15/2447. Balls Out (2014)
If you see the title to this movie about flag football and are inspired to remember Dodgeball, yeah, that's exactly what they wanted. Too bad they can't deliver. The script is meta-texturally aware of all the cliches in this type of movie, but then it completely fails to elevate any of that material. Frankly, I found the only amusing bits to come from Saturday Night Live (and AT&T commercial) alum Beck Bennett, who successfully plays his part as the cheating bully (a la Ben Stiller in Dodgeball) way over the top (a la Ben Stiller in Dodgeball).

16/2448. Good Burger (1997)
Speaking of Saturday Night Live alumni, of course this based on the recurring skit from Nickelodeon's sketch-show for teens, and while young Keenan Thompson is imminently watchable, all of the real comedy comes from Keenan's partner Kel, who is very good at playing the good-hearted moron.

If there is a movie with more Coca-Cola product placement in it, I haven't seen it.

17/2449. Young and Innocent (1937)
More of a thriller than a whodunnit, director Alfred Hitchcock makes sure that the audience knows the good natured protagonist is (probably) innocent of murder from the beginning, which is key to building his romantic relationship with the police chief's daughter. It's the prototype of a Hallmark Mystery Movie!

18/2450. Conclave (2024)
I was pulling for this to win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. I mean, I hadn't seen any of the other contenders, but this has a really, really amazing cast and is suspenseful and as illuminating about the human condition as any other great work of art. Very well done.

19/2451. The Champ (1931)
Speaking of Oscar, this won for Best Original Story, and I can only guess that's because 1931 was an off year for everyone. In a nutshell, a kid (Jackie Cooper) watches his ne'er-do-well alcoholic father (Wallace Beery) let him down in every possible way. Original! Beery also won the award for Actor, but so far as I can tell, he was only playing himself. I found it all very unpleasant. You can do better, kid.

More to come.

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Look, I know I have in the past said that there's nothing much more to a plumber's job than a willingness to enter uncomfortable small spaces and get dirty, but I'll at least admit that the secret to their job is knowing enough to enter any uncomfortably small space only once.

I, on the other hand, seem to be incapable of working on pipes without breaking something in addition to what I was trying to fix. For example, the last time I repaired the rotted drain pipes under the kitchen sink (in November 2018), I ended up needing to cut the still-serviceable sink tailpiece to get it to fit with the new pieces. But I cut it a little too short; it ended up just long enough to barely hold a washer with no room to spare. We got away with that for a while, but gravity won out eventually. So this week, when I spotted a leak for the second time in a month, I went to Home Depot, bought a replacement, brought it home, cut it to an appropriate length, went to screw it tight... and promptly broke the sink strainer basket.

Ok, technically I didn't break the strainer. I just torqued it hard enough to dislodge the old plumbers putty that was sealing it in place. Without the seal, it leaked much worse than the problem I was fixing. Too bad I didn't have any fresh plumber's putty. So another trip to Home Depot was in order.

The one smart thing I did was clean the old putty out out of the sink before getting in my car, and while doing that, I discovered that the nut holding the old strainer in place was also stripped and the whole strainer would need to be replaced. (How could that have happened? See November 2018 again.) Whew. I would have hated to have discovered that only after I came back with fresh plumber's putty. I draw the line at going to Home Depot three times in a day.

Of course, clearing out the old plumber's putty made my hands dirty, so I did what the pandemic conditioned me to do and promptly washed my hands... in the sink that was now missing both a tailpipe and a strainer basket. D'oh. No professional plumber would have made that mistake, either.

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Captain D's is currently running an ad campaign that should be considered a war crime. When my television starts chanting "Fish D'Lish," I have to drive for the remote's mute button before the repetition drives me mad (or madder than I already am, anyway).

Once upon a time, I heard Stephen Colbert suggest that the best way to kill an earworm is to sing a shorter earworm that "cannot loop." His example was "by Mennen" as sung at the end of Speed Stick commercials. John Oliver suggested the "Ricola" yodel, and that's the one that usually works for me. I've been singing "Ricola" a lot lately.

On a marginally related note, I've recently been playing with the Talkback accessibility option on my phone. Theoretically, I could use it to control my phone hands free, but I've been using it to read Wikipedia articles out loud while I walk the dogs. Today I listened to the story of the Second Peloponnesian War. I found it amusing to hear my phone insist on calling the Persian king "Xerxes Eye."

That led me to wonder what Talkback's narrator would call this website, which has a made-up name I brainstormed on a napkin in my first apartment in Athens. Everyone seems to get it wrong on the first try. To my surprise, the phone handled "wriphe" perfectly. (For the record, it's pronounced like "rife," which was Merriam-Webster.com's Word of the Day on Sunday, and I'm going to have to steal their explanation to be another tagline for this site: "Rife Wriphe usually describes things that are very common and often—though not always—bad or unpleasant.")

So of course you know what I tested Talkback on next. Hint: It rhymes with "dish o'fish." What can I say? Advertising works.

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No matter what the calendar says, spring is here. You can tell by all the thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado database, the city of Newnan, Georgia, has been hit by five tornadoes since 1974. An average of once a decade doesn't seem so bad, but three of those have hit since 2020. One of those brushed the entrance to my neighborhood. Another leveled the local high school.

Also according to NOAA, "Severe Storms" have accounted for over 50% of all the disasters to strike Georgia since 1980. (That category doesn't include "Tropical Cyclones" or "Flooding," which combine for an additional 23%.) Here in the Bible Belt, we like to thank Jesus when a tornado takes out our house but leaves us alive. Given how frequently the weather strikes these days, I guess that means Jesus loves us more than he used to.

I am not a climatologist, but given that tornadoes are driven by heat thermal energy in the atmosphere, it's probably no coincidence that the ten warmest years in recorded history are also the past ten years. This bodes poorly for the near future, especially in the current political environment where combatting climate change is taking a back seat to, well, everything else. (Which is why the current administration has proposed cutting the NOAA staff in half. Tornadoes might be more common than ever, but at least they're getting harder to track!)

I have started paying attention when the forecast calls for severe weather. Not that I can do a lot about it, other than make sure that I'm in the basement. Since I live in a basement, that's not too hard. But, as a famous slaveholder once said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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