My movie watching has really slowed down since football season started. At this rate, I'll be lucky to make it to 120 on the year.

83/2394. Stage Struck (1936)
Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Frank McHugh in a Busby Berkely movie musical about putting on a Broadway show should be a good time, but this only manages to be a forgettable uninspired mediocrity. One too many times to the well, I guess.

84/2395. Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948)
Okay, so this whole film is about a 49-year-old man (played perfectly by William Powell) panicking about his advancing age and starting a romantic relationship with a mermaid who is much, much younger than he is. As a 49-year-old man living in 2024, I find the whole thing more than a little cringy, admittedly in part because I cannot imagine wanting to make love to a fish.

85/2396. Suicide Squad (2016)
This is the first Suicide Squad movie, the bad one. And "bad" is an understatement. I realized while watching it that the sequel was written as a response to some of the fundamental errors in plot and characterizations this movie makes. Don't watch this. It's irredeemably awful.

86/2397. Tom Sawyer (1973)
Produced by Reader's Digest, it feels true to brand as an abridged version of the Mark Twain novel I read so many years ago. (That is definitely not how I remember the Injun Joe situation playing out.) The film is fine, but it is never again as good as the opening montage of Tom running and running and running and running at the sound of a riverboat whistle.

87/2398. The Big Knife (1955)
Clearly a stage play (an angry indictment of the Hollywood studio system) before being adapted to the big screen, the claustrophobic nature of the single location is befitting for the protagonist's emotional state, but it did try my patience.

More to come.

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UGA is playing at home today against Auburn... for Homecoming.

Auburn.

For Homecoming.

That really should excite me... but it doesn't. I just can't make myself care enough to spend a whole day driving to Athens and back for a sunburn.

Last year, I was in a funk in October and still had fun at the Kentucky game. So maybe I should go. Maybe I would have fun. But I just cannot imagine that this game ends up entertaining.

It's not you Bulldogs; it's me. Okay, after the last few weeks, maybe it is a little bit you. But don't take it personally. It is mostly me.

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Hour three of trying to replace a dishwasher (hour one of guy grinding stumps just outside the kitchen door), and the latest problem is the new dishwasher is too short to reach the countertop so I have to find some wood to put under the feet to raise it up and to do that I need to pull it back out of the recess but first I have to turn off the water at the street again because the under-cabinet waterline spigot won't fully close but only after I start turning off the master water line at the street do I realize that since yesterday a colony of fire ants has taken residence and because of mud in the hole the master water line won't fully turn off...

So now I'm sitting on the floor in the kitchen struggling not to scratch the ant bites and poison ivy (courtesy of my dogs) on my arms as I contemplate burning the house down.

Does this shit happen to other people?

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I type this at 1:28 AM with live weather coverage on WXIA TV telling me that Hurricane Helene is currently a category 2 storm as it passes over Valdosta headed north at about 20 miles per hour. There is minimal wind outside, but based on what I'm seeing, I expect it to pick up soon. That will no doubt bring trouble.

I've mentioned before that my neighborhood has power issues. Case in point, last night, after taking over 3 inches of rain totally unrelated to the hurricane, our power and cable went out. That's right, we were without power for 8 hours the day before a hurricane hit us. There's no telling what the state of our power grid will be by the time you read this.

I write this only to document a novel situation as I wait for the lights to go out again. I don't recall the last time a hurricane passed over Atlanta. I was certainly a Decatur resident when Opal moved through the city in 1995, but I don't remember that storm itself. That might have been the night that a limb fell through the windshield of my station wagon while I was at my girlfriend's apartment in Stone Mountain, but maybe not.

I have friends who remember being trapped in the Pink Pony, a "gentlemen's club," for 24 hours in what is now the city of Brookhaven. Their memories of Opal are much more vivid than mine. (I can only imagine the horrors. I met another friend of mine at The Pony for dinner one night, and a stripper rubbed herself all over my glasses, leaving me blind for the rest of the meal. I'm still irritated about that.)

Opal was 3 decades ago. In 2055, should I live that long, will I remember Helene? I sure hope not. That would mean that things go poorly. No one remembers mundanities. Just strippers.

UPDATE 1:50 PM: Nothing to see here. Helene wandered farther east than expected. Our biggest wind gust has been 11 MPH, and the power never even flickered.

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In 2023, only 22% of all NFL kickoffs were returned. That's boring TV, so for 2024, the NFL revamped the rules, creating a complicated mess they are marketing as the Dynamic Kickoff™ rule. So far, it's working. After 3 weeks, nearly 33% of all NFL kickoffs have been returned. Take that, going to the kitchen for snacks!

What is supposed to make the Dynamic Kickoff™ dynamic is that teams are forced to return the kicks. Assuming the ball lands in the newly designated Landing Zone™ (between the 20 yard line and the goal line), the new rules say you have to try and advance it. (Well, you have to unless the ball rolls into the end zone where you still cannot fair catch it but can surrender yourself to move your starting position out to the leading edge of the Landing Zone™. Oh, the technicality!)

However, if you are the kicking team, why would you ever willingly give your opponent the opportunity to return the kick? If a ball lands in the end zone or deeper, the receiving team gets the ball at the 30 yard line. This season NFL teams are averaging 26.8 yards per return (which is a smidgeon better than the 23 yards teams averaged in all of 2023 and a smidgeon worse than the 28.7 they averaged in 2022). Therefore, putting the ball on the 30 yard line is only a marginally worse outcome than the expected average return and has the added bonus of never surrendering a kickoff return touchdown.

As a matter of fact, even when touchbacks only brought the ball out to the 20, kicking it out of the back of the end zone was always the better strategy. A 0% chance of giving up a touchdown is always the best play, and the Dynamic Kickoff™ hasn't changed that calculation. I suspect that the 11% increase in returns is some combination of teams testing the new rules and kickers who are not capable of reliably hitting the end zone from 65 yards away. The first group is made of coaches who trust their guts over math; the second is a bunch of players who should be replaced with stronger legs. I expect both will get whittled down as the year goes on.

If it's not clear yet, I think the Dynamic Kickoff™ is a lousy rule. It does little to encourage teams to attempt returns and does nothing to repair the long-broken onside kick that has decimated the drama of late game come-from-behind attempts. It's a "solution" instituted by traditionalists who recognize a problem (danger of injuring players + boring mandatory change-of-possession plays) but are unwilling to take real steps to fix it. What it has given us is 11% more returns to the 26 yard line. Anyone need anything from the kitchen while I'm up?

UPDATE 10/1: Though 4 weeks, 18 of 32 NFL teams have a better kickoff touchback percentage than they had in 2023. Boy, that new Dynamic Kickoff rule is really doing it's job!

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