I’m trying to listen to classical music with a 10-year-old who won’t stop pretending he’s an intergalactic space admiral:
Chopin . . . great composer . . . he was from Earth, wasn’t he?
The Sanctity of Marriage
Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today’s decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle.
Here’s what’s really undermining the sacredness of modern marriage: soap operas, wedding planning, longer work days, cuter secretaries, fights over money, reality TV, low-rise pants, mothers-in-law, boredom, Victoria’s Secret catalogs, going to bed mad, the billable hour, that stubborn 7 pounds, the Wiggles, Internet chat rooms, and selfishness. In fact we should start amending the Constitution to deal with the Wiggles immediately.”
How Family Traditions Get Started
At a family gathering a few years ago, a couple of my nieces were experimenting with makeup — including bright red lipstick — when one of the maiden aunts told them that girls with red lipstick look like whores.
Well, that made quite an impression on these girls . . . now at any family get-together that the aunt attends, every girl — from high school seniors down to 5-year-olds — puts on the tawdriest shade of red lipstick they can find.
At Thanksgiving this past week, one of the girls added some ghastly white face powder, for the total painted lady look . . .
High Failure Rates on the Web
. . . when public website users perform simple Internet tasks, they’re successful two-thirds of the time on average. In other words, users fail 35% of the time . . .
Six sigma tolerates no more than 3.4 defects per million manufacturing opportunities; in contrast, the Web generates 350,000 defects per million interaction opportunities. The difference between the two quality levels is a factor of 100,000.
The only reason the Web works at all is that people are flexible and persistent enough to try again when their first attempt fails.
The good news, I suppose, is that the opportunity for improvement is virtually limitless.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Margaret Cho
My wife estimated the audience as 75 percent gay, which I think, if anything, was a little bit low.
A Damnable Doctrine
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published on this date in 1859.
A Visitor from the East
Have you ever had a house guest — an in-law, perhaps — who thought that your life would be a lot better if you ran your business the same way she does, lived where she does, managed your money the way she does, ate certain foods in certain portions because she does, put on a sweater when she gets cold, and so on?
Well, I have . . .
Unskilled and Unaware of It
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
Related Links
Can You Hear Me Now?
I have instructed my family to bury a phone with me . . . then call it.
If I answer, grab a shovel.
Management 101: How to Demoralize Your Top Performers Into Early Retirement
Sanders quit because Lions weren’t winning
Background
Barry Sanders, as you may already know, was a running back for the Detroit Lions — one of the best running backs ever.
It was shocking news — to the extent that an athlete’s retirement can be considered “shocking” — when Sanders retired in 1998 because, at age 31, he was at the peak of his career, and on the verge of breaking the all-time NFL rushing record.
Some Lions fans — to this day — still expect him to change his mind and play again.
What Sanders Said
Sanders has an “as told to” autobiography coming out, in which he says that he retired, not — as the above headline says — because the Lions weren’t winning (which they weren’t), but because of his realization that the management of the team no longer cared about winning.
Big difference.
Here’s what he says in the book:
“That realization trivialized everything I did during the off-season to prepare myself. It trivialized everything I dreamed about from the time I was a kid in Wichita . . .”
It’s very similar to something DeMarco and Lister said in Peopleware:
Most forms of teamicide do their damage by effectively demeaning the work, or demeaning the people who do it. Teams are catalyzed by a common sense that the work is important and that doing it well is worthwhile.
People want to do great work. People are dying for opportunities to do great work.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Men Are From Mars, Chickens Are From KFC
A man and a 10-year-old boy bring home the evening meal: 12 pieces of KFC for $9.99.
“Get some plates,” his wife says.
“We don’t need plates,” the man replies.
“We’re men!” the boy explains.
Wife: “You’re going to make a mess.”
Man: “Of course we’re going to make a mess”
Boy: “We’re men!”
Break a Leg
One of my nieces in Australia — she must be 11 or 12 by now — fell off the roof of her house and broke her leg.
“What was she doing on the roof?” I ask my wife.
“Her mom told her she couldn’t play in the house.”
Nice. Or as they say in Australia, noyce.
Forgive Us Our Debts
I got an email today with the subject line “Even Christians have financial problems,” advertising “debt counseling from a Christian perspective.”
Where did the idea come from that Christians should be immune from financial problems? Jesus had to walk at night because he couldn’t afford a pair of shoes.
Talk about a guy with financial problems . . .
So Much Trash
On this date in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was published. The book, considered by modern scholars to be one of the great American novels, was dismissed by Melville’s contemporaries and belittled by reviewers as “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.”
Melville took bad reviews pretty hard and gave up writing fiction a few years later. He died in New York on September 28, 1891, at the age of 72, almost completely forgotten.
Existentialism in the Cafeteria
HOLDINGFORD, MINN. — Millionaire dishwasher Kathy Welle seemed incredulous as she stared into the TV cameras and explained why sharing a $95.5 million Powerball jackpot with 15 fellow Holdingford schools cafeteria workers wasn’t reason enough to quit her $9-an-hour job.
“And I don’t plan to quit my other job, driving a school bus for the district, either,” Welle said Tuesday. “What else would I do? What else would any of us do?”
Trick or Treat
In a last minute switcheroo, my wife decided to stay home and hand out candy while I went trick-or-treating with the kids.
I had six kids in my group: four 10-year-old boys — a mummy (my kid), two ninjas, and an evil baseball catcher — plus a hyperactive 6-year-old cheerleader and a 5-year-old Blue’s Clues girl.
The cheerleader was a dynamo — the first kid to every door — and if it wasn’t opened promptly, she’d run around looking in the windows to see what was the holdup.
The evil baseball catcher — wearing a chest protector, shin guards and a skull mask — approached every house by taking a running start and sliding up to the door on his shin guards, scaring women, small children and pretty much everyone else, because no one expected him to do that, and because it looked like he’d fallen and given himself a crippling injury.
“You won’t be laughing when he does that and some old lady has a heart attack,” one mom said to me.
But the highlight of the evening came when one of the ninjas got tired of menacing the other ninja and pointed his sword at the kinetic cheerleader, who swung her candy bag around and knocked the sword halfway across the street.
It was a big hit with the whole group because you rarely get to see a ninja schooled by a cheerleader half his size . . .
Overheard
“I beat the traffic this morning. I got here an hour and a half early, but I only had to get up 45 minutes earlier.”
“So you saved 45 minutes.”
“I saved . . . let’s see . . . (looking thoughtfully skyward) . . . 45 minutes!
I Don’t Care About Your Car
I don’t care what kind of car you drive, what kind of a deal you got on it, the gas mileage, how fast it goes . . .
Here’s why:
Why Great Novels Are Not Written by 10-Year-Olds
And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean.
And so, on page 243 of a 900-page novel, the 6-year-old Son referred to in the title dies!
“So what’s the rest of the book going to be about?” I wonder aloud.
“Your butt,” my son suggests.
A Tale of Two Dinners
I took my son out for dinner tonight. We went to Hof’s Hut, his choice.
I’ve been to Hof’s Hut twice in my life. The other time was the first real date I ever had with a girl. I took her to Hof’s Hut and a movie, where she fell asleep.
That seems like just last week, and yet this week I find myself married with a 10-year-old son, who orders off the grownup menu for the very first time . . .