You've got to fight for your right to party.https://t.co/Z2APKYq8iJ
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) August 10, 2025
Newest Fruit Smoothie: Ketchup
Yes, you could have had a V8 but it wouldn’t have been quite this nauseating.
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
How Do You Fix Schools?
Given that 40 percent of American fourth graders have less than basic reading skills, and only 26 percent of 12th graders are considered proficient in math, you’d think that there wasn’t much on the mind of teachers other than the best ways to teach reading and math.
WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THAT! WE’VE GOT TO FIGHT TRUMP!
Among the initiatives approved at the latest annual gathering of the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union:
- $3,500 to “defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism by using the term facism [sic] in NEA materials to correctly characterize Donald Trump’s program and actions.”
Even the teachers can’t spell. What a horror show.
Can Your Brain Run Out of Memory?
Yes! I can remember things I learned as a kid — addresses, phone numbers, musical pieces — but I can’t remember things I learned last week.
I would think that things I learned, or tried to learn, recently would be easier to recall than things I learned a long time ago but that’s not the case for me. My brain is full.
Squirrelly Behavior
I was watching these two squirrels from the community fitness center . . .
In the first photo below, you can see them on either side of the palm tree on the right. They had been chasing each other across the wooden beams to the left of the tree when one of the squirrels made a leap for the palm tree and the other one followed.
One chased the other to the point they’re at in the photo and that’s where they stopped.
The palm tree, in my opinion, was a bad move, because 1) It’s a very tall tree. From their current position, they’re less than halfway to the top. And 2) Even if they got to the top, there’s nothing to do up there. Look at the palm tree on the left. They’d just have to turn around and come back down.
The coniferous trees, like the one in the middle of the photo, are a much better hangout for squirrels. They can scamper around up there all day.
After several minutes, the squirrel on the left started climbing again. The squirrel on the right didn’t move.
Lefty did in fact make it all the way to the top of the tree, where, sure enough, he or she turned around, climbed all the way back down, and found a shady spot to take a nap.
The other squirrel, which hadn’t moved during this time, then, maybe as an “anything you can do” move, started climbing the tree, reached the top and climbed back down again, reunited with Lefty, and they found a shady spot where they could both take a nap.
I Suppose It’s a Rhetorical Question
There's never a shortage of people to tell you that pit bulls are not an inherently dangerous breed of dog. Only when pit bulls end up in the hands of a "bad" owner do they turn violent.
So who do we blame when pit bulls with no owner kill people?https://t.co/1w7ov1nUO4
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) August 4, 2025
Are We Lowering Our Standards Fast Enough?
Sometimes I worry that things are getting worse faster than we can lower our standards.
I’m teaching a couple of ACT prep classes this summer. Part of the process of getting ready to do that is to learn what, if anything, has changed since I taught the classes last summer.
Here’s what I found:
- Reduced the number of questions overall (44 fewer)
- Reduced the test length. Students can receive their college-reportable Composite score after 125 minutes of testing, rather than up to 195.
- More time per question.
- Reduced the number of answer choices in math questions from five to four.
- Students can now choose to take the ACT National test with or without the science section. State and district customers will choose whether to include the science section with the ACT test for their students.
Brian Wilson, 1942-2025
Brian Wilson was a California boy like me. Beach Boys music is part of the fabric of the world.
Even my son, years ago at age 10, could sing Beach Boys songs by heart, almost.
“And she’ll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the TV away!”
I had to straighten him out on that. “It’s T-Bird . . . not TV.”
“What’s a T-Bird?”
RIP Brian Wilson
In the Bookstore
I went down to the bookstore this evening
and found myself in the poetry section.
But for every thin book of poems
there was a thick biography of the poet
and an even thicker book
by someone who’s supposed to know
explaining what the poet
is supposed to’ve said and why he didn’t.
So you don’t have to waste your time
on the best the writer could do,
the words he fought the darkness and himself for,
the unequal battle with beauty.
Instead you can read comfortably
about the worst the writer could do:
the mess he made of his life,
how he fought with his family,
cheated on his lovers, didn’t pay his debts
and not only drank too much
but all the stupid things
he ever said to the bartender
just before getting 86’d will be printed for you
and they’re just as stupid
as the things everyone says just before getting 86’d.
The books explaining the poet
are themselves inexplicable.
The students who have to read them
cheat.
I left the poetry section
thinking about burning the bookstore down.
Some of a poet’s work comes from his life, ok.
But most of a poet’s work comes
in spite of his life, in spite of everything,
even in spite of bookstores.
So I went to the next section
and bought a murder mystery but I haven’t read it yet.
I find I don’t want to know who done it
and why;
I want to do it myself.
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. — Ephesians 5:11
A Trip to the Supermarket
As I was walking up to the local supermarket, one of the cart wranglers was near the entrance saying — loudly — “Number one! Eyewitness News!”
Now this is a grown man, of what looked like Middle Eastern extraction, although that’s not really relevant.
As I got closer, he asked me, “Have you heard that?”
“I don’t watch the news,” I said. “It’s depressing, It’s dishonest. It’s the same things happening every day: A car chase on the freeway, someone got killed, someone got robbed, someone got stabbed on the Metro, a boy wearing makeup won a girls’ track meet.”
“I love the news,” he said. “I’d like to be a reporter.”
If anyone reading this is looking to hire a challenged but enthusiastic reporter, message me.
I exited the store through the other door, where two young people had a table set up, selling stuffed animals to benefit the SPCA.
“Ixnay,” I said.
I can’t say for sure that they weren’t affiliated with the SPCA . . . they did have matching orange T-shirts . . . but I’ve worked with legitimate non-profit organizations, we did fundraising of course, but we didn’t do it by standing outside supermarkets.
Act Like You Know What You’re Doing
I’ll let you all in on a little secret
If I could share with you a thing or two
If you just act like you know what you’re doing
Everybody thinks that you do
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. — Marcus Aurelius
I Don’t Have Much of Anything Good to Say About AP Computer Science Principles
AP’s Newest Computer Science Course Has Attracted More Diverse Students — edweek.org
More diverse than what, you ask? Probably more diverse than AP Computer Science A.
AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) was launched in the 2016-17 school year, aiming to bring more Black, Latino, and female students into computing. AP CSP is more introductory and contains less technical content. AP CSA teaches object-oriented programming via hands-on coding in Java.
I don’t often hear something so openly condescending and insulting as that the only way to bring black/brown/female students into computer science is via a dumbed-down curriculum. Get them into CSA like everyone else.
Here are some numbers on the AP CSP exam score distribution.
Not only is the percentage of students scoring a 5 on the AP CSP test significantly lower than any other math or computer science test, it’s one of the lowest percentages on any AP test.
AP CSP is an easy class, much easier than AP CSA. I’m speculating that the higher percentage of CSA students scoring a 5 is largely due to self-selection. A top-tier high school will offer AP CSA and probably produce good results. A lot of high schools don’t offer it, because they don’t have the quality of students or teachers to make it work.
At schools that offer both CSP and CSA, stronger students will take CSA because they know that CSP is a minor league class that won’t prepare them for a college-level CS curriculum.
I’ve tutored a lot of AP CSP students and invariably they have large knowledge gaps. They haven’t learned what they need to learn. They haven’t learned to think like programmers. A lot of this is because schools can’t get qualified computer science teachers, so they put the students on a do-it-yourself online curriculum. When students get stuck, they have no one to help them because the teachers have no computer science education or experience.
The CSA students may face the same obstacles — online curriculum, unqualified teachers — but they’re academically stronger and they can work through it.
I’d like to see the AP CSP class eliminated. Put everyone in CSA. There’s still a problem with getting qualified teachers for CSA but it’s insulting to offer CSP as a class for black/brown/female students.
CSP probably does more harm than good. The curriculum doesn’t prepare students for “real” computer science, and the instruction is so poor that it discourages students from ever taking another CS class.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
A Kind of Sadness
There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.
Bob Dylan on Why Music Keeps Getting Worse
I remember something Dylan wrote about most popular music artists in his book Chronicles: Volume One, and that is that making music “isn’t their destiny.” Van Morrison has an album called Born to Sing: No Plan B. Other than making music, there wasn’t anything else these guys could have done.
When I think of the artists whose work has meant a lot to me, I’m not recalling anyone who seems to have gone into the music industry to make money by churning out songs that sound like everyone else’s songs. In fact, for most of the people I’m thinking of, that wasn’t even an option at the time they started. If you could make enough money to support yourself with music, you were doing well.
Now you can make money putting out songs that sound like every other song, which is good in a way, because you can be a sellable commodity. But it’s also bad in that you’re disposable.
This Is What Propaganda Looks Like
Gene Hackman, 1930-2025
Gene Hackman died in his New Mexico home, which is not shocking in itself, given that he was 95 years old. The shocking part is that his much-younger wife died and one of his dogs died at the same time.
Well, that may not be quite right . . . they were all found at the same time, but had apparently been dead for a while.
As I write this, the reasons for the more-or-less simultaneous deaths remain a mystery. Maybe it’s just a really, really amazing coincidence, three living beings all dying at the same time.
I’ve seen Hackman in a lot of movies. I liked his work. The French Connection and Unforgiven are two of my favorite movies.
French Connection was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. My dad took me when I was 14.
RIP Gene Hackman
Goodbye Joy Reid, et al
How naive of me to think Joy Reid was fired over ratings: https://t.co/ToLxT96iNN pic.twitter.com/MoJh3WsPwm
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 25, 2025
Joy Reid is one of many media personalities being shuffled about recently. Joy Reid oozes racial hatred from every pore. She used to laugh at “white tears.” Who’s crying now?
After being fired, Reid will have more time to grope around for some kind of an explanation for how little influence she and people like her have over increasingly large numbers of the American public.
Imagine that you’re an MSNBC host and every day you show up and say the same things. Trump is a fascist. Trump is a racist. Trump is the new Hitler. Trump’s going to destroy our country. Trump is a rapist. He’s a white supremacist, white nationalist.
Then you see a huge portion of the country vote for the person that you’ve been obsessively condemning for eight years. You have to start wondering, wait a minute, it looks like Americans don’t really listen to what I say. Either they listen and they don’t trust me, or they just don’t listen at all.
I don’t think Joy Reid will reflect on this. It’s true that she had no audience, no influence and no power, but that’s not a failure on her part. It’s because Americans are too bigoted, too stupid, and too drowning in right-wing disinformation to understand how great she is.
Joy Reid’s bosses and other media higher-ups have to self-reflect though. What is it that we have done to lose the trust and faith of so many people, to make arguably the majority of the country deeply hate us and distrust us? What is it that we’ve done to contribute to this and to cause this?
And they are finally coming up with answers.