Random Monday Morning Thoughts

• Frank Gifford died over the weekend. He was part of a great post (if I do say so myself) in March on this site entitled "The Death Of A Man This Morning Who Troubled Me Because Of A Photo". 
• I also randomly posted a picture of Kathy Lee Gifford last week. The blog curse continues. 
• Along my jogging path (which I'm walking these days due to the heat), I go across a bridge which will always have a bunch of turtles underneath it. On Sunday, at the crack of dawn, I walked across it and looked down as I always do but this time I saw two huge snakes half submerged. They appeared to be cuddling. I stopped and stared. One of them sensed me after about thirty seconds and slithered off into the creek. 
• A guy is missing after a boating accident on Eagle Mountain Lake. A game warden said the boat broke apart after hitting a wake.  That makes no sense. 
• I finally went back to movie watching because of the heat and finished Gone Girl. Verdict: I thought it was really, really good. Yeah, it can be a little campy but the concept was absolutely believable. And there were two or three lines in it that made me stop down. Huge thumbs up.
• I also watched Birdman.  I need to watch it again (and again) but right now I think it is absolutely a work of art. It may very well end up as one of my all time favorite films. 
• Want to go down a worm hole? Search Google images for "screen stills" and then insert your favorite movie. 
• The Daily Beast has begun a series of podcasts on unethical prosecutors. "Suppressing evidence, coddling informants, even outright lying are some of the instances of prosecutorial misconduct that sent away nearly half the 1,621 people convicted for crimes they didn’t commit since 1989, according to the University of Michigan Law School’s National Registry of Exonerations. These are only the cases we know about, and they are surely only a fraction of the wrongly convicted. Even so, the figure is stunning—especially when you consider that 115 of them were people condemned to die. The punishment for bad prosecutorial misconduct is virtually nil."
• Wheels off news reporting involving the Dallas Morning News: A pilot was killed yesterday after his plane crashed in California. It was supposed to carry a banner over Cowboys training camp to taunt them -- and was funded by Philadelphia fans. There was even a photo.  The plane crash was true. Everything else was not. Deadspin reviews this mess.
• Trump 2016 is still alive. 
• The Paradise High School "drive by" shooting seems to have a lot of unanswered questions. And "drive by" might be a little bit of a sensational term in this case. 
• A friend of mine told me she had heard the first part of Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, on Fresh Air and thought I'd like his reflections on Odessa Permian. I found the podcast.  I don't think she got to the part where he unapologetically talks about his leather fetish and cross-dressing. That guy is intense. He doesn't suffer fools and seems to think everyone is a fool. 
• Bridgeport's Colin Jones continues to play in the NFL, and the Charlotte Observer profiled him. "A white player in the defensive backfield has become a rarity in the NFL . . . . "
• An Arlington officer who was about to end his field training shot and killed an unarmed black teenager last week. The FBI has been "asked" to help with the investigation. That's weird. Normally a police agency will call in the Texas Rangers.