Bag of Randomness should be posting at 2:00 AM CST but I’ve heard from someone that it doesn’t display when you go to the website directly, yet it will on an RSS feed. Anyone else see anything odd?
When I was a kid in school, the hardest thing to do coming back to school would be to write the correct year on the heading of papers. I remember one teacher would knock off points on all papers that listed the previous year without any warning because the correct date was always displayed on the chalkboard.
Years ago I read a book by a former George W. Bush speechwriter. In one chapter he wrote about a moment when he was alone on the Truman Balcony one night with the President, who was drinking a non-alcoholic beer, and stated how beautiful the “Washington Memorial” looked. The speechwriter knew the President referenced it incorrectly as it’s actually the Washington Monument, but he didn’t want to ruin the moment nor show any sign of disrespect. That got me to thinking how often I’ve often made the same mistake, and I noticed LiberallyLean.com made the mistake yesterday. And despite looking at a source or two, I’m still unsure when one is used over the other.
I just found out that TSA Pre-Check is only $85 for five years. It allows you to go into the “fast lane” at the airport and you don’t have to remove shoes, laptops, belts, and certain liquids. So if you only fly roundtrip once a year, that works out to $8.50 a flight for five years. Of course, you have to sign up for it before a flight, which means filling out an online form and visiting an office or airport for fingerprinting.
Yesterday was black Monday in the NFL with all the head coach firings, which reminds me of something funny a friend once said that I’ll always remember, “Never underestimate a coach whose last name ends in a vowel.”
The ‘Sherlock’ Victorian special that aired on New Year’s Day was exceptional.
I watched the NFL Network’s ‘A Football Life’ on Alan Page about three months ago. After his NFL career, he went on to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Before the start of his last game there was a pregame ceremony and he quoted some lines from the poem ‘Ulysses‘ which made me look up the poem. Every ten days or so I think of the poem, re-read it, and look at different reviews and interpretations.
Here’s a great summary of the poem – “Ulysses” details Ulysses’ intense dissatisfaction and boredom on his island home of Ithaca. The poem is a monologue spoken by him, where he not only expresses his discontent, but also describes his desire to keep sailing. He’s getting older and doesn’t have a lot of time left, so he wants to get busy living rather than busy dying. The poem concludes with his resolution to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
U.S. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy quoted the three last lines at the end of his speech “On the Mindless Menace of Violence” in America a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
The final line is inscribed on a cross at Observation Hill, Antarctica, to commemorate explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his party, who died on their return trek from the South Pole in 1912:One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
A new Texas law about school districts and time in the classroom – A new Texas state law that counts the school year by minutes instead of days means local school districts could add extra days off for both students and staff by squeezing minutes into the school day.
His credit score isn’t listed in the article though he says it’s almost perfect – Walter Cavanagh has 1,497 valid credit cards — all of which amount to a $1.7 million line of credit. Currently, he holds the record for the most credit cards and for the world’s longest wallet, which stretches 250 feet, weighs about 38 pounds and can hold 800 cards.
The TICKET’s Gordon Keith lost his mother eight months ago and his father passed away at the beginning of the year. He shared the following tweets:
@gordonkeith – My father was determined. “No child should lose both parents in the same year.” On the 2nd day of 2016, he left as I held him. He made it.
@gordonkeith – My mom & dad are both gone now. Lost them them [sic] 8 months apart to the day. As I left the hospital panic hit. Kept thinking “I’m nobody’s son”
I remember on the drive home from Parkland after my mother died I thought that even though I’m in my thirties, I felt orphaned since I no longer have living parents; that I no longer needed them, but in a way I still did need them, and I’ll no longer have that parental support or encouragement that helped me through all my life. There was, indeed, a void in my life that will never be completely filled.
I’ve been told by doctors and vets that a lot of people and animals die at the beginning of the year. People tend to hold on, keep that will to live for another milestone, and then let go. Pet owners tend to do the same before facing the task of putting a beloved one down.
Well, it’s time to get back into the swing of things.
A reader asked if I kept up my infamous spreadsheet from last year to compare the data from the last two years. Well, I didn’t keep that one up but I did start a more boring one in April of my weight, blood pressure, body fat percentage. I’ve only kept up with the weight which is charted if you scroll down a bit.
I usually just spend New Year’s Eve at home, and the last couple of years I’ve watched the Big D NYE special on WFAA, but it didn’t air this year. However, CBS11 decided to air their own event, but I turned it off the moment I saw one of their correspondents broadcasting live from a Main Event (a bowling and video game place for families with six locations in the area) in Frisco. That’s just a step up from a Chuck E Cheese. That correspondent must have ticked off someone or lost some bet to get that assignment, and I’m sure it was a ratings disaster.
I was at our local grocery store to purchase one item and stood in the checkout line behind a couple for two, maybe three minutes. When it was my turn to purchase the item, the cashier told me, “Hold on, he’s next.” and point to a grocery store employee behind me. I told him I didn’t remember anyone being in front of me, and then he stated that his coworker set his stuff down, went to get something else, and was getting back in his place in line. My passive-aggressive-self drove home immediately, fired up the laptop, and filled out the customer service survey from the URL provided on the receipt. Yeah, that will show ’em. Don’t worry, I didn’t use all caps, I’m not a savage.
With college football coming to a close, I’m going to miss all those AT&T commercials with Bo Jackson and other football greats. I was quite surprised and got a kick out of the one when Joe Montana appears and he and Steve Young share an awkward moment.
I stated I had reservations that Michigan State shouldn’t have been included as one of the final four football teams in the college football since they had too many narrow wins, some of them our right miracles. After seeing how badly they lost to Alabama by getting shut out, I was right.
Now that Baylor has wrapped up their football season, I wonder when they’ll go public with the results of their investigation of the Sam Ukwuachu incident. I think it’s common practice for most places to keep the envelope sealed if an investigation wraps up before the season, and I would suspect by now the investigation should be complete.
Gary Patterson can be a bit of a jerk, and I don’t think he has great game time management skills, but he is an exceptional coach and I have to hand it to him for suspending his star quarterback. And there’s no denying it, but the TCU comeback over Oregon in the Alamo Bowl was fantastic. Sure, Oregon lost their starting QB and center, but so was TCU among others. I did get a kick out of the Patterson bit of changing his shirt for better luck. But the most touching thing about the whole game was the storybook ending of TCU’s backup QB, Bram Kohlhausen, a walk-on senior whose only start was the Alamo Bowl and whose dad passed away from cancer just before Christmas. After the game he bargained with a guy to get his mom down from the stands to hug her and then said this in regards to the suspended QB he replaced, “I was playing this whole game for Tre,” said Kohlhausen, who had the initials “T.B.” on his wristband. “He was my best friend. He was the one who got us here and showed me how to play like I did tonight.”
I saw that Ed “Too Tall” Jones was on Twitter and I started to go through his tweets. One of them was a link to an article about . He, of course, is the tallest DE of all time. A total of three Cowboys made the list, though no Cowboy fan would like to claim Mike Vanderjagt. The tallest player of all-time is Oakland Raider Richard Sligh at seven feet tall.
We finally caught up with ‘The Knick‘ by finishing season two. It’s a shame that thing was on Cinemax as it never got good ratings despite being critically acclaimed. Originally, director Steven Soderbergh and actor Clive Owen signed on because it was meant to be more like a mini-series, with a story arc lasting only ten episodes; however, there is a bit of discussion of a possible season three. As much as I’d like to see more of the series, the finale wrapped things up so well by allowing equal parts of justice, injustice, redemption, and transformation. Doing anything more would be like Michelangelo chipping a bit more at David or Leonardo di Vinci adding something else to the Mona Lisa. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Basically, it’s a hospital drama in the year 1900, and seeing how they go about the practice of medicine is fascinating.
God made Eve from Adam’s penis and NOT his rib, claims Bible professor – The theory, put forward by revered biblical professor Ziony Zevit, suggests God made Eve from Adam’s baculum, or penis bone. Professor Zevit said this explains why man has no baculum, unlike most mammals, and why men don’t have an uneven number of ribs compared to women. To support his theory, he said the Hebrew word ‘tsela‘, taken from the Old Testament, does not translate as ‘rib’ and instead ‘refers to limbs sticking out sideways from an upright human body.’
There’s a lot of buzz, and I mean a lot of buzz, about Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer, which I think is equal parts “Serial” podcast, ‘Rectify’, and ‘Fargo’. It’s a project that the film-makers and documentarians have been working on for ten years, and here’s the trailer (YouTube) if you are interested.
U.S. News and World Report – Politicians May Have to Wear Donor Logos in California – A wealthy Republican wants to require unprecedented transparency in California by forcing state politicians to plaster their suits and dresses with the logos of their top 10 donors — and voters fed up with those politicians may actually get the chance to vote on the idea in November.
Florida news – A 270 lb Florida man has been charged with manslaughter after allegedly sitting on his six-year-old son and crushing him to death while he played a video game on Christmas Eve.
It delights me to no end when I tell the kids they can play with a big cardboard box I’m about to throw out and they spend hours playing in it. Usually, they use markers to turn it into a spaceship.
WifeGeeding’s parents wanted to meet us for lunch at the restaurant in Neiman Marcus at Northpark Center, so we obliged, though I knew I was about to feel a bit out of my comfort zone. When I first saw them, I teased them that they looked like the Ewings, especially since WifeGeeding’s father was wearing a stetson and a sportcoat that had a twist of Western influence in it, though he was sporting it quite well. The opportunity to tease them about being the Ewings arose once more when the conversation of oil prices and their oil rigs and wells popped up.
It’s always interesting to look through the clearance racks at Neiman’s and check out the prices. Even with a 25% discount, this one woman’s vest had a price tag of over $3,700.
The restaurant at Neiman’s, as part of a complimentary appetizer, includes a small cup of chicken broth to drink. I had no idea that was a thing.
Since Northpark has a Tesla gallery I decided to check out the car and sit in the driver’s seat. There’s a lot to like about it, but I think it has some bad blind spots in the rear.
Random observation: Mothers tend to carry babies and toddlers using their left arm and shoulder and fathers tend to use their right arm and shoulder.
WifeGeeding’s father has this gift of approaching people he doesn’t know, engaging them in conversation, and making them laugh and feel as if they have known him for decades. I wish I could describe it better, but there’s such a charm to it mixed with kindness and gentleness and he’s never intrusive about it.
As if being arraigned wasn’t bad enough, Bill Cosby tripped on the curb on his way to the courthouse.
Trump had plethora of reporters and camera operators on his private jet yesterday and said, “Try not to scratch the woodwork if possible.” I live in a very different world than Mr. Trump. I live in a very different world than all the candidates.
An interesting quote from a survivor of one of the recent North Texas tornadoes – “We actually went outside and started commanding the winds because God had given us authority over the winds – the airways. And we just began to command this storm not to hit our area. We – we spoke to the storm and said, go to unpopulated places. It did exactly what we said to do because God gave us the authority to do that.”
It’s an absolute delight to see Christmas through a child’s eyes.
DaughterGeeding can be just too precious sometimes, and I certainly don’t deserve her. Driving home after the Christmas Eve service we were teasing that the weather was really bad where he’s at and there was no way Santa could see through the snow while flying. This was just an attempt to get her to say that’s why Santa uses Rudolph as she’s been watching it quite a bit, but instead, she said, “Well, that’s okay. As long as we are all together as a family, that’s all that matters.”
I’m surprised that the 24-hour Christmas music station continues to play Christmas music after Christmas. Surely they take a huge ratings drop after Christmas.
On Christmas Eve, Santa, in a Lowe’s truck, dropped off a new washer and dryer and hauled off the washer and dryer my father bought in 1992. I think he really got his money’s worth out of those things as they never malfunctioned until about a year ago. That thing washed my clothes from high school, college, as a working adult, and my kids’ clothes, and the last thing from my childhood home in Mineral Wells that I continually used. In a way, I felt like it was the last piece of my youth to let go. Lowe’s offers free delivery but with a catch, you have to purchase all their accessories even if you don’t need them, like water and dryer vent hoses. The installer saw my hoses were just fine and gave me his unopened package and told me to take it back and get a refund. Just the water hoses was over thirty bucks, and yes, I did tip the installer.
I watching Working Girl for the first time and was quite surprised at all the actors I recognized – Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Melanie Griffith, Alec Baldwin, Joan Cusack, Nora Dunn, Oliver Platt, Kevin Spacey, Olympia Dukakis, David Duchovny, Ricki Lake.
I also watched and pleasantly enjoyed the 2015 movie Vacationwith Ed Helms and Christina Applegate which is a sequel, remake, and reboot (per IMDB) of the franchise with Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo. Chris Hemsworth is also in the movie and plays a DFW weatherman that is married to Audry who lives in a Plano mansion. He attempted a Texan accent but for me it sounded more like his Australian twang. As much as I enjoyed and laughed at the movie, it did bring me down as I realized I’m very much like Russ and his father Clark. We sacrifice higher paying jobs and other things to spend more time with our family, often don’t feel respected by them and others, get laughed at doing well-meaning stuff, get overlooked, fall on our face trying to fix things or make things right, feel our wives could have done better, people lack confidence in us, and others are reluctant to join us in things we want to do.
I watched Vacation by renting it on Google Play and casting it from my phone to the Chromecast on our television. While it was playing, I picked up my phone to check something and noticed that my phone would show the actors and their character names as they appeared on the screen, continuously. This is probably old news for everyone else and available on other devices, but I thought it was pretty darn cool. If I wanted to know more about the actor, all I had to do was select him or her.
The coolest bit of trivia from the movie – During the opening credits there is a brief still of the late John Hughes and his family on vacation. John Hughes was the writer of the original Vacation (1983), European Vacation (1985), and Christmas Vacation (1989).
The dogs woke me up in the middle of the night to go outside and relieve themselves. It was a full moon out and the weather was nice, so I thought I’d step outside as well and embrace the solitude. I looked up at the roof of our backyard porch and saw what I thought was a black cat staring at me. It didn’t fear me one bit, and for a while, I couldn’t shoo it away. It disappeared for a bit and reappeared at the other end of the porch roof, and then decided to climb up the roof of our two-story house and then climb the chimney. I promise this wasn’t a dream, but it was a surreal experience. The next day I got an email from our HOA saying beware of a bobcat that was spotted in the neighborhood, so maybe what I thought was a black cat was a bobcat and me and the dogs got lucky.
Our area had a lot of bad storms recently, but my area didn’t get the brunt of it. If you follow local meteorologist Pete Delkus on Twitter, he went after people that called him out for interrupting a spare bowl game for severe weather coverage.
Until I read and saw the picture in this tweet from @WestWingReport, I thought JFK was the last acting president to ride through Dallas in an open top car, but it was Gerald Ford. That lead me to do a little research and I found this DailyMail piece which stated the Ford campaign wanted to use it in a commercial, but it was a turn off for focus group since it was just 13-years after the death of JFK. In particular, this line from the commercial bothered them, “When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there’s a change that’s come over America.” You can see the unaired campaign video in the link provided above.
