Want a sneak peek at an in-progress yard sign in my studio right now? Feast your eyes on this (first-coat) primed sheet of plywood!

In animation, they say good character design is a figure you can recognize by its silhouette. So I probably don't have to tell you who that will eventually be a painting of.

Speaking of design, I was often asked in art school why I would bother doing so much prep work before I painted, as if suggesting there was no point in painting something if I already knew how the finished product would look. (I was also told my work was often "clever in a bad way," whatever that means.) Maybe the finished work of abstract expressionists reveals deep truths about, er, something to its creators, but even if that's true, maybe I just don't like surprises or, as the inimitable Bob Ross would call them, "happy accidents."

I have a good friend from college who still believes that my work is craftsmanship, not art. To be fair, he doesn't mean that as an insult. We both have nothing but respect for great craftsmen. I once knew a very impressive young draftsman at J.C. Booth Junior High School who could recreate freehand anything he could see at any size. He was a craftsman, and I still think his work was pretty darn good.

I'd define craftsmanship as the ability to execute a plan skillfully. But someone has to create the plan in the first place, and the ability to visualize that plan is what makes someone an artist. The greatest artists lie in the Venn Diagram intersection of craftsmen and artists. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Bob Ross... they could all think up a great idea and execute it. That kid in junior high lamented he couldn't draw anything from imagination. I hope he kept trying. I happen to believe that while not everyone has the natural tools to be a craftsman, anyone with an idea can be an artist.

I don't mean to suggest that I'm the equal of Bob Ross, and maybe I do tend to overthink (and underexecute) my pieces, but I will insist I'm an artist.

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A quick search reveals that I've never explicitly mentioned here on the blog that I have long owned the same two cars. I have the 1995 Jeep, which is the last year the YJ model was available. You've met it; I love and brag my Jeep about frequently. But I also own a 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue. Two-thousand two also happens to be the final year of Intrigue production. (I'm a niche collector!) As my previous silence about it should indicate, I do not love the Olds.

True story: it was my father's Oldsmobile. Briefly. It was actually purchased by my father's father, who bragged that he got a great deal on it. As I mentioned above, 2002 was the final year this car was made, and the reason it was a great deal is because the electrical systems of Intrigues are famously... sorry, I was trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying "crappy," but no, it doesn't deserve diplomacy; it's just crappy.

When my grandfather was no longer able to drive (I forget when, exactly, but 2009/10-ish), my father took the car. The one condition that my grandfather tried to impose was that under no circumstances was Dad to give the car to me. So now maybe you can understand my template for how to treat a father.

Anyway, it may have taken 22 years, but at long last, my very temperamental Oldsmobile has successfully reached 100,000 miles!

And it's only cost me $1,360.93 in repairs in the past 4 months! And it needs a new set of tires, so cut me a little slack about that "low washer fluid" idiot light. Car ownership is expensive.

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When an old man dies, a library is burned with him.

I occasionally worry about what will happen to this blog when I'm no longer alive or otherwise capable of maintaining it. No one owns anything in the virtual realm, and all sites (and all the knowledge they contain) evaporate like mist as soon as they are no longer profitable enough to maintain the energy cost of their digital existence. Since I have selfishly chosen not to have any children of my own that I can emotionally manipulate into keeping Wriphe.com alive in perpetuity, I probably need to accept the fact that once I'm gone, any evidence that I wasted so much time at a computer keyboard will be gone, too.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world really miss? Is the minutia evidence of my life really worth preserving? To answer that question, I climbed a mountain and asked a wizened sage... no, just kidding. I wrote a script that sorted and counted all 550,000 words I've recorded in the past 21 years to see if they gave me any indication of the site's value. (Note that my quick-and-dirty script returned many character strings you won't find in a dictionary, like movie titles, odd proper names, web addresses, and "g-g-ghost.")

The most common word at Wriphe.com: the

No great insight there. The is the most common word in the English language, which is no big surprise considering that it is the only definite article in the whole darn language. According to Wikipedia, it accounts for "seven percent of all printed English-language words." For comparison, it currently accounts for only about 5% of Wriphe.com. Heck, all first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my) combined make up only 3% of Wriphe.com! I guess I don't talk about myself enough.

After stripping out the top 50 most common English words (according to the same Wikipedia source), I get the following list:

1. my (3,110 occurrences)
2. it's (2,045)
3. about (1,847)
4. like (1,840)
5. me (1,769)

Ok, fine. Maybe I do talk about myself enough. Yeah, nobody in the future is going to need all of that.

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About a week ago, I took the boys for our usual walkies. It was unusually blustery, and I stopped to check the weather radar on my phone. At exactly that moment, a golf carts drove by.

Despite the fact that we live just across the highway from our local country club, golf carts used to be rare in my neighborhood. Back when I started walking the girls, there were only two carts on my street. The gas-powered one belonged to the people who teach horseback riding and use the cart to ride along the street and collect the horse droppings, like a motorized version of the street sweeper at the end of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I only saw the batter-powered one occasionally when the kids got bored and took it for joyrides, doing donuts in their yard.

(Side note: I personally don't think golf carts are more fun than watching Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I doubt those kids have ever seen it. Back in the day, there really wasn't that much to watch or that many channels to watch them on, so everyone knew everything on television, making pop culture references the coin of the realm. You made friends in school by quoting reruns of shows that had been first runs for our parents' generation: Leave it to Beaver or Gilligan's Island or Monty Python's Flying Circus. I have no idea what tweens watch these days after school, but if I threatened a kid today with a loaded banana, they'd think I was brain damaged.)

There are lots of golf carts in the 'hood now. The boys love 'em. They go crazy when they see one. I don't know why. So long as I've had the boys, they've never been within five feet of a golf cart. A golf cart has never brought them a treat. But I guess they do drive by slower than cars, making them easier to chase, and the ones in my neighborhood often have other dogs on board, making the chase worthwhile.

Anyway, as I was saying, the golf cart drove by while I was half paying attention, and Henry and Louis went berserk, and their leashes damn near pulled off the fingernail on my left index finger. Not totally. It just bent it back halfway. It hurt a lot the first few days, but it's gotten better. Or at least I thought it was getting better. I showed it to Mom earlier today, and she nearly swooned. So maybe not all better. I'm just taking it one day at a time. (Boy, that Schneider was a card.)

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I've been so tired all day. I can barely keep my eyes open, but I've had to run a bunch of errands and I had a meeting, and every time I've tried to take a nap in between, Henry has demanded something new: outside, walkies, dinner. Why are we supposed to let sleeping dogs lie if they won't return the favor?

I'm just not getting enough sleep. On Monday, Mom woke me early to pick up Audrey, who I was dog sitting. On Tuesday, I had to get up early to take Louis to the vet to have the lump on his back inspected. Today, Dad woke me up early when he called in a panic because the installer of his new washing machine could not attach it to the hot water line as plumbed.

I swear, it's getting to where a fellow just can't sleep until 2PM anymore.

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Adding to my list started on March 8, once again I have damaged my scalp, this time while cleaning limbs that had fallen into my father's yard on Memorial Day during the most recent tornado-generating weather to rumble through my town. Tornadoes have always been the most common natural disaster around these parts, but now they are stating to be annual occurrences. Isn't living in the future great? Also starting to become common occurrences: scalp injuries. The future's so bright, I gotta start wearing a hard hat.

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Ethics quiz time!

Setup: I have been playing a video game online with a friend who, to protect his anonymity, we will call Ken. Ken loves the game; I do not. Ken's enthusiasm and proficiency have resulted in much greater experience gain for his character than mine, which has the practical effect of making the game easier (and more fun) for him as it simultaneously, through natural progression of the game levels, becomes more difficult and frustrating for me.

Situation: Without telling me his plan, Ken took the time to play the game solo to perform the monotonous task of gathering resources that can be used to give additional experience to a character. Ken would later say he intended to give the resources to me so that my character would be more powerful and I might enjoy the game more. Instead, he applied those resources to his own character, and as a result, what was previously an 8 level difference between our characters has become an 80 level difference, greatly exacerbating the original problem.

Question: Despite the outcome, does Ken deserve my appreciation for his "good intention" of helping me to level up in a game I do not enjoy playing, even if the practical outcome of his act was ensuring that I will never play that game with him again?

...

...

My Answer: No. My personal philosophy is that intentions do not matter. Therefore, I do not believe Ken deserves any reward (or thanks) for the work he may have put in trying to make the game better. However, I also think it is inappropriate (and rude) to punish someone for a legitimate mistake on their part that resulted in no actual harm.

So no hard feelings, Ken, or whatever your name is.

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Google has added an "AI Overview" to the top of its search results, and I don't like it. It's not that I don't like having a quick response for queries likes "define calumnies" or "weather radar newnan ga," it's that I don't trust the AI's fact checking abilities yet. And I especially don't like any response that starts "According to a Facebook post,...".

In my high school history classes, when I wasn't being told that I would fail Georgia's statewide standardized tests if I didn't say that the South fought the Civil War over "States Rights," I was taught to consult primary sources for accurate answers. (In hindsight, I'm sure this was the teacher's way of telling me the whole "States Rights" thing was bullshit, but we didn't have easy access to actual historical transcripts of the South Carolina Declaration of Secession in the days before the Internet.)

I've played around with Chat GPT enough to know that it is less reliable than a Wikipedia page. So when I already have to Google at least 6 different variations of "lg washer inlet valve" to find the correct replacement part number, I'm not inclined to believe whatever word salad response the AI scrapes from untrustworthy websites in response to even my casual queries asking for things like "children's television hosts atlanta 1950s 60s" or "who wrote transformers tv episodes."

I know that I'm in the minority here. I don't like explainer YouTube or TikTok videos, either. I happen to enjoy research. I grew up with libraries and printed periodicals, and I can read pretty quickly. Just give me a list of links, Google, and let me do the hard work of finding the right answers. I'd much rather have open questions than wrong answers.

If I have to get my mother to fact check all of Google's responses, I might as well start my own website called Ask My Mom. I don't want to have to do that if I can avoid it. Mom's smart, but there are definitely some queries I'd just never ask her, if you know what I mean. (I'm looking at you, "dua lipa acm awards dress.")

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I remembered that second (of three) thing I was going to post yesterday! I was going to say that I finally took a COVID test.

Not because I thought I might have COVID, mind you. I took it because our last government-provided COVID tests were expiring, and we were going to throw them away. As a shut in who aggressively shuns human contact, I had never had cause to take one yet, and I figured I didn't want to miss the opportunity to see what all the hubbub had been about.

For the record, yeah, that stick up my nose tickled... until it drew blood, so I might have been a little too enthusiastic. But it was all good news:

My memory may not be doing so great, but still no COVID. Yet.

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Three things:

Thing One: Coca-Cola's summer promotion involves decorating their cans and bottles with pictures of Marvel Comics super heroes. I bought a 24 pack expecting an assortment of heroes, but no, all 24 cans were the same picture of Electra. Very disappointing. I've now drunk more cans of Coca-Cola with Electra's picture on them than I have bought comic books with Electra pictured in them. Meanwhile, my aunt bought me a 20-oz bottle of Coke Classic because she saw a picture on it of some guy in tights on it and thought I would like it even though she had no idea who it was or which characters I liked. It was Wolverine. To be fair to my aunt, even though I haven't bought a single Wolverine comic in decades, I have definitely bought more Wolverine comics in my lifetime than I have bought Elektra comics.

Thing Two: When I composed this post in my head while walking the dogs, I knew there were three things. However, I don't currently remember what thing two is. Give me a minute. I'll come back to this one.

Thing Three: I wore a kilt for the first time yesterday. I'd been saying for years that I was going to shop for one at the annual Georgia Renaissance Fair, but haven't, in part because it seems a little like cultural appropriation to me, even though Mom can trace her (and therefore mine) very WASPy ancestry well back to Scottish Clan Napier in the 18th century. I ended up buying one online, a modern cotton twill utility kilt instead of the traditional wool tartan because the whole point of wearing one was to stay cooler in the long Georgia summer. To my surprise, I liked it. I liked it a lot, especially while walking the dogs. I might buy another.

Thing Two Again: Hmm. I recently broke a part on our washing machine, but I don't think that was it. And my car was in the shop again, but that's not it either. Shit. What was I going to say here?

You know what? Never mind. It couldn't have been that important. So just two things, then.

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