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.

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Your Bag of Nothing for Wednesday, April 16, 2025

  • “Protect your focus.” I heard that on a podcast recently, and it’s been something I’ve chewed on ever since. Here are a few of the first images you’ll find when you do a Google image search on that phrase.
  • FanExpo Dallas will be at the end of May and looks like something I might attend.
    • It will host a 40th anniversary celebration of Back to the Future featuring appearances by stars Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, and Tom Wilson.They’ll be joined by both actresses who portrayed the role of Jennifer Parker: Claudia Wells, who appeared in the original 1985 film, and Elisabeth Shue, who appeared in the two sequels from 1989 and 1990. Other stars appearing include Huey Lewis, James Tolkan (who played Principal Strickland), Donald Fullilove (Goldie Wilson), Harry Waters Jr. (Marvin Berry), and more.
    • They even have something for you White Lotus fans:  The expo will also feature appearances by Parker Posey (Best in Show, Lost in Space) and Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight, Justified, Fallout), fresh off their roles in season 3 of buzzy HBO series White Lotus.
    • Heck, I just might go to see some childhood crushes. Here’s an article if you’re interested.
  • Another AI tool I’ve been playing around with is Claude. To my surprise, yesterday they announced it now integrates with Google Workspace, allowing it to search and reference your emails in Gmail, scheduled events in Google Calendar, and documents in Google Docs. Some former Google dudes founded the company, and with a partnership like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google buys them within the next two years.
  • There’s a bug on the blog that’s been hard to fix, and it’s why my formatting looks funky from time to time. For some reason, when I try to leave a blank line either by a hard or soft return, WordPress doesn’t recognize it when I publish it, so all of a sudden you see a sentence attached to the period of what I intended to be the last sentence of the paragraph. It also happens when I try to add a blank line after an inserted image. Here’s an example from a few weeks ago. Notice the words “interesting” and “Ive” on each side of the image. That wasn’t done on purpose. A blank line appeared above and below it, and the placement of the words looked correct when I scheduled to publish the post. It even happens when I add a line break [<br>]. Grrr.
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Your Bag of Nothing for Tuesday, April 15, 2025

 

  • Blue Origin crew safely back on Earth after all-female space flight
    • It’s ridiculous to consider any of these passengers astronauts.​ A person who is merely a passenger on a spaceflight—without performing any operational duties or contributing to mission safety—is not considered an astronaut. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), such individuals are designated as “spaceflight participants” rather than astronauts.
    • In 2021, the FAA updated its criteria for awarding commercial astronaut wings. To qualify, a person must not only travel above 50 miles (80 km) but also demonstrate activities during flight that are essential to public safety or contribute to human spaceflight safety. This change excluded individuals like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who did not meet these criteria during their suborbital flights.
    • But I will give Jeff Bezos this, he’s done a fine job marketing this company. The plethora of free coverage by sending morning television show hosts like Michael Strahan and Gayle King, and celebrities like William Shatner and Katy Perry first thing in the morning for the world to talk about is a genius move.  So, how does their flight compare to the flights of the first two men in space? Well, here ya go.
      Feature Vostok 1 (1961) Mercury-Redstone 3 (1961) Blue Origin NS-31 (2025)
      Date April 12, 1961 May 5, 1961 April 14, 2025
      Crew Yuri Gagarin Alan Shepard Six Women
      Flight Duration 108 minutes 15 minutes, 28 seconds Approximately 11 minutes
      Maximum Altitude 203 miles (327 km) 116.5 miles (187.5 km) Over 65 miles (105 km)
      Maximum Speed 17,000 mph (27,400 km/h) 5,180 mph (8,340 km/h) Over 2,200 mph (3,540 km/h)

      A couple of the women kissed the ground when they exited the capsule. That reminded me of when Pope John Paul II used to do that. I thought he did it all the time, but a little research tells me he was known to kiss the soil on his first visit to a new country as a gesture of respect for the land and the people. I do have memories of when he was old and feeble, and his hosts would bring the ground (soil) up to him. I wonder if any other popes do this in some form.

  • A lad who has spent ‘over 158 days’ working out one of his trap muscles is also attempting to do the same with his legThe 19-year-old, known as ‘The Crooked Man’ (@thecrookedman10) on socials, is going seriously viral for having one heck of a trap, or trapezius. It’s the large muscle group in the upper back and neck.

  • Johnny Depp has gone grey for a role and looks like the Most Interesting Man in the World.
  • These are the most mispronounced words in the United States in 2025, study says
    • In 2025, several words and names are proving to be challenging for people to pronounce correctly. The top mispronounced words, according to a study by Mondly, include Chappel Roan, SZA, Croissant, Demure, and Oregon.

  • Honestly, I always thought they were singing “Snoopy.”

  • I’m a big Buster Keaton fan.

  • I guess it’s time to support the Dallas Wings as the Mavs will be hard to support as a franchise, especially with their ownership.
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Your Bag of Nothing for Monday, April 14, 2025

  • I love how much technology has advanced and make a strong effort to adopt it in my everyday life. It’s fun living in and embracing the future. But I felt uncomfortable reading comments on a recent Reddit post.


  • From the Wall Street Journal – How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery – A global team of gambling whizzes hatched a scheme to snag the jackpot; millions of tickets in 72 hours

  • I caught the preview for next week’s 60 Minutes segment on the monarch butterfly migration to the mountains of Mexico. What stopped me in my tracks, and I honestly didn’t know this was possible, was hearing the sound of butterfly wings. That’s right. There are so many monarchs gathered in one place, their wings actually make a sound. Here’s the link if you’re interested.

  • DHS told her to leave the country. She’s a citizen — and an immigration attorneyWhen Massachusetts resident Nicole Micheroni received an email on Friday from the federal government telling her to leave the country, she was baffled.“At first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine,” said Micheroni. “So it said my parole status had been terminated and I should leave the country within seven days.”

    But the 40-year-old is a U.S. citizen, born in Newton and raised in Sharon.

    “Probably, hopefully, sent to me in error,” she said. “But it’s a little concerning these are going out to U.S. citizens.”

  • I finally watched Taxi Driver over the weekend. It’s one of those movies I’ve heard about for years but never got around to. Going in, all I really knew was the basics: a Scorsese and De Niro collaboration, a young Jodie Foster, the John Hinckley connection, and of course, “You talking to me?”

    When it ended, I found myself struggling to understand why it’s considered one of the greatest films of all time. So, I did what I often do after watching a so-called classic—I dug into the cultural context of the era and read reviews from when it was released.

    Maybe I’m a cultural buffoon, but I don’t think I should have to do homework to appreciate a film. When I watched The Godfather for the first time in my mid-twenties, I could feel its greatness while it unfolded. Taxi Driver didn’t land the same way for me.

    One thing that got my attention was his mohawk, which was something I wanted to have as a kid. Per Wikipedia, this is how it made it into the film:

    That made me think of old footage of the 101st Airborne preparing for D-Day. I believe they were the Filthy Thirteen. I always thought that would be an interesting thing to do, thinking you were participating in a suicide mission. I’m not sure if they ever got an opportunity to remove their helmets in front of any German troops or POWs, but there’s no telling what went through German soldiers’ minds if they saw this.

    Here’s a bit more of a backstory of what happened to some of them. It’s cool to see today’s soldiers honor them.

  • It’s amazing how long The Simpsons have aired, but I’ve always wondered what they would do if one of the leading voice actors died. I’m curious if any of them have anything unique in their contracts with the considerable progression of AI. I believe the late James Earl Jones had a similar agreement with Disney and his voice for Darth Vader. Anywho, this article led to all that thinking:Parks and Rec actor to take over voicing The Simpsons’ Jimbo Jones (exclusive) –
    Mo Collins will take over the character from Pamela Hayden, who retired from the show last year.
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