BagOfNothing.com

I was forced to interact with my family yesterday. The power, cable, and internet went out two separate times.

The character (not actress, just the character) I’ve fallen for the most remains Dana Scully. But Kim Wexler comes in second place.

I drove by a clinic the other day and saw a yard sign which spelled “HEROS WORK HERE” with individual letters. The way it was set up, it looked like something corporate leadership told them to do. It didn’t appear as if members of the neighborhood placed it outside for them.

How to Escape From a Sunken Submarine – First of all, you can’t just open the hatch when you’re trapped at the bottom of the ocean. But there is a way out—it requires physics and some audacity.

An Illinois mayor ordered police to crack down on social gatherings. They found his wife at a bar

Acting secretary of the Navy resigns after calling ousted aircraft carrier captain ‘stupid’

It’s one thing for the secretary to call the captain stupid behind closed doors, but it’s really stupid to address the entire crew and refer to the captain as such. Did he not see how the crew honored the captain as he left the ship?

New Zealand PM adds 2 crucial figures to list of essential workers: The Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny

Landlord changes locks on California church after pastor said he’d continue to hold services

Members of a central California church found themselves locked out of the building after the pastor originally kept his doors open, saying the shelter-in-place orders violated his freedom to assemble.

But within the past week, the landlord of the Cross Culture Christian Center in Lodi, Calif. changed the locks, so congregants couldn’t enter the building for Palm Sunday services. The landlord is Bethel Open Bible Church.

Hospitals say feds are seizing masks and other coronavirus supplies without a word

Although President Trump has directed states and hospitals to secure what supplies they can, the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.

Wisconsin House Speaker wears protective gear while telling voters they are ‘incredibly safe to go out’

History’s deadliest pandemics, from ancient Rome to modern America

The novel coronavirus has taken just a few months to sweep the globe. How many will die, how societies will change — those questions are impossible to fathom as the disease rages. But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world.

D Magazine – The Highland Park Drug Ring – How did a mother of 10 and a Plano cop wind up pushing pills in the Park Cities?

Trump’s Coronavirus ‘Experts’: A Field Guide – Here are the brave men who aren’t letting a lack of relevant training stop them from weighing in on how to solve the crisis.

Trump defends his mail-in ballot after calling vote-by-mail ‘corrupt’

A loyal reader suggested having WifeGeeding do a guest post or be interviewed by DaughterGeeding about how things have changed for her while teaching. He provided a framework of questions. If you are interested in hearing from WifeGeeding, what would you like to ask her?

1) How is it different? The same?
2) Is she tempted to ‘dress down’ like the rest of the business world does when working from home?
3) How does she prepare for a lesson and how is it different/the same?
4) How does the length of the lessons compare when she cannot see the students in the same room?
5) What is it like being a parent and teacher at the same time in this remote world.

I bet once this COVID-19 pandemic is over with, Texas will continue to allow restaurants to sell to-go mixed drinks as long as they are sealed.

I don’t think anyone should feel any sympathy for a college graduate because he or she won’t have a graduation ceremony and won’t get the opportunity to don a cap and gown. I think they should feel sorrow for them for the job market they are being thrown into.

The Amish Are Getting a COVID-19 Drive-Through Testing Center for Horse and Buggies  – Doctors in Central Pennsylvania are opening a drive-through clinic that specifically caters to vulnerable Amish and Mennonite communities.

Auto insurance companies return $800 million in premiums because no one is driving – Two insurers – Allstate and American Family Insurance — announced Monday they will give back about $800 million to their auto insurance customers because people are driving far less during the coronavirus crisis.

He Visited Disneyland Every Day for Eight Years—Then Coronavirus Happened

One thing that’s been derailed by the virus is a record-breaking streak of daily Disneyland visits by 47-year-old Huntington Beach, California, resident Jeff Reitz. When the park was forced to close last month, Reitz had been visiting it for almost 3,000 consecutive days.

Reitz and a friend had originally planned to go every day of the year 2012, as they were both unemployed at the time, and they wanted a project to get them out of the house. But after they made it through the year, they decided to keep going. The friend eventually stopped their streak in 2014, but Reitz stuck at it until Friday, March 13—the last day before the park’s closure.

Yes! – Phoebe Waller-Bridge has made the stage version of ‘Fleabag’ available for streaming in order to benefit coronavirus-related charities

Recorded at Wyndham’s Theatre and first broadcast in theaters for a special live event in September 2019, Fleabag Live will first be available to stream in the U.K. and Ireland, beginning Monday on Soho Theatre’s On Demand streaming site. In the U.S., the broadcast will be available on Amazon Prime Video beginning Friday, April 10th, and will remain on the platform for two weeks.

Something for fellow listeners of The TICKET from D Magazine – The Last (and Best) Story Ever Written About Mike Rhyner – Mike Rhyner invented a radio format in Dallas that changed the country and made him a legend. Then, unexpectedly, he retired.

Lin-Manuel Miranda And The Original Cast Of ‘Hamilton’ Zoombomb John Krasinski’s Show With Delightful ‘Hamilton’ Performance

Already cued:

To break up the monotony we’ll go through the drive-thru and then will find an open area to eat at. WifeGeeding and I will normally eat in the car but the kids like to eat outside.

In this picture, the kids are playing a game. I flipped a coin to see who would be the first to select a color, red or blue. Then, they counted the number of vehicles of their assigned color and the first to 100 wins.

This photo was taken at the same place but on a different day. They decided to take turns rolling each other down this “hill”.

The kids had a picnic in this open field and then challenged their mother to a race.

Here’s a photo of WifeGeeding teaching a geography lesson to her kindergartner class.  I bought that light ring a few years ago when I ran across a good deal and she thought it would never come in handy.

Radio host ‘Doc’ Gallagher gets 25 years for bilking Christian investors out of millions – The 79-year-old pleaded guilty in Dallas County to three charges and must also pay more than $10 million in restitution.

https://twitter.com/SInow/status/1246848433723518976

The one COVID-19 related stat I’d like to track daily is the number of available hospital beds available in the area.

This was a really fun read, and I felt pretty darn motivated after reading what Coach Taylor of Friday Night Lights told his team. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, gentlemen. But, I would have loved to see what Chris Carter (The X-Files) and Vince Gilligan could have come up with.

If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode Tina Fey, Mike Schur, and 35 more TV writers on what their characters would do in a pandemic.

We posed that question to dozens of showrunners, creators, and writers; 37 of them responded with scene scripts, monologues, and episode outlines, including a hilarious Skype session between Frasier and Niles, a classic locker-room speech from Coach Taylor, an excerpt from Selina Meyer’s biography, and a vlog for Rogelio De La Vega’s biggest fans. We even learned what caused the whole pandemic — you can blame it on Veep’s Mike McLintock.

The Average New Car Loan Is Now Over 70 Months

Considering the way I manage my finances, I’ll never be able to by a new car. Sure, it’s more cost-effective to buy a used pre-owned one that’s less than two years old to compensate for the rapid depreciation, but I’d like to know what the experience of buying a brand new one for the first time feels like and enjoy that new car smell a bit longer. Hmm, as we make technological advances in electric vehicles, I wonder what are the chances I’ll ever buy one which runs on an internal combustion engine again.

GM is working with Honda to build two new electric vehicles

Honda will design the exteriors and interiors of the new EVs, while the platform will be engineered to support Honda’s specifications, the companies say. They will be manufactured at GM’s North American plants, with sales expected to begin in the 2024 model year.

One of my coworkers who lives in Virginia pulled a nice April Fools joke on his teenage daughter who fell for this mocked headline hook, line, and sinker.

My new pain medication is quite unique. It’s like a Listerine breath strip but I apply it to the inside of my cheek and wait for it to dissolve which can take up to half an hour.

Petition to name Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ gains momentum

It looks like former Dallas police Chief David Brown will be the next Chicago police superintendent. If memory serves right, his son killed a member of law enforcement. Sadly, ironic. The former chief’s younger brother was killed by drug dealers.

I just discovered there’s something called 8D audio.

“Use headphones!” the video declared, and I dutifully obeyed, slipping my earbuds in before hitting play. Freddie Mercury’s harmonized voice erupted forth in the intro, per usual. But then the singing started floating slowly around my head, past one ear to the next. I closed my eyes and felt myself spinning, hearing the music reverberate at a distance. I opened my eyes and snapped to reality: The sound was still being piped straight into my ears. This wasn’t a remix. It was something else — a reformulation of a pop song into some kind of whole-body experience. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but it made me feel something.

This is about three months old but I thought y’all might like it.

Hair related items:

No one is able to get a haircut, so I have a feeling long hair, especially with school children, is going to be en vogue.

Two of the winners of the Hair Freezing Contest at the Takhini Hot Pools, an annual competition In Canada’s Yukon territory.  CNN

The stark differences in countries’ coronavirus death rates, explained

Some countries, such as Germany, have a fatality rate of approximately 1 percent of confirmed cases, whereas Italy’s rate has climbed above 11 percent. Even within the US, large differences are emerging: As of April 1, Louisiana had reported a CFR of 4.2 percent, one of the highest in the nation, compared to California’s 2.1 percent.

The Woman Who Lives 200,000 Years in the Past – As we confront the reality of COVID-19, the idea of living self-sufficiently in the woods, far from crowds and grocery stores, doesn’t sound so bad. Lynx Vilden has been doing just that for decades, while teaching others how to live primitively, too.

Lynx (who doesn’t share her legal name) is not your typical back-to-the-lander. The lithe, blonde former teen punk, who grew up in the “concrete and dismal gray” environs of London, has become an unlikely torchbearer of humanity’s wild heritage. Her overarching aim is not to simply survive out here in nature but “to live as wild people lived” and to show others how to do so as well.

For two decades, Lynx has been running immersive programs that she calls Stone Age projects. After signing up, a group of fifteen or so students make their way to Twisp or to other farther-flung locales, like White Clouds, Idaho; Jokkmokk, Sweden; or the Rhodope Mountains in Greece, to learn skills from Lynx such as fire starting, shelter construction, bow making, and footwear fabrication. Once equipped with this knowledge, and having sewn their own buckskins and exchanged their toothbrushes for twigs, students have the option of heading out with Lynx into a nearby forest for as long as 30 unbroken days. They make camp, hunt and forage, and pass long hours in the intimacy of this tight tribal band.