I know all about it. But I don’t see it as magic. They have a good team. It isn’t magic.
Percival’s first pitch last night was a 97 mph fastball that “accidentally” sailed about two feet inside and drilled Alfonso Soriano.
Soriano had celebrated a go-ahead home run earlier in the game with a fist-pumping curtain call.
From an OC Weekly interview with Janeane Garofalo:
OC Weekly: With war brewing, are you venturing into foreign policy?
Janeane Garofalo: I can’t think of how to say something funny about how I feel about a preemptive strike in Iraq. But I am on top of all the news, and I am endlessly disappointed in the news. I am extremely angry. . . .
This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II — to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up.
I’m explaining to my son another advantage to being an only child: personal attention . . .
“I don’t have to tell, say, four kids to shut up; I can just tell you to shut up four times as much.”
After eight years of living together, Erik decided we should marry. I didn’t want to, but I did. During that ninth year it all fell apart. It shows. Never try to hold on to anything.
This is a sad story.
Mike Webster’s football career brought him nine Pro Bowl appearances, four Super Bowl victories, a Hall of Fame induction, and irreversible brain damage, which in turn led to memory loss, depression and homelessness.
He was living in Pittsburgh with his high-school age son, who last week told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
My dad has some health problems no one knows about and that I don’t want to get into that much. But he has some brain injuries from football. I have to take care of my dad.
Best one-sentence explanation of how the dot-com boom killed professional practice in the software business:
Improving operational efficiency is not a priority during gold rushes.
Research indicates that today is the 20th anniversary of the smiley 🙂
Let the world slide, let the world go;
A fig for care, and a fig for woe!
If I can’t pay, why I can owe,
And death makes equal the high and low.
According to Tahira Hira, a professor of personal finance and consumer economics at Iowa State University, a big source of money problems is that people just don’t know enough about their own financial reality:
They don’t know what they earn, they don’t know what it takes to live, and they don’t know their discretionary income.
That is so true.
Unfortunately, in my family, my wife is dead-set on managing the finances, despite the fact that her idea of financial “management” consists of writing checks when the bills come due.
I used to fight with her about that, but I’m a very sensitive person — I can’t live in an atmosphere of constant conflict — so at this point, I’ve just resigned myself to going broke peacefully . . .
From a Dateline NBC interview with fitness guru Jack La Lanne, who will be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Sept. 26, his 88th birthday:
Keith Morrison: A lot of people, once they start to get older, have things like strokes and heart attacks, high blood pressure, arthritis, those kinds of diseases that are associated with age. Have you had a heart attack?
Jack La Lanne: I can’t afford to. It’d wreck my image. I can’t afford to die, man.
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge.
“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while–just once in a while–there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!”
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
This article concludes that the answer is no — that if you’re smart enough to get into, say, Princeton, you’re smart enough to make money wherever you go to school, even if it’s someplace a lot less expensive.
Not to say that I wouldn’t be thrilled to have my kid get into an Ivy League school, but I’ve always thought that it’s no great feat to graduate “the best and the brightest” if you only admit the best and the brightest to begin with.
One of my wife’s friends in Thailand has been trying for years to have a baby and finally did. Her typing and English are not so good, but her email I thought was quite affecting:
My girl, JOOK-KRU,is so young, so I want to spend most time for her. I had a little trouble in first 5 months pregnancy. Now I feel very good, I think big trouble in my life was gone. As you know We see docter for 8 years continuiously and spend a lot of money for the problom. We get her by IVF technique. She is healty , try to climb to upatairs, always make loud noise. I think she can call ‘ mae’ or ‘mama’ or ‘papa’ soon.
“Mae” means “Mom” in the Thai language. “Jook-Kru” means “little bird.”
With as much fun as we had doing this one, and with how much everyone enjoys these films, we should at least get together and talk about doing another one.
Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.
History doesn’t record how much fun was had “doing” Citizen Kane, but as film buffs are no doubt aware, there never was a sequel.
“Healing power of sports” nonsense thoughtfully refuted:
If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.
We have Mr. Walker for 4th grade this year . . .
I saw an article today: Do Kids Need MP3 Players for School?
It seems obvious to me that they don’t, and why even bring it up, although a pair of my kid’s back-to-school pants actually came with a built-in MP3 player holder.
His reaction: “Cool! . . . what’s an MP3 player?”
With school starting up in a couple of days, my wife is trying to get our boy in an academic frame of mind . She has him doing some exercises from a geometry workbook and of course he’s not interested.
“I can’t tell if these lines are exactly alike,” he says.
Holds the book up to his face.
“They look exactly alike . . .”
Call me biased, but turning the whole exercise into a philosophical problem, rather than just saying “I don’t want to do this,” is a pretty sophisticated plan of attack for a 9-year-old.
A NY Times business editor took an apparently intentional header off the 15th floor of the Times building.
Too bad he wasn’t the crossword editor, it would have made a better headline. You’d want to work the phrase “15 Down” into it . . .
A brief conversation between Victor, one of our project managers, and our Sales VP as Victor is walking out of the VP’s office:
VP: You’re the greatest!
VICTOR: I’m trying.
VP (louder now, as Victor is halfway down the hall): Thanks, Wayne!
