Bag of Randomness

  • As I was driving home from the Rangers game last night, I heard a song I haven’t heard in a very long time, Mike + The Mechanics’ “In the Living Years“.  I attended the game with a friend who somewhat recently lost his father, but was thankful that his dad got to hang out with his grandson.  I have to admit, as someone who never will get the blessing of seeing his parents play with their grandchildren, that makes me jealous, not bitterly jealous or anything, but just jealous in that gosh darn heck kinda way.  But hey, I’m very thankful that I now have a 3 month old son who shares my father’s name. So when I heard these all too familiar lyrics I actually shed a tear somewhere on hwy 360 because I could really connect with the echo part for the first time in my life:
  • I think the man sitting next to me was a disfigured war vet.  He wore sun glasses, but from my angle I could tell he had a prosthetic eye as well as a fake beard and believe it or  not, a glued on ear and lots of make up to conceal everything.  I spoke briefly with him, nothing of substance, but he seemed to be a pretty happy fellow.
  • Or maybe he was in the witness protection program.
  • I came within three rows of catching a foul ball.
  • The Ballpark opens two hours before the game, but only the first and third base entrances are open, with center and home opening an hour-and-a-half.  I would have thought the home plate entrance would have been the first to open.
  • At the home plate entrance is that father/son statue that is dedicated to the firefighter that fell to his death one or two years ago.  I still think that was the Rangers way of trying not to get sued, and don’t think the statue would have been created and dedicated if the father was something other than a firefighter/cop/GI, but rather something like a software engineer.
  • I did notice that the railing were raised by removing all the previous poles and wires and installing a red metallic border with higher poles and wires.  It’s all done in a way that you wouldn’t notice unless you specifically looked for it.
  • Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce can be found almost everywhere.
  • I was surprised at so many people buying the $26 one pound hot dog.  I was surprised seeing so many people take a picture with them.  I was surprised to see many ‘average’ looking men finish the whole dang thing.
  • The food is much, much better than my last visit about four years ago.
  • There were a few couples getting married at the Ballpark yesterday before the start of the game.  Couple One and Couple Two
  • It’s not quite noticeable on TV, but when you are there you can notice that the infield has much different grass than the outfield.  I was told that’s the Ranger’s strategy to slow down balls to defense better. #whoknows
  • I thought the Rangers were going to stop showing that video of Nolan Ryan beating up Robin Ventura, but it was included in a montage.
  • Speaking of montage, here’s a Random 80’s montage.
  • Oh what the heck, here’s another.
  • I’m a sucker for the dot races.
  • I saw a report on Monday night in which an SMU student was upset that the school didn’t notify students by text about the alleged gunman on campus, but only provided a tweet about three hours after the man was on top of that crane.  If that’s true, SMU officials should be ashamed of themselves.
  • Romney app misspells ‘America’
  • Justin Bieber training with Mike Tyson
  • Very interesting and interactive Civil War visualization graph
  • A Super Mario Bros. fish tank
  • Top 374 keywords the U.S. government monitors
  • 30 Famous People With Law Degrees 
  • A very awesome dress made out of film
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4 Responses to Bag of Randomness

  1. Ben says:

    I think SMU's justification for not using their campus-wide emergency alert system was that there are almost no students on campus since the spring semester is over and summer hasn't started yet. They did almost immediately notify the people located in the buildings closest to the crane, from what I understand, but chose not to use the campus-wide system because there was little to no indication from law enforcement that there was any danger to anyone outside the immediate area.

  2. DF Ranger Smith says:

    Be leary of any man with a fake bear.

  3. B_Caesar says:

    Ben is correct. The situation was contained quickly and the area potentially involved was sealed off by law enforcement – the rest of campus was not directly affected and had someone tried to walk into the potentially dangerous area, they would have been stopped. If SMU officials had decided to broadcast a general alert to everyone, as those few people have complained about, then we'd be hearing the even louder and more widespread complaints from students and parents and faculty and staff who were everywhere but at SMU (on a day the University was not even officially open for a holiday no less) about "why did we get this silly alert message that doesn't apply to me?". It's a classic damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. They chose the lesser of the two, and rightly so.

  4. dan says:

    "■There were a few couples getting married at the Ballpark yesterday before the start of the game."

    One of the couples was interviewed during the game, still wearing their formal ware. The big mouth husband did all the talking. I felt really sorry for the wife walking around in her gown surrounded by men in T-shirts and ball caps and holding beer cups.

    I think the end result of a text alert to SMU students might have been to draw more students to see what was going at the construction site. The subject, clearly visible, with search lights on him, sitting in the cab of the crane, surrounded by SWAT team members and snipers, could not have been more confined if he had been sitting in jail.

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