Bag of Randomness for Thursday, February 28, 2019

  • I don’t know what was more shocking to me. Robert Kraft going to that massage parlor or Hugh Grant dating Elizabeth Hurley and hiring a prostitute.
  • I thought Jon Bon Jovi died earlier this week. In a 40-minute drive, I heard “Livn On A Prayer” on three different radio stations.
  • When we take our six-hour road trip next month for DaughterGeeding’s state competition, I hope we see a lot of bluebonnets. I’m also willing to bet WifeGeeding is going to make us stop at a burger place called Health Camp.
  • BoyGeeding has perfect attendance this year but will most likely miss a day as we’ll be traveling for his sister’s competition.
  • I took BoyGeeding to get a haircut yesterday. About 30-seconds after using the clippers on him, the stylist asked if I could pay with cash because the card machine was broken. That put me in an awkward situation, I didn’t want to leave my son by himself as I walked across the street to the ATM.
  • You’ll never hear me refer to it as an “ATM machine” because the redundancy kills me. In essence, “ATM machine” means “automatic teller machine machine. And this is where I go on my rant many of you long time readers will recognize:
    • I won’t say “cheddar cheese” because there’s no other type of cheddar.
    • The same pretty much goes for “tuna” and “tuna fish sandwich”. No one really knows there’s a prickly pear which is rarely referred to by the same name. You don’t hear anyone state they are going to eat “salmon fish” or “tilapia fish”.
    • A “hot water heater” is simply a “water heater”. If the water is already hot, you don’t need to heat it.
    • There’s no need to say you are going “down South”. Hey, you, yeah, you, get your head out of the gutter.
    • “A free gift” – Aren’t all gifts free?
    • It’s okay to say “ink pen” because in the south and southwest, “pen” and “pin” sound the same. I’ll also excuse “PIN number” but not “HIV virus”.
    • I don’t find “frozen tundra” redundant, maybe dramatically descriptive, but not redundant.
  • Must have been mild salsa – Tennessee man accused of dipping testicles in customer’s salsa
  • I never really thought about it before, but sleep is a form of surrender.
  • This CNN list is broken into Delux, Moderate, and Value – The best Disney World hotels, ranked
  • When Topher Grace’s wife was out of town for a weekend, he edited all 10 Star Wars movies into one super trailer called “Star Wars: Always” and I think it’s great and posted it below. He also has an 85-minute edit of the prequels which is rumored to be exceptional.
    • What’s most shocking is that with only 85 minutes of footage, Topher was able to completely tell the main narrative of Anakin Skywalker’s road from Jedi to the Sith. It should be noted that the Star Wars prequel trilogy is almost 7 hours in total length. What’s better is that the character motivations are even more clear and identifiable, a real character arc is not bogged down by podraces, galactic senates, Jar Jar Binks, politics or most of the needless parts of the Star Wars prequels.
    • And this Topher Grace tidbit from the IMDB Trivia section of BlacKkKlansman
      • ”Actor Topher Grace said in an interview with IndieWire, that portraying David Duke left him feeling depressed, so as an act of catharsis he took on the project of editing Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films based on The Hobbit into a single two hour movie.”
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Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, February 26, 2019

  • Little did I know, I’ve been breaking a city code ordinance for the last fourteen-or-so years.
    • GeedingManor has a two-car garage at the back of the house. Like most houses in the neighborhood, it’s about darn near impossible to park two vehicles inside of it. And when we can manage to get two vehicles inside, opening the doors wide enough to get in and out takes Andy Dufresne like effort.
    • The houses in our neighborhood were built in the mid-Nineties and it boggles my mind why they all have small two-car garages. Meanwhile, the houses in my old neighborhood in Mineral Wells, build in the early Sixties, It think, could easily park two large vehicles and still have plenty of room for storage.
      • I looked up my childhood home on GoogleMaps. It appears to be the only house on the street with a car parked in the grass, under a tree. Man, that house hasn’t been taken cared for over the years and is full of overgrowth. I assure you, that yard was well kept by some previous tenants. Oh, that house doens’t have a garage, it converted into an apartment so grandma could live there.
    • I’ve always parked a little bit in the grass because I don’t want my one-eyed wife backing into our second vehicle (again). Back in college, she once drove into a bit yellow school bus. And, since we now have a basketball goal, I want to give the kids a bit more room to play.
    • It’s hard to tell from the picture, but when I park partly in the grass, it’s not viewable from the front street. There are some HOA rules which state certain things are acceptable in the back as long as it’s not visible from the front street, so I thought I was in the good.
    • Was I upset? Nah. It’s a small thing. As I said, I’ve been doing this for about fourteen years and only now have been cited, I just didn’t know I was doing something wrong. Do I think it’s a bit nitpicky of the city? Maybe a little, I understand why such ordinances exist and do recall some cars parked in the front yard of neighboring houses in Mineral Wells, and I was only partially parked on the grass on my own property. It’s just one of those things which you think you can do what you want on your own property only to find out it’s not quite that way.
    • Now that I’ve been cited by the city, I think this ruins any political aspirations I had. There’s no way I can survive this scandal. When someone searches for my name online, this grievance act will always be the first result which pops up. I’ve embarrassed my wife and kids, and they will have to live with this shame. The only just thing to do is to hire a lawyer and get their names changed to protect their identities and future.
  • I recently read somewhere that “liberal” in “liberal arts” is meant to be interpreted as “to liberate the mind from ignorance and to understand how to learn”.
  • The crash of a that Atlas Air Boeing 767 cargo plane in the muddy marshland near Houston reminds me of the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 in the Florida Everglades in 1995.  That crash stands out for two reasons. NFL player Rodney Culver was on the flight, and the plane was basically buried in mud and the crash site was especially hard to get to.
    • Additionally, recovery of the aircraft and victims was made extremely difficult by the location of the crash. The nearest road of any kind was more than a quarter mile (400 m) away from the crash scene, and the location of the crash itself was a deep-water swamp with a floor of solid limestone. The aircraft was destroyed on impact, with no large pieces of the fuselage remaining. Sawgrass, alligators, and risk of bacterial infection from cuts plagued searchers involved in the recovery effort.
    • Recovery of the passengers and crew took several weeks and little in the way of intact human remains was found due to the sheer violence of the impact, immersion in swamp water, and scavenging wildlife. About 68 of the 110 persons aboard the plane were identified, in some cases from examining jawbones, and at least one individual from a single tooth. 
  • President Trump will be meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam for their second summit. The first summit was surreal seeing U.S. flags next to North Korean flags. It’s going to be even more surreal for me seeing U.S. flags displayed along North Korean and Vietnamese flags.
  • The first Trump-Kim summit was in Singapore, which had two months to prepare for the event. Vietnam only had about ten days of preparation. I’ve read several Secret Service books and all the planning which goes on for a presidential trip overseas. Think about all the logistics and safety concerns and coordinating with two communist governments. The agency is certainly up to the task, but I’m sure most people don’t realize how much work goes on behind the scenes to pull off such a thing.
  • Man emails Taylor Swift to sing at his engagement party — and she shows up
  • A dog reacts to the death of Mufasa. He’s not going to like the remake, I predict.

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Bag of Randomness for Monday, February 25, 2019

  • DaughterGeeding is a third-grader and this weekend participated in her first school-related competition. I’ll be damned, she and her team came in first place and are now going to state.
    • At the beginning of the school year, a parent of a classmate approached us to recruit DaughterGeeding to be part of their Destination Imagination (DI) team. We were skeptical since we never heard of it, but after some research realized it was a legitimate and well-organized activity and agreed she could participate if she wanted to. It reminds of something I participated in back in middle-school, Odyssey of the Mind, and focuses on teamwork, creativity, and STEM concepts. Their challenge was a medical mystery.
    • Her team worked hard and spent a lot of after-school hours together. A few of us parents joked we were glad the competition was this weekend and was ready for all of this to wrap-up, none of us had any expectation for them to come in first to be eligible to go on to state competition. After all, this is the first year their school has competed in DI, as third-graders they would one of the youngest to compete (it’s open to grades 3-5), and they were competing against 12 other teams. Some of those teams were from impressive schools from some very well respected school districts.
      • Speaking of school representation, there were a lot of teams from Decatur. Wise Country was very well represented.
    • The competition was an all-day affair and it was one of those moments I looked back at my childhood and could appreciate all those times my parents sacrificed their weekends attending my events. It was held at Flower Mound Marcus High School. Just walking the halls was an out-of-body type of experience since the school shares the same colors as my high school. A plethora of high school memories came back yet, I never been inside that school before. Sure, my high school used the letters MWHS and they used MHS, but it’s all the red and black colors and seeing the phrase “Go Big Red” everywhere made me feel like I was a teen in Mineral Wells again.
    • I watched a few of the other teams DaughterGeeding’s team were competing against and was very impressed. I thought her team didn’t stand a chance and already had an idea what to say to her about how it’s important to just compete and what you can learn from losing.
    • Each team chooses its own name. One team made entirely of South Asians played off the book and movie Crazy Rich Asians and called themselves “Crazy Smart Asians”.  I thought DaughterGeeding’s team name was a little prosaic, “DI Einsteins”.
    • At the awards ceremony where the winners are announced, medals are awarded from sixth to first place. As you’d expect, they start with sixth place and work their way to first. When second place was announced, I felt bad that her team didn’t even place in the top half. But on the off chance the might win, I quickly pulled out my phone to video record their reactions if they won. And I’ll be damned, they won. And man, my back was aching after that long day and sitting in bleachers without any back support.
    • Huh, that’s now two weeks in a row I’ve posted a picture of DaughterGeeding wearing sunglasses indoors while performing at a school event. I’m making her out as if she’s a free spirit and very out-going, but I’d actually describe her as being reserved and shy. All my photos are to the contrary.
  • Jerry Jones has now owned the Cowboys for 30 years. If someone told me at the time the new ownership would win three Super Bowls in that time period I would have been very satisfied. It’s well documented that when Jerry bought the team, he had the lights turned on at Texas Stadium to walk the field and to lay down on the star on the 50-yard line. What I didn’t know until last night’s CBS11 broadcast that it cost $2,500 just to turn Texas Stadium’s lights on at the time. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $5,212 today. But now there’s a new stadium with bigger lighting, which probably operates a bit more efficiently. I reckon it’s still more expensive to turn the lights on at AT&T Stadium than Texas Stadium, even with the big HDTV turned off.
  • I think the way Jerry let go of Tom Landry was respectful. He flew down to Austin where Landry was and personally told him. I guess some people didn’t like the idea of interrupting Landry’s golf game was tactful. I think if anything, Jerry’s enthusiasm at his first press conference as the new owner looked insensitive and too giddy.
  • My pastor will retire soon. He preached his second to last sermon yesterday as the founding pastor of the church that’s been around 30-ish years. It was beautiful and most likely the one I will remember most. I’ll share more thoughts and details about it later this week.
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