Bag of Randomness

My mother would have turned 77 today. She died at the age of 58. It’s so strange and awkward to accept that I’ll be that age in eight years and two weeks. If you’re a fan of the Bag, it would be nice if you honored my mom by setting aside a few minutes to read today, since it was something she loved to do. I’ll do that and will eat some Vietnamese food today.

Prediction: The most popular costume this Halloween will be that of a showgirl.

Business Tip: Buy stock in any supplier of showgirl outfits and costume material.

A farm in Delaware mulches more than four tons of U.S. cash into compost every day. In previous eras, worn-out bills were pierced or burned.

I thought I knew all about every significant historical event of my hometown. Until this week, I never knew that the White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, and St. Louis Cardinals used to go to Mineral Wells, Texas, for spring training. Granted, this was in the 1910s and early 1920s; however, that predates the Baker Hotel, which was built in 1929. In this photo, you’ll notice there is no Baker Hotel, but the Crazy Water Hotel is in the top right. And for any of you who own a Time Was in Mineral Wells book, the definitive book of history of our small town, I couldn’t find any reference of baseball spring training, which is “crazy.”

 

Standing Left to right: Dickie Kerr, Bill Conroy, Bill Stewart, Mellie Wolfgang. Sitting: Roy Hansen, Johnny Mostil, and Lefty Sullivan

And in case you were wondering, yes, the 1919 Black Sox were in Mineral Wells for spring training of that year.

Wow, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who we all know from Kevin Costner’s classic movie Field of Dreams, was in my tiny hometown of Mineral Wells.

 

The old spring-training ballpark where Shoeless Joe and his Sox played is now a business strip on the southeast corner of SE 14th Avenue and East Hubbard/US 180. Well, as we all know, SE 14th Avenue in Mineral Wells does not (or no longer) extend to East Hubbard/US 180. So, in the map below, the purple-outlined area is approximately where the White Sox, Cardinals, and Reds practiced.

If you can spot the blue star, that’s the house I grew up in.

What’s there now? What I’ve always known as Jack Powell Ford.

Was Mineral Wells connected to the Black Sox scandal? Yes. Sleepy Bill Burns was the manager of the Resorters, a semipro team in Mineral Wells, in 1919 when the White Sox came to town. He touched base with an old teammate on the Sox, and at the end of the season, approached Burns for funding the fixed series. He was played by Christopher Lloyd in Eight Men Out. Mineral Wells even made the New York Times.

In 1919, he agreed to manage a semipro team in Mineral Wells, Texas, which brought him in proximity with the White Sox, who held their spring training camp in that town. One of his old teammates, Chick Gandil, was still on the roster. Near the end of the season, as the White Sox were preparing to clinch the American League pennant, Gandil and pitcher Eddie Cicotte approached Burns about fixing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for $100,000.

I did a little more digging and found some other interesting baseball tidbits. Ty Cobb played ball in Mineral Wells, as well as Edd Roush, 1919 World Series Champion and 2x NL batting champion.

Per GumShowBaseball.com

The White Sox used Mineral Wells, TX as their Spring training home base in 1911, but ventured out to even smaller towns playing local teams; These photos were likely taken in one of those towns, as the ballpark at Mineral Wells had fencing around the entire perimeter, as shown in this March 7, 1911 newspaper image.

Eddie Collins, Ray Schalk, Soldier, Buck Weaver, Jim Scott, Byrd Lyn, Pants Lowland

Mineral Wells Tex., March 10.-[Special.]-Privates Clarence Rowland, Edward Collins, James Scott, Ray Schalk. and Albert Russell were promoted to the rank of corporal this morning by Sergt. Walter Smiley. U. S. A., in command of the White Sox company. B. N. G. (Baseball National Guard).

The promotions were made just before the end of the daily drill, which was devoted largely to marching evolutions. After putting the athletes through their paces in company formation. Sergt Smiley divided them into five squads and assigned one of the corporals to each squad.

Vikings Under Fire Over Male Cheerleaders

But did you know, the modern style of men’s cheerleading, as a planned and organized activity, originated at the University of Minnesota. On November 2, 1898, a student named Johnny Campbell is credited with leading the first organized cheer at a football game, marking a significant step in the evolution of cheerleading from spontaneous crowd chants to a more structured activity. That day is now considered the “birthday of cheerleading.”

And, since you know my love of presidential trivia, it’s time for me to wow you with a Bag of Nothing Presidential Fun Fact. Four U.S. Presidents were once cheerleaders. Can you name all four? I could only find photos of two of them in uniform.

The other two were FDR and Ike.

The ease with which this black gentleman picked up and moved the rowdy passenger is hilarious. Fellow passengers referred to him as “The Linebacker in 17C” – Now that’s a movie waiting to be made! And get this, the man is humble. When news crews asked for an interview, he agreed as long as they didn’t show his face. So all you’ll see of him are shots from the shoulders down.

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Bag of Randomness

I did a deep dive into genealogy research at the end of last week. I just unearthed another family secret. I knew my father had married and divorced a woman in Mineral Wells named Odella, which I always thought was because his mother’s name was Della. However, I wasn’t aware he was first married at the age of 26 to a divorced 26-year-old Kentucky woman named Gertrude. It was after his first stint in the service after WWII in 1949, and he worked as a dry cleaner, something else I had no idea about. I have no clue if they divorced, if she died, or really anything else. But I’ve been earnestly playing detective.

The first family secret I was informed about was revealed to me a few years after my father’s death. Mom, for some reason, felt she needed to let me know that my brother is my half-brother and had a different biological father. That floored me, and at the time, I was trying to decipher if my mother was going crazy or if it was a possible language barrier problem. It turns out everyone, even my adopted younger sister, knew but me. I’ll be honest, at the time, it was hard to process, and I was a bit upset that I didn’t know about this sooner in life. Truth was, I idolized my brother, so to me, it didn’t change a thing. It actually made the love story between my parents even better. To put it bluntly, I assumed my father knocked up my mother and did the honorable thing back then and married her. And now the true story of a retired GI falling in love with a young Vietnamese woman with a bastard child made me appreciate my father even more. He even adopted my brother and loved him as if he were his own. Funny thing, I always felt he favored my brother more than me. One evening when I was visiting my brother, I told him what Mom told me, but I first made sure to preface it by stating that it doesn’t change a thing. Little did I know, it ended up changing everything. I never understood why, but from that point my brother stopped communicating with my mother. I can only assume he felt Mom dishonored Dad by letting me know.

I stumbled upon Netflix’s psychological crime series Mindhunter, which follows FBI agents in the late 1970s and early 1980s as they develop groundbreaking criminal profiling techniques by conducting in-depth interviews with imprisoned serial killers. While the show is fictionalized, it features chilling portrayals of real-life criminals like Edmund Kemper and Charles Manson, with actors delivering great but unsettling performances based on actual prison interviews. The series explores how these conversations with incarcerated killers helped FBI agents understand the psychology behind serial murder and develop methods still used in criminal investigations today. I give it two big thumbs up. Sadly, only two seasons were made, resulting in a total of 19 shows. It ended in 2019, but this summer, there have been rumors of its return as three television movies.

I really like the man who played Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw, and he plays a salty veteran CIA guy. The other leading cast member may best be known for playing flamboyant King George III in Hamilton.

College football will kick off on Saturday, August 30th. And, in a big way, with my two favorite teams to root for are playing against each other. The University of Texas will be playing at The Ohio State University. You’d think such a game would happen at night, but kickoff is set for 11 AM Central. Since that happens to be my 50th birthday, I thought I’d try to put something together because no one would be throwing me a party or arranging anything. So, at trivia night last Tuesday, I told two of my closest friends that since my two favorite teams are opening the college football season on my 50th birthday, I invited them to come over and watch the game with me, telling them it would be like a small 50th birthday party for myself. One friend seemed apprehensive at first until I let him know it was an 11 AM kickoff. The other flatly said he wasn’t interested in the game and was looking forward to watching the LSU game that evening against Clemson.

Immediately, I remembered why I have always been hesitant all my life about taking risks and putting myself out there. It hurts to get your hopes up for something you’d think would be an easy ask, only to get them flushed down the toilet.I felt foolish for thinking that a friend of over 30 years would sacrifice a Saturday afternoon with three weeks notice to be there for a friend trying to celebrate his 50th birthday. I even prefaced the invite by saying my kids aren’t scheduled to be with me that day, and I’m sure their mother would be making plans so they couldn’t see me that day, as she has in the past for similar occasions. One reason I was putting this together was to try not to feel so bad about turning 50 and soften the blow of how, at 40 years old after climbing my first mountain and dancing with my wife literally on top of Texas, I couldn’t envision over the next ten years she would literally leave me and take the kids, I’d suffer through five spinal surguries and suffer from physical and mental health challenges, no longer be a homeowner, have a church stab me in the back, and be unemployed for months. I’ll be honest. I cried a bit during the drive home that night after trivia as I tried to figure out how everything went so wrong and wrestled with whether I deserved all of this. The pain of being let down or failure is greater than any feeling of potential joy, and that’s why I tend not to put myself out there or take chances.

Mystery deepens as California man’s plane keeps getting stolen, taken for a joy ride, repaired and returned: ‘There’s no real leads’

Is Perrier as pure as it claims? The bottled water scandal gripping France

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Bag of Nothing

The 1991 P.M. Dawn hit Set Adrift on Memory Bliss randomly started to play on my 90s and 2000s playlist while I was driving the other day. Great song (Baby you send me, baby you send me…), and I totally forgot Christina Applegate is mentioned in it. Briefly, I wondered how she has been doing since her health has declined dramatically.  Then, the next day, I saw an article that she had been rushed to a hospital in Europe.

Currently has 95% on Rotten Tomatoes & has been called one of the most heartbreaking horror films of 2025. Good Boy releases in theaters on October 3, 2025.

Count me out – A horror movie shot from the perspective of a dog who sees its owner haunted by supernatural entities. Even though it’s obviously fiction, I’m just too much of a sympathetic lover of canines. But I give the director a lot of credit for using a real dog.

There’s this trend I’ve been seeing on profile pictures of women on dating apps that has been a turnoff for me. Now I know it’s called Love Island Face. Here’s a good description of it:

“Usually, the lips are full (often as a result of hyaluronic acid fillers), noses tend to be narrow, foreheads are virtually motionless, and cheeks are plumped and sculpted.”

So Why Do People Over 35 Find This Unsettling?

From Dr. Sturm’s POV, it’s visual and visceral: “People over 35 don’t like the look that you can tell had work done. We see the beauty of a natural youthful face. You can’t go back to being 20 with flawless skin, but if you spend that time of your life with too many injectables, it’s like lost time to us.” She also warns that the look doesn’t age well. “They already look older, and we’ll continue to see filler migration and filler blindness”—a phenomenon where people don’t notice their own filler anymore and keep adding more.

Lawmakers want to end HR ghosting during the interview process—here’s how

Geoff Duncan, who served as Lieutenant Governor of Georgia from 2019 to 2023 as a Republican and stood up to President Trump to discredit his state’s election results, announced that he’s officially swapping sides to join the Democrats.

Duncan explained in an op-ed that being a Democrat will put him in the “best possible position each day to love my neighbor.” In the op-ed, published Tuesday in The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Duncan explained that the quest to love his neighbor guided him in office and that GOP policies on healthcare, immigration, and gun reform have strayed from that moral imperative.

Read it at The Hill

The White House Rose Garden has had a massive revamp. President Trump said it was mainly due to bad drainage and chairs getting stuck after their legs poked into the grass.

Across the street, the White House Historical Association recently unveiled its life-size replica of President Trump’s Oval Office from his first term. I got a kick out of the detail that went into it:

It is strikingly similar to how Mr. Trump had the room set up back then, with many of the objects 3-D printed to mimic the real thing. The books on each shelf are the same and sit in the same position. The portraits, though printed instead of painted, appear identical. So does the Reagan-era beige rug and Frederic Remington’s “Bronco Buster” statuette

“We used a lot of the same vendors that do work at the White House,” Mr. Boorady said, citing the people who installed the floors and upholstered the furniture. (Mr. Trump’s sofas were first used by President George W. Bush.) “In fact, when they came, they noted, ‘Hey, you’re off a half-inch here, a quarter-inch off here.’”

Of course, not everything can be exactly the same. The Resolute Desk has only one phone instead of two, because visitors kept tangling the lines. Unlike the real Oval Office, there is no bust of Abraham Lincoln, as it would block the exhibit’s accessible entrance.

Of course, Trump has recently updated the Oval Office with a lot of gold.

Back in the days, presidents who were from wealth tried to be understated. Some did it to relate to the common everyday voter, but for others, it was just who they were.

Oh wow dusty up in here now….Florida Panther Mackie Samoskevish grew up in Sandy Hook, CT, brought the Stanley Cup to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Memorial for his day with the cup.

“I thought we’d just bring it back in honor of them”

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— WuTangIsForTheChildren (@wutangforchildren.bsky.social) August 4, 2025 at 2:30 PM

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Bag of Nothing

While watching something on PlutoTV, I saw my first Halloween commercial of the year. It was from HomeGoods.

If you know me well, then it’s no surprise I watched the rebooted The Naked Gun this weekend. Thankfully, I watched it with a close friend. In high school and college, we watched the original on VHS several hundred times. I no longer go into these movies with the expectation of whether it’s going to be better or worse than the original. Now, I just like to be entertained and see what they can do with the source material and make it their own. Overall, I’d say it was pretty solid. I was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t raunchy at all.

It’s official, I’m old.

I had a job interview scheduled last Monday that I was really looking forward to, especially since it dealt with my background and the emerging AI field. It was the one in which I had to take a two-and-a-half-hour assessment that I mentioned before. Wearing a nice dress shirt and sport coat, I log into the Microsoft Teams meeting a few minutes early. Surprised the meeting hadn’t started after a few minutes past the scheduled time, I checked my email, where I found this in my Inbox:

OK, no big deal, stuff happens. I replied, saying sure, and I was available the rest of the afternoon or would be happy to reschedule for the next day or a later time in the week. Not hearing back from her on Monday or Tuesday, I followed up with another message to touch base on Wednesday. The rest of the week goes by without me hearing a word. However, on Sunday, I received a message thanking me for taking the time to interview with them, and while I was talented, they decided to go with another applicant.

I struggled to get excited about the other interview I had scheduled last week with a different company because it was with an AI avatar. At first, it asked me some basic questions, and I’d reply as if I were talking to a computerized customer service phone tree. It asked if I had any questions, so I tested the system by asking some non-generic questions and was slightly impressed at the detailed, customized answer. As it started to ask me more challenging and complex questions, I changed my demeanor and spoke to it as if it were a real human. After each question, it would then audibly summarize my answer and then move on to the next question. It was hard to get a feel for how I did overall. I am curious how a hiring manager will get the results of my answers. Will he just listen to an audio recording of what I said, receive a summary created by the AI interviewing tool, or something else?

Someone told me the State of Texas is doing a lot of hiring, so I’m going to explore that.

A USA Today exposé on the Dallas Stars – ‘They control everything’: How the Dallas Stars monopolized Texas youth hockey

Unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, a handful of NHL teams are intimately involved in running the youth levels of their sports in their regions – perhaps none more than the Stars. In Dallas, the Stars spent decades turning what was once seen as a community good into a lucrative arm of their for-profit enterprise.

This whole Sydney Sweeney “controversy” is stupid. Very, very, stupid. And, I have a feeling Micah Parsons isn’t going anywhere. But if he does, I’m sure he’d prefer to go to Washington to play for his old coach, but I’d like to see him in Buffalo.

Texas lawmakers unveiled a proposed redistricting map this week. The map shifts several districts that are currently held by Democrats.

Thirteen-year-old BoyGeeding wanted to cook dinner for us this weekend. He took it seriously, even making his own alfredo sauce instead of opting for a premade version in a jar.

Good point.

I think Willow Bend is the newest mall in the area, opening 24 years ago yesterday. It’s looking pretty barren.

I visited the mall today 8.3.25 and it is not looking too well. There were a lot of vacant spaces. The food court is completely devoid. Probably 75% of level 2 was vacant.
byu/MrTacocaT12345 inDallas

Here’s a summary of the drama that’s going on in The Ticket’s subreddit.

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