Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• Is the Update updating? No. Is Random Thoughts random thoughting? Yes. Once again proving I'm the hardest working man in show business.
• When I was growing up on the mean streets of Bridgeport, the neighborhood kids would divide into teams and go out onto the road and line up about 60 feet from each other. From there, we'd set up a ton of bottle rockets pointed at each other and light them with a "punk". It was nuclear war. It was fantastic.
• Every now and then a kid would get hit in the chest by one of the bottle rockets. Were we worried about him? Heck no. That was a moment of high comedy.
• You remember "cherry bombs"? My neighbor Chris displayed its power one time when his parents were getting some carpet replaced in their house. How thick is the hardened cardboard that serves as the tube that new carpet is wrapped around? A half inch around the circumference? More? Whatever it was, he put a cherry bomb in the end of a discarded one of them and it blew the end of it into a shreddy mess. 
• The Cherry Bomb was outlawed shortly thereafter.
• In high school, one of my buddies made a make shift bottle rocket launcher by taking an old golf club and sawing the the club end off of it. He would light a bottle rocket, insert it in the golf shaft, hold out his newly made launcher -- arm extended -- parallel to his chest, and let it rip. It was awesome.
• We might have tried out the golf club launcher on a house of a man who would later become the mayor of Bridgeport. He was none too pleased and called the cops. As my buddy and I hastily retreated to a nearby field and laid in a culvert, my buddy - as spotlights came and went overhead - gave me the greatest piece of criminal law advice I've ever heard: "Shut up and don't move."
• Changing gears . . . 
• I hate ESPN's Sportscenter, but they've been playing a montage of soldiers coming home to the surprise their parents, wife, and kids and . . . it's fantastic. It's overlaid with Daughtry's "I'm Coming Home."
• The Ticket's Jake Kemp had a segment this week of his upcoming 12 day trip to The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland. I'm so jealous. I once heard someone say that disposable income should be spent on travel and not things. I'm so conflicted by that. You want to spend a week in Cancun or, these days, buy three monster flat screen TVs for the house? I guess the answer depends on your age, how much you've traveled,  and whether you've ever had a monster flat screen TV.
• Funny bit this week: Mrs. LL tried to buy a membership online to the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art and ended up buying one for the MoMA in New York. (I would laugh at her, but a Google search, and the MoMA's nondescript website, would have caused me to do the same thing.)
• She managed to get a refund, which will occur within the next 30 days, but, for awhile, I was a member of The MoMA.
• Still remember the person who told me that my posts are "over comma'd".
• Regardless of your position on the issue, here's a great Dallas Morning News piece on the stats about abortion in Texas.
• I'm not sure I've ever heard as many negative reviews as I have about The Lone Ranger. 
• Sports: (1) The Texas Rangers signed Manny Ramirez yesterday to a minor league contract. He's 41 years old. (2) Chris Davis hit another home run, and (3) Dwight Howard talk gives me Tired Head, and he ain't that great. 
• Someone asked yesterday about whatever happened to the PI Dallas lawyer who advertised that he would "bring you flowers." Oh, my. He died earlier this year after falling 1,500 feet while hiking in New Hampshire.
• Also from that obit: "He ran half marathons on the Great Wall of China, up Pikes Peak, and in Luxor, Egypt. He climbed mountains in places such as Nepal, Ecuador, and Tanzania." Once again, I jealous. 
• I tried switching to boxers from boxer briefs about six months ago but just couldn't do it. (I'm only mentioning this because the BagOfNothing guy wrote that he tried the same thing. Weird.)
• What's going on with Steve Eager at Fox 4? They are making him read social media comments on their newscast and he's also posting off-the-cuff opinionated Tweets? He seems like a good guy being bossed around in an unstable media market.
• If you aren't a documentary fan, watch The Wild and Wonderful Whites Of West Virginia and get back to me.
• And the new documentary of How To Make Money Selling Drugs -- a film attacking the War on Drugs -- looks promising.
• Sports Talk Radio: I've already listened to some of The Ticket's all day Rotten Radio extravaganza this morning and it's fantastic. 
• Egypt's Al-Tahrir newspaper takes a shot at the President in English: