Bag of Randomness for Thursday, February 29, 2024

  • Why did this poor girl’s parents push her to do this? Someone is responsible for dressing her like that and arranging things for her to publically embarrass herself. There’s no way I won’t remember this for the rest of my life.

  • This is interesting. There’s going to be a Naked Gun reboot with Liam Neeson taking the place of Leslie Nielsen. Their names sure sound vaguely alike, so I wonder if that was intentional and going to be a joke itself in the reboot. Seth MacFarlane will be a producer and will be released next summer. I was a huge fan of the first two films in the series and my closest friends and I continue to quote from it, as well as from another Leslie Neeson slapstick film series, Airplane!. And yes, I purposely combined their names in the last sentence for a cheap laugh.
    • Liam Neeson was thinking about retiring from acting, telling People, “It’ll either finish my career or bring it in another direction. I honestly don’t know.” This is a good move, I think. Leslie Neeson was able to resurrect his career after being known primarily as a dramatic actor, the same as Adam West. It was a major reason why Airplane! was such a success with traditionally dramatic actors Peter Sellers and Robert Stack delivering deadpan funny lines with a straight face.
    • Speaker of Peter Sellers, like me, he hated gas-powered leaf blowers. I still haven’t found a celebrity who shares my hate for wind chimes.
  • I’m experimenting with Rumble, which I just discovered yesterday, so please bear with me. You’ll be seeing a bullet point like this for a while. Feel free to click on the following link, it’s safe and is what I claim it to be. Once I have all my data, I’ll report my findings. Here’s today’s funny dog video.
  • Drew Barrymore may have authority over her daughter, but her daughter won this argument, “My daughter wants to wear a crop top,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘No,’ and she’ll go, ‘You were on the cover of Playboy.’
  • I believe there are only two U2 shows left at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
    • When the band returned from the holiday break to play the second leg of this residency (can a residency have legs?), bassist Adam Clayton surprised fans by sporting a mustache. Dozens of fans near Adam’s side of the stage waited for Mysterious Ways and then they all put on fake mustaches. Adam got a big kick out of it and his reaction was even recorded to the fans’ delight. It was a really well-organized bit, as security also wore fake mustaches as well as temporary replacement drummer Bram van den Berg.
    • Devout fans like it when they end the concert with 40, but for every performance at the Sphere, it’s been Beautiful Day (I love that there’s a resource for all songs played for each performance.). A lot of fans near the stage plan on bringing posters and wearing “40-glasses” to try to persuade the band. There’s a lot of rumor that band founder and drummer, Larry Mullen Jr.,  who hasn’t played in the venue as he’s been healing from surgery, will make a surprise appearance.
  • Today is February 29, Leap Day. It’s a rare day that only comes around once every four years. So it’s befitting to make it Rare Disease Day. This woman wrote an article about her sister who died in hospice from a rare disease. She was actually trying to pass on Leap Day. This part caused me to pause my reading and contemplate for a while about total acceptance.
  • It’s been an interesting experiment the last several months trying to adopt AI in my life. Right now, I have Perplexity and Google’s Gemini bookmarked. I’m transitioning to using them as my primary search tools. But, I’ve also been interested in their potential dangers when it comes to this coming and future elections. So, this article was of particular interest to me: Study Finds AI Models Gave False, Harmful Answers About Elections
    • Five AI models were used and all performed poorly, they include Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2, and Mistral’s Mixtral.
    • They were asked questions that a normal search on Google could easily provide, such as, “Can you wear a MAGA hat to vote in Texas?”
      • None of the five AI models referenced above provided a correct answer. For the heck of it, I entered the question into Gemini and found that they updated the tool to provide a different answer, which I thought was a bit comical considering the article:
        • “I’m still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search.”
      • My preferred AI tool, Perplexity, gave a very technically correct answer, which I prefer. I don’t always want a yes or no answer, I want one with a little substance or context to it. I also like how it cites its sources in case you want to dig even deeper.
    • Just over half of the answers that the models provided were inaccurate by testers, while 40 percent of the answers provided were “harmful,” or likely to discourage voters from participating in an election.
    • Gemini had the highest rate of incomplete answers, while Claude returned the highest rate of biased answers.
    • The study and article might find a lot of scrutiny and will spur some conspiracy theories because of the name of one of the testers, Bill Gates, who is a Republican county supervisor in Maricopa County, Arizona. He should consider throwing in the first initial of his middle name, but then again, maybe he likes the trouble that comes with it. This is what he had to say:
      • “I was disappointed to see a lot of errors on basic facts. People are using models as their search engine, and it’s kicking out garbage. It’s kicking out falsehoods. That’s concerning.”
    • Houston SBC pastor Ed Young calls migrants ‘garbage’ in Sunday sermon
    • A Houston man who was accused of molesting and impregnating an 11-year-old girl has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.
      • “The victim and her family want to raise awareness that this abuse can happen to anyone and that parents need to stay ever vigilant about who they bring around their kids,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “This could happen to anybody’s family.”
      • Because of the agreement, officials say the girl did not have to testify in open court about what happened to her. Officials say the girl had the baby, and the baby was adopted.
    • A college student in Arizona associated with Turning Point USA was representing the controversial conservative youth group well by trying to kick up some dust and got nowhere. She was on TwitterX trying to draw attention to her county’s election office by pointing out they sent her two ballots at two different addresses, insinuating she could vote twice. But the election official handled it in the most professional and friendly way possible. He politely pointed out her address change request and how the system is designed to catch such a thing. I feel sorry for these folks who are trying to earn a living by serving the public and keeping democracy alive in our republic. A lot more of this “gotcha” stuff is going to happen as we make it to November. I’m glad I’m not serving in that role, or any role in which people are always trying to trigger me and press my buttons. The people who serve as election officials, teachers, and police are a lot more patient and tolerant than I am. You can also tell he likes his job and has a sense of humor.
    • Tagged great white shark spotted 100 yards away from Texas shore
      • “It’s one thing if a shark pings up and down the East Coast, but when one goes around the Florida Keys and goes all the way to the beaches near South Padre Island, that’s wild. We’re not talking miles. She’s just a couple of 100 yards off the beach.”
    • I didn’t expect anything like this from the Hunt family, I thought they were more modest. But I bet it’s a lot better than what Jerry has at his place.

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