A 68-year-old South Carolina man was arrested in the 1957 slaying of two Southern California police officers who were shot after they stopped a car for running a red light.
According to the Associated Press:
Gerald Fiten Mason was a solid member of his South Carolina community, a golfer who lived quietly with his wife of 40 years.
I’ve always distrusted a man who plays golf . . .
In a local “headless torso” case, two boys were arrested for killing their mom, then cutting off her head and hands to hinder identification of the body, a trick they picked up from watching “The Sopranos.”
This is why I don’t allow a lot of TV viewing at my house . . .
Cybersex and so-called virtual affairs on the Internet are the all the buzz among professionals who study spouses who stray.
But the truly fertile ground for dangerous emotional attachments outside marriages is much more conventional: the workplace.
The Programmer reflects that perhaps sex in the workplace is a good indicator of employee morale:
I remember my first job, I worked on some great teams and great projects. I also had liaisons with a secretary and a senior systems analyst (quite a coup for a junior programmer).
A married operations manager kind of came on to me, but she had a crisis of conscience at the last minute.
Currently, I work in a low-morale workplace — a low-morale industry, for that matter — no one has any emotional connection with one another, and I get no sex at all.
Of course, I’m married now, but even among my unmarried colleagues, no one really has that ‘I just got laid’ spring in their step on a regular basis.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
From an actual job posting:
Time management and data organization skills are also required.
What kind of world are we living in where that sort of thing has to be explicitly specified in a job description?
Aren’t time management and data organization skills pretty much required for daily life, outside of, say, a prison or a mental asylum?
Thus spoke The Programmer.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where my memory is honored by a full slate of NBA basketball games . . .”
I read a story in Time magazine about a family in Columbus, OH, evicted from their apartment and living in a homeless shelter because they couldn’t afford a rent hike on the apartment.
The husband was unemployed at the time; the wife was a pizza delivery driver. Both are high-school dropouts and they have three kids.
The lesson here, according to Time:
All it takes sometimes is a sudden rent hike to push a working family into a shelter.
Psychologist B.R. Forer found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone. Consider the following as if it were given to you as an evaluation of your personality.
The conventional wisdom on this is that black coaches are hired on merit, while white coaches are hired by racists.
Headline from a Morningstar newsletter:
Does Your CEO Have a Strong Hand on the Rudder?
Yes! In fact, he had shoulder surgery earlier in the year — I suspect as a result of employing too strong a hand on his rudder . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time . . .
“Really? How do you sleep?”
My son is watching SportsCenter in the other room . . .
He says, “UCLA hired a new coach: Carlos Burrell!”
By which I think he means Karl Dorrell.
That is a great, great hire.
I say that as a USC grad who was sorry to see Bob Toledo go. They might never beat the Trojans again . . .
People often ask me: How’s the computer business?
One thing I can tell them is that a significant number of my Merry Christmas emails from former colleagues end with something like this:
P.S. Please let me know if you hear of any job leads as I am currently unemployed.
After my son got close to 50 items on his Amazon Xmas wish list, I said it might be helpful to add a comment to the stuff indicating which things he wanted the most.
Now most of the items include one of the following three comments:
With varying numbers of exclamation points . . .
Got an email from Harvard this morning:
Hello Paul,
Thank you for catching the error on the Harvard at a Glance page. We now use the correct "principal."
Sincerely,
The Harvard News Office
You are quite welcome! How about throwing in free tuition for my kid?
I was marveling at the Harvard University fact page — 14.6 million volumes! Established 1636! — when I noticed “10 principle academic units.” Egads! A grammatical error on the Harvard site!
I’d better send them an email . . .
I noticed this weekend that Starbucks has rolled out the Christmas menu — Egg Nog Latte, Gingerbread Something-Or-Other . . . also that my local Starbucks has mounted a wreath on the inside of the entry door, anchored only at the top, so when you pull the door open, the wreath swings out and smacks you in the head.
Merry Christmas! Ouch!
Nearly 30 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map. You can try it yourself here.
Dat’s de ‘fect of education; dat’s de t’ing what’s gwine to rule;
Git dem books, you lazy rascal! Git back to yo’ place in school!
If you’ve ever wondered — I know I have — if certain of your colleagues completed the 8th grade, or rather spent their time jacking off like apes when they should have been doing math homework, you may be interested in Could You Pass 8th-Grade Math?, a sample of the Illinois State Board of Education’s math test for 8th graders.
A boy’s will is the wind’s will
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
That’s a beautiful verse to me — not just what it says but the tempo of it . . . try reading it aloud and you’ll notice that you really need to slow down when you get to “long, long thoughts.”
I have a boy of my own now, and I can also tell you that a boy’s heart is simple and pure, and just by asking him does he want to play some catch or something, you can make him the happiest person in the world . . .
