It's primary season in Georgia, and right now there are at least three (three!) leading Republican candidates for governor currently airing television commercials during every Jeopardy! commercial break vowing to get tough on the same issue. Not taxes. Not jobs. Not education. Not data centers or immigration or crime or polluted water or unaffordable housing or traffic congestion or gas prices. The issue they're worried about is "men" stealing trophies in women's sports.

Yes, I do live in a basement, and no, I don't have a daughter, but I still have to wonder if that's really the biggest issue facing Georgians today. Or ever, really. Outsports.com lists only five openly transgendered athletes playing for Georgia teams the past twenty years. Exactly zero of those were biological men who joined women's teams in search of fame and fortune. Zero examples would seem to make this a solution in search of a problem.

Even recognizing there were a couple of swim meets in the recent past where transgendered women stormed our borders and won (or, as in the case of Riley Gaines, placed fifth), this still doesn't seem to be a problem because A) the Georgia High School Association banned transgendered girls from playing as girls on high school teams in 2022, B) the NCAA banned the same at the college level in February 2025, and C) Georgia passed a state law ("The Riley Gaines Act") banning them from any event statewide in April 2025. It's not (yet) illegal to be transgendered in Georgia, but they better not try kicking any girls' balls.

So we ask the question: why are all these Republican governor candidates spending so much time and money decrying a vanishingly rare situation that is already triply illegal in the state they say they know enough about to run? I guess it's too much work to come up with a plan to address the ongoing homeless crisis or social media monopolies when you can just keep holding up your pitchfork and yelling "Won't somebody please think of the trans children?"

All I can say for sure is that it doesn't look like I'll be voting Republican this year. Again.

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Great news! I may have finally killed my "The Way" brain worm (details here) with the following song which I have listened to over and over and over again for the past three days, not because I have to but because I want to. (Is it still a compulsion if you enjoy it?)

Whiskey Peak Saloon featuring Leo P by Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli

Lucky for you, if you don't want to listen on YouTube, Netflix has you covered with links to plenty of other platforms here: netflixmusic.ffm.to/whiskypeaksaloon.

TURN UP YOUR SPEAKERS AND BOOGIE.

(And before you ask, yes, I have watched both seasons of the Netflix live-action One Piece series. I enjoyed them a quite a lot.)

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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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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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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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By chance, while waiting for an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to start, I stumbled into the end of an episode of a series I'd never seen before: The White Lotus.

In particular, my first glimpse of any The White Lotus was a scene in which 53-year-old Walton Goggins put his tongue on the nipples of much younger Aimee Lou Wood. And it creeped me out.

I could go on at length about what I think creeped me out about that scene (in fact, I've spent the past hour typing and deleting as I grasp at straws), but all I can say for sure is that it makes me very uncomfortable thinking about how they rehearsed and shot that scene in real life.

If the actors both had input and were genuinely okay with their participation (as a Googled article at Elle.com suggests), well, they are both adults and professionals, after all. So long as they had agency to consent and/or refuse, more power to them, I guess.

But that doesn't mean that I'm going to be watching any more White Lotus episodes. They creep me out.

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For the record, I'm still watching After Midnight, even though I still think it should be a half-hour show, because it cheers me up to see Taylor Tomlinson genuinely laughing at the jokes of her fellow comedians.

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I feel like that joke was aimed squarely at Jason Sudeikis (born September 18, 1975, SNL cast member from 2003-2013, host in 2021, and performer on the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special) and me (who did none of those things but is enjoying the company).

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I was reading in today's newspaper about how those two astronauts that Boeing stranded on the ISS were passing the time after their one-week trip became an eight-month stay, and I made a joke to myself about how this was a good opportunity for a Gilligan's Island reboot where the hapless astronaut castaways keep getting unwanted visits from astronauts on nearby satellites, exiled dictators, rock groups hiding from groupies, and li'l Kurt Russell.

And then the voice in the back of my head reminded me that it's already been done. With Gilligan himself (and Chuck McCann).

Sid and Marty Kroftf's Far Out Space Nuts

Who says they don't make 'em like they used to?

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