According to the British Journal of Ophthalmology, wearing a too-tight necktie may increase the risk of glaucoma by boosting blood pressure inside the eyes.
Ouch!
Who volunteers for this kind of thing? Choked blind with your own necktie!?
EppsNet Goes to the Movies
I was buying movie tickets with my 10-year-old boy when a woman with her 20-something daughter smiled at us and said, “When you get older, your kids will take you to the movies.”
Later, in the snack bar line, I asked him, “So are you going to take me to a movie when I get older?”
Introducing a 10-Year-Old to Poetry
Me: (reading aloud from syllabus for UC Irvine Young Writers class, in which my kid is enrolled) “We are going to be doing a variety of activities, including a facade poem, a four season poem, journal writing, and a memory snapshot story.”
Him: Poems blow.
Undercutting the Offshore Bid
Goldilocks and the Three Networks
Diversity on television
White and black characters are overrepresented, while Latino and Asian characters are underrepresented on prime-time TV, according to a recent UCLA study tracking diversity on television.
(I would say first of all that if you want to know anything about diversity, you should definitely ask someone at UCLA. They are all about diversity over there, and here’s what it leads to — “researchers” watching sitcoms with a stopwatch.)
Kids in America
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average child care worker earns $9.57 an hour. This is less than we pay people to cut our hair ($10.40 an hour), shine our shoes ($9.95 an hour) and park our cars ($9.87 an hour).
Repeat: Kids in America are being raised by people earning $9.57 an hour.
That explains a lot . . .
Happy Birthday
We celebrated my son’s birthday yesterday by going to his favorite restaurant of all time, BD’s Mongolian Barbeque in Irvine, only to find that they’d gone out of business, finally beaten into submission by the ultra-popular BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery next door.
Fortunately, 10-year-olds bounce back from these kinds of setbacks pretty quickly, especially when they get the Kung Fu Chaos game they really, really wanted . . .
2 Fast
Costa Mesa, CA. — Michael Allen Hanson was cruising at 100 mph in his new Porsche on the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway when a black car zoomed past Tuesday night.
So Hanson, president of his mortgage company, hit the gas.
Misinformed
RICK BLAINE: I came to Casablanca for the waters.
CAPT. RENAULT: The waters?! What waters? We’re in the desert.
RICK BLAINE: I was misinformed.
My wife and son are in Amarillo for a few weeks visiting relatives. I’m not sure I want to be in Texas in July, but they told me the temperature was in the 70s, so I decided to fly in for a few days.
When I got there, it was 104, although it did drop into the 70s at night . . .
Another Reason I Never Put My Kid in Day Care
LANCASTER, California (AP) — The foster mother of two young boys who died after being left five hours in a sweltering sport utility vehicle was arrested for investigation of child endangerment.
The woman’s occupation? She runs a day care center.
I’m looking at a picture on CNN.com, and the vehicle appears to be a Cadillac Escalade, so at least the kids died in a nice car . . .
Overheard
You can’t beat that with a sharp stick!
Why does the stick have to be sharp if you’re just going to beat something with it?
Life Imitates HTTP
I took my family to the airport today. Their flight was scheduled to leave from Gate 404.
We couldn’t find it.
Another Reason I Let My Wife Handle the Grocery Shopping
IRVINE — A mentally disturbed man wielding a samurai-style sword killed two workers and slashed three other people at an Albertsons before police shot and killed him Sunday.
Banzai!
The Joys of Retirement
It looks like Dominik Hasek may be ending his retirement.
That’s big news at my house because he’s my son’s favorite goalie, but also another blow to the theory — held by my wife and others — that lots of money plus lots of free time equals major satisfaction, even if your life lacks any real direction or purpose.
Now you might say that Hasek loves to play hockey and that’s why he’s getting back into it.
And I say: If he was having so much fun, why did he retire in the first place?
Three Short Arguments Against Affirmative Action
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that race can be a factor for universities shaping their admissions programs, saying a broad social value may be gained from diversity in the classroom.
The Fairness Argument
If it was unfair when we used to discriminate against blacks and Jews, don’t tell me it’s fair now to discriminate against whites and Jews.
Runaway Train
Railroad workers in a Montclair switching yard lost control of 30 freight cars loaded with lumber yesterday. The cars rolled out of the yard in the general direction of Los Angeles, which is about 30 miles westbound and downhill from Montclair.
The cars eventually reached a speed of about 50 miles an hour, so rather than let them rocket into the downtown area, Union Pacific decided to derail them into a Mexican neighborhood in Commerce.
Something Sad About Parenting
I see things around the house, like a bike that’s too small now, and think about the kid who used to ride it, and how I loved that kid, and now he’s gone . . .
Brain Teaser
This was posed to me in an interview. I don’t know if there’s a “right” answer, or whether it’s just intended to probe the thinking process of the applicant.
You have 50 white marbles, 50 black marbles and two bags. Your task is to arrange the marbles in the bags so as to maximize the probability that a person making a blind selection from one of the bags will select a black marble.
Yowzah!
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a
determin’d man!
Stuff They Don’t Teach You in School
A client I’m working with is rewarding the top 20 percent of its sales force by flying them to Lake Tahoe for a 3-day weekend.
An enterprising competitor might say to himself, “Hmmm . . . what if something were to happen to that plane?”
Now there’s something they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School.