Bag of Randomness for Thursday, July 23, 2020


Country Time sending $100 stimulus checks to kids with lemonade stands

The lemonade and soft-drink company is mailing out $100 “bailout checks” to kids as part of its “Littlest Bailout Relief Fund.”  It’s a nod to the Payment Protection Plan, a federal loan program that helps keep small businesses afloat.

“Due to social distancing guidelines, lemonade stands aren’t what they used to be, and we want to help kids foster their entrepreneurial spirit by offering a small relief to those who can’t operate their lemonade stands this summer,” Andrew Deckert, a brand manager at Country Time, said in a statement.


WifeGeeding’s birthday was last week. My gift to her was an ice maker that makes the nugget ice you get from Sonic.


I donated blood recently at Carter Bloodcare. One benefit of donation is a free total cholesterol test, but they now also provide a free COVID-19 antibodies test. I tested negative and the cholesterol was under 200 and could be better.


The NBA is doing a great job of making the best out of an empty arena for a television audience.


Person, woman, man, camera, TV.


There’s a small spot on the bottom of my nose that has been irritating me for about three years. It seems to flare up at times, the pain isn’t always constant and some weeks can be worst than others. I really don’t like it when it flares up because my CPAP nasal mask directly hits it. I saw a dermatologist about it last year and was prescribed an antibiotic ointment. That didn’t help so she prescribed a stronger antibiotic, but for some reason, I never followed up after that visit. However, I did visit her last week and she took a biopsy. I received the results yesterday and was given a diagnosis which I can’t pronounce, but, in short, it’s pre-cancerous and I’ll be going in on Friday for her to burn/freeze it off with liquid nitrogen. I probably should have taken this more seriously a lot earlier considering my father had skin cancer and not only had a lot of the liquid nitrogen burning/freezing procedures but a snippet of his ear removed. Right now, I can almost hear my friend Brent yelling at me as his father succumbed from skin cancer.


‘Dangerous road hazard’: Texas police warn motorists of tire-flattening spikes scattered on major highway

A weapon used for centuries is endangering motorists on a major roadway in Texas.

Caltrops, sometimes called “stop spikes,” have been recovered by police in the state along Interstate 20 throughout July. The Smith County Sheriff’s Office on July 9 reported more than 30 were recovered over a week. Local news outlets reported more were found Tuesday.

The I-20 is known as the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway within the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The spiked caltrops have been found roughly 100 miles east of Dallas.

“This device is a tire deflation device and is a prohibited weapon by the Texas Penal Code,” the sheriff’s office said on its Facebook page. “A person commits an offense if the person intentionally or knowingly possesses, manufactures, transports, repairs, or sells a tire deflation device. This offense is a state jail felony.”


Person, woman, man, camera, TV.



DFW’s MedStar ambulance service says it has responded to about 100% more cardiac arrests this month than it did in July of 2019.


Someone recently recommended ABC pants from Lululemon as the ultimate non-jeans pants for males. I’ll be honest, I’m not secure enough in my masculinity to buy anything from Lululemon. And to more honest, I’m not willing to spend $128 on a single pair of pants. But, I learned “ABC” stands for anti-ball crushing pants.


Man, that’s a lot of money. But then again, it probably takes a lot of money to entice a house speaker.

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder arrested in $60 million bribery case

Federal agents arrested Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four others Tuesday as part of a $60 million racketeering and bribery investigation that prosecutors described as one of the largest public corruption cases in Ohio history.

All the charges are tied to what federal prosecutors said was a criminal enterprise dedicated to securing a bailout for two nuclear power plants in northern Ohio owned by FirstEnergy Solutions of Akron. The bailout is expected to cost the state’s utility ratepayers $1 billion.


I think it was last year when WifeGeeding was trying to convince me that camouflage clothing was “in style”. I laughed and told her that camouflage will always be associated with red-necks and such. All that came to mind when new photos of the future king of England were released.


Person, woman, man, camera, TV.


This guy is part of the Trump campaign’s leadership team and doesn’t understand that it’s literally Trump’s America right now.


I applaud this man’s efforts and pulling it off. I’d suggest one of their future kids’ middle name be that of the comet.

Upstate New York couple goes viral with engagement under comet NEOWISE


A fellow Perry Mason fan was nice enough to inform me that the Sister Alice character is based on Aimee McPherson, a famous evangelist in LA during the time period of the Mason-origin story. Milton Berle claimed to have had an affair with her. And it appears the latest season of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful focuses on her as well.

Aimee Elizabeth Semple McPherson (née Kennedy; October 9, 1890 – September 27, 1944), also known as Sister Aimee or Sister, was a Canadian Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s, famous for founding the Foursquare Church. McPherson pioneered the use of modern media in religious services, using radio to draw on the growing appeal of popular entertainment and incorporating stage techniques into her weekly sermons at Angelus Temple, an early megachurch.

In her time she was the most publicized Protestant evangelist, surpassing Billy Sunday and other predecessors. She conducted public faith healing demonstrations involving tens of thousands of participants. McPherson’s view of the United States as a nation founded and sustained by divine inspiration influenced later pastors.

National news coverage focused on events surrounding her family and church members, including accusations she fabricated her reported kidnapping

Speaking of the show – Perry Mason Renewed at HBO


Since it’s a short book, I might just give this a read as the thought itself is interesting, whether it be Trump or any future president.

What Could Happen If Donald Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat?

Lawrence Douglas, a legal scholar and a professor at Amherst College, gave himself the task of methodically thinking through the unthinkable. The result is a slim book, “Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.” Douglas begins by taking the President at his word. “While his defeat is far from certain,” he writes, “what is not uncertain is how Donald Trump would react to electoral defeat, especially a narrow one. He will reject the result.”


Whatever happened to the summer job?How seasonal gigs became a nostalgic relic of the past for many of today’s young people.

Much of the drop traces back to the Great Recession, which led to a dramatic decrease in the number of teens who work during summers, according to research from the Urban Institute. A June 2020 report on the summer job outlook for teens in light of Covid-19 from Drexel University’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy suggests the pandemic has set back any gains since: Had the pandemic not happened, the report explains, seasonally adjusted teen employment rate was expected to be about 31 percent, the highest level since before the Great Recession. Now, the teen summer employment rate is expected to be at a historic low: 23 percent.

Yet the summer job remains so embedded in American consciousness that it is treated with a kind of nostalgia. Jobs working in restaurants or behind cash registers, mowing lawns, or washing cars may not have been the stuff of dream-job glamour, but they represented a significant turning point for young people: Real life, and a sense of real responsibility.


Tesla will build Cybertruck factory in Austin, Texas

The new factory in Texas will be open to the public, Musk said, and that there will be a boardwalk and hiking and biking trails. “It’s going to basically be an ecological paradise. Birds in the trees, butterflies, fish in the stream,” he said.

In addition to the Cybertruck, Tesla will also build Model Ys and Model 3s destined for the East Coast, as well as the Tesla Semi, Musk said. The site where Tesla is building the factory consists of about 2,100 acres of land east of the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, with about two miles of exposure to Texas’ Colorado river.

Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

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