BagOfNothing.com

• One week ago, I wrote that my blood pressure was 163/91 with a resting heart rate of 88 BPM. As an experiment, I thought I’d commit to drinking at least an additional 48 ounces of water a day and track my results with no other modification to diet or exercise. I probably drink about 30 ounces of water a day, but wondered if adding 48 more ounces (coming close to a total of 80 ounces daily) would have any effect. Last night after putting the kids to bed, my blood pressure was 134/74 with a resting heart rate of 91 BPM. I think I’m gonna add water to my diet.
  • I’d like to figure out the percentage decrease, but not sure how. I don’t think you can treat those numbers like fractions.
• In case you are wondering, I mostly drink a mixture of green and black tea throughout the day and maybe 8 ounces of either a Coke or a Sprite.
• I don’t have a whole lot of Twitter followers, but I’m sure more than half of them are spam accounts.
• You may know Eve Plumb best as Jan Brady, of ‘The Brady Bunch’. When she was eleven, and with the help of her parents, purchased a beachside house in Malibu for $55,300. She recently sold that house for $3.9 million.
• GIF – After that hit in far left field, I was pretty surprised the first baseman was able to field it and tag him out, all on his own.
• Buzzfeed – 11 Heartwarming Family Celebration At The Rio Olympics
• I’m not trying to fan flames or advocate, just thought this was interesting for folks on both sides of the gun debate – A priest planned to destroy a gun as a gesture of peace. In return, he got threats
  • A girls’ all-star softball team was raising money to attend a major competition by holding a raffle for an AR-15.
  • Not comfortable the gun was a prize to support children, he offered for the girls’ trip himself, but since the raffle already started that wasn’t an option, so he used $3,000 from the church’s discretionary fund and bought 150 of the 500 raffle tickets. – Donors replenished the $3,000 he’d used from the church coffers and then some.
  • He won.
    • “I’m not sure that’s exactly how God works, fixing raffles,” he said with a laugh. “I like to believe I took a faithful stance. But I think that God would have been on my side even if I didn’t win, because we helped send a girls softball team on their trip.”
  • As the owner of the gun, he wanted to publically destroy it as a symbolic gesture – melt it down, turn it into a piece of art, perhaps a garden tool.
  • It was suggested this was a violation of Oregon’s new gun law by failing to have a background check conducted on a parishioner.
    • The Oregon State Police, acting on a tip from a local gun club official, opened an investigation into the allegation that he’d violated the background check law. A spokesperson there said the case is under review. Such a misdemeanor is punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine that could reach more than $6,000.
  • Blogger Note: In retrospect, I should have made this a separate or individual post. Also, I’m sure that article raised the blood pressure of some of you out there.
• Buzzfeed – 25 Overwhelmingly Emotional Pictures Of Proud Olympic Parents
• ‘Catfish’ recap: Knoxville man thought he dated Katy Perry for six years online
• Time-waster – Search for photos by painting a picture
• Cut Delkus some slack – What It Really Means When There’s A 50 Percent Chance Of Rain
  • The factor that’s missing in the comprehension of Probability of Precipitation (PoP)? Area. To quote the National Weather Service (NWS), what PoP is actually describing is the chance of rain at any point over an area.
• A last will and testament of someone before being deployed.
• In a World Gone Blerg, We Need 30 Rock More Than Ever
• Who Is the Best Movie Cop of the Past 30 Years? – From RoboCop to Marge Gunderson, we have the definitive answer
• 1992 Olympic pop-culture flashback – Dan & Dave, a great marketing campaign which didn’t quite work out for the athletes. Dan didn’t qualify for the Olympics and Dave ended up with the bronze. But Dave did win the gold in 1996.

• When I first started this blog, my intent was to never post any of my thoughts or anything about me. It started with just a bunch of individual posts of this or that. Later when I couldn’t find much material, I’d just group them together in something called Bag of Randomness. When I couldn’t find enough material even for a Bag of Randomness, I would sometimes throw some personal stuff in there. A handful of readers said they liked hearing what’s going on in my life, which I still can’t understand, so that’s when I started to post random personal thoughts and experiences. Now, I basically just do a Bag of Randomness and it’s all mixed together.
• It doesn’t matter if the road trip is five minutes or five hours, but we’ve never let our kids watch any movies or play with tablets or smartphones. It’s our way of trying to teach the kids to be patient, to look and observe, to not feel needy or occupied all the time, and it’s a great way to converse. Also, we just want them to experience a little bit of what we had to go through when we rode with our folks.
• Watching the United States men’s basketball team play Argentina, I’ve come to the conclusion that Argentina fans are boisterously annoying, especially when they have air horns.
• Manu Ginóbili was playing for Argentina. If there’s one thing I’ll remember him for, it was bringing the art of flopping in soccer to the NBA. Maybe not bringing it, but perfecting the annoying tactic.
• I’m surprised sprinters still attach their race bibs, or whatever you call that sheet of paper looking stuff attached to their front and back, with baby pins. By now, something more “advanced” should be used. Like, maybe something peel and stick?
• I only ran the hurdles for a small bit in junior high, but I really enjoyed it. There was something about counting and pacing your stride and the repetitious pattern that made if more fun than a regular sprint.
• I don’t want to be too quick to judge Ryan Lochte, but he does have a bit of an interesting past that could lead one to think he made up the fake cops mugging him and his peers story. And it would be just his luck that the s hits the fan when his teammates are pulled off a plane because of the story. But I could also believe government officials doing what they can to discredit the story and make them hosting the Olympics look better. For now, I think I’m going to side with Lochte, thinking he told his mother with no intention of the story getting out and being hesitant to not get his friends in trouble because they were out so late. As for his story not being entirely straight, I think we’ve all been prone to embellish a story a bit and adrenaline and nerves will mess with your mind.
• I think within the next five to seven years, we’ll find out Usain Bolt was doping.
• The Olympic pool in Rio may have given some athletes an edge
• One of the saddest stories I read all year – Arkansas police: Girl, 4, found zip-tied, beaten thought her name was ‘Idiot’‏
  • “when a police officer asked the girl what her name was, she said, “Idiot.” Police later discovered Reed regularly called the child “Idiot” instead of using her actual name.”
• Sports Illustrated Campus Rush – An oral history of how the Big 12 came to be
  • I got a chuckle out of this. The article title states it’s an “oral history”, which I understand the context, but since the oral part is now recorded in print, it’s “printed history” that’s now available in text form. I chuckle because it made me think of the Pepper Hamilton Report provided to Baylor, which was only provided orally, and there’s supposedly no recorded form of it, audio or print/text. Perhaps the report provided to Baylor should only be referred to as the Pepper Hamilton Oral Report. [Blogger Suggestion: Get your head out of the gutters with all the sexual innuendos.]
    • How Art Briles is the only coach fired and made scapegoat is baffling.
• Take a look at the most opulent labour room in the world

• Sometimes WifeGeeding will point something out to me and I’ll reply, without any intention of sarcasm, with, “Good eye.”  Sometimes she’ll reply back, “Yeah, it’s the only one I got.”
• Yesterday was orientation at DaughterGeeding’s school. It’s the second year of existence of the school, and the second year for the headmaster to be headmastering. Last year at orientation, he gave a speech and never introduced himself – his name nor his title. I playfully joked with him last year about it saying a lot of us parents had no idea who he was or his role with the school, but we assumed he was the principal. He’s not Bono, where you can stand in front of a crowd and everyone knows who you are. This year I was wondering if he would do the same. Almost. He said his name, but never mentioned his role with the school. I’m sure there were a bunch of kindergarten parents wondering who this young man speaking was, and when the headmaster was going to be introduced.
• I learned at orientation if a student is found with a mobile phone or smart watch, it will be taken and only given back after a small fee is paid.
• On last night’s ‘Hard Knocks’, rookie quarter Jared Goff  was asked if he was more of a sushi or burger man. He said sushi. I don’t want the quarterback of my team being a sushi man. He also prefers Justin Bieber over Justin Timberlake.
• Props to head coach Jeff Fisher explaing to his team how to stand and act during the national anthem.
• I ready comics daily, one of them is Ripleys’s – Believe It or Not!. Yesterday, former Texas Rangers great, Toby Harrah, was included.
• It’s like ‘Aerial America’ but with drones and a cute host – Droning America: Dallas, TX
• I’m considering visiting the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, TX sometime this fall. Only problem, it’s a four-hour drive.
• These girls at Ole Miss have a glammed up dorm room.
• LiberallyLean.com – Decatur High School Has An “Abstinence Only” Program That You Must Opt Out Of?
• If I read this article correctly, the Navy plans on using drones to help refuel aircraft that’s already in flight.
• There was a video of a boy who swallowed a dog toy and squeaked when he moved flying around yesterday, but I think it’s fake.
• Electric Cars Are Way More Practical Than You Might Think – A new study finds that electric vehicles could handle most of our driving needs.
• As a Sherlock Holmes fan, I’ll be looking forward to this – Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly Reunite For ‘Holmes & Watson’
• Buzzfeed – This Runner Stopped In Her Olympics Final To Help Her Injured Competitor Finish
• TIME – Why the World’s Best Athletes Can’t Stop Eating McDonald’s
• If you are burnt out on the Olympics and can’t find anything on television to watch, I thought I’d recommend Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’, maybe the best thing I’ve watched all year. I plan on writing a spoiler-free post sometime soon. Netflix has posted the first eight minutes of the first episode on YouTube, which I posted below, along with a couple of trailers (I think the second one has the s-bomb).
  • I read all the boys in the film read scenes from Stand By Me when auditioning for the film.
  • The mysteries of Stranger Things are better left unsolved – Why the show’s lack of mythology is exactly why it worked
    • But the show’s success isn’t just due to the scenes, shots, and scenarios it cribs — though there are certainly plenty. It also emulates the storytelling style of the era: a time when movies reigned supreme, stories had endings, and just because something was a hit didn’t mean it warranted 42 tie-in comic books and an interconnected cinematic universe.
  • I have serious concerns about actress Natalia Dyer’s health after seeing this picture of her at the premiere. She’s either ill or has an eating disorder.
  • Vimeo – ‘Stranger Things’ Side-By-Side With All The ’70s And ’80s Movies It References
  • YouTube – Stranger Things | Virtual Reality / 360 Experience – Click and drag around the video to look around

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY