or actual force they were able to conquer nearly every other European nation and convince those Europeans to accept major elements of their ideology. European democracies appear strong but apparently are easy to control by anyone who threatens to disrupt the bourgeois comforts of the populace. Nor do Europeans have the internal strength to dislodge violent minorities who’ve gained control of their societies. In the 1940s it was the leveling of German cities by the British and American air forces and Soviet artillery that convinced Europeans of the impracticality of Naziism.
France Weighs In
Sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa says Europeans have been dreaming. Writing in Le Monde (in French), Lamo says Europeans have thought they would be spared because they haven’t supported the Bush administration’s policies.
John Kerry, International Man of Mystery
I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, ‘You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,’ things like that.
‘In terms of who he’s talked to, we’re not going to discuss that,’ spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said yesterday. ‘I know it would be helpful, but we’re not going into that. His counsels are kept private.’
A Brief History of Democratic Statesmanship
Speaking at Columbia University in 1959, a student challenged the 33rd President [Harry Truman], a Democrat, on dropping the second A-bomb. ‘The reason I asked this,’ the student said, ‘was that it seemed to me the second bomb came pretty soon after the first one.’ After speaking testily of ‘Monday morning quarterbacks,’ Truman said simply: ‘I was there. I did it. I would do it again.’
KERRY: I think George Bush rushed to war without exhausting the remedies available to him, without exhausting the diplomacy necessary to put the U.S. in the strongest position possible, without pulling together the logistics and the plan to shore up Iraq immediately and effectively.
TIME: And you as Commander in Chief would not have made these mistakes but would have gone to war?
KERRY: I didn’t say that.TIME: I’m asking.
KERRY: I can’t tell you.
Mother and Son
“Do you ever listen to me?”
“What?”
I’d Like to Buy a Bowel II
Proving that looks are not always deceiving, here’s a photo of the gentlemen accused in the UCLA grave robbing scandal.
Mr. October
Henry Aaron never hit 50 [home runs] in a season . . . Bonds hit 73 [in 2001], and he would have hit 100 if they would have pitched to him. I mean, come on, now. There is no way you can outperform Aaron and Ruth and Mays at that level.
Warren Buffett Gets the Last Laugh
Warren Buffett published his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders this week:
Our gain in net worth during 2003 was $13.6 billion, which increased the per-share book value of both our Class A and Class B stock by 21%. Over the last 39 years (that is, since present management took over) per-share book value has grown from $19 to $50,498, a rate of 22.2% compounded annually.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold. . . . When one really can’t stand anymore, the limits are transgressed, and one thing has become another; poetry registers itself on the hospital charts, and heart-break has to be taken care of.
On this date in 1948, she and eight other patients died in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, NC. Because they had been locked in their rooms for the night, the patients were unable to escape the flames.
Like Father, Like Son?
The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So [Bill] Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation’s industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad.
My brother is a doctor.
He doesn’t encourage his kids to go into medicine though, because he’s incredibly frustrated by the fact that you go to school for 20 years to learn something, only to have clerks from insurance companies decide if a procedure you’ve recommended is or is not “medically necessary.”
I’ve worked in computing for 20 years.
I don’t push my kid to get into it because during that time, it’s become less and less like a professional business and more like a big class project, full of people who have no aptitude, no education and no role models.
A friend of mine teaches a computer science class at a local community college. He loves it.
I don’t think I could bring myself to stand up in front of a group of young people and encourage them to be programmers. I’d probably wind up yelling at them to go be flight attendants or meeting planners and stop wasting their time.
Where are you going to go as a programmer to do interesting, influential work with bright, educated people? The list of possibilities is very short.
Microsoft is on the list — but the fact that Bill Gates is out recruiting at Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard while you’re sitting here in a community college class suggests that a Microsoft career may not be in the cards for you.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Song Lyrics That Didn’t Resonate Till Years Later
Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me.
Better Look Again
20 Alleged Illegal Immigrants Found in LA
I would have guessed there were a lot more than that . . .
Foreigners for Kerry
I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, ‘You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,’ things like that.
SEOUL — North Korea’s state-controlled media is known for its reverential reporting on Mr Kim Jong-il.
But the Dear Leader is not the only one getting deferential treatment: Mr John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic candidate in the United States, is also getting good play in Pyongyang.
His speeches are being broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported in glowing terms by the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA).
Quotes on Kerry
Yet not all Democrats are thrilled with John Kerry. (As an aside, try to wrap your mind around the phrase ‘thrilled with John Kerry’ and you’ll see why he might not be the strongest nominee.)
I have never met anybody, nor seen anybody interviewed, nor received an email from anybody, nor read a letter to a newspaper from anybody who really woke up in the morning and thought: If John Kerry doesn’t win, I just don’t know what I shall do.
Kids in America
The woman cutting my hair today tells me her son’s favorite things to watch are horror movies — he really likes The Evil Dead — and The Simpsons.
Did I mention that her son is 4-1/2 years old?
You’ve Got a Problem
You know you’ve got a problem when:
- You take your stroller-age child to an amusement park and you’re buying a beer at 11:30 in the morning; or
- You are the stroller-age child.
I was at California Adventure yesterday and I saw this happening over and over . . .
I’d Like to Buy a Bowel
Today’s Text
Time passes. Listen. Time passes. . . .