here was an old woman tossed up in a basket,
Nineteen times as high as the moon;
Where she was going I couldn’t but ask it,
For in her hand she carried a broom.

“Old woman, old woman, old woman,” quoth I,
“Oh whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?”
“To brush the cobwebs off the sky!”
“Shall I go with thee?”
“Aye, by-and-by.”

Take that, liberal heathen! She’s not “supposed” to pray in a school but she did it anyway! And that’s why she’s alive today!

It would be useful to know for the purpose of assessing the value of prayer as a tornado survival tactic, how many of the 24 people who didn’t survive the Oklahoma tornado were praying at the moment of their death.

Of the 10 children who were killed, were any of them praying? Maybe God said to himself, “Okay, change of plans. I was going to hit Rhonda Crosswhite with this tornado, but since she’s praying out loud in a school, I’ll redirect it into those 10 kids.”

Hi, everybody! Here’s a picture of me taking a nap on my porch.

I know what you’re thinking: “Lightning, did you refinance to take advantage of the low interest rates?”

HAHA . . . I OWN THIS PLACE FREE AND CLEAR! IT’S PAID OFF!

— Lightning

My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person.

— Andy Warhol

My whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn’t for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle — where a father’s not at home, where a father’s not helping to raise that son and daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man. . . .

Growing up, I made quite a few [bad choices] myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.

We’ve got no time for excuses.

In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.

Moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.

Morehouse College is a historically black, all-male college in Atlanta.

Related articles

• Obama gets personal about race and manhood in Morehouse speech (washingtonpost.com)

“He’s a joker, he’s a smoker, he’s a midnight toker,” Obama added.

When I get coffee from the break room, I try to cycle through the creamers — French Vanilla, Hazelnut and the regular Half & Half.

Today I got coffee and I couldn’t remember where I left off in the cycle. I’m in a quandary . . .

so·te·ri·ol·o·gy \suh-teer-ee-ol-uh-jee\, noun:

1. spiritual salvation, esp. by divine agency.
2. the branch of theology dealing with this.

[Editor's Note: Obviously I disagree with this egregious opinion, but I'm committed to hosting a wide range of viewpoints. -- PE]

You have mothers, you have wives who are also mothers, you have daughters who are also mothers . . . attention has to be divided and no one is satisfied with her share of the pie. As a son, husband and/or father, you can’t win, it’s just a question of how badly you’re going to lose.

Women are bitching on the run-up to Mothers Day, they’re bitching on Mothers Day, and they’re laying down ground rules regarding what they will and will not put up with on next year’s Mothers Day.

It’s a big foofaraw and nobody’s happy.

Conversely, on Fathers Day, everyone’s as happy as a lark, despite the fact that Fathers Day is commemorated, in my family at least, by absolutely nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if you’re still alive. I know you could be, even though I’m almost 70 years old myself.

Here’s a recent picture of me . . .

I’m taking a lot of naps now that I’m older. Although come to think of it, I took a lot of naps when I was younger too!

I can’t move my legs very well now — my back legs, mostly. They don’t hurt, but I can’t feel them very much and I can’t tell where they are. It’s funny that I used to be the fastest pug and now I’m the slowest.

I remember you told me that dogs teach people about two things:

1. Unconditional love, and
2. Nothing lasts forever. Everything ends so don’t take anything for granted, even for one day.

If you don’t hear from me next Mothers Day, it’s not because I forgot. If I go to heaven first, I’ll wait for you and we’ll all be together again!

Love,

Lightning

What’s the billing code for that?

Lassa Witch Doctors

Alternative medicine is not a real thing. You don’t have a choice between medicine and alternative medicine. You have a choice between medicine and Things That Have Not Been Proven to Work.

Alternative medicine that works is called “medicine.”

Some people tell me that regular doctors don’t know about alternative medicine because they don’t teach it in medical schools.

They don’t teach it in medical schools? If I didn’t know anything about my job beyond what I learned in school 25 years ago, I’d be in bad shape. I’d be unemployable.

If there are any doctors out there who’ve never learned anything outside of medical school, those are not the doctors you want to be going to.

They were rescued on Monday of this week when one of the women screamed through a small opening in the front door, “I need help! I need help! I have been kidnapped for 10 years.” Two men in the neighborhood heard her screaming, kicked the door in and the women were able to escape.

(Why it took 10 years to think up the Scream for Help strategy, I don’t know. I wish the reporter had asked about that.)

A childhood friend of one of the women said, “I’m so thankful, God is good. I’ve been praying. Never forgot about her, ever.”

So let’s see . . . 10 years of prayer = no results. Screaming for help = instant results.

I know some wiseass is going to say that prayer did bring results because God sent someone to kick the door in, but did he have to wait 10 years to do it? It’s a good thing the guys who heard the screams didn’t take 10 years to mull over their next move . . .

Best of the Web Today: Crunch Time – WSJ.com

I hate to admit it but I’m getting old. My mind is still sharp and I’m still handsome but I can’t move my legs very well anymore. I feel like pretty soon I won’t be able to move them at all and when that happens . . .

My owner promised to take care of me all the way so I’m not scared. He tells me he loves me. He never used to tell me that but I knew anyway.

He asked his wife the other day if it’s okay to say “Love you” to a dog. “It feels a little silly,” he said, “but maybe he understands it.”

I think he knows that our time together is almost over . . .

I never actually noticed it before, but the gas station where I buy sodas every morning has a sign out front showing the current jackpots for Powerball and Mega Millions.

Both of the jackpots were three digits this morning (nine digits if you add six zeros for the millions) — one a little more than 200 and one a little less. Maybe that’s why I noticed them today, because there were so many digits. Or maybe it’s my destiny to win the lottery and the hand of fate turned my eyeballs to the jackpots.

“I noticed the numbers out front,” I said to the clerk. “Give me a ticket for Powerball and Mega Millions.”

“That’s a lot of millions,” he said.

“It sure is. I’ll still stop by in the morning for sodas though.”

The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled — the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor — refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired. . . .

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

— Lightning

I got my teeth whitened today. Ah, vanitas vanitatum!

“Have you done this before?” the esthetician asked me.

“No . . . have you?”

Most days I park on Level 5 of the office parking structure because that’s where the open spaces are at the time I arrive.¹

This morning I got a spot on Level 1! A guy was pulling out just as I was pulling in and I got the spot.

Unfortunately, when I went out for lunch, I walked up four levels out of habit and couldn’t find my car.

¹There are actually a lot of open spaces on lower levels but they’re “reserved” for people who aren’t there, which is rubbish. If you’re really that important, you should be the first person in every morning and you can have any parking space you want.

Related articles

• Parking: Tips for Finding the Best Space (allstate.com)

Edmund Gettier

What does it mean to say that you “know” something is true?

According to traditional philosophical thinking, you can be said to know that some proposition P is true if and only if:

1. P is true.
2. You believe that P is true.
3. You are justified in believing that P is true.

These three conditions jointly form the concept of justified true belief (JTB).

As an example, let’s examine my claim that I know Paris is the capital of France. Unless an edict to the contrary has come down in the last few minutes, Paris is the capital of France, I believe that Paris is the capital of France, and I’m justified in believing that based on available evidence. So according to the concept of justified true belief, I know that Paris is the capital of France.

Gettier Problems

Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say I wake up in the morning, look at the clock (let’s make it an old-fashioned analog clock), and it shows the time as 7:30. And let’s say that the time is in fact 7:30, but that, unknown to me, the clock has stopped. Do I “know” that the time is 7:30? My belief that the time is 7:30 is correct, but is it knowledge — or is it more of a lucky guess?

Another thought experiment: Given the following scenario, do I “know” that my wife is in the house? I come home from work and see my wife in the kitchen. As it happens though, what I see in the kitchen is actually a perfectly rendered hologram. My wife is in the house though, but she’s upstairs where I can’t see her. Again, the three JTB conditions are true, but my justification for belief has nothing to do with the truth of the matter.

These types of thought experiments are called Gettier problems, named for Edmund Gettier, who in 1963 published a paper called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”

If this kind of thing is of interest to you, Wikipedia has articles on Edmund Gettier and Gettier problems and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a more in-depth treatment.

Photogravure of Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In democratic societies, there exists an urge to do something even when the goal is not precise, a sort of permanent fever that turns to innovations (which) are always costly.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1831)

Country music legend George Jones dies at 81

— CNN.com

This picture was taken just after I said to Mark Twain, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

And Twain said, “That’s a good one! I’ve got to write that down!”

Actually, the Twain statue is just inside the main entrance of Doe Library at UC Berkeley. I asked the nerdy-looking Asian girl at the front desk, “Who’s the guy on the bench?” She stared at me for a second. “Kidding,” I said.

“At first, I thought it was Albert Einstein,” she said, “so it doesn’t surprise me when people don’t know.”

Shame on everyone who assumed that the bombers were Muslims from a foreign land! Wait — what? They were Muslims from a foreign land? OK, never mind.

Calling out “far-right extremists” for “demonizing bogeymen” is either hilariously ironic or depressingly symptomatic of American decline. Since Salon is not known for its satire, I have to go with the latter.

William of Occam

Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They’re Better — PBS NewsHour

An academic says that Silicon Valley is “not a meritocracy.”

He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce.

The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X.

In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do.

Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to see them sometimes?

The fact that more men than women are founding startups is not evidence that women are being discriminated against. The simplest explanation is that women just don’t want to do it as much as men do.

These people who see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

(Photo credit: The Bees)

There’s an unwritten rule in the software business that any integration between two systems must be described as “seamless,” the result being that the word no longer has any meaning.

My favorite seamless integration storyline took place years ago when IBM had a joint marketing pact with Vignette, and offered “seamless integration” between the WebSphere application server and the Vignette content management system. In fact, the two systems weren’t integrated at all by any definition of the word “integrated” that I know about. We had to write our own interfaces to move data between them.

The funny thing is, that is seamless integration if you think about it, in that there’s no seam between two things that are not connected at all.

For example, my shirt neatly integrates sleeves, cuffs, pocket, collar . . . but not seamlessly. There are seams all over the place. Whereas the shirt is seamlessly integrated with my pants. I can stuff the shirt in there and if I don’t move around too vigorously, it will stay there and not come out.

What’s so bad about seams, anyway?

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t swipe it yet.” Time passed.

“Okay, go ahead.”

After I swiped the card, she said, “Can you read me the four-digit security code on the front of the card.”

I read it to her. More time passed. “Can I see the card please?” she said.

“I thought this was supposed to be easy.”

“It is easy.”

“Okay, sorry.”

Along with my Staples receipt, I was given a coupon for 40 percent off a different, more expensive brand of notebook. I had actually looked at the other brand of notebook when I was in the store, but didn’t think it was worth the extra cost. If I’d had the coupon at the time, I might have used it to buy the more expensive brand.

The coupon expires in three weeks. I’m not going to need another notebook in the next three weeks. What’s the use of giving me a coupon for a notebook when I just bought a notebook?

Best-educated moms are also more likely to ‘opt out,’ research finds

Opt out of what?

It turns out “opt out” means opt out of the workforce. How is a mom staying home and raising her kids considered “opting out”?

It’s a completely unnecessary system to begin with because I can monitor the tire pressure myself, as drivers have done since the invention of the automobile.

Let’s add a completely unnecessary new system so when it breaks, the owner will have to pay to fix it.

Can I just ignore the warning light? I don’t know. The worst-case scenario is that the TPMS not only breaks but creates a domino effect that knocks out a critical system that I actually need.

Toilers in software development can draw their own analogies . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

everything is permitted
absolute freedom of movement
that is, without leaving the cage
2+2 doesn’t make 4:
once it made 4 but
today nothing is known in this regard

— Nicanor Parra, “Watch Out for the Gospel of the Times”

]]> http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/watch-out-for-the-gospel-of-the-times/feed/ 0 http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/watch-out-for-the-gospel-of-the-times/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eppsnet/~3/RPyvht7QkQw/ http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/but-this-guy-he-might-be-for-real/#comments Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:59:28 +0000 PE http://eppsnet.com/?p=18007

]]> http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/but-this-guy-he-might-be-for-real/feed/ 0 http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/but-this-guy-he-might-be-for-real/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eppsnet/~3/qHczrfyMEcA/ http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/riddle/#comments Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:01:36 +0000 PE http://eppsnet.com/?p=18000 Q: How do bananas get downstairs?

A: They slide down the bananaster.

]]> http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/riddle/feed/ 0 http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/riddle/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eppsnet/~3/jCATo_vb7RU/ http://eppsnet.com/2013/04/hws-movie-reviews-42/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 23:01:23 +0000 Hostile Witness http://eppsnet.com/?p=17992

Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball!

Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already.

You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.”

When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities.

You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now.

Let’s move on already.

Rating:

Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco Giants don’t have a single black player on their current roster (although some of the Latin players are pretty dark). Black men can play baseball if they want to but they don’t want to.

Whoever’s in charge of brand management for the food truck industry has got to be a genius.

My wife asks how my job is going . . .

“I’m hittin’ home runs like Willie Mays!” I reply. “You know Willie Mays?”

“No.”

“I’m hittin’ home runs like Mark McGwire!”

“I know Jackie Robinson.”

“Jackie Robinson didn’t hit a lot of home runs.”

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is the journal of an old man — a pastor in a small town in Iowa — writing to his young son, whom he intends to read it after his death. He doesn’t know how to get to the point, he complains about his health despite an absence of physical symptoms, he sees everything as a blessing . . .

He has no strong convictions — I think this but other people think that and they may have a point. The one strong conviction that he does have, he recants by the end of the book.

It’s not a bad book but since the author, Marilynne Robinson, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for it, I feel like I have to say that it’s not a very good book either. Imagine being cornered at a family reunion by one of your least interesting older relatives and you’ll have a good sense of what reading Gilead is like.

Rating:

Straight Man by Richard Russo

Straight Man is an academic satire set in a small state college in Pennsylvania. William Henry Devereaux Jr. is the chairman of the English department. His colleagues, who can’t stand one another, maneuver to hold on to their jobs in the face of rumored upcoming budget cuts.

Straight Man is a fun book to read, if not quite up to the gold standard for academic satire, which is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Russo offers a nod to Amis by giving Devereaux the nickname Lucky Hank.

Russo has also won a Pulitzer Prize, not for Straight Man but for a novel he wrote a few years later called Empire Falls.

Rating:

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections is a terrific piece of work. Enid Lambert, mother of three grown children and wife to a man losing his faculties to Parkinson’s disease, has her heart set on bringing the whole family together for one final Christmas. Franzen uses the motif of “corrections” in multiple ways, including the way that children shape their own lives as “corrections” of the lives of their parents.

Unlike the two previous authors — Robinson and Russo — Jonathan Franzen has not won a Pulitzer Prize. The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2001, and was a finalist for the fiction Pulitzer in 2002, but lost out to Russo’s Empire Falls.

If you just read The Corrections and Straight Man, you’d have to say that Franzen is a much better writer than Russo, but it may be that Russo’s ambitions were more modest with Straight Man than with Empire Falls. If I were a real book reviewer, I would have read Empire Falls and could tell you for certain, but I’m not and I haven’t.

The Corrections is a good companion piece to Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin on the themes of aging and what happens in families when the kids become grown-ups and the parents get old.

One section of the book — the Denise section — is a notch below the rest, but everything else is so good that I can’t give anything less than the highest acclaim.

Rating:

Powell’s Books has a Poetry Madness bracket online to determine the Best Poet of All Time. Unfortunately, along with some really obvious omissions, they don’t understand the concept of seeding, so while minor poets face off in a number of first round matchups, there are inexplicable heavyweight pairings like T.S. Eliot vs. Emily Dickinson . . .