43/2613. Up Periscope (1959)
A dull WWII movie with James Garner. For what it's worth, the dullness is not Garner's fault; there's just too much dead air masquerading as "suspense."

44/2614. L'Avventura (1960)
This is one of those movies that critics say you should see before you die, but reports say the first audiences to see it walked out on it. And they were right. Sure, it looks great and plays with some cinematic and storytelling structure concepts in unique ways, but the end result is that the audience spends two tense hours with some horrible people who know they are horrible people yet still being being horrible and resolving nothing. The ultimate lesson is don't do any of this. Not an enjoyable experience.

45/2615. Orion and the Dark (2024)
What can only be described as a Charlie Kaufman film for kids (because it is) has plenty of subversive surreality but has softened too much of Kaufman's uniquely signature metatextural navel-gazing for its younger audience. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad. It's just a lesser Kaufman work.

46/2616. Downhill Racer (1969)
Every possible sports cliche is in this action movie which is really a character study of the kind of damaged person who succeeds in the world of cutthroat sport. In hindsight, it's a very interesting counterpoint to The Candidate, which I'm sure is no coincidence as it was made three years later by the same director and star. Personally, I think The Candidate is Redford's best work (leveraging his charisma to make a point about the corrupting force of politics), but I admit that's because I prefer my satires sharp enough to draw blood. Your mileage may vary.

47/2617. T-Men (1947)
This is a crime drama procedural with noirish elements including most notably the beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography. I would argue that it's not quite true noir because the protagonist is a straight cop who walked into his noirish situation with eyes open, but that feels a bit like picking nits. Remember, kids: crime doesn't pay (but neither does being a cop).

More to come.

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In anticipation of this week's National Spelling Bee (hooray!), a website I visit regularly, Language Log (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu), has posted a list of "America's most misspelled words in 2026" as compiled by a website I have never visited, Unscramblerer (unscramblerer.com). The good news is that it's still just May, and there's plenty of time remaining before 2027 for us to get better at tomorrow, which, apparently, we love to put an extra m in. Americans are a generous people.

It seems the list was compiled by an Estonian, so it's mostly interesting as a lens for how outsiders interpret how Americans use our own language, at least as filtered through Google (the source of unscramblerer's data). For example, in their explainer, they call out the difficulty American spellers have with silent letters, giving the example of the "silent" c in schedule. As an American, I can definitely say that particular c isn't silent to us, though they're correct not to ask us to spell scissors. Unscramblerer also seem to think we struggle with color. Is this really a list of misspelled words in the King's English? We already knew British people talk funny, so it makes sense they would spell funny, too.

Even outside of those context clues, I'm not sure I have a great deal of faith in the rest of their list. Their "most common" misspelled were bougie (hooray, Marxism!), favorite, and through. The first is obviously already slang (though, again, in my experience, I've found it far more common in UK exports than native to the States), the second commonly drops the silent o when used in pidgin and comic strips, and even McDonald's prefers to drive thru. Granted, those are more fun than what I suspect remains the real worst offender: its / it's. I know the difference, yet its something I still type wrong all the time.

According to the list, the most commonly misspelled word in the state of Georgia (as in Oklahoma and Wyoming) was Chihuahua, which coincidentally happens to have been the question to the Daily Double answer "In Northern Mexico, a capital city, a state & a desert all have this name" in yesterday's episode of Jeopardy!. I'm pretty confident that I can spell that one (hooray, dogs!). I checked, and I have posted the word in three previous Wriphe.com blog posts in the past twenty-one years, so even if I have misspelled it, I've hardly done so commonly.

To be thorough (thourough? thorogh? Thoreau?), I double checked for Wriphe.com posts with common misspellings of Chihuahua and found none. However, Google tells me the most common misspelling is Chiwawa, and I'm quite sure I would never type such a thing intentionally. So if I misspelled it in here somewhere, which remains possible as spelling is not among my stronger suits and I can be very creative with my typos, it probably looks something more like Chihuahuah with a completely unnecessary extra h. As a generous American, I do so love to make things more complicated than they actually are.

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My latest painting:

I wanted a photo of me punching that Mystery Box, and I couldn't take it myself, so I enlisted Mom's help. She has never played Super Mario Bros., and she didn't quite understand what I was after or, apparently, that you can keep pressing the shutter button on my phone to capture a whole bunch of images (because, you know, there's not actually a roll of film inside the phone). And that is how you get an expression like that on my face.

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"I talked to God, and He told me it’s time to take a new step."

—New LSU Head Football Coach Lane Kiffin
in response to ESPN reporter Marty Smith's question
"Why was LSU the right choice for you?"
while standing in an airfield on his way out of Mississippi
which he abandoned before the 2025 postseason started
November 30, 2025

I'll be the first to admit that I have never been privy to any conversations that Lane Kiffin has had with his God, but I'm skeptical that any god really cares enough about Kiffin's financial situation to give him professional advice.

Kiffin is a football coach, not a preacher. At the risk of sounding blasphemous, it strikes me as no coincidence that Kiffin's new job is paying him $4 million more than the old. If money wasn't an issue, LSU could certainly save some of that cash for the players. Or even their students. Maybe pious Kiffin will share with the less fortunate.

Maybe I'm just jealous. God never tells me which jobs to take. (If God has been giving me career advice and I haven't heard it, whose fault is that?) I suppose it remains possible that Lane Kiffin has been hoarding God for himself. I bet $13 million a season buys a lot of divine advice.

And although this sounds to me like a con man's rhetorical trick to avoid honestly answering a reporter's nosy question, you can't argue with God. That's why there's a whole Commandment instructing not to take the Lord's name in vain. I'm sure Kiffin wouldn't break a Commandment any more than he'd break a contract. (That's probably why he coaches college and not pro ball; gotta keep that Sabbath day holy.)

Whatever the case, I'll just thank God that Lane Kiffin isn't coming to coach Georgia, home of the 2025 SEC Champion Bulldogs and the highest paid college football coach in the country. Go Dawgs!

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45/2477. I Love Melvin (1953)
MGM tried to recreate the magic of Singin' in the Rain by re-teaming Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor to diminishing returns. Yes, there are some entertaining song and dance numbers, but the plot is a stretched terribly thin and the chemistry between the leads just doesn't work as well without Gene Kelly.

46/2478. Three the Hard Way (1974)
The title explicitly refers to the plot in which three action heroes (Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly) must race to three different American inner cities to stop mass poisonings. At least, I think that's the plot. The actual scenes aren't staged, filmed, or edited particularly well. (There's a scene near the climax where Brown literally trips over a folding table and has to stumble out of the way of an incoming breaking glass stunt. I guess they had to use that take because they only had one pane of glass?) But no one is watching this movie for the narrative. We watch to see Jim Kelly go kung fu on a bunch of cops and Jim Brown climb a dam with his bare hands and Fred Williamson kill a bunch of Nazis with explosions (plus a trio of topless motorcycle prostitutes who interrogate a man to death... with sex!). And we do get all that and more.

47/2479. The Big Trail (1930)
On the other hand, the amount of pre-planning and care that had to go into the massive wagon train scenes in John Wayne's first starring role is downright impressive, even if Wayne is not so much. They really don't make 'em like this anymore.

48/2480. Kaboom (2010)
Awful, just awful. The film juggles a lot of pop culture elements that also turn up in other fringe indies (coming of age struggles, philosophy, sex, homosexuality, religious cults, prophecies, conspiracies, psychic powers, witches, etc.) but the third act just kills all momentum with a long sequence of talking heads trying to explain everything that to that point hadn't made much sense. And then the movie just ends. I can only assume that the filmmaker Gregg Araki ran out of money and gave up. Avoid this turkey at all costs.

49/2481. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
Now this is eccentric filmmaking done right. This, writer/director Jacques Demy's musical follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is definitely not perfect (the unrhyming song lyrics distracted me throughout), but it is very, very colorful and charming and life affirming. It also happens to have Gene Kelly in it. Coincidence? I think not.

More to come.

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The current federal administration has finally done something I agree with. They've stopped minting pennies.

For a long time, the buying power of one one-hundredth of a dollar hasn't stretched very far. Boomers might remember buying penny candy, but any Gen Xer will tell you that "12 cassettes for 1¢" sounded too good to be true even in the 1980s. (Nancy Reagan told us winners didn't do drugs, but she kept her trap shut about the predatory dangers of the recording industry.) There's not a lot of reason to carry around a penny when even vending machines spit them out.

The metal content of a penny is dictated by law,^[1] and although the Secretary of Treasury has some wiggle room to accommodate market forces^[2], as you might expect given their small practical value, it's now impossible to legally make a penny that costs less than what it's worth.^[3]

However, despite what The Wall Street Journal reported today,^[4] the penny isn't being legally "phased out." The U.S. Mint, a bureau of the executive branch's Department of the Treasury, has just decided it isn't going to make any more. At least at the present time. The current executive branch administration has proved it's nothing if not mercurial. Always emotion, the future is.

All those pennies the U.S. Mint has ever made?^[5] Yeah, they're still "legal tender for all debts";^[6] only Congress can really kill the penny.^[7] By law, pennies have to stay in circulation and remain legal tender until Congress says otherwise,^[8] and, as you may have noticed, Congress has had a hard time saying much of anything lately.

^[1]Source: Title 31 U.S. Code § 5112 Denominations, specifications, and design of coins. "[T]he one-cent coin is an alloy of 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc;"

^[2] Also 31 USC § 5112: "(c) The Secretary may prescribe the weight and the composition of copper and zinc in the alloy of the one-cent coin that the Secretary decides are appropriate when the Secretary decides that a different weight and alloy of copper and zinc are necessary to ensure an adequate supply of one-cent coins to meet the needs of the United States."

^[3] U.S. Mint 2024 Annual Report, page 10, "MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS (UNAUDITED)" : "The unit cost for pennies (3.69 cents) and nickels (13.78 cents) remained above face value for the 19th consecutive fiscal year."

^[4] Adedoyin, Oyin. "Treasury Sounds Death Knell for Penny Production." The Wall Street Journal May 22, 2025

^[5] Just how many pennies that is has been hard to determine. Many sources, like NBC and USA Today, are reporting 114 billion. Other sources, like Wake Forest economics department, estimates 250 billion. In either case, I think we have enough to last us a while.

^[6] Source: 31 USC § 5103 Legal Tender (1983)

^[7] Per Article 1 Section 8 Clause 5 of the United States Constitution (which, last time I checked, was still the law of the land, for whatever the law is worth these days), "[The Congress shall have Power] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures".

^[8]The last time Congress "phased out" a coin was the half-cent, in 1857. According to Wikipedia ("Penny debate in the United States"), the ½ cent coin in 1857 had the buying-power equivalent of "about 17 cents" in 2024 currency. On the other hand, if you had a 1857 Braided Hair Half Cent coin today, it would have a retail value upwards of $100, so you might not want to spend it on... well, what can you get for 17¢? Hmm. Maybe we should start phasing out nickels and dimes, too.

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No matter what the calendar says, spring is here. You can tell by all the thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado database, the city of Newnan, Georgia, has been hit by five tornadoes since 1974. An average of once a decade doesn't seem so bad, but three of those have hit since 2020. One of those brushed the entrance to my neighborhood. Another leveled the local high school.

Also according to NOAA, "Severe Storms" have accounted for over 50% of all the disasters to strike Georgia since 1980. (That category doesn't include "Tropical Cyclones" or "Flooding," which combine for an additional 23%.) Here in the Bible Belt, we like to thank Jesus when a tornado takes out our house but leaves us alive. Given how frequently the weather strikes these days, I guess that means Jesus loves us more than he used to.

I am not a climatologist, but given that tornadoes are driven by heat thermal energy in the atmosphere, it's probably no coincidence that the ten warmest years in recorded history are also the past ten years. This bodes poorly for the near future, especially in the current political environment where combatting climate change is taking a back seat to, well, everything else. (Which is why the current administration has proposed cutting the NOAA staff in half. Tornadoes might be more common than ever, but at least they're getting harder to track!)

I have started paying attention when the forecast calls for severe weather. Not that I can do a lot about it, other than make sure that I'm in the basement. Since I live in a basement, that's not too hard. But, as a famous slaveholder once said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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A friend of the blog recently had a birthday and told me they were now "old." That didn't seem right to me. Yeah, that person is older than I am, but "old" is always something in the future, a long way off. Mentally, we're always benchmarked to high school or college or whatever time when life was really hopping for us. No one really ever gets "old," do they?

To answer that question, I decided I'd do what everyone else does these days: I'd ask AI. Specifically, I asked Microsoft's Copilot.

PROMPT:

When does a person become old?

RESPONSE:

The concept of "becoming old" varies widely depending on culture, perspective, and personal experience. Biologically, aging is a gradual process, and people may feel "old" at different stages depending on their physical health, lifestyle, or societal milestones.

In some societies, old age is associated with retirement—commonly around 65 years old—or when one begins to feel the effects of aging in their daily life. Emotionally or mentally, though, "feeling old" can be tied to experiences, maturity, or even one's outlook on life. Some say you're only as old as you feel!

What are your thoughts on aging? Do you think it’s more about physical changes or a state of mind?

I know I shouldn't say such things about our new AI overlords, but that's some bullshit vague answer right there. If I wanted to know what I thought, I wouldn't have asked it.

Obviously we're building the future on discarded fortune cookies and horoscopes. Which I think answers my original question: "old" knows better.

Happy Birthday, smarty, whoever you are.

Interesting footnote: While I was typing this up, the Music Choice '80s channel on my television started playing Rod Stewart's "Forever Young." Coincidence? Or is the AI trying to tell me something? You be the judge! (If you choose the latter, know that the prior song was "It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls. Work that into your cosmology.)

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'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other word would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare wrote those lines in 1597,^[1] by which time Greenland had been called "Greenland" for 611 years,^[2] which I mention only to give perspective to the following bill introduced this week into the United States Congress,^[3] itself founded 173 years after Shakespeare died.

---

119th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1161

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
February 10, 2025

Mr. [Earl L. "Buddy"] Carter of Georgia introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and in addition to the Committee on Natural Resources, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. Short title.

This Act may be cited as the “Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025”.

SEC. 2. Purchase or other acquisition of Greenland.

The President is authorized to enter into negotiations with the Government of Denmark to purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland.

SEC. 3. Renaming of Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(a) Renaming.—Greenland shall be known as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(b) References.—Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the United States to Greenland shall be deemed to be a reference to “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(c) Implementation.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Chairman of the Board on Geographic Names, shall oversee the implementation of the renaming described in subsection (a) with respect to each Federal document and map.

(2) REQUIREMENT.—Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the head of each Federal agency shall update each document and map of the Federal agency in accordance with the renaming described in subsection (a).

---

I wish I could say that this bill is the dumbest thing we will see in 2025, but we all know better.^[4]

We are now living in a theater of the absurd. It's only a matter of time before someone actually makes their horse a senator.

Here's drink. I drink to thee.

^[1] Source: Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 38-44. (You know, the balcony scene.)

^[2] "Grœnland" is the name given by tenth century Norse colonizers, but there is no record of what the previous inhabitants called it, and the current "natives" are actually newer settlers than the Vikings. At what point does the colonizer become the native? As an American who can trace my ancestry back to the American Revolution, I can only say that I don't know.

^[3] Source: www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1161/text

^[4] I mean, for one thing, a man convicted of 34 state felonies, found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation, and charged with fomenting rebellion against the federal government and stealing classified documents from the federal government has been sworn-in as president, and in just the past six weeks we've witnessed, in no particular order, the United States under his direction withdrawing from the World Health Organization; sanctioning the International Criminal Court; starting trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and Columbia; threatening Panama, Greenland, and Denmark; buying-out the contracts of an estimated 75,000 government employees without the funding to do so; ending the corruption prosecution of the mayor of New York City accused of taking bribes from Turkey; ordering the Army Corp of Engineers to fight future fires in Los Angeles by releasing water from California dams into streams that do not reach Los Angeles; blaming an airliner crash in Washington DC on handicapped people; re-renaming Mount McKinley and Fort Bragg; firing 17 Inspectors General in the Executive branch; pledging to permanently displace all Palestinians so that Gaza can be turned into "the Riviera of the Middle East"; banning Constitutionally-granted birthright citizenship; eradicating "anti-Christian bias in government" before demanding an apology from a bishop for suggesting the president show mercy to marginalized communities; ending the "weaponization of the federal government" by appointing a man with an enemies list of "conspirators" to be FBI Director, blocking all transgendered people from the military; ordering colleges to give medals to non-transgendered athletes; refusing to enforce the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because its bad for business; selling meme coins; restarting Ronald Regan's Star Wars missile defense project; removing any reference to climate change from the Department of Agriculture; freezing Congress-allotted funding agencies including FEMA, USAID, EPA, CDC, NIH, CFPB, NOAA and others; axing any mention of "Diversity," "Equity," and "Inclusion" from government websites and databases (with sometimes hilarious results); ignoring election pledges to take action on inflated grocery prices; assuring Russia that Ukraine will never join NATO; replacing the board of the Kennedy Center with loyalists so that the president could be elected chair in order to stop "wokey" productions; appointing an accused statutory rapist to Attorney General, an anti-vaxxer to lead Health and Human Services, a conspiracy-theorist to lead National Intelligence, an avowed dog-killer to lead Homeland Security, an accused alcoholic to lead Defense, and the world's richest man to lead deregulation efforts in the name of "Government Efficiency"; and, of course, pardoning everyone involved in the January 6 riot. Note that I did not mention getting rid of the penny; it is well past time for the penny to go (although the president doesn't actually have the power to do that). At least he hasn't gassed any protesters again... yet. It's going to be a very long four years.

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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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