Bag of Randomness
Monday, August 11, 2025

I did a deep dive into genealogy research at the end of last week. I just unearthed another family secret. I knew my father had married and divorced a woman in Mineral Wells named Odella, which I always thought was because his mother’s name was Della. However, I wasn’t aware he was first married at the age of 26 to a divorced 26-year-old Kentucky woman named Gertrude. It was after his first stint in the service after WWII in 1949, and he worked as a dry cleaner, something else I had no idea about. I have no clue if they divorced, if she died, or really anything else. But I’ve been earnestly playing detective.

The first family secret I was informed about was revealed to me a few years after my father’s death. Mom, for some reason, felt she needed to let me know that my brother is my half-brother and had a different biological father. That floored me, and at the time, I was trying to decipher if my mother was going crazy or if it was a possible language barrier problem. It turns out everyone, even my adopted younger sister, knew but me. I’ll be honest, at the time, it was hard to process, and I was a bit upset that I didn’t know about this sooner in life. Truth was, I idolized my brother, so to me, it didn’t change a thing. It actually made the love story between my parents even better. To put it bluntly, I assumed my father knocked up my mother and did the honorable thing back then and married her. And now the true story of a retired GI falling in love with a young Vietnamese woman with a bastard child made me appreciate my father even more. He even adopted my brother and loved him as if he were his own. Funny thing, I always felt he favored my brother more than me. One evening when I was visiting my brother, I told him what Mom told me, but I first made sure to preface it by stating that it doesn’t change a thing. Little did I know, it ended up changing everything. I never understood why, but from that point my brother stopped communicating with my mother. I can only assume he felt Mom dishonored Dad by letting me know.

I stumbled upon Netflix’s psychological crime series Mindhunter, which follows FBI agents in the late 1970s and early 1980s as they develop groundbreaking criminal profiling techniques by conducting in-depth interviews with imprisoned serial killers. While the show is fictionalized, it features chilling portrayals of real-life criminals like Edmund Kemper and Charles Manson, with actors delivering great but unsettling performances based on actual prison interviews. The series explores how these conversations with incarcerated killers helped FBI agents understand the psychology behind serial murder and develop methods still used in criminal investigations today. I give it two big thumbs up. Sadly, only two seasons were made, resulting in a total of 19 shows. It ended in 2019, but this summer, there have been rumors of its return as three television movies.

I really like the man who played Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw, and he plays a salty veteran CIA guy. The other leading cast member may best be known for playing flamboyant King George III in Hamilton.

College football will kick off on Saturday, August 30th. And, in a big way, with my two favorite teams to root for are playing against each other. The University of Texas will be playing at The Ohio State University. You’d think such a game would happen at night, but kickoff is set for 11 AM Central. Since that happens to be my 50th birthday, I thought I’d try to put something together because no one would be throwing me a party or arranging anything. So, at trivia night last Tuesday, I told two of my closest friends that since my two favorite teams are opening the college football season on my 50th birthday, I invited them to come over and watch the game with me, telling them it would be like a small 50th birthday party for myself. One friend seemed apprehensive at first until I let him know it was an 11 AM kickoff. The other flatly said he wasn’t interested in the game and was looking forward to watching the LSU game that evening against Clemson.

Immediately, I remembered why I have always been hesitant all my life about taking risks and putting myself out there. It hurts to get your hopes up for something you’d think would be an easy ask, only to get them flushed down the toilet.I felt foolish for thinking that a friend of over 30 years would sacrifice a Saturday afternoon with three weeks notice to be there for a friend trying to celebrate his 50th birthday. I even prefaced the invite by saying my kids aren’t scheduled to be with me that day, and I’m sure their mother would be making plans so they couldn’t see me that day, as she has in the past for similar occasions. One reason I was putting this together was to try not to feel so bad about turning 50 and soften the blow of how, at 40 years old after climbing my first mountain and dancing with my wife literally on top of Texas, I couldn’t envision over the next ten years she would literally leave me and take the kids, I’d suffer through five spinal surguries and suffer from physical and mental health challenges, no longer be a homeowner, have a church stab me in the back, and be unemployed for months. I’ll be honest. I cried a bit during the drive home that night after trivia as I tried to figure out how everything went so wrong and wrestled with whether I deserved all of this. The pain of being let down or failure is greater than any feeling of potential joy, and that’s why I tend not to put myself out there or take chances.

Mystery deepens as California man’s plane keeps getting stolen, taken for a joy ride, repaired and returned: ‘There’s no real leads’

Is Perrier as pure as it claims? The bottled water scandal gripping France

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Monday, August 11, 2025

Bag of Nothing
Friday, August 8, 2025

The 1991 P.M. Dawn hit Set Adrift on Memory Bliss randomly started to play on my 90s and 2000s playlist while I was driving the other day. Great song (Baby you send me, baby you send me…), and I totally forgot Christina Applegate is mentioned in it. Briefly, I wondered how she has been doing since her health has declined dramatically.  Then, the next day, I saw an article that she had been rushed to a hospital in Europe.

Currently has 95% on Rotten Tomatoes & has been called one of the most heartbreaking horror films of 2025. Good Boy releases in theaters on October 3, 2025.

Count me out – A horror movie shot from the perspective of a dog who sees its owner haunted by supernatural entities. Even though it’s obviously fiction, I’m just too much of a sympathetic lover of canines. But I give the director a lot of credit for using a real dog.

There’s this trend I’ve been seeing on profile pictures of women on dating apps that has been a turnoff for me. Now I know it’s called Love Island Face. Here’s a good description of it:

“Usually, the lips are full (often as a result of hyaluronic acid fillers), noses tend to be narrow, foreheads are virtually motionless, and cheeks are plumped and sculpted.”

So Why Do People Over 35 Find This Unsettling?

From Dr. Sturm’s POV, it’s visual and visceral: “People over 35 don’t like the look that you can tell had work done. We see the beauty of a natural youthful face. You can’t go back to being 20 with flawless skin, but if you spend that time of your life with too many injectables, it’s like lost time to us.” She also warns that the look doesn’t age well. “They already look older, and we’ll continue to see filler migration and filler blindness”—a phenomenon where people don’t notice their own filler anymore and keep adding more.

Lawmakers want to end HR ghosting during the interview process—here’s how

Geoff Duncan, who served as Lieutenant Governor of Georgia from 2019 to 2023 as a Republican and stood up to President Trump to discredit his state’s election results, announced that he’s officially swapping sides to join the Democrats.

Duncan explained in an op-ed that being a Democrat will put him in the “best possible position each day to love my neighbor.” In the op-ed, published Tuesday in The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Duncan explained that the quest to love his neighbor guided him in office and that GOP policies on healthcare, immigration, and gun reform have strayed from that moral imperative.

Read it at The Hill

The White House Rose Garden has had a massive revamp. President Trump said it was mainly due to bad drainage and chairs getting stuck after their legs poked into the grass.

Across the street, the White House Historical Association recently unveiled its life-size replica of President Trump’s Oval Office from his first term. I got a kick out of the detail that went into it:

It is strikingly similar to how Mr. Trump had the room set up back then, with many of the objects 3-D printed to mimic the real thing. The books on each shelf are the same and sit in the same position. The portraits, though printed instead of painted, appear identical. So does the Reagan-era beige rug and Frederic Remington’s “Bronco Buster” statuette

“We used a lot of the same vendors that do work at the White House,” Mr. Boorady said, citing the people who installed the floors and upholstered the furniture. (Mr. Trump’s sofas were first used by President George W. Bush.) “In fact, when they came, they noted, ‘Hey, you’re off a half-inch here, a quarter-inch off here.’”

Of course, not everything can be exactly the same. The Resolute Desk has only one phone instead of two, because visitors kept tangling the lines. Unlike the real Oval Office, there is no bust of Abraham Lincoln, as it would block the exhibit’s accessible entrance.

Of course, Trump has recently updated the Oval Office with a lot of gold.

Back in the days, presidents who were from wealth tried to be understated. Some did it to relate to the common everyday voter, but for others, it was just who they were.

Oh wow dusty up in here now….Florida Panther Mackie Samoskevish grew up in Sandy Hook, CT, brought the Stanley Cup to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Memorial for his day with the cup.

“I thought we’d just bring it back in honor of them”

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— WuTangIsForTheChildren (@wutangforchildren.bsky.social) August 4, 2025 at 2:30 PM

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Friday, August 8, 2025

Bag of Nothing
Monday August 4, 2025

While watching something on PlutoTV, I saw my first Halloween commercial of the year. It was from HomeGoods.

If you know me well, then it’s no surprise I watched the rebooted The Naked Gun this weekend. Thankfully, I watched it with a close friend. In high school and college, we watched the original on VHS several hundred times. I no longer go into these movies with the expectation of whether it’s going to be better or worse than the original. Now, I just like to be entertained and see what they can do with the source material and make it their own. Overall, I’d say it was pretty solid. I was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t raunchy at all.

It’s official, I’m old.

I had a job interview scheduled last Monday that I was really looking forward to, especially since it dealt with my background and the emerging AI field. It was the one in which I had to take a two-and-a-half-hour assessment that I mentioned before. Wearing a nice dress shirt and sport coat, I log into the Microsoft Teams meeting a few minutes early. Surprised the meeting hadn’t started after a few minutes past the scheduled time, I checked my email, where I found this in my Inbox:

OK, no big deal, stuff happens. I replied, saying sure, and I was available the rest of the afternoon or would be happy to reschedule for the next day or a later time in the week. Not hearing back from her on Monday or Tuesday, I followed up with another message to touch base on Wednesday. The rest of the week goes by without me hearing a word. However, on Sunday, I received a message thanking me for taking the time to interview with them, and while I was talented, they decided to go with another applicant.

I struggled to get excited about the other interview I had scheduled last week with a different company because it was with an AI avatar. At first, it asked me some basic questions, and I’d reply as if I were talking to a computerized customer service phone tree. It asked if I had any questions, so I tested the system by asking some non-generic questions and was slightly impressed at the detailed, customized answer. As it started to ask me more challenging and complex questions, I changed my demeanor and spoke to it as if it were a real human. After each question, it would then audibly summarize my answer and then move on to the next question. It was hard to get a feel for how I did overall. I am curious how a hiring manager will get the results of my answers. Will he just listen to an audio recording of what I said, receive a summary created by the AI interviewing tool, or something else?

Someone told me the State of Texas is doing a lot of hiring, so I’m going to explore that.

A USA Today exposé on the Dallas Stars – ‘They control everything’: How the Dallas Stars monopolized Texas youth hockey

Unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, a handful of NHL teams are intimately involved in running the youth levels of their sports in their regions – perhaps none more than the Stars. In Dallas, the Stars spent decades turning what was once seen as a community good into a lucrative arm of their for-profit enterprise.

This whole Sydney Sweeney “controversy” is stupid. Very, very, stupid. And, I have a feeling Micah Parsons isn’t going anywhere. But if he does, I’m sure he’d prefer to go to Washington to play for his old coach, but I’d like to see him in Buffalo.

Texas lawmakers unveiled a proposed redistricting map this week. The map shifts several districts that are currently held by Democrats.

Thirteen-year-old BoyGeeding wanted to cook dinner for us this weekend. He took it seriously, even making his own alfredo sauce instead of opting for a premade version in a jar.

Good point.

I think Willow Bend is the newest mall in the area, opening 24 years ago yesterday. It’s looking pretty barren.

I visited the mall today 8.3.25 and it is not looking too well. There were a lot of vacant spaces. The food court is completely devoid. Probably 75% of level 2 was vacant.
byu/MrTacocaT12345 inDallas

Here’s a summary of the drama that’s going on in The Ticket’s subreddit.

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Monday August 4, 2025

Bag of Nothing
Friday August 1, 2025

A good friend asked if I could pick him up from a place at six in the morning in Dallas, which was just a 20-minute drive down I-35 for me. I thought nothing of it, but I forgot how aggressive morning commuters can be. Traffic wasn’t congested or anything, but it was as if everyone was driving as if they were 10 minutes late getting to wherever they were going, and all their blinkers had become inoperable.

That’s one way to create a lasting legacy. Unlike flagpoles, a 90,000 square feet $200 million ballroom can’t be uprooted. Naturally, it will forever be referred to as the Trump Ballroom.

Trump is building a new $200 million ballroom at the White House

Honestly, I support this and think it makes sense. This sort of thing is Trump’s bread and butter. Not to mention, he’s right, always having to host an event inside a tent is a bit unbefitting for a president to host large-scale events. The East Wing currently accommodates 200 seated people; this ballroom will have a seated capacity of 650 people.

And the Secret Service will love the idea, as it will make security much easier as opposed to hosting an event away from the White House. What shocks me is that President Trump didn’t make the announcement himself; it’s his sort of thing to be in such a spotlight. And it appears they are going about it the right way, with donors fitting the bill instead of taxpayers.

In a press release, the White House said Trump has held several meetings with members of the White House staff, the National Park Service, the White House Military Office, and the United States Secret Service to discuss design features and planning.

“The President and the Trump White House are “fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserve the special history of the white House, while building a beautiful ballroom that can be enjoyed by future administrations and generations of Americans to come,” White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said.

Construction starts soon, this September. I haven’t found anything about a planned completion date, but surely it will be completed before the president’s term. But then again, who knows when he’s leaving office? It is interesting to imagine the stress and pressure the builder will have to come in on budget and on time.

This headline reads like Godzilla’s next big brawl is about to break out.

Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

Workers at a site in South Carolina that once made key parts for nuclear bombs in the United States have found a radioactive wasp nest but officials said there is no danger to anyone.

Employees who routinely check radiation levels at the Savannah River Site near Aiken found a wasp nest on July 3 on a post near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, according to a report from the US Department of Energy.

The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, officials said.

The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste. No wasps were found, officials said.

I’m not sure how it came about, but during crosstalk with the Musers yesterday, they wondered when an actor’s voice is dubbed in another language, if it’s always the same actor. Several years ago, on a flight, I watched a wonderful documentary about the 24 voice actors who dubbed George Clooney’s movies in their respective languages, Being George Clooney. Here’s the trailer.

Toy Story 2 almost never happened and was saved after being deleted twice.

Pixar was putting the finishing touches on what would become one of its most beloved films. A slip-up deleted the entire movie from the studio’s servers. To make it worse, the backup system had quietly failed. One employee, working from home while caring for her newborn, happened to have an offline backup on her personal computer, saving the project from total annihilation.

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Friday August 1, 2025