Bag of Randomness for Thursday, January 18, 2024

  • Cowboys keeping Mike McCarthy? I’ll believe it if nothing happens over the weekend. Again, if I were writing NFL fan fiction, I’d have it where Jerry contacts Belichick by that back channel route I referenced earlier this week. The coach then calls Parcells for his thoughts. Parcells will say it never set well with him when Jerry brought in Terrell Owens, that Jerry is not a man of his word. That’s enough for Belichick to hear, and through that back channel informs Jerry that he isn’t interested. Jerry, then is able to save face and is never publically turned down and releases a statement it’s in the team’s best interest to keep McCarthy.
  • You may remember I had my kids over the night of Christmas Eve in 2022, which was extra cold that year. All was well when we left to go to our church’s candle-lit service. But when we got home, the garage was flooded. Water was coming out from the wall near the washing machine. Turning the water off at the connections didn’t stop things, so I had to turn the main valve off. I called my landlord, but there was no way I would get a plumber or any crew over that evening. To make things worse, the garage floor doesn’t slope outside. So, I did my best to sweep the water out with what I had available, a broom and a one-gallon wet/dry vac. That was a heck of a night. Yesterday around lunchtime, I left the house to pick up some prescriptions. When I arrived home, I found the garage flooded again. Thankfully, it wasn’t the night of Christmas Eve and I was only away for maybe 15 minutes. The landlord was sending a plumber who would be over in a few hours. I used my little wet/dry vac, but after bending and lifting from using and emptying it half a dozen times, my back was really starting to hurt. So, I thought I’d work on being more of an extrovert and instead of doing things myself, ask for a little help. So, I talked to my neighbor, and he loaned me a huge wet/dry vac. Oh man, that saved me a lot of work. I think in all, I vacuumed over twenty gallons of standing water.
  • I keep forgetting to write a little more about my trip to see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas and the very brief relationship I had with a girl who liked my profile on a dating app who was so beautiful, that there was no physical feature that could be added or taken away to make her better looking. Oh, I smitten I was. She gave me hope that someone great may be out there, and could be interested in me. She made me realize that when it came to dating since divorce, I’ve been doing a lot of settling in hopes of trying to find a best friend again.
  • I sent a text expressing how much I love and appreciate my closest friends last night when I heard the news that Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojević died of a heart attack at 46. All of us are 48 years old. Most were math majors, so it was no surprise when one of them said that 48 years is 2/3 of the 72 years that used to be life expectancy. I remember reading that life expectancy statistic in high school, circa 1993, which was for white males. My dad was 69 at the time. That was a major reason why I was a homebody and drove home at least once a month from college. Family always came first for me. You may remember that Dad had a cardiac episode and a pacemaker put in three days before my high school graduation. But, back to that stat and how it relates to us. Thankfully, all of us are non-smokers, and the overwhelming majority of those men in that statistic were smokers. And, medicine has advanced. But, we all know how unpredictable life can be and the curveballs that it will throw.
  • On the evening news, there was a segment on Nikki Haley’s comments about the U.S. never being a racist country. The reporter asked a person in a control group her thoughts, and she said, “Was she asleep during the Sixties?” Well, to be fair, and hopefully not come across as a smartass, but she was born in 1972 and totally missed that decade.
    • That, along with any talk of book banning, makes me think of this classic scene in Field of Dreams when Annie says,
    • And, anytime I hear a reference made about the Sixties, I think of this classic scene from the same movie.
  • The Mavs did well drafting this mature and encouraging 19-year-old. I like that he took the opportunity the reporter gave him and what he said. Sure, we’ve all heard the same message from an athlete a thousand times, but it encourages people like me who feel they are surviving life instead of thriving at it, who live alone, and have little to no family.

    Sidenote: I think it’s commendable that the reporter, Jonah Javad, ends the end of every 1-on-1 interview asking if the person has anything else they’d like to say or add. I literally ended every argument with the person I was married to the exact same way. The number of times she ever added or asked anything – zero. That led me to believe we were on the same page. Boy, was I wrong, and that’s why I never saw the divorce coming.

  • I hope you don’t read that as “negative zero,” because zero can neither be negative nor positive.
  • I think it’s pretty darn neat that every time Mark Cuban has sold a company, he gives all his employees some type of bonus. He’s doing that with the sale of the Mavericks, divvying up 30 million dollars. He was being interviewed by one of those employees yesterday on the radio, who has worked for the organization for 13 years. Cuban had to think about it for a second but said the bonus should be $75,000. I wonder what would happen if Cuban over-quoted the amount by mistake. Like, when the employee actually gets the bonus, it’s $55,000. Surely, Cuban would make up the difference.

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