Bag of Randomness for Monday, June 12, 2017

  • I’m not trying to make it sound worst than it is, but DaughterGeeding is still having trouble rebounding from this round of sickness and we had to take her to the ER again. She’s really bummed since plans for her and her cousins to stay at Great Wolf Lodge got canceled due to her illness. But she really didn’t like it when she had to be placed in a bathtub full of cold water to bring down her 103-degree fever.
  • I never used witch hazel until my late thirties but now I find myself using it all the time.
  • A “lifehack” I thought that was amazing as a kid was when people placed their six-pack of canned beverages on the sides of the shopping cart.
  • ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ had a segment of one of my fears, being lost at sea all on your own, no boat or life preserver. What I didn’t know, was that the Coast Guard has a program that helps them calculate where a person may be. They input all sorts of stuff like the height of the person mission, the possibility of using a  floatation device, wind and current variables, and so on.
  • I’m not criticizing, but I’m surprised President Trump would allow his son to wear a simple t-shirt walking to the White House after riding Marine One. Sure, other children of presidents have done it, but to me, it just doesn’t fit Trump’s personality of being ultra wealthy and having everything gilded. Perhaps, and just speculation, but maybe consultant told him to do it to soften up his image. Either way, it’s a damn cool shirt and I expect sales of it to skyrocket.
  • The Musers on Friday had “convenience store talk”. My gosh, they brought back some great memories for this small town boy. There was something that felt so grown up about riding your bike to the local convenience store, “parking” your bike similar to the cars parked out front, paying for a Slush Puppie or candy all on your own, and playing video games.
    • I would have preferred an ICEE or Slurpee, but Mineral Wells didn’t have any 7-Eleven’s at the time. I think there was one near Lamar Elementary, but that turned into a Mr. C’s. We also had EZ Marts.
    • The big video game at the time was Gauntlet. It allowed you to choose one of four players, the warrior, wizard, valkyrie, or the elf. Each character has his or her own unique strength and weaknesses. Everyone wanted to be the warrior since he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and could kill the bad guys easily, but he was slow as molasses.
  • It’s so funny the entire world has fallen for Adam West’s death. We all know Bruce Wayne plays Adam West who plays as both Bruce Wayne and Batman and is simply using this cover to go on a secret bat-mission. Heck, even the U.S. Department of Defense thinks he’s dead. But then again, they may be in on the act.
  • One of my most loyal readers is in the military and does bomb squad work, which makes me wonder if any of them ever made the “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb” line, or is that a totally overused joke in that line of work.
  • With the timing of Adam West’s death, I thought this would be a good time to promote a Twitter account I love to follow – Batman 66 Labels. Mainly, it points out all the signs or labels in the background of the class television show. Below are some examples.

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Meet the World’s First Milk Sommelier

For Bas de Groot, cow’s milk is more than an accompaniment to cereal—it’s a liquid of serious complexity akin to a fine wine. This milk sommelier treats each taste like a sensory experience worthy of discernment and “terroir” exploration. We caught up with de Groot as he traveled to Sonoma, the heart of California’s wine country, to taste the milk of Clover Sonoma’s Bucher Farms. His tasting notes: “Fresh, sweet, with a long aftertaste.”

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Bag of Randomness for Friday, June 9, 2017

  • That’s a map the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex made by the Soviets sometime in the 1980’s. I found this on Reddit along with a lengthy Wired.com article – Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers
    • The maps are still a taboo topic in Russia today, so it’s impossible to know for sure, but what they’re finding suggests that the Soviet military maps were far more than an invasion plan. Rather, they were a framework for organizing much of what the Soviets knew about the world, almost like a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia, built from paper.
    • “Large-scale maps for ordinary consumers had to be compiled using the 1:2,500,000 map of the Soviet Union, with the relevant parts enlarged to the needed scale,” he wrote. That’s like taking a road map of Texas and using a photocopier to enlarge the region around Dallas. You can blow it up all you want, but the street-level details you need to find your way around the city will never be there. Worse, the maps for the masses were deliberately distorted with a special projection that introduced random variations. “The main goal was to crush the contents of maps so it would be impossible to recreate the real geography of a place from the map,” Postnikov tells me. Well-known landmarks like rivers and towns were depicted, but the coordinates, directions, and distances were all off, making them useless for navigation or military planning, should they fall into enemy hands. The cartographer who devised this devious scheme was awarded the State Prize by Stalin.
    • The US military made maps during the Cold War too, of course, but the two superpowers had different mapping strategies that reflected their different military strengths
      • “The US military’s air superiority made mapping at medium scales adequate for most areas of the globe,” Forbes says. As a result, he says, the US military rarely made maps more detailed than 1:250,000, and generally only did so for areas of special strategic interest. “The Soviets, on the other hand, were the global leaders in tank technology.” Maneuvering that army required large-scale maps, and lots of them, to cover smaller areas in more detail. “These maps were created so that if and when the Soviet military was on the ground in any given place, they would have the info they needed to get from point A to point B.”
    • Other tables give the distances for visual objects (a lit cigarette can be visible up to 8,000 meters away at night, but you’d have to get within 100 meters to make out details of a soldier’s weaponry in daylight).
  • Concept cars usually look fantastic and the finished product is often “meh”. I wonder if there has ever been the case in which the finished product looked better than the concept.
  • I’ve concluded rutabaga is just as fun to say as zucchini.
  • I’ve gotten to the point I’d rather misspell a word while typing and correct it with auto-correct than taking the time to try to spell it correctly. Too many times I’ve lost my train of thought because I was too busy trying to figure out the correct spelling of a word. However, over the years, I’ve learned my ability to spell has suffered greatly. All of this came to mind because I couldn’t spell rutabaga or zucchini.
  • Why printers add secret tracking dots
  • io9 – The New Darth Vader Comic Gives Us a Much Better Version of Revenge of the Sith’s Infamous “Noooo!”
  • Game of Thrones’ season 7 finale will be 81 minutes long
  • Yesterday, Barry over at LiberallyLean.com briefly wrote about how saluting is a gesture associated with the military but is now commonplace. That reminded me of a childhood memory of my father I’ve been wanting to share but feared getting raked over the coals. So here it goes.
    • It didn’t happen often, but my father, a WWII, Korea, and Vietnam Vet had several other war veteran friends over to play cards back in 1981. President Reagan started the practice of saluting military personal and it upset these vets. The use a lot of colorful languages, but I think TexasGOPVote.com summed up their discussion well:
      • The President of the United States is a civilian. He is not a member of the US Military and is therefore not entitled to salute. The military salute is a privilege earned by honorable service in the military. It is also a privilege that can be taken away. Military prisoners are stripped of the privilege of saluting. While the President is Constitutionally the CINC, he is not a member of the military. One of the core principles of our country is our military is under civilian control. The President is that civilian authority over the military as is the Secretary of Defense and the Secretaries of the branches of the armed services.
    • I do recall one of the men saying it was just a harmless salute, and another stating something to the effect, “A salute is not harmless, it’s a military privilege, and Reagan has cheapened it for glorifying his image. Hell, Ike never saluted as president.” The vet replied back it was just courteous.
    • In 1986, Reagan provided a light-hearted explanation of why he salutes (paragraphs seven and eight).
    • There was a bit of talk about how “Army regulations, for example, state that neither civilians nor those wearing civilian attire (both of which describe the U.S. president) are required to render salutes.“
    • As a kid, I thought it was really neat hearing old men argue about the leader of our country, laugh, curse, laugh, yell and insult, and laugh together again.
    • It’s my memory of this conversation which caused me to become upset at then-President George W. Bush for wearing military garb flying to the now infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech. But I think TexasGOPVote.com nicely sums up my feelings about all of this and throws in an interesting caveat about presidents who have served:
      • Is the newly founded tradition a harmless gesture of support to members of the military? Or, is it rather, a slow erosion of the principle of civilian rule over the military? While, as an Air Force Staff Sergeant, I enjoyed watching President Reagan show his respect for the military openly by returning the salutes to us. However, I actually resented President Bush’s wearing of a military uniform while serving as President. Some presidents, like both Bushes, Carter, Kennedy, and Reagan have earned the right to salute as veterans of our military forces. Other’s like Clinton and Obama did not.
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