Random Monday Morning Thoughts

• It drives me nuts when ESPN shows a football highlight and speeds up the footage to save time. They have enough time to rattle their jaws for hours on end, but they can't take 10 seconds and show a kickoff return for a TD at a normal speed?
• I like weekends more now than I have ever have.
• Slideshow of various pro and con signs held up during Sarah Palin's visit to Dallas on Friday.
• I told you I have OU/Texas tickets this weekend. Man, I'm excited. And I rarely get excited about anything. And I'm assuming ESPN's College Gameday crew will be there, but I haven't seen anything official.
• I was halfway keeping an eye on the Cowboy game yesterday when I swore I saw a Cincinnati player with more hair coming out of the back of his helmet than I've grown in the last 10 years.
• Elisabeth Shue is 45 today. I could watch her in Adventures In Babysitting until my eyeballs bleed.
• I repaired a PVC pipe this summer on a very hot day. It held like a charm. Until yesterday when the recipient of my generosity was rewarded with a flooded back yard. Power. Down.
• I've been praising The Innocent Man until you guys are sick of hearing about it, but I'm well into a new book that might be better: Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town. It helps that the author is spot on with Texas legal concepts like enhancements, drug-free zones, and probation eligibility.
• I think I'm becoming obsessed with incompetent or corrupt cops as well as prosecutors who have blinders on.
• That book makes me feel much better about questioning multi-county drug task forces which I did while DA -- Task forces that have now been all but abolished by the legislature. What a horrible idea that was. (Think of a summer camp with no adult supervision.)
• Those GPS devices are amazing. I was temporarily lost this weekend, hit the "home" button on the sucker, and the next thing I now I'm being told to take a series of lefts and rights until I'm safely where I need to be.
• In The Spin last week, I referred to the legendary "Newark Spaceman." It wasn't until Saturday that someone finally wrote me to tell me I was an idiot. I meant "Aurora Spaceman."
• And I was wrong about the DA in The Innocent Man still being the DA. He retired at the first of the year with three years still left on his term - and he was honest enough to admit that the Grisham book had something to do with it.
• I hate getting out of bed in the morning when it is raining.
• I like looking at the laundry of the person in front of me when I'm at the dry cleaners. With that limited information, I try to make a quick judgment as to what kind of person they are.
• After hearing one of the local judges talk about it, I downloaded the free application for the iPhone that allows you to hold the phone up to anything playing a song (radio, TV, other mp3 player) and within seconds it will tell you the artist and the name of the song. It works like a charm, never fails, and knows even the most obscure song. It's called Shazam and here is a 45 second youtube video showing how it works.
• For the first time in my life, I had to yell at kids next door for being a nuisance. (Throwing rocks at animals constitutes a nuisance in my book.) Little hellions.
• I hate it when some fancy smancy car owner takes up two spaces. Over at the D Magazine blog, this guy hates it too. And calls the offender out with a picture.
• I TIVO'd the Baylor/OU game last weekend because I was going to miss it. So I'm heading home at about the time the game should be over, and I'm doing a great job of keeping away from all radio coverage so as not to learn the score. Then I see a car drive by flying an OU flag. There's no way, I thought, that the guy is going to have the flag out if the greatest upset in the history of ever had just happened. Ugh.