Come to the office on a weekend — when you’re not allowed to be there — not to work, but to store some of your personal belongings. Fall down a flight of stairs. Then file a worker’s comp claim.
I’m not saying I know someone who actually did this . . .
The Ashley Harkleroad Playboy photos, while tastefully done by modern standards, are more daring (think pubic hair) than the recent Amanda Beard Playboy photos, which were so tastefully done they were actually boring . . .
Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.
If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘All the time.’
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Randy Pausch was lucky in that, thanks to the worldwide fame he achieved from his lecture and book, he died knowing that things he did and said would not be forgotten after he was gone.
Without the pancreatic cancer, he couldn’t have achieved that. Let’s face it, you can’t peddle the kind of pabulum cited above as “wisdom” in the absence of a terminal illness.
We own this book because my mom sent it to my son for his birthday. He hasn’t read it yet and probably won’t, but I read it.
I feel bad saying it, but it’s a tiresome collection of warmed-over platitudes. It’s like being cornered by your most annoying advice-giving relative at a family reunion.
Pausch was also lucky in being able to make an early departure from his famously self-absorbed wife, Jai (pronounced Jay), who didn’t want him to give the lecture in the first place because it would mean taking time away from her.
From a Wall Street Journal story last May:
A friend suggested to Jai that she keep a daily journal. She writes in there things that get on her nerves about Randy.
My wife would totally do that, but I bet there are some women would use the journal to record things they cherish about their terminally ill husbands.
“Randy didn’t put his plate in the dishwasher tonight,” she wrote one night. “He just left it there on the table and went to his computer.” She knew he was preoccupied, heading to the Internet to research medical treatments. Still, the dish bothered her. She wrote about it, felt better, and they didn’t need to argue over it.
Hey honey, just put the goddamn plate in the goddamn dishwasher, will ya? It’s part of living with other people. God knows what sort of minutiae this man would be having soul-crushing arguments about over the course of a normal lifespan.
I mean, I’m no saint, but I’ve put other people’s plates in dishwashers hundreds of times, and they were all in perfect health.
R.I.P., Randy Pausch.
I tell my son, “When you call grandma to thank her for the book, tell her you really liked the part about brick walls letting us prove how badly we want things.”
We went to Souplantation for dinner tonight. I was really hungry but when we got there, there was already a line of people at the salad bar.
I hate when that happens.
Let me tell you what I did: I grabbed a tray and came in swinging, cracked a few people in the cranium, then finished them off with a serrated-edge knife from the silverware station.
It’s a crude plan, but let me tell you why it works: the element of surprise. No one goes to Souplantation expecting to be knocked over the head and stabbed . . .
It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.
Haven’t seen it. Might see it . . . not sure yet. I’ve seen the trailer though and I’ll tell you something: Heath Ledger is TERRIBLE!
That’s not acting! Put the same makeup on somebody else, give ‘em a script, let ‘em read the same lines . . . there’s a million people who could do the same thing.
You don’t think so? You don’t think Heath Ledger knew that? Why do you think he’s dead of an overdose?
Outer-space sex carries complications
Hey NASA, I’m no aeronautical engineer but what I’d do is to tether the woman to a stationary object so she can’t move, just like I do here on Earth.
Uh . . . with her consent, of course . . .
Simplify, simplify, simplify!
Thoreau’s Walden had a profound impact on my thinking. It’s hard to achieve the kind of transcendent simplicity he describes when you live with other people, as I do, but if your family is out of town for a week, as mine is, here are some things you might want to try.
When my wife is here, we have to sort and bag bottles, cans and plastic separately. Later on that noise! Everything goes straight into the garbage! Simplify, simplify, simplify!
Drink liquids from the container and eat food straight out of whatever you cooked it in. If you have to clean an eating utensil, put it in your mouth, press your lips together, and pull it back out.
Why walk all the way to the bathroom if there’s a bottle, can or sink close at hand? A real time-saver!
Look, toolbox — you can either back into the spot when you arrive or back out of the spot when you leave. Backing in is harder because you’ve got less room to work with and you don’t want to bang into a neighboring vehicle. If you back out, you’re backing into open space.
But the worst thing is that by backing in, you put your driver’s side door right next to my driver’s side door, so we have to wait for each other to get in and out of the cars . . .
A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . .
In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000.
Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much.
Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings.
Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students.
ROME - Italian railway police say an American tourist was hit and killed by a train at a Rome station as he was walking on the tracks in a daze after being drugged and robbed.
Police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said Monday that 74-year-old Frank Phel from California died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station.
Arrivederci Roma!
A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom.
“Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up an Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.”
“There are Asian gangs in Irvine.”
“Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .”
JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Paul Davis, a singer and songwriter whose soft rock hit “I Go Crazy” stayed on the charts for months after its release in 1977, died Tuesday. He was 60.
That’s disappointing.
Not the fact that he died, because who cares, really, but the fact that he didn’t actually go crazy and kill himself in some bizarre fashion . . .
I’m definitely not a morning person. I used to be a night person, but now I’m more of a nothing person. There’s no hour of the day or night that I wouldn’t rather close my eyes and sleep . . . and sleep . . .
According to a billboard I saw today, a child is diagnosed with autism every 20 minutes!
That goes to show how little I know about it. I would have thought that once would be enough.
Is he still autistic, doctor?
I’m afraid so, but I’ll check him again in 20 minutes . . .
Welcome to EppsNet, where the writers are not on strike!
Striking writers are stupid. Pretend you’re a TV executive and your writers are on strike.
Oh dear! What will I do? I’ll have to show reruns and only get 90 percent of the dimbulb audience I’d get showing new episodes. Boo hoo hoo! 
Television is the opiate of the masses, man! People will watch it no matter what’s on. They can’t live without it.
We’ve got TVs in restaurants, health clubs, cars, you name it. They’re ubiquitous!
The number of people like me — who think that if you want to eat dinner in front of a TV set you should stay the hell at home — is very small compared to the number of people who will not leave their homes if it means being separated from a television.
Hey scribes! People are going to turn off their flat-panel LCD high-def TVs — and do what? Read a book? Interact with their families?
Fat fucking chance!
Writers can stay on strike forever for all anybody cares.
That’s why TV shows are so stupid. They’re written by stupid people.
Stars Won’t Attend Golden Globe Awards
Golden Globe-nominated actors and presenters won’t attend the televised award show Jan. 13 because of the writers’ strike, the Screen Actors Guild announced Friday.
Well then . . . that casts things in a whole new light! Actors will not attend the Golden Globes because they’d have to cross a picket line of angry wordsmiths and ink slingers.
OMG! I hope the earth doesn’t stop revolving on its axis and fling us all into space because actors are boycotting the Golden Globes telecast!
What are the Golden Globes anyway? Another excuse for actors to get together and suck each other’s dicks?
Rot in hell, thespians!
A fat woman at the office, sitting at her desk finger-fondling a frosted gingerbread man, whether because it was “male” or because it was edible, I’m not sure. It’s no less disturbing either way.
Parenthetically: I don’t think she knew anyone could see her . . .
The rising tide of the mortgage industry lifted some pretty spurious boats here in Orange County, so it’s fun now to watch the subprime sinkhole laying them low.
Example: John Lynch, the “surfing banker,” executive VP of Secured Funding Corp., specialists in home equity loans and second mortgages to people with bad credit.
I had this guy pegged as a moron years ago, around the same time OC Metro ran a fawning blowjob of a profile on him:
For the foreseeable future, he will continue as a master of both the surfboard and the boardroom — plus anything else that he decides to do.
Well, that was then and this is now:
The party is over in Orange County. These days, Secured Funding’s once-buzzing office building in Costa Mesa, near John Wayne Airport, is gutted.
The imprint of “Secured Funding” is all that remains of the corporate logo that once graced the outside of the two-story building. Above it is a “For Lease” sign advertising the 82,333-square-foot (7,649-square-meter) building.
Lynch was so, so chatty with the press in 2004. What does he have to say now?
Neither [Lorne] Lahodny nor his partner in Secured, John Lynch, responded to messages left by phone and in person at their offices.
I’ve got here an email from the Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF), soliciting online donations at the IPSF website.
Also on the website is a page listing the names of the IPSF board members, along with their corporate affiliation. Seven of the board members have no corporate affiliation and instead are given the tagline of “Community Leader.”
Question: What in the world is a Community Leader?!
How does one acquire such a designation, other than not having a real job?
Couldn’t we just identify them as Volunteers or Parents or Parent Volunteers, instead of making them out to be some sort of tribal chieftains?
Based on the one Community Leader that I actually know personally, I’d say a more appropriate label would be Community Nuisance or Gadfly.
