Random Thursday Morning Thoughts

• The Denton County elections for county commissioner seem more exciting than ours. The full flyer, unfortunately, isn't on his website. 
  
• Dear TxDOT responsible for the red light on 380 in Bridgeport at FM 1658 (the road that leads to the spillway/dam): Those lights are seriously screwed up. If you are headed eastbound on the heavily traveled 380, it cycles for 60 seconds on red and only 15 seconds on green. Fix this, Rich!
  
• We've got some animal crime just north of us. And shooting a longhorn is some serious sorriness. 
  
• I'm not sure what this was about yesterday but someone got a few seconds of footage. Edit: It's in the Update.
  
  
• This is one weird paragraph in Tulsi Gabbard's silly defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton.  [Edit: Deleted. I was duped.]
• Adam Schiff started Trump's Impeachment Trial with this quote from Alexander Hamilton. It fits so perfectly that I was worried that Hamilton didn't say it. He did. 
  
• I'm really proud of the two Runaway Bay City Council persons who voted against the Second Amendment Proclamation.  I suspect, but don't know, that they did so on the basis of, "Why exactly are we wasting our time on this meaningless gesture? Don't we have roads to fix?"
• Randomly wondering why NFL players agree to the owners' demand for a "salary cap." The greatest capitalists in America just somehow unanimously agree that the free market is bad in this one aspect of their lives?
• Very random ending to a Division 3 basketball game. Watch it. He got the shot off, right? But can the ref believe that it is not physically possible to get a shot of in 0.2 so the clock, her ruled, must have had a delayed start? There is no replay in Division 3, but I watched this replay way too much.
  
• I never look at a shot clock without having the weird thought of "how can time ever really run out?" Stay with me here. Years ago basketball went to a tenth of a second clock, right? Why? Because without it, and we saw the clock move from 1 to 0 seconds, it actually had to go through 0.9. 0.8, 0.7 etc before it hits 0.0. The buzzer shouldn't sound, we all agreed, when we see 0. It should sound one full second after we see 0. So the rule changed so we could "see" that hidden tenth of a second. But, and this gets to my point, why not go to a hundred of a second clock because once the clock hits 0.0 don't we have to move through the time of 0.09, 0.08, 0.07 etc. to get to 0.00 when time really runs out? But wait. Isn't there still time remaining at 0.00 that we can't see because of the hidden next decimal? Shouldn't we also see the the thousands of a second digit?  When the clock hits 0.00 shouldn't we have to go through 0.009, 0.008, 0.007, etc before we get to 0.000? And this brings us to this: How can it ever end? How about revealing the next decimal place. And the next. There's always time left on the next hidden decimal, right? So, taken to the extreme, how can time ever really run out in a game? (Side note: I actually wrote about this over a decade ago and got scorched in the comments. Then one brilliant guy or gal told me I wasn't a fool at all -- I had actually come up with "Zeno's Paradox" on my own.)
• The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on a Montana state constitutional amendment that bars taxpayer money from being used on private religious schools. (It is one of 38 states to have a "no aid" provision.) Montana says the law simply enforces the Establishment Clause -- government money should not be used to support religion. Makes sense. And those fighting the provision have another problem: The Montana law prevents taxpayer money from going to any private school, religious or not, so everyone is being treated the same. Despite all that, the Trump Court is somehow expected to rule the Montana law unconstitutional. 
  
• I'm an expert on the Supreme Court because I was just there. Here's a pic from an angle you never see: There's actually a double row of columns in the front of the building. 
  
• It's a good time to point out that far right wingers always want the Texas legislature to pass a "school vouchers" provision which is just the opposite. That's code for "Let's funnel taxpayer money to Christian private schools."
• Trump had 132 tweets or retweets yesterday. That's a new record.