Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, January 23, 2024

  • Yesterday’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not stated that Chopin, who is Polish but died in France, was buried in that country with a small urn of Polish soil that he kept. That reminded me of one of my history lessons in junior high. Someone, but I can’t remember who had his heart removed and buried in another country.  It involved the U.S. Sounds like something Lafayette would have done, but I couldn’t find a record of it. However, this was the first time I heard of the practice but it made an impression on me. I did a little research and found heart burial was not uncommon, as it was easier and less smelly than transporting an entire body (usually a soldier). Interestingly, Chopin did this, which made me think Ripley’s led with the wrong story. Even though I couldn’t find the person I was looking for, I ran across articles from Atlas Obscura and Mental Floss about famous people who had it done. This little nugget about Thomas Hardy stood out, “A persistent, but unproven, story has it that a cat ate part of the heart when the doctor who was removing it got distracted; a gruesome addendum says the animal was killed and buried alongside the organ.“
  • I think my next dog will be named Lafayette, and I hope I don’t have to make that decision for a very long time.
  • Random memory: Those commercials in which luggage was tested by a gorilla.
  • I knew 49’ers head coach Kyle Shanahan played football at the University of Texas and Lions head coach Dan Campell played at aTm. But I wasn’t sure if their time overlapped. I bring this up because their teams will be playing each other in the NFC Championship. Shanahan’s time was from 1999–2002 1995–1998.
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Bag of Randomness for Monday, January 22, 2024

  • A Kansas City and Detroit Super Bowl would pit Taylor Swift against Eminem. If this happens, move Usher to next year for the halftime entertainment and have Swift and Eminem perform.
  • Can you imagine how many people would lose it if the Chiefs win the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift gets a ring?
  • What I wouldn’t give to have a friend (preferably a girl) support me in something I enjoy doing as much as Taylor Swift supports Travis Kelce. It must be nice to be rich and powerful enough to be able to go to any NFL game you want and watch it from the suites.
  • I had a pastor friend get upset when Adam Levine tore his shirt off at a Super Bowl halftime performance. But, I bet he got a good laugh and was totally okay with the elder Kelce being shirtless. It’s a world of double standards, and I understand and accept it.
  • Patrick Mahomes has been a starter for six years and will now play in his sixth AFC Championship. That’s a crazy stat. Overall, I know he’s a good dude, but I’m already sick of him.
  • I only caught the end of the Green Bay and San Francisco game. It looked competitive but what caught my attention was the weather. Apparently, it was pouring the whole game. I couldn’t help but think what the game would have looked like if played at Candlestick Park on a muddy field. Man, I miss games like that.
  • Winter night games played in Buffalo sure are fun to watch.
  • People often reference a football field to make a large-size comparison, but it’s funny how it’s often a game of inches. I thought about that after a few goal-line plays had to be reviewed.
  • With the families’ blessing, I would like to see AI used to create a John Madden and Pat Summerall broadcasting team. I bet it could be done. James Earl Jones gave permission for his voice by Disney for Star Wars stuff, and an AI was used in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series to recreate his voice.
  • If I were advising Nikki Haley, I’d have her hammer home how Trump kept confusing her for Nancy Pelosi. Biden is actually doing it for her by using her.
  • If Trump wins in November, will he make Ronnie Jackson the Surgeon General?

  • If I were advising the Atlanta Falcons, I’d advise them to hire Harbaugh over Belichick. You gotta think what’s best for the team longterm.
  • I went on a date Saturday night with a girl my age who grew up in Denton to watch the Von Erich brothers movie, The Iron Claw. I’m glad we watched it at the Alamo Draft House. Before the film, they showed old wrestling footage of the of the brothers and their father wrestling. Man, that brought back a lot of memories. Overall, I liked the movie, especially because of the local coponent. It could have been polished in a few places. It’s one of those movies where you smile a lot in the beginning because of all of nostalgia, and you leave sad at the end of it because of the nostalgia.
    • Lily James is in the film. I always confuse her for Lily Collins. As long time readers know, I’m a big fan of her father, Phil. Both are the same age, played a Disney princess, have brown hair, from England, and are mediocre kissers.
  • I went on a lunch date with a different girl after church on Sunday. She was grew up on the East Coast. We ate at a nice Italian restaurant. At the end of our meal, our waitress boxed up the food we didn’t finish and started to place the items in a single bag when I said, “Oh, we’re not going home together.” The waitress and my date made eye contact with each other, and after a tiny moment of silence smiled. My date broke the silence by saying, “He said that as if he’s not getting lucky later this afternoon.” They laughed. I blushed. I don’t think I got lucky.
  • Sure, I go on a bunch of dates, but I rather be in a committed relationship. I miss having a best friend and someone to list as my emergency contact.
  • Jerry Jones is often villified, but he and the Cowboys recently did a kind thing.

  • Speaking of Batman, this reminds me of a scene from The Dark Knight.

  • I feel like this was a pretty solid Bag of Randomness.
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Bag of Randomness for Friday, January 19, 2024

  • Dana Carvey recently lost his son. This week he returned to his podcast with David Spade. He mentioned going to church, which made me curious about his spiritual life, “We’re all together and we do a lot of fun things,” Carvey said. “We hike, we go to church. You just want to make sure that you keep moving.”
  • I’m not sure why I’ve had a stigma of East Texas since childhood. In particular, Tyler. I think my brother had a playoff game there and I didn’t have a good time or the long drive out there. In my Texas history class, when I learned the city was named after the president in office when Texas was annexed, I thought that was pretty cool. As an adult, when I read about how that president betrayed the country he once led (he pledged his allegiance to the Confederacy, and his coffin was draped with its flag, making him the only president not to have the United States flag used), then I thought it was weird for a city to hold the name of a person in disrepute. Over time, I don’t think the name is held in disrepute at all because people don’t make the connection and link history as I often like to do.
  • I think I wasn’t a good student when it came to the Civil War. It’s possible that my school system did a poor job of teaching it, but I feel more responsible for my lack of knowledge, even if my teachers would disagree. But I remember the first time I came across the name Jefferson Davis. I was courting who would become my wife and we were visiting her sister and brother-in-law in Marshall, in East Texas. They lived on a street or avenue named, “Jeff Davis.” I knew who Jim Davis was (the creator of Garfield the Cat), but not Jeff. Smartphones weren’t a thing then, so I had to look it up, which I did during a break at work. The top results stated it was a shortened name for Jefferson Davis, and I read about who he was.  I was like, wow, they live on a street named after the leader of a man who betrayed his country. Why would a place do that? I don’t think I could live on a street named after such a person. Then, I slowly started to learn that East Texas is much different from the area of Texas I grew up in. In my neck of the woods, I guess you could say the South was respected, but wasn’t held in esteem, like East Texas.
  • Why did I lead off with those two bullet points? It’s just stuff that came to mind after I was reading about the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man. Yes, for you non-comic book character fans, there are multiple versions of Spider-Man than just Peter Parker, I know it can be hard to keep up. His father was a Black police officer who shared the same name as the late president of the Confederacy. Though the character later changed his name, that’s another story. But, that led me to research why the author, who is white, used that name. It turns out it was the name of a friend’s father, and he never made the connection until readers pointed it out to him after publication.
  • Instant leader of the pack.

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Bag of Randomness for Thursday, January 18, 2024

  • Cowboys keeping Mike McCarthy? I’ll believe it if nothing happens over the weekend. Again, if I were writing NFL fan fiction, I’d have it where Jerry contacts Belichick by that back channel route I referenced earlier this week. The coach then calls Parcells for his thoughts. Parcells will say it never set well with him when Jerry brought in Terrell Owens, that Jerry is not a man of his word. That’s enough for Belichick to hear, and through that back channel informs Jerry that he isn’t interested. Jerry, then is able to save face and is never publically turned down and releases a statement it’s in the team’s best interest to keep McCarthy.
  • You may remember I had my kids over the night of Christmas Eve in 2022, which was extra cold that year. All was well when we left to go to our church’s candle-lit service. But when we got home, the garage was flooded. Water was coming out from the wall near the washing machine. Turning the water off at the connections didn’t stop things, so I had to turn the main valve off. I called my landlord, but there was no way I would get a plumber or any crew over that evening. To make things worse, the garage floor doesn’t slope outside. So, I did my best to sweep the water out with what I had available, a broom and a one-gallon wet/dry vac. That was a heck of a night. Yesterday around lunchtime, I left the house to pick up some prescriptions. When I arrived home, I found the garage flooded again. Thankfully, it wasn’t the night of Christmas Eve and I was only away for maybe 15 minutes. The landlord was sending a plumber who would be over in a few hours. I used my little wet/dry vac, but after bending and lifting from using and emptying it half a dozen times, my back was really starting to hurt. So, I thought I’d work on being more of an extrovert and instead of doing things myself, ask for a little help. So, I talked to my neighbor, and he loaned me a huge wet/dry vac. Oh man, that saved me a lot of work. I think in all, I vacuumed over twenty gallons of standing water.
  • I keep forgetting to write a little more about my trip to see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas and the very brief relationship I had with a girl who liked my profile on a dating app who was so beautiful, that there was no physical feature that could be added or taken away to make her better looking. Oh, I smitten I was. She gave me hope that someone great may be out there, and could be interested in me. She made me realize that when it came to dating since divorce, I’ve been doing a lot of settling in hopes of trying to find a best friend again.
  • I sent a text expressing how much I love and appreciate my closest friends last night when I heard the news that Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojević died of a heart attack at 46. All of us are 48 years old. Most were math majors, so it was no surprise when one of them said that 48 years is 2/3 of the 72 years that used to be life expectancy. I remember reading that life expectancy statistic in high school, circa 1993, which was for white males. My dad was 69 at the time. That was a major reason why I was a homebody and drove home at least once a month from college. Family always came first for me. You may remember that Dad had a cardiac episode and a pacemaker put in three days before my high school graduation. But, back to that stat and how it relates to us. Thankfully, all of us are non-smokers, and the overwhelming majority of those men in that statistic were smokers. And, medicine has advanced. But, we all know how unpredictable life can be and the curveballs that it will throw.
  • On the evening news, there was a segment on Nikki Haley’s comments about the U.S. never being a racist country. The reporter asked a person in a control group her thoughts, and she said, “Was she asleep during the Sixties?” Well, to be fair, and hopefully not come across as a smartass, but she was born in 1972 and totally missed that decade.
    • That, along with any talk of book banning, makes me think of this classic scene in Field of Dreams when Annie says,
    • And, anytime I hear a reference made about the Sixties, I think of this classic scene from the same movie.
  • The Mavs did well drafting this mature and encouraging 19-year-old. I like that he took the opportunity the reporter gave him and what he said. Sure, we’ve all heard the same message from an athlete a thousand times, but it encourages people like me who feel they are surviving life instead of thriving at it, who live alone, and have little to no family.

    Sidenote: I think it’s commendable that the reporter, Jonah Javad, ends the end of every 1-on-1 interview asking if the person has anything else they’d like to say or add. I literally ended every argument with the person I was married to the exact same way. The number of times she ever added or asked anything – zero. That led me to believe we were on the same page. Boy, was I wrong, and that’s why I never saw the divorce coming.

  • I hope you don’t read that as “negative zero,” because zero can neither be negative nor positive.
  • I think it’s pretty darn neat that every time Mark Cuban has sold a company, he gives all his employees some type of bonus. He’s doing that with the sale of the Mavericks, divvying up 30 million dollars. He was being interviewed by one of those employees yesterday on the radio, who has worked for the organization for 13 years. Cuban had to think about it for a second but said the bonus should be $75,000. I wonder what would happen if Cuban over-quoted the amount by mistake. Like, when the employee actually gets the bonus, it’s $55,000. Surely, Cuban would make up the difference.

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