BagOfNothing.com

• Every April 15, MLB players wear the number 42 to honor Jackie Robinson’s debut to Major League Baseball. We all know that Commissioner Bud Selig retired the number from all of baseball in 1997, but I forgot Ken Griffey Jr.’s role in starting the tradition.
  • Griffey was the first player to come up with the idea of wearing No. 42 on April 15. Interestingly, he implemented it twice.To trace the first time he broached the idea, we have to go all the way back to April 15, 1997, the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s Major League debut, and the day Selig retired his number. Griffey, who was playing for the Mariners at the time, asked that his uniform number be flip-flopped, switching from No. 24 to 42.Fast forward 10 years, and Griffey again wanted to wear No. 42 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Robinson’s debut. But this time, since the number was retired, he had to ask permission.So he called Selig at home.“I said, ‘Would it be possible if I wore 42 on Jackie Robinson Day?'” Griffey recalled during a recent interview with Harold Reynolds on MLB Network. “We had a 10-minute conversation. [Selig] said, ‘Is it OK if I call Rachel [Robinson, Jackie’s wife] and ask if it’s OK?'”

    Selig called Griffey back the next day and granted the request, but added he would like to extend the offer to wear No. 42 to anyone who wanted to.

    “I said, ‘The more, the merrier,'” Griffey said.

• Rachel Robinson is still alive. She will turn 100 on July 19 unless she pulls a Betty White.
• I watched an episode of America in Color on the Smithsonian Channel. Jackie Kennedy’s first public appearance since her miscarriage was the infamous Dallas trip. I also noticed JFK flew from the White House on a helicopter that had “ARMY” on the side. That got me wondering when did the Marines take over for the Army, because we’re all familiar seeing Marine One transport the president. Well, according to Wikipedia, the Army and Marines shared that responsibility until 1976.
• An under-reported story is happening near New Orleans. Unidentified snipers are shooting motorists on I10 since 2020. For comparison sake, the DC sniper happened during 22 days in October of 2002 with ten people killed and three critically wounded.

  • On Valentine’s Day, The New Orleans Police Department found a man shot multiple times in a vehicle on the Pontchartrain Expressway near the I-10 Slidell exit. Wednesday, Feb. 2, around 11 p.m., an unidentified sniper shot 24-year-old Christian Honore as he drove westbound on Interstate 10, causing him to crash his vehicle near Louisa Street.

    WDSU, Channel 6 in New Orleans, said after the Valentine’s Day shooting, officers told a reporter they had responded to dozens of interstate shootings so far in 2022.

    Shootings which Police Superintendent Shaun D. Ferguson initially called unrelated gang-on-gang and road-rage activity today count police officers, honeymoon couples and school children among the victims.

    In 2020, New Orleans saw an average of two interstate shootings per month, and on January 12, a news release from the New Orleans Police Department detailed more than 30 interstate shootings in the Crescent City in 2021.

    Six days later, they added four more victims to their list.

• I started doing my taxes yesterday, another big reminder that my marriage was a failure. Unfortunately, I can’t claim either child as a dependant, which I think is ridiculous considering I have to pay child support.
• My daughter told me it really bothered her when her mother cut me out of one of the family pictures and displayed the photo. I just told her everybody has their way of dealing with certain things.
• Some folks probably don’t understand why I’m opening up so much. I ran across this Maya Angelou quote yesterday which might shed a little light, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
• Ukrainian couple fighting against Russian invasion marry on the front line
  

the best interruption of a live shot I’ve ever had on @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/nGy4JQJuSU

— Ellison Barber (@ellisonbarber) March 6, 2022

• I had a great time attending DaughterGeeding’s softball games on Friday. Because of schedule conflicts with BoyGeeding’s soccer game, I couldn’t attend her Saturday games. Of the three games she had on Friday, she got to play in the first one. She had one at bat and popped flied. The coach put her in right field and she came very closing to fielding a ball hit towards her. Of the two games her team played on Saturday, she played in one of them and fouled out at her only at bat. Hey, she’s a sixth grader playing against seniors in high school, she doing just fine. BoyGeeding did well in his game despite his team getting creamed.
• I worked on becoming less introverted and more social and struck up some pleasant conversations with other parents of our and our opponents’ teams. I also have to thank my best friend for allowing me to borrow his car so I could travel to her game, drive back to pick up BoyGeeding at dismissal, and then back out to east Dallas.
• There are so many things I hate about divorce. I never imagined what it would be like to sit apart and not socialize with the mother of my children at one of their sporting events, but this is now the norm and how she prefers it. I always thought we would sit and cheer our children on together. It sucks our daughter has to look in two different areas to find her mother and father. During was one interval between games, I sat in the shade on the ground next to a building and watched our children play on the adjacent playground. My ex sat next to me for about twenty minutes, but it scared me to say a single thing to her. She often takes things the wrong way, not to mention she has an open lawsuit against me to change the divorce decree to withhold me from calling the kids, except for a half-hour call twice a week. Not to mention, the last time we spoke, I asked if we could make a commitment to just be nicer to each other and she refused to answer, so it’s hard to know where things stand with her or how she will take things. I hate it. But less is more.
• I get the impression from my ex that she doesn’t want to coordinate anything together, even if our kids have a conflict in schedules and neither of us can attend both events at the same time. I’d rather work with her so our children can have the benefit of riding with one of their own parents and at least one parent can be in attendance at each child’s game. She often won’t return messages and when I consolidated the busy weekend schedule and reached out to her earlier in the week, all I got was a two word response that left me unsure if she was going to attend any event or willing to help. It was awkward, sad, and unfortunate I had to reach out to another parent to give our daughter a ride to her Saturday games as oppose to first asking her own mother. Conversely, I always reach out and let her know I’m available to help in any way. The mixed blessing in all this was the individual quality time I had with each child driving to the games.
• Yesterday, BoyGeeding melted my heart. He said he couldn’t wait until spring break, which starts at the end of school this Friday. The stupid divorce decree states I get the kids for that period in even-numbered years. I asked him why he couldn’t wait, expecting some answer like not having to go to school. Instead, he said, “Because we get more family time with you.” And to think, my ex worked so hard at trying to keep her children away from their own father.
• ‘The Mandalorian’: John Wayne’s Grandson Does Not ‘Think’ He’s ‘Allowed to Say’ How Much He Actually Appears as Din Djarin
  • John Wayne‘s grandson Brendan Wayne is one of the body doubles for Din on The Mandalorian. In a 2019 interview with Vulture, Brendan Wayne shared that he is actually onscreen as the character “frequently,” but he does not “think” he’s “allowed to say” exactly how much screentime he has.
• I saw this headline but didn’t read the article. If true, there’s no better time to attack or invade Russia. Someone break the news to Napoleon. – US: 95% of Russia’s amassed firepower now in Ukraine

Little girl singing "Let it go" in a shelter#UkraineRussianWar #Ukraine #UkraineUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/6gfcUoiwJJ

— Ankita Jain (@Ankita20200) March 6, 2022

A girl playing 'Nich Yaka Misyachna' (What a Moonlit Night) on the violin in a bomb shelter.
Source: SKRYPIN#SupportUkraine #SaveUkraineNow #Ukraine️ #CloseTheSkyUkraine pic.twitter.com/GBrAABNgAE

— WithUkraine 24/7 (@With__Ukraine) March 7, 2022

• It’s a very busy weekend for us. Today, my DaughterGeeding plays in her very first softball game at a tournament in east Dallas at 11:00 AM. Her next game is at 3:00 PM, but I’ll miss that as I have to pick up BoyGeeding from school in Lewisville. We’ll both drive from Lewisville back to east Dallas to make her 7:00 PM game. Then, on Saturday, BoyGeeding has his first soccer game of the season at 1:15 PM in Little Elm. DaughterGeeding will also have a game on Saturday, but we won’t know the time because it depends on how well her team performs on Friday.
• My old model Nissan Leaf will not be able to have enough power to make it to all these places, and there’s not a charging station at the softball fields. So, luckily, I have a friend who is letting me borrow his car. But, I may have to rent one on Saturday depending on how things go. You may recall I let my ex have the gas-powered vehicle in the divorce to make things easier on her and the kids.
• I reached out to my ex to see if she wanted to coordinate things for both Friday and Saturday, but have heard nothing back nor do I expect to. At first, she reached out about Friday, but since we are both taking the day off, it kinda worked itself out. I never wanted to be a single parent, but I’ll do what I have to.
• Yesterday was also a bit of a challenge. BoyGeeding’s soccer practice in Flower Mound started at 5:30 PM, but I had to pick up DaughterGeeding in Carrolton from softball practice at 6:00 PM, and then make it back to Flower Mound to pick up BoyGeeding at 6:30 PM.
• Russian oligarchs are in the news. I’m too lazy to look it up, but are there other types of oligarchs than Russian ones?
• Texas company convicted for supplying potentially tainted rocket fuel to NASA
• If this is true, I’m extremely disappointed in Shaq – Shaquille O’Neal allegedly hazed NBA rookies by pooping and peeing in a bucket for a week and then dumping it on them, according to his former Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat teammate Gary Payton.
• Google tests an even darker ‘dark mode’ for its Android app
• In a first, a mysterious rocket part is about to slam into the moon — by accident
  • Traveling at an estimated 3.3 miles per second, the hunk of metal, now believed to be left over from a 2014 Chinese lunar mission (Gray originally identified it as a SpaceX rocket booster), is expected to make a crater 65-feet long — about the size of a tractor-trailer, and smash into who-knows-how-many pieces. Though NASA and the European Space Agency weren’t monitoring the high-flying space junk — hardly anyone does — they have given credibility to the findings, confirming the crash forecast. The impact will happen at 7:26 a.m. EST.
• I hope this is true.

https://twitter.com/StrictlyChristo/status/1499200835695169539

• I got a phone call from the hospital saying I owe them $250 from my neck surgery back in December. They said insurance already paid their part, so I asked for an itemized bill. A week goes by, but the bill hadn’t arrived, and they started to call every day to collect the funds. I got tired of it, so I go online to try to make a payment, but I get some sort of error, so I call in for assistance. The representative said if I’m willing to pay on the phone through him, he’d knock 30% off, so all I’d owe would be $175.
• I caught the very end of The Amazing Race last night. I used to record it and try to watch it with my ex as a bonding experience. One of the contestants asked that all the video crew following the teams get a chance to be on camera for all their hard work behind the scenes to make the show possible. That should be done more often. Heck, the show should have a special on how they make episodes.
• I’m sure you all remember Kramer from Seinfeld. The actor, Michael Richards, is still close friends with Jerry and I recently saw him in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Richards, as you may recall, lost his temper on stage and said some very racist stuff. In this clip (cued), Richards appears genuinely remorseful, that he’s taken a lot of time to reflect, grow, and learn from his mistake. It reminded me of when this incident first happened and Seinfeld stepped in to help by going on Letterman and having him interview his friend. It’s the only time you’ll see Jerry Seinfeld tell people to stop laughing because it wasn’t funny.  Seinfeld could have easily left him hung out to dry, but showed true loyalty and friendship.
• I saw a picture of Babe Ruth looking at Lou Gehrig’s open casket. Gehrig died in 1941 at the age of 37. Ruth only lived seven years after his Gehrig dying at 53.
• A lot of people mistakenly thought Mark Hammil dressed as Luke Skywalker and performed sign language, but it was actually a Mark Hammil impersonator. Both recently cleared up the confusion on Twitter.

I understand, Fluke, so don't worry about it. I only wish I knew how to sign like you. The video was so touching & heartwarming. All the best, mh

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) March 2, 2022

• Yes.

DEBATE: Is this a distraction while driving down the road at night or no? pic.twitter.com/7HEVeXHY2J

— Dallas Texas TV (@DallasTexasTV) March 1, 2022