Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, May 1, 2019

  • First World Problem I experienced yesterday – ordered a Coke with my to-go meal and when I got home I discovered it was a Diet Coke. I detest diet drinks, they leave a weird aftertaste.
  • I think it’s absolutely amazing photographs exists of veterans who have fought in the Revolutionary War. I got wind of this from an old tweet from historian Micheal Beschloss about Captain George Fishley, one of longest surviving American veterans of the Revolutionary War who posed for this photo in uniform shortly before death in 1850.
  • Here are more pics of other veterans of the Revolutionary War. I thought the mini-biography of Jonathan Smith was quite interesting – After the war he became a Baptist minister. He was married three times and had eleven children.
  • GIF – I had no idea you could sew with a Swiss Army knife
  • MIT ‘hackers’ turn Great Dome into Captain America’s shield

    • The dome wasn’t painted, it’s was a huge piece of fabric. This does remind me of a tradition in my hometown of Mineral Wells. Believe it or not, our high school had a dome roof over the basketball court (The Ram Dome, and yes, the ram was our mascot) and seniors (12-graders, not the elderly) would sometimes paint it with the year in which they were graduating. I was able to find a few old pics. I never said it was a nice dome, nor did I state the seniors did a decent job of painting.
  • Jalopnik – Enough with the ‘Actually, Electric Cars Pollute More’ Bullshit Already
  • Tom & Jerry interpolated to 60fps
  • Random thought – What if HBO released the finale of Game of Thrones in theaters?
  • Game of Thrones cinematographer: it’s not me, it’s your TV settings – You’re the problem, and also maybe HBO’s bitrate
    • After all, Wagner says the show was directed and shot like a cinematic experience that could be viewed in a movie theater, even though it’s predominantly streamed at compressed quality to screens of all shapes and sizes.
  • The Battle Of Winterfell: A Tactical Analysis
    • This specific part makes me want to research Soviet battle techniques as I’m not familiar with this bit of history. The closest thing I could find was this scene from a movie about Soviets attacking German trenches. Battle of Moscow, maybe?
      • On the Night King’s signal, the undead breach the fire-trench the Soviet way: with their bodies. Only upon initiation of a successful breach do the defenders attempt to suppress the force. By then it is too late, and the assault force strikes the walls.
      • Wagner himself also said HBO’s compression of the episode, to help smooth over the streaming process for millions of viewers with varying connection speeds, is another contributor.
  • Old, but new to me (I think), and better than I expected – A Song of Vanilla Ice and Fire
  • I need to read up on my history, I never knew Nixon’s Attorney General (or any AG in our nation’s history), the head of the Department of Justice, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, was jailed. He served 19-months in prison. He died in 1988 and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, based on his World War II Naval service and his cabinet post of Attorney General. I wonder if that ruffled any feathers with veterans, and I freely admit, I don’t know when any veteran or former cabinet official loses the right to a burial with full military honors.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments

Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, April 30, 2019

  • For the record, and I want to be very clear and put things to rest. I am not a half-whit, I am half-white. Get it right, people.
  • When I first moved to DFW and moved into my own apartment, my first “big” purchase was the largest television I could find, a 35-inch Sony Trinitron (CRT, not HD).  I finally got rid of the thing last weekend by taking it to Best Buy for recycling. They charged me $25 because it was over 25-inches. WifeGeeding has been begging me to get rid of it for years, but I was hesitant since it was upstairs and didn’t want to go through the hassle of transporting the awkward 139-pound behemoth. However, I felt up to the challenge after watching the latest Avengers movie. I’m an oddity in that I like the challenge of moving such objects with no help, usually when no one else is around. This was the first time I did such a thing after my spinal fusion surgery, but I managed and conquered the task. A hand truck (dolly) and a couple of straps greatly aided.
  • To my fellow TICKET listeners, I’m what you call a little slow. It never dawned on me that George DiGianni and the golf show which followed on Saturday mornings were nothing more than paid ads. I always thought The TICKET paid them, but in actuality, they were paying the radio station for air time.
  • Regarding the NFL Draft, I always wondered why the first handful of teams in the first round took so long to make their pick. I found out why in yesterday in Peter King’s weekly article. The NFL asks teams to not turn in their selection until at least five minutes of their 10-minute first-round time limit had passed, so the league could do the TV-presentation stuff and not get the picks all backed up.
  • Poet stumped by standardized test questions about her own poem
    • Poet Sara Holbrook, who often writes humorous verse for kids, had some harsh words for the Texas Education Agency after she discovered she couldn’t answer questions about poems on the its standardized tests — poems she herself wrote.
  • The dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50 years
  • No apologies, but this is going to be Game of Thrones heavy.
  • I have no idea how Ghost survived that last episode of Game of Thrones. But I support the theory he bit off the femur of a Wright, retreated to the forest, and just gnawed at it for the whole battle – just a happy dog with a bone. We know he’s alive because he’s spotted in the preview for next week’s episode.
  • When it first came out, my friends and I use to quote Bedazzled quite a bit, in particular, the post-game basketball interview after major sporting events. That’s why I got a kick out of this version of the quote referring to the most recent Game of Thrones episode.
  • Social media, in particular, Twitter, is great for things like Game of Thrones. Not that it should be used or checked during the episode, but to check out the immediate global reaction and feel a part of one large friendly community.
  • I could never watch a television show in this kind of setting, I need it to be quite so I can hear all the dialog and any hooting or hollering would grind my gears. Yet, watching the reaction of this crowd brought a smile to my face.https://twitter.com/NameIsKoushiK/status/1122813948460277760?s=09
  • The moment all Baylor fans have been waiting for. Hey, it’s an honor HSU will never get.
Posted in Goofy | 3 Comments

Bag of Randomness for Monday, April 29, 2019

  • It was an entertainingly emotional weekend for me. It all started on Thursday night watching Hamilton. The play does an extraordinary job in the scene Hamilton loses his son. It pulls on your heartstrings. In particular, you start to realize the beat of the song is actually his heartbeat, then all other accompanying music fades until eventually, it’s only the heartbeat and then it stops. On Friday I watched Avengers: End Game (more on that later) and then there was last night’s ‘Game of Thrones’, but personally no deaths last night were major or suprising to me. When I was in high school and college, I never understood how people could become emotionally attached to storytelling and cry. Now, as an adult with a certain degree of life experience and obtaining some perspective, well, I’m tearing up while eating my humble pie.
  • I actually watched Endgame twice. Once with a friend and once with the family. I really wanted to watch it the first time fully invested without the interruption of taking a child to the restroom or answering questions. I’m glad I did it this way, and in some ways, it was even better watching it the second time with my family – I like to see their reactions to certain scenes. Yet, I’m surprised I cried more the second time since I knew what was coming. As I said, I like to find commonalities with the characters, especially when it comes to adversity, and once I do I get emotionally invested and connect, I feel as if I’m pulled into the story. It was one of those cries in which you either want to blow your nose or make a take a deep breath in with your nose (which just might release an onslaught of tears), but the theater was so quiet during those scenes I did all I could do to hold it in because I didn’t want my wife and kids to look over.
  • Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about Endgame, but if you aren’t interested in them I have included other typical BoN fodder after them.
  • Spoiler heavy Endgame thoughts:
    • WifeGeeding noticed Black Widow was wearing a silver arrow necklace from Tiffany’s, I bought her one last Christmas.
    • If you have issues with losing loved ones and wishing you could have just one more conversation with them, this is the movie for you. Need to cry on your mom’s shoulder? Thor has you covered. Wish you could spend some time with your dad and show tell him you love him without actually saying you love him? Tony has you covered. How about wanting to dance or reconnect with the love of your life? Cap has you taken care of.
    • I didn’t catch it the first time, but I absolutely loved it when Falcon said, “on your left” when everyone comes back for the final battle, just like Cap said to him at the beginning and end of Winter Soldier. It’s the little things, that small attention to detail, which totally makes it great. It would have been neat if he said it again when he approached Cap when he was sitting on the bench.
    • I had a decent chuckle when Hope called Steve Rogers “Cap” after chiding Scott for doing so in Antman and The Wasp.
    • I thought Cap, Bruce, and Tony should have visited Wakanda and take advantage of their advanced technology to work on their machine.
    • I felt the movie used Carol Danvers just the right amount in just about the perfect way.
    • In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter gave Tony a hug with Tony stating, “It’s not a hug, I’m just opening the door. We aren’t there yet”. After Peter comes back with the rest of The Vanished, Tony gives Peter a hug, which I guess means there are definitely there now.
    • I expected a Coulson appearance and was surprised it didn’t happen.
    • Drax actually wore a shirt for Tony’s funeral, but he was so still I almost didn’t notice him.
    • I thought Pepper could have said something a bit more poignant other than, “We’ll be okay.”
    • I bet Cap stealing the Pym particles inside Shield is probably why Hank accuses Howard Stark of stealing the particles in the Eighties at the start of the first Ant-Man movie.
    • Seeing Cap returning the Soul Stone would have been interesting, talking to Red Skull and all.
    • I swear they used my body for Thor.
    • The Asgardians chasing Rocket called him a rabbit was a nice touch. I guess all rabbits look like raccoons on Asgard.
    • Jarvis was the same actor as the one in ‘Agent Carter’.
    • I like the evolution of Tony’s Iron Man suits Tony’s suits, he has learned from every failure. There was the icing problem in his first movie. In Iron Man 2, Whiplash electrocuted the suit and damaged it. Then in the first Avengers film, Thor hit him with lightning and it was running on 400% power. Now, then in this film, Tony built something into his suit specifically to take Thor’s lightning blast and use it without damaging anything. He incorporated nanotechnology so Ant-Man could get inside, melee weapons and shields for hand to hand combat with Cap in Civil War, and a parachute for Peter Parker’s new suit because of what happened to Rhodes when his suit failed.
    • Yes, Howard the Duck was in the final battle, here he is bottom rightish.
  • Running Out of Children, a South Korea School Enrolls Illiterate Grandmothers
    • Here’s the one part of the article I chose to try to encourage you to take the time to read this story, “My memory, hand and tongue don’t work like I wish,” Ms. Park (age 75) said. “But I am going to learn to write before I die.”
  • Jeopardy! producers have stripped contestants of their god-given right to bet $69 on Final Jeopardy
  • I was a teenager when I learned that I am the direct descendant of a slave owner. – How should I think about my great-great-grandfather and his legacy? What is the path to healing in our nation?
  • BYU student commencement speaker comes out as gay during speech

  • This low-cost version of The Matrix is funny and clever.
Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Bag of Randomness for Friday, April 26, 2019

  • Last night I took WifeGeeding to watch Hamilton at The Music Hall in Fair Park. As we approached the entrance we ran into our old friend Roger Staubach. Well, at least to me he felt like an old friend. It’s funny, for the last several years I’ve been working on implementing several tenants of stoicism in my life, trying to set apart feelings and emotions and think more rationally and logically, mind over heart. All that went out the window when I saw Captain America. For the next half-hour, I couldn’t think straight, put together a coherent sentence, or walk in a straight line. I checked my FitBit and my heart rate was elevated for the next ten minutes.
  • I asked Mrs. Staubach if she would be kind enough to be in the photo. I’ve heard so many great things about her, I really wanted her included. After the picture, she asked what district did I live in. I told her we lived outside of Dallas but we’d vote for whoever she told us to vote for. She then politely requested we ask any of our friends who live in District 13 to vote for her daughter for Dallas City Councilmember.
  • In case you are wondering, Roger Staubach smells like freedom, but not just any kind of freedom, but the sweetest and most heroic kind with a slight twist of liberty and patriotism mixed in.
  • As for who took that photo of me and WifeGeeding, I’ll just let you take a guess. (You don’t really have to guess, I’m being rhetorical.)
  • After the photo was taken, a high school or college age girl approached me and asked, “Who was that, some kind of famous politician?” I wanted to respond by simply stating, “Captain America,” and walking away. I also was tempted to tell her that he played football in that big stadium over my shoulder called the Cotton Bowl and detail how he won the Heisman Trophy as a cadet in the Naval Academy, served our country in Vietnam, won two Super Bowls (one of which he was MVP), is an NFL Hall of Famer, a better Catholic than the Pope, a recent Medal of Freedom recipient, and the holiest and most humble figure in all of Dallas. But I simply told her he’s the most legendary Dallas Cowboy and she replied with, “Oh, okay, thanks,” and walked off.
  • I lucked into some really good tickets for a reasonable price. Ticket prices changed throughout the hour depending on the demand at the time you visit their website, I simply found the night there wasn’t as much demand and bought them at an odd hour. We were only ten rows from the front, inside aisle seat, side section. To my surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Staubach sat ten rows behind us, but in the center section. Also making an appearance two rows in front of us (but also in the center section) was Emmitt Smith. Between us three, we won five Super Bowls.
  • Some musicals have spoken dialog between musical numbers. Hamilton is not one of those. I’ve seen a handful of musicals, but this is the only one which kept me engaged the whole time. And the woman who planed his wife had perhaps the best singing voice of any stage performer I’ve ever heard.
  • The stage, or set, was quite simple. However, it did have an embedded rotating or slowly spinning floor, like a huge lazy susan. It was really neat seeing how it was used to add emphasis to certain parts.
  • It may be a musical about Alexander Hamilton, but Aaron Burr the better musical numbers.
  • The entire cast is made up of minorities, except for King George who was portrayed by the sole white person. The sole Asian in the show played George Washington, which I didn’t like at first, only because I thought Washington should be taller and older, but the actor eventually won me over.
  • WifeGeeding had a great observation about all the songs King George sang, the music had traces of The Beatles.
  • As well received as this musical is, I don’t think the older generation will like it, but that’s okay. What I do like is that it’s a musical for my generation, the ones who grew up with R&B, pop, and saw the creation and evolution of hip-hop and rap. We are the ones who will really appreciate it. This isn’t Oklahoma or Guys and Dolls, something traditional and connected with the past. This is something defining of our generation and a glimpse of the future of theater and something we can call our own.
  • It’s a crazy weekend for me in regards to emotional investment and entertainment. It started with Hamilton last night. Today it will be watching the latest Avengers movie, and I’m sure there will be a handful of deaths in which I’ll have to say goodbye to some characters I’ve been attached to for the last decade. And, on Sunday, Game of Thrones will have an epic battle and I know for sure I’ll have to say goodbye to some characters I’ve also emotionally attached to. See, I do this thing in which I try to relate to the characters as much as I can to get into the story, I relate their struggles and any adversity they go through with similar events in my life and then I feel as if I know what they are going through. And that, in a weird sort of way, gives me motivation and hope that I can endure and conquer adversity just like they did.
  • I think it’s amazing how this musical started as an experimental or concept hip-hop album by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The first time any hint of what was to be was performed at the White House by a young-looking Miranda in May 2009, and some folks even laughed at the idea and performance.
Posted in Personal | 4 Comments