BagOfNothing.com

• I wrote a “Bag of Randomness” for yesterday but forgot to post it. It’s posted at the bottom of this post. Sorry about that.
• Ten years ago today I landed in Vietnam and returned my mother’s ashes back to her homeland and got to visit family I was only told stories about. I bet there’s only a handful of you who followed this blog back then. If for some reason you are interested in reading about that journey, follow that link and at the end of each post is an right-pointing arrow to go to the next entry.
• When concentrating I grind my teeth, which gives me headaches. I have lots of headaches. When I’m aware of it, I place my tongue between my teeth, which somewhat helps. I also grind my teeth at night but wear a chew or a night guard for that.
• Yesterday was the first time I had to fill the SUV up all year.
• Fallon forced to change ‘Tonight Show’ amid Colbert ratings wins
  • “The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon watched his show’s ratings take a hit yet again on Tuesday as competitor “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” won its fifth straight week in overall viewers — and sources say Fallon’s being forced to change his strategy to win back eyeballs.
• ‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 7 will air on July 16 of this year but will have only eight episodes in the season instead of the usual ten. And then the next season, the final, will have eight. WifeGeeding has about sixteen episodes to watch to get caught up before new episodes air. It’s been great watching them with her and seeing it a second time, picking up on things I missed and making sense of the complex plots.
• The Atlantic – Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine
  • Specializing in one part of the body isn’t what’s weird—it would be one thing if dentists were like dermatologists or cardiologists. The weird thing is that oral care is divorced from medicine’s education system, physician networks, medical records, and payment systems, so that a dentist is not just a special kind of doctor, but another profession entirely.
• The New York Times – The Rise, Then Shame, of Baylor Nation
  •  There’s not a lot of new stuff, though there are some details about Kendal Briles and the hostess program I wasn’t aware of and found disturbing. I love the people of Baylor, it’s the leadership I have trouble with and worried how they are continually enabled.
    • In a statement to The New York Times on Monday, Baylor officials said the university was committed to “doing the right thing” — through self-examination, repeated apologies and implementing 105 recommended changes to its policies and structure. “Our mission statement calls for a caring community based on Christian principles, and any act of sexual violence is inimical to these standards,” the statement said.
    • In its statement to The Times, Baylor said: “There should be no doubt that, rather than worrying about its ‘brand,’ Baylor leadership has been focused on doing the right thing.” The university went on to say that its efforts to address and repair the damage done far surpass those taken by any other educational institution. “No other college or university has, at its own initiative, undergone such a thorough self-examination,” it said. “No other college or university has made such wholesale leadership changes based on that self-examination. No other college or university has eagerly embraced an ambitious slate of 105 recommended changes. And, despite the accusations of some, no other university has been as transparent about its failings.”
    • According to the lawsuit filed by Mr. Clune, the lawyer from Colorado, the football staff at the Baptist institution employed a “‘Show em a good time’ policy,” in which current players offered alcohol and drugs to high school prospects visiting the campus and introduced them to female students. The lawsuit also alleged that the university unofficially used its hostess program, the Baylor Bruins, to further entice recruits. It said that “attractive female students” in the Bruins were expected to ensure that recruits had a good time on campus by, for example, engaging “in sexual acts with the recruits to help secure the recruits’ commitment to Baylor.”
    • A particularly notorious allegation in the lawsuit is that Kendal Briles, a former assistant coach and Art Briles’s son, enticed one recruit by saying: “Do you like white women? Because we have a lot of them at Baylor and they LOVE football players.”
    • Last month, the reform group called on the university to reveal how much it was paying in legal fees to have recommendations from the Pepper Hamilton report carried out. The group estimated that the scandal had cost Baylor $223 million in expenses such as legal fees and settlements as well as in lost revenue from projected contributions.

Bag of Randomness for Thursday, March 9, 2017

• After we read bedtime stories to the kids, they will sometimes ask us how many steps WifeGeeding and I have on our fitness trackers to see who’s the winner of the day. Last night, we both had the exact same number of steps, 6,394. I don’t know how to do probability equations, but that’s got to be a pretty darn high number.
• This summer will mark the nineteenth anniversary of my father’s death and I still have the rubber tree plant a close friend gave to the family. That thing has been with me everywhere I lived since college. It’s not a pet or anything, but I’ve grown attached to it, even having a sense of pride as it grew about seven feet tall despite hardly caring for it. WifeGeeding recently asked if she could trim and repot it and I saw no harm in her doing so. However… the plant now is roughly just a foot tall. It’s been struggling for the last week, and now I know why. WifeGeeding read something and confused replotting with propagation. So the plant I now have has no roots, she actually threw the roots away. I’d rather have WifeGeeding in my life than that plant, but considering how she’s a country girl, I’m surprised at her lack of understanding basic horticulture – plants need roots.
• Last night I received an email which concerns my father and it caused me to tear up. I’m trying to process the content as my emotions are getting the best of me, but it’s a big Alex Haley moment and overall a good thing. It’s something that made me feel significant again, in a weird good kinda way, and it’s all because someone took time out of his day and extend me grace. More to follow once I’m my brain catches up with my emotions.
• A Visual Guide to the Fake Fleets and Inflatable Armies of World War II –
  Military units in both the Allied and Axis powers used air-filled tanks and straw airplanes to deceive enemies.
• A good question I found on Reddit last week – Has any one individual ever saved the “world” so to speak
  • This was the top answer:
    • Vasili Arkhipov. He was a soviet naval officer, second in command on a submarine during the Cuban missile crisis. The captain of the sub wanted to launch nuclear weapons, the third senior officer agreed. But the order required authorization from all three senior officers, and Vasili refused. Prevented world war 3.
  • Here was another one which caught my attention:
    • Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov – On September 26, 1983, just three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.