The multimillionaire Republican candidate for Georgia's U.S. Senate seat is running not one, not two, but three different AI-created commercials emphasizing how much money his Democratic opponent spends annually on hair and makeup. (The commercials aren't explicit, but other news reports place the total at $2,887.) I'm curious what he thinks this line of attack is accomplishing.

As a voter, am I supposed to be mad that someone spends campaign donations on their appearance? Given the cost of everything these days, three thousand for hair/makeup services doesn't strike me as extraordinarily excessive, especially for someone on television running for office. This line of attack seems particularly counterproductive given that it's the Republican party that has fully embraced the much more expensive artificial "Mar-a-Lago Face" (base price: $90,000).

Does the attacking candidate have market research indicating Georgians want their government representatives to look like unkempt trolls? Should we all get our haircuts from Great Clips? (Even they now charge at least $20 per basic monthly trim, tip not included.) I won't deny that a majority of us voted for a sunburnt orange with a bad comb-over, but if we love slobs, just being a candidate with splotchy five o'clock shadow should be enough to win the race without AI recreations to make your opponent look even better than he does in real life.

I assume that if stronger, more substantive attacks could be made, there wouldn't be three commercials with this silly complaint, leaving me with the feeling that all this has to be an old-fashioned attack on his opponent's manhood, as a Real Man would never use a beauty product more exotic than lye soap. Maybe someone should have told that to John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds; those ladies looked particularly good in makeup and wigs.

The particular candidate making these loud dog whistles has a history of employing people with extremely unpopular (some might say "anti-women" or "pro-Nazi") opinions and no qualms about using deep fakes of his opponent despite the current AI backlash, so I already had plenty of reasons to doubt his judgement. But no matter how many times you mention it, I just don't care if my representatives in Congress are spending their money on professional stylists. That's certainly a better use of cash than AI attack ads. At least the stylists are real people.

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In Metro Atlanta, all cars are required to pass an emission inspection each year in order to renew their tag and stay street legal. In theory, this is a good system to maintain our air quality. In practice, it has some problems.

I own my grandfather's 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue (which he explicitly told my father never to give to me) with only about 104,000 miles on it. For many years, I've spent too much money keeping it running. Right now, it has a broken smog filter system. I'd fix it, but parts are hard to come by, which is no surprise considering that GMC retired the entire Oldsmobile brand in 2004. After consulting with the local GMC dealership, my mechanic found and tested several potential aftermarket replacements, but none worked. Oldsmobile, it seems, didn't do a great job of documenting the parts necessary for a car they were discontinuing.

In their infinite wisdom, Georgia lawmakers foresaw this problem and allowed the Georgia's Clean Air Force (GCAF), which is responsible for oversight of the emissions testing, to give a car a waiver if it can be declared Non-Complying Obsolete. I applied for such a waiver. They denied my request. They spoke to my mechanic who explained the problem, and then they said their much more knowledgeable researchers could find suitable parts online, though they declined to share which parts they found. They suggested I look at Autozone, which I think was their way of politely telling me to go to hell. (I looked. Autozone does not have the part.)

The GCAF offers that I can still apply for a Repair Waiver if I spend a total of $1,176 on repairs. To date this year, I have spent $816 on parts from eBay and mechanics bills before we ran into this availability problem. What's the point of paying a mechanic another $360 to remove and reinsert the old parts over and over? Even if I did, I expect the GCAF would still find another polite way to tell me go to hell.

The "good" news is that there's another way to bypass the emission requirement: cars 25 years old and older are exempt from the requirement. By my math the Oldsmobile will be 25 years old in 2027. Although the tag expires on my birthday, I wrote a letter to my local tax commissioner's office asking if I could simply wait to renew in January. They said no. Apparently the 25-year exemption is somehow tied to my birthday, not the year of renewal. In response to my repeated pleas, they insist that they will not let me renew it with an emissions exemption until next September.

So, my options are

1. Donate to my mechanic $380 for a car that is increasingly not worth repairing and hope the GCAF will issue a waiver;

2. Cancel my insurance and mothball the car in my driveway for a year;

3. Try to sell a car with a permanently on "service engine soon" dashboard light to someone born in January; or

4. Move myself outside the Metro Atlanta area.

That last option is looking increasingly attractive.

I'm frustrated that despite my best efforts, I haven't found a solution that doesn't require me to buy a new house or a new car. But that's why everyone hates government, isn't it?

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FYI: My power is out again. Are we having fun yet?

UPDATE: Fixed. And in just under six hours this time!

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FYI: My power was out again yesterday.

Lights went out just after 5PM and came on again around 7PM, so it wasn't the longest outage, it just came at a bad time on one of the hottest days of the year. And, of course, it was the second outage in eight days.

What caused it? No idea. I drove around the neighborhood and saw no sign. Did someone cut down a tree? Georgia Power's notification said it was caused by "storm damage." On a cloudless, sunny day. With no wind. Sure, okay. Maybe lingering from last week, I guess.

It's hard to pretend we aren't living in end times when I'm starting to master the art of kerosene lamp maintenance.

UPDATE 4:40PM: My power is out again today!

Two days in a row, three outages in nine days. And counting. At least this time a thunderstorm really did pass through, so now's the time for yesterday's excuse, (increasingly misnamed) Georgia Power.

If the housing market wasn't so fucked up, we'd start looking for a new house. I'm so mad, I'm ready to start voting for some Democratic Socialists!

UPDATE 7:10PM: Estimated time of restoration is 9PM. I just took the boys for a walk around the neighborhood (better than sitting in my 80° house, I figured) and there are limbs down everywhere. So you get a pass this time, Georgia Power. There's nothing you can do against Mother Nature (except maybe proactively cut down more limbs or bury power lines or cut back on your fossil fuel plants). Nothing.

UPDATE 2:56AM: Power! (Just thought you'd like some closure.)

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I know they tell me I shouldn't be worried about invasive Joro spiders here in Georgia, but is no one else concerned that they spin one of the the strongest webs in the world and multiple Joro spiders hang out in the same web? Foreign gangs with nets hanging around just outside my garage? Between this and the rise of AI, I'm definitely not enjoying living in the future as much as I thought I would.

UPDATE: The morning after I posted this, I opened the back door to discover that a Joro spider had spun a giant web covering the doorway. He was just waiting for me to step out.... Is it still called paranoia if they really are out to get you?

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FYI: My power is out again.

Some rough weather came through the neighborhood yesterday afternoon. About 15 miles up the road, several trees and some traffic lights were downed. We thought we got through unscathed,, but no sooner had the sun gone down then the power went out. As I type this on my phone at midnight, it's been out for three hours. Georgia Power tells me a tree fell on our lines. Current estimated time of restoration is four hours from now.

This is the second extended outage this summer. It happened back on June during the day. At least at night I don't miss the air conditioning.

What's so wrong with my neighborhood that this sort of extended blackout happens at least twice a year? Isn't there a long term solution to this? I bet data centers don't have this problem.

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The hiccup in today's voting was that I had to do it twice. The first time I went all the way through the very long ballot for 31 local and state positions and studiously reviewed my choices only to have the system tell me it could not print my ballot, that I should remove my card and speak to an election officer. I did as instructed. The officer consulted another officer and together they decided I should just try again from the beginning. I cannot tell a lie: I selected a lot fewer boxes the second time through. Sorry, nonpartisan candidates for Judge - Superior Court Coweta Judicial Circuit (To Succeed C. Jephson Bendinger).

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Seeing that this blog doubles as my personal diary, I feel I need to make note of the passing of Friend Michael, killed too young by cancer.

Rummaging around my archives for a pic of Mike to commemorate the sad occasion, I found this, taken (probably by James) in the parking lot of Medieval Times in Lawrenceville in June 2013.

Talking comic books and acting like big dorks. Yeah, I think pretty accurately encapsulates our three decade friendship.

Thanks for the good times, Mike.

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The only downside to watching over two hundred hours of Olympic coverage in recent weeks is the constant bombardment of advertisements for the latest entry in the Georgia governor race, Rick Jackson. Apparently, he's a billionaire, and I only know that because A) he brags about it in his ads, and B) he bought ads in seemingly every possible commercial break. From someone who likes to remind us that he's a self-made billionaire, that doesn't seem like a very effective use of money.

The story of his by-his-bootstraps, up-from-foster-care wealth isn't the only thing I've learned from his commercials. He's also really into cutting taxes. A billionaire who doesn't want to pay taxes? How novel. I wonder if neither of us pays, which one comes out ahead?

To be fair, it seems everyone in the race wants to cut my taxes. Getting rid of income tax is a hot topic in Georgia politics right now. I say "right now," but it's a fact of life that no one ever wants to pay taxes. And, as an added bonus, if the state government doesn't have any money, then they don't have to worry that some of that money might be spent on people who "want to sit on your butt, binge watch Netflix, and scarf down Cheetos," to quote the Rick Jackson on my television. What kind of worthless scum likes watching movies and eating delicious snacks? Fuck those losers!

It would be disingenuous to call Rick Jackson an outsider in Georgia politics. He has long been a prominent (and deep-pocketed) donor to state and national Republicans. His late entry into this election indicates he doesn't think he's getting his money's worth from the current candidates. Though I'm no fan of his recent vow to become "Trump's favorite governor," I have read enough about Jackson to suspect he's probably a better human being than his vainglorious attempt to buy an election would indicate. It's nice to think that there are very fine people on both sides.

Therefore, I assume Jackson would be pleased to hear that many, many, many repeated viewings of his life story have already left an impact on my life. I'm so sick of his commercials that I have nicknamed the mute button on my remote the "Rick Jackson button."

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Since I usually post about Georgia home football games, I suppose I should mention that the final tickets in my annual season package were for today's home finale against the 1-9 Charlotte 49ers. I did not go. I gave the tickets to the daughter of a high-school friend who went to Georgia Tech (ha-ha!), which means I watched from the comfort of my couch as freshman running back Bo Walker's two-touchdown debut paved the way to a 35-3 route. Good for Bo. I hope he makes a lot of other people's money playing ball.

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