6.18.2019

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts



  • We've all seen this picture by Tom Fox of the Dallas Morning News of the shooter yesterday. It's great. It might win a Pulitzer. But one of the little talked about aspects of the photo is the reflection of the shooter on the right in some mirror-like panel on a column. That has to be a reflection off a similar mirror  facing the shooter which is then projected onto an opposite mirror which is then capture in the photo. Captured in a moment of what would have been a once in a lifetime photo even without it. Edit: Getting some emails that the reflection is actually from the granite -- not mirrors.
  • But I'm not sure when that photo was taken. The crazy footage of the shooter in action shows the photographer hiding being a column. But the picture couldn't have been taken from that vantage point because the photo shows two protective cylinders behind the shooter, the absence of multiple big planters in the background, as well as the street with the pickup in the background. It doesn't add up.  (And the street view from two years ago doesn't show any reflective mirrors on the columns.) Edit: One Faithful Reader says the photo was taken a block away and the photographer then moved closer. 
    As shooter approaches
    Shooter fleeing to run across the street
    Street view from 2017. (Those trees in the planters must be now gone.)
  • And we learned that the shooter was a vet, a gun nut, and a Civil War fan. And this caused my head to hurt: "One meme he shared [on social media] referred to a 'Chad rampage' vs. a 'virgin shooting' — the Chad vs. virgin trope is a common 'incel' meme, which is short for 'involuntary celibate.' The meme contrasted how two men — a 'Chad' and a 'virgin' — would go about carrying out a shooting."
  • Gloria Vanderbilt has died. You don't know fashion chaos until you lived through the late 1970s where teenage girls were paying for overpriced Vanderbilt jeans while other girls went with equally overpriced Jordache.
  • As predicted, the Supreme Court amazingly says it's OK for the state and the feds to prosecute a guy for the same crime in two separate prosecutions. But Trump appointee Gorsuch sounds like a dirty lib in his dissent. And he writes like me. He starts sentences with "And" and "But" and used my trademarked one word sentence of, "Really?"

  • Really?
  • Job opening. (Side note: There was a time in this county where everyone called the town "Alvoyd." Now you never hear it.)
  • Right wing Williamson County is going to do this? 
  • Millions? This is just another red meat lie to his base. 
  • He got mad a Fox News again. "Something weird."
  • The 21 Year Old Going To Lithuania Update from yesterday: It took her 20 hours to fly from Dallas to Houston.  She's now delayed four hours in Frankfurt airport. But she is happy to report that she got a food voucher for "10 Euros!" I sent her a message to not make any Hitler jokes. 

at 8:33 AM

6.17.2019

Random Monday Morning Thoughts



  • Target had a cash register/computer malfunction on the Saturday before Father's Day that shut down their operation for about two hours.  Can you image the money they lost? But most of the focus was on customer inconvenience. I'm not familiar with this "lifestyle guru" who was upset with Target, but the following didn't work out for her. She deleted it.

  • Count the confusing parts: The 21-Year-Old-College-Senior-Home-From-School was on her way from DFW to Lithuania yesterday but, due to the storms that came through, ended up in an Austin hotel room overnight with a 16 year old female traveler who was also flight delayed. Confusing enough? How about if I told you Mrs. LL was waiting at Houston International to help rescue her.
  • This is great: Trump gets all grumpy when his Chief of Staff coughs during his answer to one of George Stephanopoulos questions. (But you can tell he understands TV by resetting his answer.) 
  • O.J. Simpson is now on Twitter and tells us "you'll get to read all my thoughts and opinions on just about everything."  He and I have something in common: Why would you guys out there even care? 
  • I'd rather they show the background at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach than the actual golf. 
  • A few pretentious gems in this story about a couple who live in the Arts District of downtown Dallas. (Ticket fans: That's the father of former board op Grubes.)
  • She had been around forever but apparently she got fired on the spot on Friday after an office argument with the new DA. I'd love to know what that was about. 
  • All the news media freaked out on Friday as reports broke that a Fort Worth deputy had been gunned down in his car in downtown Fort Worth. It turned out that he fell and hit his head and then pasted away. Tragic either way, but that wasn't the best news filtering by the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office. 
  • There was a car fire on the North Dallas Tollway this morning. Watch this (quick loading) video for a "small" explosion as a firefighter walks up to the front of it. 
  • The New York Times reported that the  U.S. has been planting malware into Russia's power grid but officials don't trust Trump enough to tell him. (Trump confusingly said it was "treason" for the Times to release the information about the hack but then turned around and said it was false story.)
  • Here's why Greg Abbott has signing ceremonies for bills which would become law even if he didn't sign them: Far, far right stations like OAN report that he is responsible for all the bills. (By the way, Liz Wheeler of OAN might be a Stepford wife.)
  • I watched HBO's Chernobyl. Verdict: Two big thumbs up. (It's a great drama, and you get to learn the basics of how a nuclear reactor works.)
  • This was wilder than I expected:
  • Messenger: Above The Fold.
at 8:30 AM

6.14.2019

It's Friday. Let's Get Out Of Here.








at 2:00 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts

  • Hey, look what the guy who Trump called as "dumb as a rock" bought. It's 16,000-square-foot home was listed for sale at $8.5 million. 
  • Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be gone. I'll miss her because I knew she would lie which made her consistent. The only acceptable replacements are . . . 
    The Mooch
    Constitutional scholars Diamond and Silk
  • That was then. This is now. 

  • Well, the legislature let the requirement that all plumbers be licensed lapse so Gov. Abbott took Trump's playbook and used an executive order to keep it alive.  Right wingers are mad:
  • Sheriff Joe. Birthdays. Death during childbirth. And a rattlesnake reference. Lots to unpack here.
  • How much does it cost to remove a tree? I had one die and paid around $600 to have a couple of guys chop it up, grind the stump, and haul it off. Maybe I got a deal because they were already in the neighborhood cutting one down. Anyway, because of the tree damage in Dallas, that topic of cost has come up on the radio.  I've heard several people say to cut down this radio host's tree and remove it would cost in the thousands. 
  • Watch Jordan Speith call out his caddy yesterday."Two perfect shots, Michael. You got me one in the water and one over the green."   Speith is a media and DFW darling, but I've always thought he was a brat putting on an act. 
  • The Fort-Worth-hiker-lost-in-Arkansas guy gave an interview to WFAA. From the story: On Monday, June 3, there was the sound of hope. "I heard people call my name: 'Josh! Joshua!''' he said. "That type of thing. So, of course, I yelled back. The next thing I heard the rescuer say, ‘Where the hell is he?’” I don't think he explained how he was not found at that point. And I don't think WFAA asked about the GoFundMe page which raised $11,256.
  • Conservative icon George Will is on a book tour. 
  • In what might be the most protracted litigation in Wise County history, I present Joseph Palazzolo vs. Fort Worth Independent School District -- a whistle blower suit by a former assistant principal at Arlington Heights High School. It all began when he was fired in 2010. In 2016, a Wise County jury (don't ask how it ended up here) awarded him $2.4 million in damages but that verdict was reversed in 2016, and the case was sent back to Decatur. Because of the screwy rules involving the government and this type of lawsuit, the school can appeal pre-trial rulings. They did so again last year. Yesterday, the Fort Worth Court of Appeals said the lawsuit can continue in Wise County. Opinion is here. (Footnote no.1 basically says, "This is such a cluster of a lawsuit.") For lawyers: Do you think the ISD's lawyers billed for a Reply Brief that was denied as untimely to which the lawyers agreed because of an "internal calendaring mistake"?


at 8:33 AM

6.13.2019

Random Thursday Morning Thoughts



  • Here's a followup to Texas banning smoking for people under 21.  We join these conservative states:
  • Johnny Armstrong was found guilty of murder yesterday in Wise County. (I told you there would be no surprises.) You know what his first criminal charge ever was? Possession of tobacco in 1998. (Cause no. JP4-12052) Spin that anyway you want. 
  • I learned this yesterday: You'll need a federal government imposed gold star on your driver's license in order to commercially fly after October 1, 2020.  Obviously this is the beginning of the Mark of the Beast or something like it. 
  • Stooges in Texas in 1936. I didn't think they were big until around 1950, but I was wrong. 
  • Legal stuff: Do you think there would be a judge who thought he could revoke someone's probation by just calling the probation officer up to the bench, not swearing her in, allowing her to say the defendant failed drugs tests (with no proof that the statement is true), and not letting the defendant's attorney to cross-examine her or allowing the defendant to present any evidence at all? Well, one judge in Bexar County saw nothing wrong with that procedure: Judge Wayne A. Christian. Yesterday, the San Antonio appellate court, with complete agreement from the State, slapped him down. (But not hard enough.)
    "Do I look like a judge who doesn't understand Law For Dummies 101?"
  • This is the lawyer who bought the Robert E. Lee statue from Dallas for $1.4 million. He is real estate attorney who graduated from LSU law school in 1973. (It's not clear if he bought it for himself or for some third person.)
  • The town of Waskom, Texas, population 2,200,  became the first municipality in Texas to ban abortion by city ordinance. This gives rise to two questions -- one interesting and one simple. The interesting one: May cities legally zone out abortion clinics? The simple one: Does the Waskom City Council look like you would expect them to?

  • A current judge of the Texas Supreme Court running for re-election had a campaign event at lunch yesterday in Houston and posed with a placard of all the law firms and lawyers, many with current and future cases headed to his court, who were sponsoring the event (and him).  This isn't new or shocking. It's just proof we have a broken system. 

  • If he said these things in a grainy video with low quality audio, he'd be impeached in a week. 
  • Whales.
  • This is the International Space Station passing in between Earth and the Sun (in a rapid fire time lapse photo since it took a fraction of a second for the Space Station to pass).  Side note: In that moment, if you were to travel to the Sun, you would pass the Space Station when you reached mile 250 of your 93,000,000 mile journey. 
  • "Sources tell me the 'working theory' is that Jaquavion Slaton shot himself around the same time officers fatally shot him." - Fox 4's Brandon Todd on the man who was shot by police in Fort Worth earlier this week. 


at 8:33 AM
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