I’m a government contractor. Fortunately for me, my project is deemed “essential” and I’m still working with pay. Not all my coworkers are as fortunate. A lot of us who are able to work with pay will voluntarily donate some of our earned vacation time carried over from last years so those who can’t work can still get a full paycheck.
Though it shouldn’t, rhetoric most likely will win over any logic or fact.
A new adults-only restaurant named RM 12:20 Bistro has opened in Lake Highlands. The name is biblically inspired:
The restaurant name, RM 12:20, is meant to be pronounced “R-M-twelve-twenty.” It’s a reference to a Bible verse from the book of Romans: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
I had no idea actor/comedian/director/writer Albert Brooks‘ real name is Albert Einstein, something I only discovered because of his brother, Bob Einstein (better known as Super Dave Osborne or Marty Funkhouser), died yesterday.
The family saw Mary Poppins Returns. When I watched the original as a kid, it felt wrong of me to be attracted to the lead character for some strange reason. I felt the same way watching this remake. The family loved the film, I thought it was just OK. As much as I like Emily Mortimer, I thought she was a bit old for the role of Jane. I thought the adult version of Michael Banks should have had red hair, like the kid in the original, and his mustache was distracting because I thought it was going to fall off at all times. It was certainly worth seeing a ninety-something-year-old Dick Van Dyke jump on and off a desk and do a jig. When people say they want to live to close to a hundred years, they mean doing so with the same vitality as Dyke. I read Emily Blundt didn’t watch the Julie Andrews film but instead focused on the books, which has a more direct and eccentric version of Poppins. I thought it showed, in a good way.
How basketball court lines are painted
NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft is sending back some interesting photos of the furthest known object in our solar system (or something like that) but let’s not forget the greatness Cassini gave us. This video is an assemblage of still images.
Absolutely beautiful video created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during its flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter's Great Red Spot and then Titan as it passes over Saturn and it's edge-on rings. NASA/JPL/Kevin M. Gill pic.twitter.com/BWaVP5h6Ob
Those modern-day pictures of Macaulay Culkin are from a new Google Assistant ad.
I’m a fan of the relatively new update to my Google Pixel phone. I can screen any call by having Google answer the call and I can follow along by reading the real-time text it’s speaking to the caller. Depending on how the caller responds, I have a variety of voice-to-text responses, mark it as spam, or take the call. It’s so much fun I somewhat look forward to the random spam call.
Anytime I ask DaughterGeeding if she would like an ice cream cone, she always asks, “Will it have ice cream in it?” I’ve never pulled a joke of that nature on her, so I’m not sure where she picked that up.
If I see a lost shopping cart in a parking lot and it’s between me and the entrance, I’ll roll it back inside. It simply bugs me seeing those out of place and it’s unnerving when one is in a parking spot in which I’d like to park.
Notable probably only to loyal reader RPM and me – Scott Pelley of CBS News tweeted he has an upcoming book, Truth Worth Telling. Pelley hasn’t tweeted anything since June 2017, and rarely tweeted before that, but yesterday he tweeted at least twice. He also created a new Instagram account, the first picture is of his family, and his son looks like a giant in that picture. The book comes out in May.
Beverly D’Angelo has an attractive name, and from my limited research, that’s her real name. Her work in the entertainment industry started as an illustrator at Hanna-Barbera Studios of all things.
I was in East Texas last weekend to celebrate Christmas with WifeGeeding’s family and her father’s 80th birthday. He took the grandkids to ride a miniature train in Mineola.
I’ve never watched an episode of ‘Laverne & Shirley’. I’d watch the intro to the show and then turn the channel to something else.
One of WifeGeeding’s coworkers lost her husband to cancer this week. He was a father to three daughters, two are in college and one is still in high school. WifeGeeding gave me her mean one-eyed stare when I suggested we introduce her to our neighbor who just lost his wife to cancer.
If Mexico would simply go ahead and pay for the border wall like they are supposed to there wouldn’t be any U.S. government shutdown.
About two weeks ago when driving the kids to school a projectile hit the windshield with such force shards of glass hit my face and fell into my coffee. No one was hurt, though it scared the kids. I was proud of myself for remaining calm and using it as a teaching moment on how not to panic.
“A sitting National Security Advisor, former head of an intelligence agency, retired Lieutenant General, and 33 year veteran of the armed forces knows he should not lie to federal agents.”
Whether you’re a student or an educator, newer to computer science or a more experienced coder, or otherwise interested in software engineering, we hope there’s something for you here in Google’s Guide to Technical Development. We’ve carefully curated a collection of material from many sources, including Google, that you can use to supplement your classwork or direct your own learning.
Today’s dose of ‘MURICA (There might be cursing at the end, but to me, it’s inaudible)
Yesterday I read a tweet by Mrs. LiberallyLean and it dawned on me that it was the seventeen-year anniversary of meeting WifeGeeding for the first time. Of course, she wasn’t WifeGeeding back then, just a mysterious sexy woman with glasses who walked into my apartment. A group of my friends was going to a Mavs game and one of those friends invited her roommate, which was WifeGeeding, and everyone was meeting at my place before the game. I saved the ticket and put it in a scrapbook I gave her years ago.
That means today is the seventeen-year anniversary of our first date which lasted to about three in the morning. The date was rather simple, I took her to Stonebriar Center to go ice skating, which no longer has an ice rink. She spent most of the evening laughing her end off because I kept falling on mine since it was the first time I ever tried skating on ice. Before skating, we ate at the Chic-fil-A in the food court. Unlike all my previous dates with other girls, I didn’t pay for her meal.
You’ll hear a lot of commercials for the theater play ‘A Bronx Tale’, which was originally a movie produced and directed by Robert De Niro. It was one of my favorite movies for a long time and it included a certain “test” I used to judge a woman’s character. In the movie, a mob boss mentors a kid. One day the kid becomes a teen and is about to go on his first date and the mob boss loans him his car. The mob boss tells the kid that when he picks up his date, he needs to be a gentleman and open the passenger door for her, but after she sits down and he closes the door he needs to walk around the back of the car and glance through the rear window to see if she reaches over to unlock the door for him. If she does, that means she’s worth pursuing because she’s considerate. Of course, that was back in the day before automobiles had remote keys or the ability to unlock all doors at once with a prolonged turn of the key in the door lock. The car I drove to pick WifeGeeding up on our first date didn’t have a remote key, but it did do that trick of unlocking all doors with a prolonged turn of the car door lock (a “regular” turn of the key would only unlock that particular door). Because of ‘A Bronx Tale’ I put WifeGeeding to the test several times that night, and each and everytime she reached over to unlock the driver side door for me, so I thought she was worth pursuing.
One other thing I’ll note about our first date seventeen-years ago. On our way to the food court, I asked her what’s one thing someone wouldn’t know about her unless they specifically asked. That’s when she told me she had a glass eye.
A quote from ‘A Bronx Tale’ which has stuck with me, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and the choices you make will shape your life forever.” The thing is, I have no talent, so I never had the opportunity to waste anything.
There’s a James Avery Christmas commercial with a sappy song which seems to air after every other commercial and it drives me batty.
I don’t recall any fanfare over the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog this year. Since they are local, and I watch the local news consistently, usually it catches my attention.
No complaints, but without doing anything special my back has felt progressively better over the past two weeks. I mean, my back isn’t great, but I feel improvement for the first time in maybe six months.
I like to jovially compare my back situation with Tiger Woods because he also had a lower-lumbar fusion, we are the same age, are half-Asian, and have fathers who served in the Army. I’ve been under the impression that he’s absolutely pain-free of any back problems, but that may have been a poor assumption on my part. He may be competing again at a caliber level, and you don’t see him grimace, but that doesn’t mean he’s pain-free. Also, I also assume he’s not taking any medication, but there’s the possibility he could be taking anything from Advil to some type of prescribed nerve medicine, pain medicine, or muscle relaxer.
We took the kids to ICE at the Gaylord Texan yesterday evening. That’s the thing with 2-million pounds of carved ice in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer theme sits in a 9-degree Texas-sized freezer. Of all the things I enjoyed, it was breathing in allergy/pollen-free air. The kids really enjoyed the ice slides. Anytime I see Hermie the Elf, I’m reminded of an old manager I had who looked like the real-life human version. Hotel employees wear a nametag which states where they are from, and I saw one from South Africa. She said she wasn’t fond of the cold and employees are only allowed to work an hour at a time inside the warehouse-sized freezer. Parking was expensive, it cost us $17.
If you look carefully, you can see DaughterGeeding and BoyGeeding on the Abominable Snow Monster’s shoulders
