Bag of Randomness for Thursday, May 11, 2017

  • This blog has never had a large viewership or whatever you all it, and I’m used to only getting a handful of comments, but it feels dead around here as of late. I may have to write a controversial opinion about something just to rile things up, like, there should be no drinking age and the easy access to travel long distances in a relatively short amount of time has only made society worst.
  • Did men in biblical times wear underwear? No undergarments, but underwear.
  • The older I get, the faster my nails grow.
  • We don’t wash our sheets over a set schedule or period of time. It’s one of those things where we just kinda think, yeah, it’s about that time. I’m also bad at using the same towel for too long.
  • I can’t relate to anyone who talks about working out and achieving a runner’s high, but I certainly can relate to anyone about over-eating and getting the meat sweats. And therein lies the problem with my overall health.
  • Even if I were skinny, I’d avoid wearing skinny jeans on principle alone.
  • My taste for comedy is probably different than most, but I did get a kick out of this line from ‘Angie Tribeca’, “What brings you to Carl Jr’s Junior High?”
  • I don’t get the food truck craze. I can’t recall eating anything from a food truck that’s memorable.
  • The Sandlot: Where Are They Now?
  • The Most Comfortable Shoes, As Told By People Who Are on Their Feet All Day – Nurses, teachers, bartenders, and a farmer weigh in.
  • Jesus Christ Superstar is NBC’s next live musical
  • Tesla opens up preorders for its solar roof – A 2,000-square-foot home with solar roof would cost $50,000 to install
    • Tesla claims the tiles do not degrade over time like asphalt or concrete. “Solar Roof is the most durable roof available and the glass itself will come with a warranty for the lifetime of your house, or infinity, whichever comes first,” the company says.
    • The tiles themselves are made with tempered glass to protect the underlying panels from damage. They’re also printed a special way so that the solar panels aren’t visible from the road — they supposedly look opaque enough to be mistaken for traditional roofing tiles unless you’re looking almost straight down on them.
    • Elon Musk’s Instagram – Slo-mo hail cannonball impacting Tesla solar roof tile
    • I used their solar roof calculator for my address and it provided me with the following results, which can also be adjusted for a mixture of regular and solar roof shingles:
  • Wired – Why The US Never Raises The Federal Gas Tax, And Maybe Never Will
  • Little Boy Demands Apology From Mike Pence After VP Accidentally Hit Him In the Face
  • Trump Advisor, “Mr. President, with the firing of the Comey and all the smoke in the air about Russian interference with our election, I advise you to steer clear of anything remotely associated with Nixon.”
    President Trump, “That’s fabulous advice. You are the best at what you do. Tremendous. Thank you . . . Hey, Henry! About time you got here, sit your 93-year-old self right over here.”
    Trump has unscheduled meeting with Kissinger
  • I found this Gizmodo article about how they tricked a select group of 15 Trump officials to click a link in an email from a fake email account three weeks ago interesting and just a bit concerning. Below is a bastardized summary, for true context, check out the article.
    • We sent them an email that mimicked an invitation to view a spreadsheet in Google Docs. The emails came from the address security.test@gizmodomedia.com, but the sender name each one displayed was that of someone who might plausibly email the recipient, such as a colleague, friend, or family member.
    • Some of the Trump Administration people completely ignored our email, the right move. But it appears that more than half the recipients clicked the link: Eight different unique devices visited the site, one of them multiple times. There’s no way to tell for sure if the recipients themselves did all the clicking (as opposed to, say, an IT specialist they’d forwarded it to), but seven of the connections occurred within 10 minutes of the emails being sent.
    • Two of the people we reached—informal presidential advisor Newt Gingrich and FBI director James Comey—replied to the emails they’d gotten, apparently taking the sender’s identity at face value. Comey, apparently believing that he was writing to his friend, Lawfareblog.com editor-in-chief Ben Wittes, wrote: “Don’t want to open without care. What is it?” And Gingrich, apparently under the impression he was responding to an email from his wife, Callista, wrote: “What is this?”
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“The president was wearing a different hat at that time.”

This quote reminded me of the mention of the hats of Ike and Truman in the book I’m reading about the relationships amongst presidents. Inaugurations were considered a very formal affair and all incoming presidents wore a top hat, but Ike broke tradition.

  • At his 1953 inauguration, Dwight D. Eisenhower broke with tradition by wearing a black homburg instead of a top hat. He also wore a homburg at his second inauguration, a hat that took three months to craft and was dubbed the “international homburg” by hatters since workers from ten countries participated in its making. Wikipedia

  • However, at Kennedy’s inauguration, Ike decided to wear a top hat.
  • And to sum up presidential hat wearing at inaugurations:
    • Many presidents have, of course, worn hats to their swearing-in ceremonies, most notably the top hat, worn from the days of Franklin Pierce, in 1853, through Harry Truman. Dwight D. Eisenhower broke the tradition by wearing a homburg. Mr. Reagan, though, plans to go hatless, a precedent set by Theodore Roosevelt. Interestingly, the first President to break radically with the tradition of formal dress was not Jimmy Carter, as many believe, but Lyndon B. Johnson who wore a business suit and a fur hat.
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