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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A true story:

WALTER:
Give me a hug.

WALTER'S MOM:
(takes a step back)
Why?

End scene.

Working title: Unconditional Love Is a Myth.

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10/2442. Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Before there was To Kill a Mockingbird.... Actually, it's kind of surprising how much the two stories cover the same ground. Mockingbird does it with more style and grace, but Intruder, rough as it is around the edges, doesn't pull any punches. Good movie.

11/2443. Murder! (1930)
Does anyone ever talk about the worst Hitchcock films? Ok, so it's better than Marnie (and maybe The Trouble with Harry), and, yeah, sure, it's got some clever scenes, but overall I found it terribly, terribly boring with some of the worst written and delivered dialog. (How much of that is due to it being an early talkie?) Yawn.

12/2444. 3 Women (1977)
If there's anything worse than hearing someone describe their dream, it's watching a movie of it. In this case, the dreamer was Robert Altman, and he has filled it with enough "symbols" that he hopes your over-evolved monkey brain will have a field day trying to decipher as opposed to, you know, actually having a narrative or plot or meaning. For example, one of the women obsessed with superficial commercial things has a yellow car (and yes, the importance of the color is called out in the dialogue) and late in the film takes a delivery of Coca-Cola from this truck:

Is this somehow significant? You tell me. And then tell me how you feel about your mother.

13/2445. The Kid (1921)
Maybe I've been selling Charlie Chaplin short all these years. The Kid is actually pretty good cinema, even it if does jerk the tears a little too hard for my tastes in the third act that has a "comedy" dream sequence for no other apparent reason than the main story was just too short. (Obviously, I'm not willing to bury all my hatchets with the Little Tramp.)

14/2446. Appointment with Death (1988)
Watched with Mom. We had both read this Agatha Christie novel and remembered how the murder was committed (the movie certainly isn't shy about telegraphing it) but not the guilty party. It's not one of Christie's best, but any time spent watching Lauren Bacall is time well spent.

More to come.

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Breaking news! My 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue, which cost me $1,728.86 in mechanic bills to keep running in 2024, has already cost me an additional $1,254.43 in the first six weeks of 2025 alone (for valve gasket covers, power window assembly switch, and wheel bearings). And it *still* needs that new set of tires. This is becoming a problem.

My first car, by which I mean the first car to which I held the title, was a 1985 Crown Victoria Country Squire station wagon. Mom gave it to me when I went to college. (She bought herself a Mazda Miata. Mid-life crisis much?) I drove it until the transmission broke. It wasn't the only thing on the car not working, and I made the decision to sell it rather than spend thousands I did not have to repair it. We all loved it, and in hindsight, I might have done things differently, but maybe not. I'm sure I really thought I was making the best decision I could at the time.

My second car was a used 1990 Honda Acura. It soon developed a leaky sun roof that was more expensive to repair than the Country Squire's transmission. I didn't fix it, either. Eventually the cabin smelled of mildew which I tried to hide with vanilla air fresheners. You can begin to understand why my fourth car was an open-top 1995 Jeep Wrangler.

(Honorable mention to my third car, a very '90s burgundy and beige pregnant egg, a 1992 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, which I inherited from my late grandmother. I didn't keep it long before selling it to my father after he wrecked whatever his latest car was. I borrowed it back from him for a 24-hour road-trip down to Jacksonville for a Jaguars/Dolphins Monday Night Football game on October 12, 1998. That trip is most memorable for B) the terrible headache I had on the entire 8-hour drive home because my poverty and anxiety kept me from stopping to get anything to eat, and A) my yelling "I'm going to kill him" at the highway patrolman who pulled us over for a broken taillight. The "him" in this case was Dad, who had assured me the car was in perfect condition for driving, but the cop certainly didn't know that. Thankfully, my companion on that trip, Matt, has always been a fast talker, and we're both white.)

The point here is that I really need to start thinking about throwing in the towel on the Oldsmobile. Is it time I draw a line in the sand? How much is too much? If I have to be spending so much money on a car, I'd rather be spending it on the Jeep.

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Note to future Walter: Mom has owned a Ford Escape for six years. At the end of the first three years, the battery died, and I replaced it. It was a total pain in the ass.

In their infinite wisdom, Ford decided to hide the battery deep under the cowling for the windshield wipers, which means that the wiper assembly has to be disassembled before the battery can be removed. Because of the amount of labor involved, my local Advance Auto Parts refused to do it.

I mention all that now only because it's been three years, and the battery died again, and I was wondering how long it had been since the last time I had this particular pain in my ass. Apparently I didn't mention it here on Wriphe.com at the time. I guess I thought I'd remember. (That was awfully careless of you, past Walter!) Therefore, I post this here so that when I look back from 2028, I can see when I last had this particular pain in my ass.

For the record, Mom's beaux changed the battery this time, and he did it by removing the air cleaner assembly in front of the battery instead of trying to take the wiper assembly apart. He says it was a total pain in the ass.

Maybe in 2028, we should just have it towed to a mechanic.

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Today, while casually discussing bulls with my father (as one does), I mentioned that ten times more people in the United States die every year from cattle than from shark attacks. My father asked where I got my data, and when I told him it came from the CDC, he told me the CDC lies about its death numbers and should never be trusted.

I immediately assumed he was talking about COVID, which is a topic he likes to downplay, so I tried to be diplomatic and agreed that the pandemic was chaotic and the CDC was an imperfect organization hindered by politics and could only report what it was told by states like New York and Florida, which were both sued for intentionally misleading the public about COVID cases. I also agreed that the CDC even admitted that their numbers were sometimes flawed (sometimes by man, many thousands) and had to revise their numbers over time based on updated data and data collection methodology. I concluded that the CDC's numbers were probably now as close as we were going to get to accurate numbers and could still be useful.

And he said, "Of course they're correct now. Two people resigned over it."

Whether he was implying that those two noble souls refused to participate in the CDC's malicious miscounting or were taking responsibility for it, I cannot say. Whatever the case, if he was now agreeing that the current data set was useful and could be used for rough analysis why did he say it could never be trusted in the first place?

By this time I had already had enough of his bullshit, and I just couldn't take any more. So I stormed out. Was my response rational? No, definitely not. But it's the best I can do some days.

For the record, if you can believe anything these days, the CDC counted specifically 22 cases where people were killed by cattle in each year between 2003-2008 (in just four states!). Meanwhile, the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) indicates that sharks kill fewer than 10 people globally annually, and only about 1 per year in the US. So I was wrong, you're statistically about twenty times more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark.

Some days I just can't be right about anything.

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Mom is participating in her annual college football bowl game pool, where she tries to correctly predict winners against the spread in every bowl game. I never participate myself, but I do always root for her picks.

The first game of the pool was last Saturday's IS4S Salute to Veterans Bowl (formerly the Camellia Bowl) and Mom picked South Alabama to cover 9.5 points. They very nearly did, if only Western Michigan (which has one of the country's worst bowl game winning percentages) hadn't kicked a late field goal to cut the difference to 7 points at game's end. Those dicks!

The question I was asking myself late in the game was whether gambling on the outcome actually made the game more fun. Yes, I cheered when S. Alabama kicked an extra point to go up by 10, but I found myself rooting against W. Michigan's kicker late.

This is exactly why I don't play fantasy football: cheering for or against individual players to compile stats is not nearly as satisfying as pulling for a team to win a game. I'm sure I would have been at least equally entertained by W. Michigan's attempt at a late comeback if I wasn't counting points and waving my fists in the air at the football gods.

Mom never does great with her picks, in large part because she never picks against a team she wants to see win. I think that's wise. And I still agree with picking against Western Michigan in a bowl game, especially since they are now 2-10 all time. Those dicks!

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I've been to a lot of Georgia games, but I've really never been to any game like this before.

The forecast for the rare Black Friday night game was for severe cold, so I lost my seat mate. Mom made the right decision. I've never been so cold in Athens, and for more than three quarters of football, the Bulldogs didn't do anything to help. (I didn't feel so cold in the fourth quarter, but that was because I really needed to pee and couldn't worry about both discomforts at once. When I finally went, I felt colder than ever.) It may have be the worst, the most inept football I've ever seen the Bulldogs play in person.

GA Tech led 17-0 at halftime, and I kept telling myself that if they stretched that lead any, I was going to go home. But they couldn't. Georgia finally started scoring, but when Tech scored with less than 6 minutes to restore a 2 touchdown lead, half the stadium gave up. I don't blame them. At the time, it seemed the sane decision. Sadly, that only made the rest of us colder because we lost our windbreak.

And then somehow, very late in the game, UGA came back to tie. So after a bad game, they played one overtime. Then another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. Eight in all. It was the most bonkers thing I've ever seen in Sanford Stadium.

Think I'm exaggerating? This is the ESPN Win Probability graph of the game.

The football was so crazy, I don't know that I have space in my brain for all the other notable things. Poor Uga (whose name is, ironically, Boom) tried to run away from the pre-game fireworks. The 50th anniversary of the Alumni Band played at halftime. Georgia's decision to go for 2 when down by 11. The crowd deciding that GT was faking injuries to slow the game down and booing those players when they were helped off the field. The failure to explain overtime rules to the crowd and their resulting confusion when Georgia didn't attempt a kick for the win in the second OT. The scoreboard gave up on counting overtimes after 5. And have I mentioned the cold?

When I thought I was going to be leaving early, I decided I would post a picture of the stadium at the moment I finally decided to leave. Ultimately, at three minutes after midnight, this is that moment:

Truth be told, I didn't even leave then. I watched the Tech players crawl off the field and waited for the presentation of the Governor's Cup (by the Governor). Then, when the Georgia student section finally left, so did I.

I'm home now (4:32 AM), and I'm still cold.

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A year and a week have passed since I last visited Athens, GA, but today* I attended my first football game of the year to see the #12 Georgia Bulldogs play the #7 Tennessee Volunteers.

Things have changed a little in the past year. For one thing, the Bulldogs aren't quite as dominant now as then, struggling to get started in what eventually became a convincing win. For another, the local high school where we have parked for years has become a new unofficial tailgating lot, meaning we had to find a new place to park the car. Third, the stadium now sells beer, though the raucous atmosphere didn't seem too out of place for a Tennessee game. Very late starts always portend a carnival atmosphere in the stands.

Fourth and perhaps worst, the stadium now has fireworks. Those aren't rain clouds in the photo above. There were launchers all around the stadium; fireworks went up after every Bulldogs' score, and ash fell down on the fans. Ick.

Mom was my companion, and she was a real trooper. She doesn't really like cold night games (she prefers to be curled up with a heating pad and a good book by 9 PM), but in recognition that this could be one of the last chances to watch a game in Sanford Stadium with me, she soldiered on without complaint. Thanks, Mom!

* By "today" I really mean yesterday. Technically, I'm typing this at 3:28 AM on November 17, but that's only because I didn't get back to Newnan until 2:40. It was a 7:45 PM kickoff, the game ran the full four quarters, and we didn't even get from the stadium back to the parking lot until 12:08 AM. As I said, Mom was a real trooper.

Additional note: For about a half hour prior to the game, Kirk Herbstreit was on the field with his newest travel companion, Peter, who is apparently the brother of Kirk's late golden retriever, Ben. Herbstreit certainly looked to be a great dog daddy as he let anyone who wanted get a picture with Peter, who eagerly accepted all the head scratches he could get. Go dogs!

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We have two types of frozen hamburger patties in our freezer. One is a 1/3-pound angus beef patty, and the other is a cheaper 1/4-pound "classic" (read: red slime) beef patty. I like the angus, but we also bought the "classic" because, as I just said, it's cheaper. The cheaper patty tastes like what you get from the concession stand at a high school football game, which is fine enough if you're in a high school football stadium. But at home, I like something with a little less salt. (The "classic" patty is probably the healthier option, as it has fewer calories, less fat, less cholesterol, and even a little bonus iron and fiber. Just don't tell my achy breaky heart that it also has nine times the sodium!)

Tonight I cooked burgers for Mom and me, and since I don't like the "classic" patties and she claims she can't taste any difference (and I'd be wasting food if I threw away perfectly good frozen meat), I made one of each, a quarter-pounder for her and a third-pounder for me. Except I put both of them on the same platter, and you can guess which one Mom grabbed for herself.

When I complained, she blamed me for the error. How was she supposed to know that they were two different types of patties? If I was a better cook, maybe the "classic" would look and taste better. If I was a better son, I would have put the correct patty on a bun and brought it to her already made like those fancy Five Guys instead of asking her to make it herself like a low-rent Fuddruckers. If I was a better person, I wouldn't even have mentioned her mistake.

Counter argument: If she had raised me better, I wouldn't be living in her basement and dining on frozen hamburgers.

I tease. Mom, I know you're reading this, so let me confess that while I truly was looking forward to eating the patty I thought would taste better, I am not and never will be mad at you for eating my hamburger. It makes me happy for you to eat what you want, and I'll always humbly take whatever leftovers you leave me. Because I don't have any other choice. You already ate the good stuff.

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