BagOfNothing.com

I guess you can say I had a holy weekend and I’m totally poped. I binged-watched the nine episodes of HBO’s The New Hope and watched Netflix’s The Two Popes all in a three-day span. We just started to watch Netflix’s Tiger King and it’s as wheels off and entertaining as you’d imagine.

This family did a great job recreating Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

I wonder if any lawmaker of the stimulus bill being negotiated explored if there is a way for people to opt-out if they haven’t been financially affected. For instance, since I’ve always worked from home for the company I work for, I’m not affected financially like a waiter or waitress or a cosmetologist. It seems unfair for someone like me to benefit when I’m (thankfully) unaffected financially.  But then again perhaps people like me are minuscule. The government would be going further in debt if it’s just giving money away to people who aren’t impacted. But then again, they do want it to stimulate the economy, so I suppose they are encouraging folks like me to simply spend it and not save it or use it to pay down any debt. I suppose I could donate the money, but, well, I’m too selfish.

Rita Wilson is either feeling better.

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A post shared by Rita Wilson (@ritawilson) on Mar 21, 2020 at 11:31pm PDT

It was quite impressive and surprising to see Doug Dunbar of our local CBS11 doing the national broadcast of the CBS Evening News on Saturday and Sunday. It was a little odd seeing and hearing the national broadcasting formats, graphics, and music being used while he was broadcasting from the local station. Just to be sure this was happening, I confirmed it with Uncle Barkey on twitter. Dunbar later replied to my tweet with class remembering all those behind the camera making such an event happen. Sometimes I think he’s a bit full of himself and tries to pull off a Captain America vibe, but now I feel I’ve been too hard on him.

honor for sure, but a lot of faces you didn't see helping make it all happen while the CBS building in NYC is shut down. One rope, everybody pulls. 🙂 Thanks for watching!

— Doug Dunbar (@cbs11doug) March 21, 2020

This online toilet paper calculator will tell you just how long your supply will last

Howmuchtoiletpaper.com is a website created by student software developer Ben Sassoon and artist Sam Harris, both based in London, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The tool calculates just how long your stash of TP will last you during a quarantine.

The layout is simple. Users enter how many rolls of toilet paper they have and how many times they visit the loo.

If you scroll to the “Advanced Options” section, you can really get detailed, customizing the average number of wipes per trip, the number of sheets per wipe, sheets on the roll, and people in the house.

Canadian Politician Defends ‘Paw Patrol’ For Encouraging Kids To ‘Embrace Capitalism’

Over the weekend, Canada’s Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer shared a video on Twitter responding to a CBC article critical of the kids show “Paw Patrol”.

“Does Paw Patrol encourage our kids to embrace capitalism?” the article questioned.

Interviewed for the article, criminology professor Liam Kennedy explained that the show consistently depicts government officials like Mayor Humdinger and Mayor Goodway as unethical, corrupt, or bumbling.

“I would argue that the Paw Patrol, as a private corporation, is used to help provide basic social services in the Adventure Bay community,” he continued. “That’s problematic in that the Paw Patrol creators are sending this message that we can’t depend on the state to provide these services.”

Kennedy added, “I just think that as time goes on, children might be less likely to critique the capitalist system that causes environmental harm in the first place and reproduces inequality.”

Baker Hotel window replacement

Here’s an earlier video of a tour of the basement, It appears the hotel was self-powered using steam, which I never knew.

It’s nice to see how this huge remodeling effort is being documented, quite nicely I’ll add, but I think HGTV could make a great show out of this, evening partnering with that couple in Waco and Fort Worth’s own Grace Mitchell. Hopefully, my tweeting will get some eyes.

This is such a huge remodeling effort with such detail, @HGTV is missing out on a great opportunity for a show. I can even picture collaboration with @AStoriedStyle and @chipgaines & @joannagaines, perhaps giving them a specialized suite to design. https://t.co/vPu0VYQ8LR

— BagOfNothing (@bagofnothing) March 22, 2020

I’ve actually been sitting on some Baker Hotel stuff for a while, trying to find a good time to post them. This seems like as good a time as any.

The backend of this video shows some great animation of what the grand old lady will look like once the restoration is complete.

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, a more than decent fireworks show (for Mineral Wells standards) happened off the roof of the Baker Hotel.

In an effort to find accentuate the positive, this pandemic came at a time in history in which humans can handle it best.

• Medical science is at its peak, even if we can’t fix a horse’s bone (Ticket reference).
• We all have plumbing. (TMI Alert: We have a bidet, we don’t need any TP.”
• Hello, electricity.
• There’s an infrastructure to deliver everything. Roads are already built, as are railroads, airports, as well as shipping ports.
• We have broadband internet which allows for fast data communications which not only allows us to communicate across the world in less than a second, and allows for businesses to track and manage inventories with complex algorithms, but websites like Amazon exist which allows us to order anything and have it delivered to our front door. If this happened in the mid-Nineties, imagine trying to do this on a 14.4 or even a 56k modem.
  • “Modem” is actually short for “modulator-demodulator”. Thank you, Dr. Livsey. (That’s a joke intended for an audience of one.)
• Grocery stores and places like Wal-Mart and Target have had a chance to establish curbside pickup. Imagine if curbside pickup wasn’t an option at Wal-Mart and just how much more crowded it would be inside. You can place an order and have an expectation of what’s in stock and not. Then, you can pick it up at a scheduled time and you don’t even have to leave your car – and, it’s free.
• Boredom can easily be conquered, though we will still complain about it. You can read any book in the world which has ever been printed just by ordering it online to an e-reader. You don’t have to download movies or television shows, you simply can stream any show or movie ever created. If that’s not enough, we entertain ourselves with our own created content using Tik Tok and YouTube.
• Mobile phones, yo, anything you need to find out or anyone you need to contact is literally at your fingertips.
• We have mobile banking.
• Waste management.
• We learned our lesson from the Ice Capades.
• Godzilla humidifiers exist.
  

One thing I try to instill in my children is that it’s not what happens in life, it’s how you choose to react respond to it.

I bet since a lot of schools are going to some sort of online content, a lot of parents are going to find out that the teacher is not the problem.

I’m guessing it would be a good time to own a drive-in theater?

Is Australia still on fire?

Malaysia Flight 370 has been missing since March 8, 2014.

Armchair Political Consultant – President Trump has been hard on China as of late, perhaps deflecting blame. I’d caution that approach, the Chinese don’t take kindly to being insulted, but more importantly, because most drug ingredients come from China. If China wanted to, they could jack up prices and kill our economy even more, if they wanted to utilize that leverage. I’d advise the president to go hard against the Middle East counties who have ramped up oil production causing job losses in U.S. oil fields.

Hang in there, Italy.

Italian Army Transports Dozens of Coffins Out of City After Crematorium Overwhelmed With Coronavirus Deaths

• The city’s crematorium has resorted to operating 24 hours a day in order to deal with the number of deaths amid the outbreak. As reported by L’Eco di Bergamo, army vehicles have now been used to take the coffins away to neighboring areas.
• The Washington Post previously reported the dead in Bergamo are being buried with no ceremonies as family members remain under quarantine or too sick to attend themselves.
• The obituary pages in the local newspaper can also stretch up to 10 pages and feature around 150 names as it lists all of the COVID-19 victims.

Another heartbreaking image from #Italy fighting #coronavirus #covid19

Lines of military trucks deployed to transport corpses from Bergamo – one of the most plagued towns – to Modena and other regions.

They are too many to be buried, therefore they are going to be cremated. pic.twitter.com/9CxSMZw01w

— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) March 19, 2020

Here are scenes from inside an Italian hospital. The quietness is haunting.

Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded – Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

To quote from President Trump’s inauguration speech, ” The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs.”

Senator Dumped Up to $1.6 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness – Intelligence Chair Richard Burr’s selloff came around the time he was receiving daily briefings on the health threat.

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

A week after Burr’s sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since.

On Thursday, Burr came under fire after NPR obtained a secret recording from Feb. 27, in which the lawmaker gave a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus than what he had told the public.

Coronavirus Diaries: I’m a Flight Attendant. Boy, My Passengers Are Weird Now.

• A lot more passengers have been bringing their own sanitary supplies, wiping down their seats, wearing face masks, wearing gloves. I’ve also noticed people declining drinks and snacks altogether, just not wanting to interact with us at all.
• One thing that I took note of on my last trip: A lot of passengers who come on the airplane and feel sick for unrelated reasons have become defensive about it. They’ve started to give me too much information about the reason for their illnesses. So I’ve had passengers go into great detail about how they had too much to drink last night.
• Some of our service standards have changed. We’re no longer handing out blankets and pillows. We no longer serve glassware on board. Any time there’s a basket of communal snacks or something, we’re handing them out instead of having people reaching in.

Microsoft can filter out the sound of you eating potato chips on a conference call – The software giant’s trained artificial intelligence software to identify background noise that isn’t your voice. Snackers, rejoice.

Time is undefeated.

Gosh, this week is dragging on. I’m not sure if it’s mainly because my kids are home for spring break, the pandemic, cancellation of baseball and softball practice, and having housework done and not having any furniture downstairs. It’s probably a combination of things, and you can add to it the uncertainty of knowing how long the kids will be forced to stay at home. I love my family and all, but I like having them gone during the day. You know, that whole absence makes the heart grow fonder kinda things.

Yesterday, Kellyanne Conway stated her husband, George Conway, is a half-Asian. So, now WifeGeeding and she have something in common. And, now I’m contemplating if I should add George to my highly out-dated BagOfNothing Half-Asian Hall of Fame.

The federal agency I work at asked us to limit our Skype video sharing because the increase of users working from home is stressing our capabilities.

The latest Star Wars movie has a great John Williams’ cameo and Easter egg tribute. Williams plays a bartender outside a droid shop. Every piece of seemingly random stuff that populates the area where Williams’ character is standing represents one of the 51 films for which he’s been Oscar-nominated. Examples include Indiana Jones’ whip from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the barrels from Jaws, and the iron from Home Alone. You can read more about it here.

Mark Cuban says bailed out companies should never be allowed to buy back their stocks ever again

“No buybacks. Not now. Not a year from now. Not 20 years from now. Not ever,” Cuban said on “Squawk Box.” “Because effectively you’re spending taxpayer money to buyback stock and to me that’s just the wrong way to do that.”

He also said, “Whatever we do in a bailout, make sure that every worker is compensated and treated equally — in that the executives don’t get rewarded extra to stick around because they got nowhere else to go.”

I have a few ideas I’d like to see happen for any company which takes a federal bailout.  And I’ll be honest, I haven’t given these hardly any thought, I’m coming up with these on a whim.

• For the next five years, the highest salary can be no more than fifty times that of the lowest-paid full-time employee. So if the lowest-paid full-time employee makes $35,000, then the top salary at the business could only be $1,750,000 (50 x 35,000).
• Executive bonuses would be eliminated for this time period.
• For all airline travel, no chartered jets, no business or first-class seating.

Kevin Bacon Encourages Social Distancing With Sweet ‘6 Degrees’ Campaign

On Wednesday, the “Footloose” actor took to Instagram to share his new #IStayHomeFor initiative to promote social distancing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Inspired by the pop culture phenomenon “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” Bacon encouraged his followers to share who they’re staying home for to prevent the spread of the virus.

What Will ESPN Do Without Sports?

From March Madness to Major League Baseball, auto racing to international soccer, leagues and events have been suspended, postponed, and outright canceled, all in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The result for the sports world is an abrupt and unplanned hiatus — an indefinite, all-encompassing athletic shutdown that has left ESPN, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports,” facing a vast programming void. In March and April alone, ESPN will have to replace 60 lost NBA regular season and playoff games, 28 MLS matches, the entire NCAA women’s basketball tournament, and a number of other games and events

Here’s an interesting art installation in Marfa, TX by Marc Thorpe called Citizens of Earth.

I think it’s really cool how some grocery stores are opening with “Senior Hours”, a time set aside only for senior citizens. Finally, it’s acceptable to segregate. The arc of the moral universe is long, but look at it bend.  (Just trying to add a little humor, folks.)

I have a feeling that Vote By Mail is going to have some record numbers in the November election.

Serious question. With Biden and Bernie at a higher risk for being infected with COVID-19, what would happen if both of them died before the convention? I guess it will be like old times and party delegates would pick one out at the convention.

Josh Gad and Amy Adams are reading children’s books on social media to support families who are home from school – These celebrities are sharing videos of themselves reading kids’ books to help families who are stuck at home due to the coronavirus

Sports cancellations leave vasectomy patients without planned March Madness binge options

Alcohol-free sanitizer given to prisoners to prevent them from making ‘moonshine’

Once we can all become social again, if you are looking for something different to so in the Dallas area, may I suggest armored combat at Warlord Combat Academy? They also offer a winged sabre historical fencing class.

Have fun learning Hungarian military sabre and fokos (long-hafted axe).  Learn what makes a curved sword different than a straight one, and how to maximize the advantages and limitations of both.  Cross-training with a variety of historical western weapons as appropriate

Learn how to fight with a Single Saber and graduate to Dual-wielding, Staves or Cross-guard Sabers from accredited instructors!