Bag of Randomness for Thursday, March 14, 2020


I may have had the strangest fifteen-minutes of my life, and I bet I shared that moment with millions of others. Former Gov. Sarah Palin was unmasked as a masked singer and sang “Baby Got Back” on national TV, President Trump banned travel from most of Europe, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson revealed they had COVID-19, and the NBA season got postponed.


Right before 9/11, all the local news stations had their own branded helicopters to report on traffic and other things. But after 9/11, they were grounded and proved to be too costly. Soon, technology advanced, like GPS and traffic cameras, and it’s like it never happened. I presented that train of thought because I’m wondering in what ways will COVID-19 trigger a change that becomes the norm. For instance, Super BaD Radio spoke about how the NBA started to restrict reporters from the locker rooms as a way to prevent contamination. They said players have been wanting this for a while, and once things get better, they will decide they’ll continue this policy.


As much as I don’t care for Sarah Palin, I like what she did and wholehearted support her in this endeavor.  If anyone is upset at her appearing hypocritical because of conservative values and the song she sang, I say, “Dude, lighten up.”

“But it’s all about fun. It’s unity. This is all good. This is something that our country needs right now too.”


Experts Say You Shouldn’t Make Homemade Hand SanitizerThey’re not as effective as you think.

For example, a popular recipe circulating online suggests using 2/3 cups of either 99 percent rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol) or ethanol (ethyl alcohol or alcohol) as the main antimicrobial active ingredient, resulting in roughly 66 percent active content in the final product. However, there is a nuance in the FDA’s rule governing the hand sanitizer product category regarding the different actives recommended as being safe and effective, Aral says.

The rule states that the minimum recommended level for isopropyl alcohol is 70 percent in the final product as opposed to the minimum of 60 percent for ethyl alcohol. So if you use isopropyl alcohol at the recommended 2/3 cup level in the recipe, the active level would fall short of the recommended 70 percent, Aral notes. If ethanol is used instead, the recipe should theoretically meet the minimum of 60 percent required by the FDA rule.


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Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, March 11, 2020


Somehow, the screen on WifeGeeding’s MacBook Air cracked. I suspect her habit of keeping it on the floor around children who run around without looking where they step to be the cause, but I digress. For the heck of it, I thought I’d try to repair it myself. I found a replacement screen online for $75 and the screwdriver set on Amazon was like six bucks, and I utilized a YouTube video which made it look simple. To my surprise, it actually was, and I think I did it in under 45-minutes. I’m guessing I saved at least $150 on this project.


Leading Texas School Board Candidate Wants to Teach Pole Dancing, Conspiracy TheoriesDespite his history of sexist, racist tweets and conspiracy-laden rants, more than 54,000 Republican voters propelled Robert Morrow into a runoff for a seat on the State Board of Education. GOP leaders are terrified he might actually win.


Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus

The Council on Foreign Relations has canceled a roundtable called “Doing Business Under Coronavirus” scheduled for Friday in New York due to the spread of the infection itself. CFR has also canceled other in-person conferences that were scheduled from March 11 to April 3, including roundtables in New York and Washington and national events around the U.S.


Vietnam veteran is ready to go to war with the City of Dallas over his support of President Trump

Dalas Van Syckle’s flag featuring President Trump and the phrase “Keep America First” first provoked the ire of the city about four months ago when he raised it. “I’m sure I hurt somebody’s feelings that came by and was a Democrat and didn’t like my flag,” said the 67-year-old, who has now received multiple citations.

A spokesperson for the city said they consider it both a campaign sign and a code enforcement violation. Van Syckle disagrees. “My argument is it’s not a political sign. It’s a sign that supports my country and my president.”

But a city ordinance does exist stating political signs cannot rise than 8 feet above the ground. The city sent Van Syckle a warning in January about that. After three warnings, code enforcement sent VanSickle a citation.


 

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Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, March 10, 2020


Last Friday was the BoyGeeding’s first baseball practice of the season. I’m helping out as an assistant coach. I introduced myself as Coach Keith but I think one player thought I said “I’m Coach K” because he asked, “I can just call you Coach Krzyzewski?” Not bad for a seven-year-old.

The head coach of the team is the pastor of my church. He didn’t ask me to help out but through an odd series it worked out that way. I’m hesitant to do such things for several reasons – my back doesn’t make it easy, I’m impatient with kids, I never played the sport, and with similar situations, relationships get damaged. Here’s to hoping I’ll use this as an opportunity to improve upon these things and not allow them to drag me down or come true. It helps simply being an older adult, you learn not to take things so seriously and understand that sometimes things fall apart so it’s all about winging it.


If you’ve read this blog, you know that I will jovially gripe about how my last name (Geeding) is often misspelled. The most common misspelling is when someone adds an “r” to it making it “Greeding”. It used to tick me off because “greed” is such a negative word and to insinuate me with it was insulting. Well, DaughterGeeding recently had to experience this curse. She won an award and her last name was spelled “Greeding”. To make matters worse, instead of her first name being displayed on the award it was her mother’s first name.


I think the 2021 Ford Broncho Sport looks like a muscled up Mini Cooper.


Roger Staubach has 15 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Yesterday on the new BaD Radio, he mentioned that Jerry Jones gets a bad wrap on how he fired Tom Landry. I wholeheartedly agree. Jones didn’t fire him by phone call, he did it in person, even traveling down to Austin where Landry was at to do so. Jones went out of his way to be respectful.


Political junkies used to be in love with Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, but the outcome of the last presidential election tarnished his prognostication a bit. To be fair, he works in probability and not prediction and the public often confuses this. If you are into this sort of thing, you should check out Rachel Bitecofer. Here’s a great article about her and a snippet.

Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.

And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.

Sex Before Marriage Is Now Legal in VirginiaFornication was considered a Class 4 misdemeanor with a fine of up to $250.


Legendary pitmaster Aaron Franklin is now selling BBQ pits. They weigh about 600-pounds and can fit about three briskets. It comes with a double-walled firebox, a single cooking grate, a water pan shelf. Like going to his restaurant, you’re gonna have to wait as there’s a long waitlist. They will cost you $2,950 each.


Random Coronavirus tidbits from this article – Everything you need to know about the coronavirus

  • The WHO named the illness caused by the coronavirus COVID-19 — “co” and “vi” for coronavirus, “d” for disease, and “19” for the year when the disease emerged.
  • Around 80 percent of confirmed cases are mild. That’s 80 percent of the cases that we know about.
  • About 5 percent of cases are critical, and it appears around half of the people with critical cases of the illness die from it.
  • There aren’t any proven treatments for COVID-19, but there are dozens of studies underway to try and find some. One leading candidate is remdesivir, an antiviral medication originally developed to treat Ebola.

Here’s What A Photo Flyby Of A Carrier Group Looks Like From The Helicopter Taking The PicsNot only can you see the formation blast past, but you can also hear it too!

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Bag of Randomness for Monday, March 9, 2020

 

We used our extra hour of daylight to practice some hitting.


https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1235974551487623168


This is my new favorite sport.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9edCYLBhXU/


Most parents do not successfully transmit their political values to their children, study finds

Less than half of all people in the United States adopt their parents’ political party affiliation, according to new research published in the British Journal of Political Science. The study also discovered some factors that appear to influence whether parents successfully transmit their partisan identities to their children.

“Most parents want to raise their children with the ‘right’ values. What is right, of course, depends upon the parent but understanding what factors might aid or harm a parent’s ability to successful transmit their values to their children is important to many, particularly in this era of hyper polarization,” said study author Pete Hatemi, a distinguished professor at Penn State University.

“Generally speaking, if there has been one constant in the study of political behavior it was the belief that political orientations are reliably transmitted from parents to children. The problem is that the evidence of this belief has almost entirely relied upon the concordance between self-reported parent and child values.”


I get a kick out of how Kathryn McKinnon is trying not to break character and laugh.

https://twitter.com/nbcsnl/status/1236523965759262720


“The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” turns 42

Yet on March 8th fans of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (“HHGTTG”) will pay tribute to the comedy science-fiction series, which had its radio premiere on that day in 1978 and was subsequently adapted into novels, TV series, video games and a film.


Gyms and Coronavirus: What Are the Risks?Sweat cannot transmit the virus but high-contact surfaces, such as barbells, can pose a problem, a doctor said.


Newspaper prints blank pages as substitute for toilet paper amid shortage

An Australian newspaper printed an extra eight pages to be used as toilet paper after coronavirus fears prompted customers to bulk-buy supplies, leaving some supermarket shelves bare.

In a bid to tackle the shortage, The NT News provided a practical — if unconventional — solution.


2-legged Ohio dog named ‘Lieutenant Dan’ is a finalist to be the next Cadbury Bunny

 

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