Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, April 6, 2016

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  • I finally repaired our oven. The cooling fan for the control panel would start to whine and it was easily “fixed” by just hitting it like The Fonz used to do to turn on a jukebox, but after a while, the power of The Fonz started to fade so I ordered a replacement fan. The fan in question must have felt intimidated and started to work fine again for about two months so I just put off replacing it until it started whining again last week. The repair would have cost about $300 if someone came over to do it, but I did it myself and the part cost only about $80 on eBay and my labor is cheap.
  • One of my neighbors got on the Rangers jumbotron on opening day. The next day Knoxie interviewed him. If this keeps up, he’ll be GM by the end of the season.
  • While watching ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ on ABC last night, it was abruptly interrupted with breaking news. All they said was that Ted Cruz won Wisconsin with 5% of the votes being reported. I believe Cruz was forecasted to win, so that’s hardly breaking news, especially to interrupted a show. They then returned to the show but started it a few moments before the interruption. One reason I like superhero stuff is that it’s a break from reality, and here they pull me right back into it.
  • Mental Floss – Is It Illegal to Fake Your Own Death?‏ – Pseudocide—faking your own death—is not technically illegal. However, to fake your own death, you’d most likely need to break several laws.
  • 9-year-old reporter breaks crime news, posts videos, fires back at critics
  • It’s almost like owning your own magazine with you always being on the cover, but not quite – Taylor Swift to receive first-ever Taylor Swift Award
  • George Mason tweaks name of Scalia law school to avoid ‘Ass’ acronym – The Virginia college announced on Thursday that the school’s new name would be the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University. The name change spurred a fair amount of ridicule accompanied by the hashtag #ASSLaw on Twitter. The official name remains the Antonin Scalia School of Law, although the school’s website and marketing materials have recently been tweaked to the Antonin Scalia Law School, according to the Wall Street Journal.
  • I caught the HBO ‘VICE’ segment about restoring eyesight to cataract sufferers in Ethiopia. Each “kit” to perform the surgery, which takes only about five minutes and requires no stitches with a 24-hour recovery period, costs less than twenty bucks. It was amazing to see the patients’ reactions after the bandages were removed. I, thankfully, will probably never experience such an amount of relief in my life. I can only imagine what it must be like to have something you take for granted every day, think it’s forever lost, and then have it gifted back.
Posted in Personal | 3 Comments

Vulture – How Hollywood Gives Actors Plastic Surgery With A Mouse Click

Spaceships and giant robots are old news. Now, Hollywood special effects can shave years off an actor’s life, reshape a performance, or even recast a role after a movie’s been shot.

Today, digital face replacement is just one technique at Hollywood’s disposal. Braga regularly uses CG to retouch actors, “whether it’s a pimple, or an actress who has bags under her eyes on that particular day, or painting out a nipple in a sex scene.” When an actress got a nose ring without telling him, his postproduction team removed it at a cost of “tens of thousands of dollars.” Such work can get expensive, but it’s industry standard.

Until recently, vain actors were limited to makeup, flattering lighting, corsets, plastic surgery, Botox, crash diets, personal trainers, steroids, muscle suits, color grading, lenses and filters, body doubles, and spray-on abs. Now they also have software: Zits vanish with a click. Wrinkles ­disappear. Abs harden. Jawlines sharpen. Cellulite vanishes. “In postproduction, if they want your nose to be a little smaller or a little bigger, that’s up to them, man,” says actor Michael Shannon. “Some attractive person gets out of a swimming pool dripping wet? Nobody wants to see how they really look: It’s fantasy.”

De-aging, once a groundbreaking special effect in Benjamin Button, is not so special anymore. In Netflix’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, 63-year-old Paul Reubens picks up right where he left off in 1990, thanks to Vitality Visual FX, a firm started by two Lola founders. Reubens told the New York Times, “I could have had a face-lift and we would have saved $2 million.”

Full Article

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Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, April 5, 2016

  • I only caught the last three minutes of last night’s game and my goodness that was one amazing finish. Those last two shots were simply amazing and that game has to have one of the best finishes ever. And sometimes these things are more fun to watch when you have no rooting interest whatsoever.
  • Twitter Video – A North Carolina fan with great seats says “Oh, s—-” right before the final shot goes in.
  • Man, anyone that tweeted the sad Jordan meme last night sure picked some low hanging fruit.
  • I like how the player who made the game-winning shot answered the question on whether he knew it was going to go in. He simply said, and without any arrogance, that he expects all his shot to go in just like the last one.
  • I love puns – One Shining Moment. And I’m glad TBS, in their first year hosting the finale, continued with the actual One Shining Moment. They took it one step further, after coming back from commercial we got to see the players still on the floor watch it live/
  • Howard Hamlin sure was wearing a lot of purple in last night’s ‘Better Call Saul’. And even though I’ve heard of “Svengali”, it was used in a context last night in which I had to research him a bit.
  • I was craving BBQ on Sunday evening but I have this “rule” no good BBQ places are open on a Sunday night; however, I caved.  Someone recommended Smoke in Plano since he knew I love me the hard to find beef rib, so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t know it was one of those places in which you have a waiter and just can’t order meat and sides, you have to order designated plates of food that’s paired with a particular side. That’s strike one. It seemed like a smoke house designed for affluent hipsters who prefer style and atmosphere over substance. All their meat wasn’t smoked enough, the connective tissue wasn’t dissolved enough, and they like to put weird pickled or fermented garnishes on all their meet, which totally screwed up the taste. Good BBQ needs no garnish or even sauce. Also, due to price, we have to eat in for the rest of the month.
  • A conversation yesterday lead me to look up Judge Wapner, who is still alive at 96. I was surprised to learn that Rusty the Bailiff (he died back in 2002) served as bailiff during the trials of Caryl Chessman, Charles Manson, and Patty Hearst.
  • The Masters will be played this week and it’s a major turnoff for me despite having an appreciation for golf. I guess it has to do with the pretentiousness of venue and the event. Loosely related, it reminds me of the pretentiousness of alumni of the SEC or all college alumni that worship their alma matta. I always thought it was strange that people are more connected with their college in which they spent about four years and paid money to go to as opposed to their hometown where many spend most of their formative years. But if I were to really examine my thoughts and feelings about his, I’m sure there’s some jealousy on my part.
  • I think I’ve gotten to the point I don’t really care for sports all that much. Sure, I have an interest in my local and state teams and enjoy championship games, but I tend not to get attached anymore. Perhaps that’s just me getting old and understanding how unimportant all of it really is. Heck, in the 90’s when the Cowboys lost, it would wreck my entire week, which is really silly when you think about it.
  • Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, the last Plains Indian war chief, dies at 102 – I first heard of this man when he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not only was I fascinated that he had a connection with the Battle of Little Big Horn, but how he became a Crow War Chief:
    • It was on the European battlefields Medicine Crow completed all of the four tasks needed to become a Crow War Chief. As a scout he led several successful war parties deep behind enemy lines; he stole German horses; he disarmed an enemy; and he touched an enemy (counted coup) without killing him.
  • All the President’s Men premiered 40 years ago this month. Despite being a fan of presidential history, I still haven’t seen it. I want to, I just never made the commitment.
  • GIF – How a river in Peru changed shape from 1985 – 2013.
  • Vietnam’s Bikini Airlines Set To Create Country’s First Female Billionaire
  • Bill Simmons and HBO are making a Game of Thrones recap show – After the Thrones premieres on HBO Now on April 25th
  • On last night’s ‘CBS Evening News’, John Dickerson, the network’s political director and host of ‘Face the Nation’, stated he was briefed on convention rules by RNC officials because “the party wants to make sure the public understand how it works.” That leads me to believe there’s no way Trump will be their nominee and that he will indeed run as a third party candidate.
  • Erik Bauersfeld, Admiral Ackbar Voice Actor in ‘Star Wars’ Films, Dies at 93
  • Results of a U2 fan survey for the year from the band’s biggest fan website.
  • Unique stadium in Brazil – Estádio Milton Corrêa – The name (and the fame) come from the unusual circumstance that the midfield line supposedly lies exactly on the Equator – zero latitude -, thus causing each team to defend one hemisphere.
  • The Atlantic [Video] – The Inevitable Fallout of Naming Your Son ‘Hitler’
  • The New Yorker – THE VOYEUR’S MOTEL – This opening paragraph gives me the creeps, but also reminds me of one of the new ‘X-Files’ episodes:
    • I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.
Posted in Personal | 6 Comments

Bag of Randomness for Monday, April 4, 2016

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  • What you see above is my Mike Schmidt tee-ball set my father gave me for Christmas when I was a young-little-BoyGeeding. You can also see it was important to me as I wrote my name on it along with my phone number, because that’s what you do with important stuff when you’re a kid. Yesterday, I bought a new tee-ball set and used its parts to make my old tee-ball set functional and gave it to BoyGeeding. We spend a good amount of time playing with it in the backyard yesterday. When it was bedtime, he went to the backyard to retrieve it because he was worried it was going to rain. He also tried to take it upstairs with him so it could be in his room next to his bed.
  • I also bought BoyGeeding his first glove yesterday, which he slept with. It’s a Rawlings and only ten bucks and most importantly to him, it had a lot of green on it, his favorite color.
  • GIF – BoyGeeding’s first hit in blastball (tee-ball). He really stuck the landing.
  • YouTube – Every Sunday, DaughterGeeding takes BoyGeeding’s hand and leads him down to the front for children’s sermon. It melts my heart. Every. Single. Time.
  • While at BoyGeeding’s blastball game, some father was wearing a Jim McMahon BYU football jersey. That was totally out of the blue, no pun inteneded.
  • I mentioned my pastor was going to do a two-week series about having a Christ-centered insight to elections, and he stressed going into it that he was in no way endorsing any political party or candidate. There’s a lot I could say about the sermon, but I’ll just leave you with quotes he started it with and the one he ended with.
    • If your God never disagrees with you, you might be worshipping an idealized version of yourself. – Tim Keller
    • When the Republican party or the Democratic party has more influence over your faith than Jesus, then something has got to change. – Dale Patterson
  • Holy cow, ‘The Walking Dead’ had a fantastic season finale cliffhanger.
  • I can’t recall if this is the first year TBS has aired the Final Four, but I was surprised that it wasn’t on CBS. I only knew of this when watching an episode of ‘Conan’ with the cast of Batman v. Superman and there was a little logo in the corner that stated the championship game was going to be on CBS. I have a feeling some folks on Monday will be surprised the game isn’t on CBS and will be hunting for it come tip-off tonight.
  • I may not watch more than a total of 15-minutes of the entire tournament and championship game, but I’m a sucker for watching “One Shining Moment”. I love how they time actions and certain plays and outcomes to certain choruses.
  • While reading this article, I learned the last time the men’s NCAA Tournament title game was played in an actual basketball arena was twenty years ago. Kentucky beat Syracuse in front of a crowd of 19,229 at Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey.
  • I finished watching the second season of Netflix’s ‘Daredevil’
    • Many mainly know Jon Bernthal as Rick’s best friend Shane in the first several seasons of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’. When he was cast as The Punisher, I didn’t think he’d have the chops to pull it off, but he was great.
    • Elodie Yung plays Elektra and she’s captivating and beautifully exotic, especially with that French accent. I also discovered she’s half-Asian (Cambodian/French), and may soon end up in my poorly kept Half-Asian Hall of Fame.
    • I didn’t really understand the Marvel Cinematic Universe until one of my readers pointed it out to me last week, and with that in mind, I really like how the writers are able to connect the Daredevil storyline and characters with the current onslaught Marvel films and television shows – you never know who will make the surprise cameo.
  • GIF – This girl has impressive trampoline skills, but I really like the finish.
  • Disney Plans Live-Action Film About Snow White’s Sister – Rose Red is a character that appeared in Grimms’ fairy tales in an adventure that had no relation to the more well-known Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs fairy tale that inspired the classic Disney animated film. The story is a revisionist take that transposes Rose Red into the Snow White tale, making her a key player in the later part of the classic story.
  • NFL prospect says a team asked if he would choose a knife or gun to kill someone
  • At the end of each ‘CBS Sunday Morning’, they have a “Moment of Nature” segment in which they show nature footage and audio without any commentary. WifeGeeding and I like to play a game to see if we can guess where it was shot, and to our surprise, yesterday’s was Dallas’ Great Trinity Forrest. I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard of that place.
  • Created by four college men back in February – The Daily Mail – A Twitter account titled @BabesForTrump featuring women wearing little clothing and promoting the GOP presidential frontrunner has quickly gained a following of more than 6,000 Twitter users.
  • This house for sale near the White Rock Lake area of Dallas has an surprising interior.
  • New drone video shows Apple’s massive new spaceship campus is coming together
Posted in Personal | 7 Comments