Bag of Randomness for Monday, March 28, 2016

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  • I’m sure I’ll get knocked or beat up for this, but I’ve never been comfortable with how little was written about Jesus’ life after the resurrection. I’d think any of his teachings or gatherings after conquering death, in the 40 days before the ascension, would have been important enough to make scripture.
  • This Easter photo of FamilyGeeding after Easter service looks like a piece of campaign propaganda.
  • My pastor is a Purdue University graduate and had this funny line, “No other university has had more graduates in space than Purdue. The first and last astronaut on the moon were Purdue graduates. That means as a student at Purdue, you have a greater chance of walking on the moon than appearing in the Final Four.” I didn’t do the math, but it made me laugh. For the next two weeks, he’ll be taking a walk on the wild side with this sermon series – Voting God’s Way! Is There a Christ-centered Insight to Elections?. He promises no endorsements of any party or candidates.
  • I was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers t-shirt at dinner yesterday and a very elderly gentleman stopped by out table to ask if I was from Brooklyn. He had such a look of hope in his eye that I wanted to say yes.
  • Driving home from church yesterday on Jack FM was Micheal Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” which I haven’t heard in a very long time. Last night on HBO’s ‘Togetherness’, Amanda Peet’s character sang the song. It was weird that song popped up two different times yesterday despite me not hearing it in years.
  • I watched Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and here are some spoiler-free thoughts:
    • I really enjoyed it.  Several online reviews for the movie were negative, so I had my doubts, but it was better than expected.
    • Speaking of better than expected, Ben Affleck was a pretty good Batman/Bruce Wayne. When I heard he was first cast, I thought he’d be too distracting, but he did a good job. However, I really didn’t like Jesse Eisenberg’s performance, but Holly Hunter made a great senator.
    • I don’t really want to use the term cameos, but there were a lot of unexpected characters that made an appearance.
    • There’s way too much use of real news people making cameos in this film, especially one specific network.
    • In the lobby was some dude dressed as Batman in a pretty realistic costume. The theater employees were really getting a kick out of it, and they told me he wasn’t hired, it was just some guy that decided to show up dressed at Batman. People were excited to see him and he posed for a surfeit of pics. And the guy was pretty well built, filling that costume better than I’ve seen most actors.
    • Our showtime was just a little before 10:00 PM and I was surprised at the number of toddlers and kids who couldn’t be passed kindergarten. Yes, it’s a superhero movie and there are a ton of toys marketed toward them, but it’s a pretty dark movie with more skin than one would expect and some pretty darn scary parts, not to mention the violence. Most of them weren’t well behaved, and one  kid wouldn’t stop snoring, which was really distracting.
    • There’s no need to stay after the credits for extra footage.
    • There have been about seven or eight Bagman movies, and I’m surprised that Adam West hasn’t made one cameo.
    • If you’re observant, there’s a great Jack Nicholson nod in the film.
    • Speaking of cameos, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and huge Batman fan continued his streak of making a cameo in Batman movies.
    • After watching the film, I thought back to the BaD Radio segment about Star Wars The Force Awakens the day after it opened in theaters where they gave away some plot elements and spoilers. They stated what they were saying was everything you only saw in the movie trailers, but as I said before, those trailers tease elements of a film, they don’t confirm what happens regarding a plotline. That’s definitely true with Batman v. Superman.
  • All for love: 14-year-old mows lawn to earn cash for date
  • Rolling Stone – See U2’s the Edge ‘Geek Out’ About New Custom Guitar – Guitarist speaks in-depth about his first-ever signature instruments, a Fender Stratocaster and Deluxe amp
  • Fortune – Why U2’s Bono is one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders – You can hate his music and his ego, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but he can get world leaders and businessmen with a fixed point of view and expand their aperture a bit to get them to work together.
  • They’re brothers – TCU’s little geniuses, ages 10 and 13, are big men on campus
  • Bearing cupcakes, Henry S. Miller CEO offers to drop suit against Alzheimer’s patient – The Dallas Morning News reported last week that the brokerage arm of Miller was suing Ruth, claiming she owed the company tens of thousands of dollars in brokers’ fees as a result of a failed attempt to sell her house in 2012. A state appeals court sided with the real estate company, and with attorneys’ fees, a judgment against the old woman had swelled to more than $125,000.
  • Today’s dose of ‘MURICA! – YouTube – A short stretch of road along Route 66 / Hwy 333 near Tijeras plays the end of “America the Beautiful.”
  • From a Reddit’s Today I Learned – TIL John Wayne was in his hotel room, below Frank Sinatra’s, who was having a party. The noise kept Wayne up so he went to his room and yelled at him. A guard came saying, “Nobody talks to Sinatra that way.” Wayne slapped the man and knocked him out by breaking a chair on top of him. The noise ended 
  • CBS Sunday Morning
    • There was a profile segment on Charlotte Jones Anderson and Stephanie McMahon about the upcoming Wrestlemania event at AT&T Stadium and being in the “family business”.  Over the past three or four years, Anderson sure has been in the spotlight a lot.
    • Things I did not know about Joel Osteen before this segment (Note – this is in no way an endorsement of him):
      • His wife is co-pastor. Their first date was a Houston Rockets game, and now their church is in the same building that game was played in.
      • He doesn’t take a salary from the church but states he only makes money off his books and “other projects”.
      • They purposely don’t ask for money on TV but people send it anyway.
      • His father was the pastor of the church and let Joel give a sermon. Six days later, Joel’s father died, and he just kind of took it from there.
    • Rob Greenfield is a minimalist (warning, the first pic of the website has him bare except for a well-placed passport – All My 111 Possessions – I have 111 possessions to my name. I have nothing stored anywhere and no home to go back to. The Earth is my home and I feel as home here as I have felt anywhere else. The reason I’ve chosen the 111 possessions that I have is to meet my most basic needs and to aid in living an environmentally friendly life. The purpose of my minimalism is to keep myself from focusing on material possessions, to keep my life simple, to curb my consumption, and to live an environmentally conscious life. It’s also designed to keep my involvement with money to a minimum and to live with a great level of happiness, health, and freedom.
    • If you are interested in how Netflix uses algorithms and stats, this article might be of interest.
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