Bag of Randomness for Friday, March 1, 2019

  • That’s a picture of me, probably around the first grade. I don’t remember ever owning or wearing a Scooby-Doo shirt.
  • Jason Witten is leaving the ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’ booth to return to play for the Cowboys. I’m not sure who broke the story, but shouldn’t it have ESPN? I think he would owe that to them for backing out of his contract.
  • I wish I had video evidence of this, but DogGeedingII moved the big fluffy dog pillow across the living room to directly in front of the fireplace and proceeded to take a nap in front of the fire.
  • Not too long ago I posted about ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create human faces which look like the real thing. There’s a new website which uses those AI created faces and lets you choose if you find them attractive or not. It reminds of that old timewaster of a site back in the late Nineties called HotOrNot.com. However, since this is based on AI, I can’t help but think there’s a conspiracy theory behind all of this. Like, maybe AI has advanced so much that computers want to collect data on what humans find attractive and use that information against us.
  • Local broadcasting legend John McCaa will call it quits at the end of the 10 p.m. newscast tonight. After 35-years working at WFAA and living in the Dallas area, he and his wife will be moving to McAllen, Texas where she has family. Believe or not, the straight-laced McCaa used to be an R-rated comic.
  • My pastor will preach his last sermon on Sunday and will officially retire after preaching in the area close to the same amount of time McCaa has been at WFAA. Both of my parents have been gone for over a decade, Mom for 13 and Dad for 20 years, and I’m still in my early forties. But these two men are about to retire and both of their fathers are still living. That amazes me.
  • It’s going to be a big weekend for SpaceX and for Americans and this will get us really, really close to no longer having to rely on the Russians. This article is pretty concise and informative.
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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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