Bag of Randomness for Friday, September 23, 2016

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  • As I’ve noted on this here blog, sometimes stress, anxiety, and depression will hit me and hit me hard. Sometimes, the two best ways of coping are to water the grass with me just using a water hose or cleaning the garage. Oh, and sometimes a Xanax.
  • I don’t know why I like using the phrase “this here blog” but I do.
  • I’ve never been to the Plano Balloon Festival but have always heard it’s a great experience to be there after sunset when all of the hot air balloon pilots fire up their burners and illuminate their balloons at the same time. I’d like to make it there tomorrow with the family.
  • Best line I heard about Hillary Clinton’s appearance on “Between Two Ferns” – Her husband was between two Bushes. #TripleEntendre
  • The kids asked me what animals sleep standing up. Here’s what I found:
    • Horses, zebras and elephants sleep standing up. Cows can too, but mostly choose to lie down. Some birds also sleep standing up. Flamingos live on caustic salt flats, where there’s nowhere they can sit down.
      • Somewhat of a tangent, but I’m reminded of how the Elephant Man slept and died:
        • The grotesquely large head of the so-called Elephant Man – subject of the 1980 film starring John Hurt – was so heavy he risked dying from suffocation if he slept lying down and so he would go to sleep sitting up with his legs drawn up and his head resting on his knee. So when he was found dead lying on his bed in 1890, aged 27, his doctor, London Hospital surgeon Frederick Treves, believed he may have died after trying to sleep like other people and had suffocated himself.
  • The Dallas Observer names Hutchins BBQ the best barbecue in the area. They also name KXT 91.7 the best music radio station in the area.
  • Soon, confirmation won’t be needed, a Star Wars film will be released every year – Disney confirms Star Wars anthology movie for 2020
  • Buzzfeed – After Breaking Up With Her Fiancé, This Woman Did An Epic Solo Disney Engagement Shoot
    • “When I look back on those photos, I see a princess choosing to have a perfect day amidst an imperfect situation.”
  • CBS News leads network news divisions in Emmy wins
    • CBS News won more Emmys Wednesday evening than its network news rivals, and more than any cable outlet, taking home seven statuettes at the 37th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards. “60 Minutes” earned five awards, while “CBS Sunday Morning” won one Emmy, and the “CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley” and “CBS This Morning” shared another.
  • Oregon will dress like actual ducks against Colorado
    • The team will wear green jerseys with white pants, and will complement that with orange socks and orange cleats. It is the first time that Oregon, the team with the most uniform options in the sports world, has worn both orange socks and orange cleats.
  • This YouTube video of a guy exploring an abandoned South Texas Blockbuster, published in August, was hitting the rounds yesterday. I think it’s staged, all video, candy, and frozen stuff are left fully stocked and there’s no dust anywhere.
  • This probably belongs to some other blog a lot of y’all like to frequent – Reports of improper teacher-student relationships in Texas hit 8-year high
  • Scientists use ‘virtual unwrapping’ to read ancient biblical scroll reduced to ‘lump of charcoal’
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  • Why “Westworld” Matters – The new version comes out on HBO on October 2. The 1973 original is still shaping sci-fi.
    • I have a friend who really liked the 1973 movie Westworld and is looking forward to the HBO series by the same name. This article highly references the old film, and this link is for him.
    • To be honest, even with all the commercials HBO airs about it, I never really understood the premise. This one sentence from the article sums it up nicely:
      • The movie imagined a future in which tourists take fabulous vacations to elaborate theme parks that mimic ancient Rome, medieval times or the Old West—each of them populated by robot characters that act an awful lot like human beings.
    • Daughter has to recite a lot of things as a first grader, here’s “I Know All The Sounds” by Jack Prelutsky. The kiddo has been home sick all week with a fever that keeps popping back up.

 

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Bag of Randomness for Thursday, September 22, 2016

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  • The perfect name for a self-driving vehicle would be “automobile” but that’s already taken.
  • My favorite line in last night’s season premiere of ‘Modern Family’ was when Phil was about to crash the car and fearing death yelled, “Not today!”. WifeGeeding and I’ve been watching the first two seasons of ‘Game of Thrones’ and a repetitive phrase used is, “What do we say to death? Not today.”
  • WifeGeeding’s favorite podcast, NPR’s trivia, puzzle, and game show,”Ask Me Another“, will be recording a show in Dallas next week. I love the host’s first name, Ophira.
  • There’s some sort of local trial going on that the media is all abuzz about but I can’t tell you one thing about it other than a blonde woman is a victim. I’m not trying to throw the race card, that’s really all I know about it. And then there’s another big murder which also includes another blonde woman.
  • I ain’t complaining, but you just don’t see Jessie Jackson in the news like you used to. And to me, that’s surprising considering racial tensions the news broadcasts.
  • I caught a little bit of Kiefer Sutherland’s new show in which he becomes president after all or most of the cabinet dies. It has potential, but he’s wearing makeup which contorts his face a bit and throws me off.
  • Vanity Fair – Barack Obama And Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview
    • As his two-term presidency draws to a close, Barack Obama is looking back—at the legacies of his predecessors, as well as his own—and forward, to the freedom of life after the White House. In a wide-ranging conversation with one of the nation’s foremost presidential historians, he talks about his ambitions, frustrations, and the decisions that still haunt him.
    • There’s a lot of talk about ambition and how it relates to Lincoln’s quote, “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”
      • The two go back and forth on how former presidents gained and lost ambition with a good mix of temperament and optimism. I’m not an optimist, though I strive to be one.
    • There’s so much I’d like to comment about this article, but I know politics is a dicey issue, but I will say I really enjoyed this read and he’s much more aware of certain things regarding perception than I thought he was.
    • One IKE story:
      • I think I told you the story about Eisenhower, that he had not personally dialed a phone call for so long that when he finally was out of the presidency he picked up the phone and he hears this buzz, and he said, “What’s this buzz?” It’s the dial tone, Mr. President.
    • The article mentions this painting. I never noticed the rainbow over Lincoln’s shoulder until the article pointed it out. I guess I just focused on all the faces all these years.
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  • Buzzfeed – 14 Disney Rides You Can Only Ride At One Place In The World
  • The bun looks like an airplane propeller – Australian man patents the Hamdog – a hotdog and burger combo
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Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, September 21, 2016

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  • That’s a picture of WifeGeeding’s grandmother at her birthday party yesterday, she turned 100. She’s not the one on the left, she’s the one in the middle. The gal on the left is WifeGeeding, the one on the right is one of her older sisters.
    • As I’ve stated earlier, she’s got dementia. WifeGeeding said she spent a lot of time just spitting on the floor, and no one really knew why. But she enjoyed the cake, eating more than she’s had in a very long time. She was known for being a very neat and tidy person and keeping a clean house. Part of that is still with her, as she wanted to help clean and put away things during the party.
    • She is one of eight children. Three of her siblings are still alive, she’s the oldest of the surviving children.
    • On the way home, WifeGeeding visited her grandmother’s birthplace. She was born inside her family’s house, and the house and land had since been sold and is now a cemetery. The family’s plot is where the house once stood. When she dies, she will be buried basically in the spot she was born. I’ll call that the East Texas Circle of Life.
    • Our kids have only referred to her as “Old Grandmother”.
    • I wonder how often a birthday for a 100-year-old is canceled because the honoree didn’t live long enough to make it to the party.
  • The upstairs AC is just blowing hot air, time to call another repairman. Please don’t let it be the coils.
  • How a Texas man was killed by quicksand on the San Antonio River last year – Out of 580 deaths in Texas rivers and lakes in the last 5 years, this case is the only one involving quicksand.
  • How AT&T plans to deliver cheap, high-speed internet over power lines
    • Called Project AirGig, the experimental system places low-cost plastic antennas along existing power grids to deliver low-cost, multi-gigabyte internet.
    • “You don’t have to lay any fiber, you don’t have to touch anything, other than get some of these devices up on the wires,” said AT&T chief Strategy Officer John Donovan.
  • KWTX is a mid/small market television station serving the areas around Waco and Killeen, Texas. Yesterday, one of their evening anchors made a Facebook post, but it was quickly deleted after people were questioning how a mid/small market television station could afford a private/luxury jet, and poking fun at her sporting her shades trying to ham it up. Rumors (so who knows if there’s an ounce of validity) say her reporting is being funded by wealthy Baylor alums to expose faults in the sexual assault investigations and Briles’ firing. For what it’s worth, she’s a co-host of the Baylor Gameday show. But then again, she was the one in that awkward Ken Starr interview.
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  • 3% of American adults own half of guns in the US
    • But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.
    • While there are an estimated 55 million American gun owners, most own an average of just three firearms, and nearly half own just one or two, according to the survey results. Then there are America’s gun super-owners – an estimated 7.7 million Americans who own between eight and 140 guns.
    • This kind of concentrated ownership isn’t unique to guns, firearms researchers noted. Marketing experts suggest that the most devoted 20% consumers will typically account for 80% of a product’s sales.
    • Overall, the survey found, gun owners tended to be white, male, conservative, and live in rural areas. Thirty per cent of conservatives said they were gun owners, compared with 19% of moderates and only 14% of liberals. The strongest predictor of gun ownership was military service. 44% of veterans said they owned a firearm.
    • Clear racial disparities in overall gun ownership remained, with 25% of white and multi-racial Americans saying they personally owned a gun, compared with 16% of Hispanics and 14% of African Americans.
    • But there was essentially no disparity in gun ownership based on income level for Americans who make between $25,000 and more than $100,000 a year. Americans who made less than $25,000 a year were less likely to own guns.
  • Japan’s Newest Technology Innovation: Priest Delivery
  • North Korea Has Accidentally Leaked its Propaganda Websites
  • The Battle of Marignano: The Reason for (Almost) 500 Years of Swiss Neutrality
  • Why A 70-Year-Old Retiree Went Back To Work—As An Intern
    Remember that movie where De Niro plays an intern? Paul Critchlow decided to try it

    • This makes me think of people like Michael Jordan or when Roger Clemons (at age 50) did minor league stints and baseball fans complaining these gimmicks are taking the spots of deserving players trying to earn a roster spot.
  • We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.
  • The Bombings of America That We Forgot – In the 1970s and 1980s, small-scale attacks were nearly commonplace in America. So why doesn’t that period freeze in our collective memory?
    • It may be hard to recall now, but there was a time when most Americans were decidedly more blasé about bombing attacks. This was during the 1970s, when protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade—so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life.
  • A lot of folks think Anthony Bourdain is cool, he did a Reddit Ask Me Anything yesterday.
  • The Complete List of Lewd-Sounding Town Names in America
    • Don’t read any further if you are easily offended…
      • TEXAS: Bangs, Bleakwood, Camp Wood, Cumby, Cumings, Comstock, Dickens, Ding Dong, Friendswood, Glaze City, Greatwood, Jean-Loving, Kinkler, Latex, Leakey, Lovelady, Rockwood, Snook, Spearman, Tool
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