Your Bag of Nothing for Tuesday, April 22, 2025

  • While no one wants to be involved in a plane crash, I know we all want an opportunity to go down the slide.

  • BoyGeeding and I have started watching the Amazon series Invincible together. I was delightfully surprised to see that the main character is half-Asian, with an Asian mother and a white father.

    I remember being a young kid watching television and thinking I must have been adopted because no shows had a mixed-race family like mine. In my kid logic, it kind of made sense. I was a loyal viewer of Different Strokes, where the boys were adopted by a white man. So in my little mind, seeing a family like mine just didn’t seem possible unless someone was adopted. Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, young Keith?

    Of course, it made no real sense. I was just an ignorant kid trying to fit myself into the stories I saw. It’s funny looking back now. Too bad I didn’t realize back then that Desi Arnaz wasn’t white either.

    Speaking of Desi Arnaz, he died shortly before Lucille Ball was honored at the Kennedy Center in 1986. Unknown to her, Desi had written a final note that was read aloud during the ceremony after his passing. Sadly, I bet too many today don’t understand the significance of that moment.

    “I Love Lucy was never just a title.”

    That simple line hit her hard. It hits differently knowing Desi died just days before. That tribute became both a love letter and a goodbye. Wild how something written for a formal event ends up feeling so personal.

    The way Robert Stack, with that incredible voice, reads it — calm, reverent, and with so much understated emotion — and Lucy trying to hold it together in the audience, it’s one of those rare TV moments where everything feels honest and real.

    Even though they had divorced back in 1960, there was still a deep, complicated love and respect between them. In private, Lucy reportedly said that Desi’s words “meant the world” to her and that they gave her a sense of closure she hadn’t realized she needed. She also said something to the effect of “it was like Desi was there with me one last time.”

    Turns out TV was teaching me more about life than I realized, even if young Keith was a little slow on the uptake. Guess it only took 40 years, a cartoon, and a Cuban bandleader to finally make it click. Representation matters, even if it took me half a lifetime to notice.

  • No other celebrity is having a better year than Walter Goggins.
  • I watched the first few seasons of Mythic Quest and enjoyed it. After season four aired, Apple decided to abruptly cancel the series. But it’s interesting how Apple allowed the show to edit its season finale to make it a series finale, and fans are no longer able to watch the original ending. For someone like me who takes the canon of television and movies seriously, this raises a lot of questions.
  • It wouldn’t surprise you to know that, as a presidential history nerd, I follow presidential library Twitter accounts. One reason is that they will sometimes post interesting footage of them out of the public eye, acting natural, as in this case with Nixon and Clinton. I’m so used to these men acting formal in front of the camera, it takes a moment or two for me to adjust to just seeing two men talk. Pat Nixon died three months later. In one book I read, Nixon held a grievance against Clinton for not calling on the day of her passing.

  • Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, also known as Friendly Fire Barbie, needs a lesson in optics. But then again, she’s the one who doubled down on shooting a dog that wasn’t up to her standards. Her own party has roasted her for her ‘ICE Barbie’ stunts, calling her out for ‘cosplaying’ as an ICE agent. She wore full makeup and her hair blown out when she toured a prison in El Salvador, sporting a $50,000 gold Rolex. On Easter, while at a burger spot, a thief nabbed her purse, which contained Noem’s driver’s license and passport, DHS access badge, checks, medicine, makeup, and roughly $3,000 in cash.
  • In a guest essay for the NY Times, Larry David skewers Bill Maher for dining with President Trump at the White House.
    “Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, …”
    “…it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
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Your Bag of Nothing for Monday, April 21, 2025

  • A few quick thoughts about A Few Good Men.


    The film is directed by Rob Reiner. Do you remember Aunt Ginny?


    Kaffe: “I was expecting someone older.”
    Aunt Ginny: “Me too..”


    That’s his daughter-in-law, Maud Winchester. She is married to his son, Lucas.



    J.A. Preston, the judge in the film, does an exceptional job in the role, and I think everyone who has watched the film would totally agree without hesitation. He’s still alive at 92, and his last film credit was in 2006.





    Colonel Jessup sure showed his true colors, when, during his diatribe, he calls out Lt. Weinberg for no good reason.


    Ah heck, here’s the full clip.
  • I had The Godfather Part II on in the background on Saturday.


    Here’s an idea: how about a new TV series of Michael Coleone’s time in the Marine Corps?

  • I’m serious when I say this. I don’t think there’s been a more hurtful thing a woman has said or could ever say to a man in all of cinema than when Kay Coleone told Michael she didn’t have a miscarriage but had an abortion. My jaw literally dropped the first time I saw that scene.


  • My kids and I have this inside joke about them eating fresh pretzels and sipping on ICEEs at my funeral. So, when I came across this clip from The Family Guy, I just had to send it to them.
  • Last week, on Last Week with Jon Oliver, the host shared something I didn’t know about Eerie, Pennsylvania:





    Intrigued. I had to look up more about that story.



    You know what’s a funny coincidence? The president and CEO of VisitErie, Erie County’s tourism promotion agency, is named John Oliver, just like the television host. Their first name is just spelled differently. And of course, VisitErie is doing what it can to capitalize on the attention.

    From (Erie’s) John Oliver to (TV’s) John Oliver: Learn more about Erie, Pennsylvania – VisitErie CEO details the city’s attractions for his television namesake and ‘Last Week Tonight’ host who only knows that ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne’s body was boiled in Erie.
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Your Bag of Nothing for Friday, April 18, 2025

  • Virginia flag banned in Texas district over exposed breast
  • Meet the Great Texas Trucker With 4 Million Miles of Safe Driving Under His Belt Buckle – Homero Flores, a career trucker for the Texas-based HEB grocery store, has driven enough miles to circle the earth more than 160 times.
  • Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet – Further studies are needed to determine whether K2-18b, which orbits a star 120 light-years away, is inhabited, or even habitable.
    • A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.

      Have you ever wondered how astronomers learn what’s in a faraway planet’s atmosphere? Here’s your one-sentence answer: Gases appear as different colors through the various colors of light in a prism; that is, each gas in a planet’s atmosphere blocks specific colors of starlight. Here’s your more detailed explanation that I learned from watching a couple of episodes of the rebooted Cosmos.
      Each gas absorbs very specific wavelengths of light, like taking tiny, precise “bites” out of the spectrum.

      For example, if you pass sunlight through a prism, you see all the colors of the rainbow smoothly changing from red to violet. But if that same light passes through a gas first, the gas will absorb very specific wavelengths, causing thin dark lines to appear in certain spots of the rainbow spectrum.

      These absorption lines are like fingerprints – hydrogen absorbs different specific wavelengths than oxygen, which absorbs different wavelengths than carbon dioxide, and so on. Each gas has its own unique pattern of these dark lines.

      So when astronomers look at starlight that has passed through a planet’s atmosphere, they don’t just see “the color blue” and think “that must be water.” Instead, they see specific patterns of these thin dark lines in the spectrum and can match these patterns to known gases.

      She briefly explains it here and has some other fun info on the subject to share.

  • White House Says It Has Tech That Can ‘Manipulate Time and Space’I suppose science has advanced rapidly since Trump returned to office. I found this on the White House website.
  • How long has McDonald’s sold steak with breakfast meals and sandwiches? This was news to me. I usually keep up with this sort of stuff. I tried asking the drive-thru employee how long they had been selling them, but she just shot me a confused look and tapped a fellow employee, as she didn’t speak English. After a chain of four, all for the same reason, I just smiled, waved goodbye, and drove off. How does it taste? Not bad, all jokes aside, about what you’d expect.Of course, I had to conduct a little research, and here’s what I found.

  • This Texas charter school superintendent makes $870,000. He leads a district with 1,000 students. –

    On paper, Salvador Cavazos earns less than $300,000 to run Valere Public Schools, a small Texas charter network. But taxpayers likely aren’t aware that his total pay makes him one of the country’s highest-earning superintendents.

  • Chinese diplomat trolls White House press secretary over fashion choice while tensions rise over tariffs

     

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Your Bag of Nothing for Friday, April 18, 2025

Your Bag of Nothing for Thursday, April 17, 2025

  • I excelled at some productive procrastination yesterday morning. Not sure what productive procrastination is? That’s when you really want to start on a task, but before doing so, you start to do a lot of other or little tasks you normally wouldn’t do.
  • The most obedient and pleasing dog in the history of ever.

  • I received mail from TxDOT stating that it’s time to renew my driver’s license, and I can do so online. I thought it was interesting that the video embedded on this government website was flagged as age-restricted and can only be viewed on YouTube. It’s just an innocent six-second spot about a forgetful father going camping. I reached out to them via Twitter, but they have yet to respond or fix it.
  • ‘I’m in ruins,’ teary Mike Lindell tells judge in Smartmatic sanctions hearing
  • I use txtify.it all the time. It converts web articles to nice, easy-to-read plain text. Not to mention, it will bypass a lot of paywalls.

  • China is taking the trade war to a new battleground: America’s TikTok feeds.

    Chinese suppliers have been flooding American social media this week, urging users to outflank President Donald Trump’s 145% tariffs on Beijing by buying directly from their factories.

  • Here’s a pretty cool and easy-to-understand image that compares the flights of Blue Origin and the SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets that return to Earth.
  • A minor league team scored 3 runs on a bases-loaded walk … and it was all somehow completely legal

  • Dallas’ own St. Vincent (Annie Clark to some of us) had a killer performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. Love that girl.
  • They took the bait.A group of Mariners fans wore shirts that spelled out GO MARINERS and got put on the Jumbotron. Then they turned around to reveal the backs of their shirts that spelled out SELL THE TEAM.
  • I’m not a fan of promposals to begin with. I understand this dude’s masked heartbreak, but he shouldn’t have added the “marry/jk” part.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Your Bag of Nothing for Thursday, April 17, 2025