Right now, if you ask Google how to "define misspelled" (you know, as one does when they have doubts about whether they have spelled the commonly misspelled word "misspelled" with the appropriate numbers of es, ls, and ses), you'll get this:

If you're a pedantic bastard like me, you may have noticed that the past tense is given as "misspelled" (as expected) but the past tense verb used in the example sentence is actually "misspelt," which is not among the variants listed for verb tenses. Did Google make a mistake? Obviously, further research was needed.

Although "spelt" has been listed as an alternative form of "spelled" since Noah Webster's very first 1806 A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language*, the word "misspelt" does not appear among the several hundred thousand words in my beloved 1977 Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged, Second Edition. Nor does it appear now on the Merriam-Webster website. Therefore we can be pretty sure that "misspelt" isn't an English word, at least not in America.

Fortunately for everyone, Google does give its sources, and their dictionary is provided by Oxford Languages, which is an arm of the Oxford University Press which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, the most highly esteemed dictionary of English English. Sure enough, those Brits have no Puritanical American qualms about unconventional spelling:

So what lesson, if any, can be drawn from this exercise? Is Google surreptitiously trying to force American to learn a foreign language? Are the British playing the long game to get Americans back for the War of 1812? All I know for sure is that it's harder than I thought to misspell "misspell."

* Technically, America's first dictionary spelled them "fpelled" and "fpelt" where the old-school long s was printed using the f letterform on the era's moveable type printing press. It's worth noting that Webster was considered an eccentric in his day for even attempting to standardize spelling. Even Shakespeare could have cared less about which letters went in which words. Per Love's Labor's Lost, act V, scene 1, lines 45-46 in the 1623 edition of the First Folio: "Yes, yes, he teaches boyes the Horne-booke: What is Ab speld backward with the horn on his head?"

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25/2457. The Search (1948)
Montgomery Clift turns in a great, naturalistic performance here in his first starring role as a young American G.I. trying to help a war orphan in the ruins of Berlin. It's a very good movie. In fact, by focusing attention on the orphans and their broken world (similar to but less humorous than 2019's Jojo Rabbit), it manages the rare feat of being anti-war without glorifying the violence.

It seems unlikely Coke gave this production any money, but If the filmmakers really wanted to hide the product, they could have used a bigger towel.

26/2458. The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)
Most of the entertainment value of this comes from watching motion picture studios entering the talkie era figuring out how to create the musical genre in real time. It fails as a whole, but it does have its moments. (Buster Keaton's crossdressing mermaid dance, sadly, is not one of them.) Jack Benny is the highlight as one of two Masters of Ceremonies.

27/2459. Flow (2024)
Yeah, Oscar got this one right. It's captivating. Definitely watch it with your pets: even Henry enjoyed watching it. (More accurately, I think he enjoyed listening to it. The soundtrack is all recordings of real animals.)

28/2460. Forbidden (1932)
This early Frank Capra is pure dreck melodrama without any of the audience-pleasing uplifting treacle that would become the director's trademark. I've often pooh-poohed Capra, but this could easily be my least favorite Capra film. (No, I did not know it was Capra when it came on, or I might have just turned the TV off.)

29/2461. Naked Acts (1996)
Watched on TCM in February before our Glorious Leader outlawed Black History, this is a mid-90s indie about an aspiring actress (imagined as the child of a Pam Grier type) who has body issues and a lot of baggage as she confronts the expectations of a male-dominated film industry. The budget is low and the talent is clearly raw, but the script is good and the finished product very watchable.

More to come.

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Today is the The Good One®'s fourth birthday!

I told Henry he had to sit real nice for a birthday portrait, and he did.

However, I think his brother is starting to get jealous of all that special birthday attention.

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I don't know what in specific I thought I was saving this for, so I'll just put this here:

*This is an actual quote. Though I have started repeating it in sad desperation at what now passes itself off as American government, Colbert said it largely in jest at the end of his "Meanwhile" rant on August 14, 2024, in response to a July 25, 2024, article in the Associated Press about the Ohio Supreme Court's 4-3 decision that deboned chicken wings advertised as "boneless" may still contain bones. Per the report, the majority ruled that "boneless" was a style of preparation not a guarantee, and consumers should have the common sense to consume them with due caution without dining establishments fearing lawsuits from choking victims. I tend to agree with the court here, but I can see the point of the three dissenting justices that Americans are probably much, much dumber than the court gives them credit for.

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Am I keeping track of this? Power went out last night at 9:30 as a thunderstorm blew in, and it's been out for 15 hours so far. I turned on the generator this morning so that I could have a cup of coffee. (It's like camping in your house! I hate camping!) I haven't dared open the freezer, but the puddle is water under the fridge doesn't bode well.

I hear a tree fell on the power line. It's always a tree falling on a power line. So explain to me again why don't we bury the power lines?

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When I left the neighborhood this morning at 8 AM to take Dad for cataract surgery, there was a fleet of Georgia Power trucks restricting traffic at the entrance to my neighborhood. When I passed back by the neighborhood with Dad in the car 30 minutes later, they were still there. When we came back by 4 hours later, they were still there. I made a mental note to come home by way of the neighborhood's other entrance (which is technically an entrance to the adjacent development, but we share a connecting street on the back side).

But then, on the final leg of this trip, while thinking about where I was going to turn, I drove past the dental office about a mile up the street and got to thinking about how the young hygienist I recently saw at a different dentist's office talked so much that maybe hygienist schools teach students to always be agreeable to clients and prattle to distract them from the scraping and what a funny word "prattle" is and what its etymology might be and how rarely we use the word "prattle" except in the context of hygienists who talk too much and the They Might Be Giants song "Lucky Ball & Chain" except the word repeated in the chorus of that song is actually "rattling"... and then I turned into my regular neighborhood entrance where I usually do and saw the muddy tire tracks on the road and belatedly realized that I had intended to turn elsewhere.

The good news is that the Georgia Power trucks had already left.

The bad news is that I probably shouldn't be allowed to drive a car.

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On April 1, the high was 77°. On April 2 and 3, the high was 84°. On April 4 and 5, the high was 85°. (Atlanta broke a 54-year record high.) They say it'll be cooler next week, but I decided I'd seen enough of my poodles lying around panting, so they got their first clipper cut of the earlier-than-expected summer season yesterday.

I love cutting on my living topiaries. It's very relaxing for me, and the boys don't complain too much. Louis mostly likes the attention, but Henry will make himself scarce if he sees me moving towards the scissors storage, so I have to be sneaky!

I always leave the whiskers a little longer around Henry's muzzle, but as you can see, I generally trim Louis completely. I think this is the last time I'll be doing that. Sure, he's cute with short hair, but when fuzzy, he looks a more like a teddy bear, which really suits his personality better.

Meanwhile, Henry's just ready for a break in the pollen and heat.

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20/2452. Reality Bites: A Hannah Swensen Mystery (2025)
The installments written by star Julia Sweeney have solid mysteries (although it's pretty clear that a lot of plot-tightening is happening in the editing suite), but they tend to go a little heavy on melodramatic characterization, especially for the mother, whose style of comic relief grows closer to a Jerry Lewis performance in each installment.

21/2453. Hero at Large (1980)
John Ritter plays a "real life" super hero in this very gentle comedy. It's so gentle, in fact, I wondered who the target audience is. There's not enough action (and too much drama) for kids, and its story is too thin to keep the attention of adults. The premise has been done better as both parody and satire in comics, television, and movies in the decades before and since. Frankly, it's just not very deep or very funny, and that means it's just not very good.

As a general rule, I don't always include shots of incidental Coca-Cola advertising, but these are pretty prominent in the opening sequence, so here you go.

22/2454. Hamlet 2 (2008)
See? This is how you poke society in the eye with a sharp stick and make them laugh at the same time. It's just so absurd in all the best ways, like Mel Brooks' The Producers, that I was often blindsided by the more subtle punchlines. Would watch again.

23/2455. Hamlet (1948)
Lawrence Olivier's adaptation abridges the original to get the time down, I guess. This sort of thing is done all the time when adapting novels, but Shakespeare? It's pretty, and the climax is staged well, but I really missed Rosencratz and Guildenstern, and, frankly, it seemed to me that there just wasn't enough death in this incarnation of Denmark.

24/2456. The One and Only Dick Gregory (2021)
A documentary biography of the controversial comedian who dared to call out society for its hypocrisy. He strikes me as too often sanctimonious, but maybe he earned that by being right (and angry and bitter) about so many injustices so many of us tolerate and, unintentionally or otherwise, perpetuate.

More to come.

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