I'm pretty sure that tonight's game matching #10 Texas against #5 Georgia was the last game I'm going to see in Sanford Stadium as a season ticket holder.

To ensure we made it this time (after the traffic fiasco that prevented us from seeing Mississippi last month), Mom and I left the house four-and-a-half hours early. For many years, we parked at Clarke Central High School, where parking fees helped fund extracurricular activities, but as the University has driven tailgating farther and farther from expensive campus lots, the high school now fills up extra early. So we parked at the dentist office across the street instead. Mom wanted to walk the old route through the student center into the stadium, which ultimately only served as a reminder that the University has built new barriers to block it. Oh well. We had plenty of time, and were still in our seats 90 minutes before kickoff, even after I was misled by some context clues (temporary stadium seats that looked like the old seat backs replaced earlier this year) and mistakenly accused someone else of being in our seats. Poor Mom. She's usually in bed by 9, but we didn't get home again until after 2AM. (Don't worry about Audrey: the dogsitter got her fed and to bed on time.)

As it happens, the guy I wrongly asked to move has been attending UGA games for decades, even after moving from Covington, GA, to Florida, but he said after a few decades, he canceled his season tickets and now instead spends that money and more buying tickets on the secondary market just for the games he wants to attend (in Athens and in other locations for other teams). It's a sound plan, one I've been contemplating a lot recently in this modern era of pay-for-play college football. Once upon a time, the university told me my donations bought books and meals. Now, my money finances base salaries, freeing big-donor money to outbid other colleges for the best kickers in the transfer portal. Somehow, I don't find that as satisfying.

Which is not to say that I don't think the players should be paid. Since they are the product, they should get the lion's share of whatever the football program takes in. But it's also fair for me to judge whether I think I'm getting my value's worth from my season tickets. Given that I only made it to two games this year (UGA closes its home schedule next week against 1-9 Charlotte at 12:45 PM, and I am definitely not going), I think the math is pretty clear.

As it happens, when I wasn't stuck in my own head thinking about the future, I did notice there was also a football game played in Athens. It was okay, but it certainly did not live up to the hype. (Though I'm probably spoiled by the two spectacular wins UGA put on Texas last season.) Georgia was pretty obviously the better team for most of this game, even if their offensive coordinator was calling predictable plays that made Texas's defensive line look amazing for about half the game. But the imprecision of the Longhorn's youthful quarterback (some kid named Arch Manning) ultimately doomed them. You'll read in the tabloids about fourth down conversions and an onside kick that blew the game open late, but Georgia had 14 points by halftime, more than enough to win what would become a 35-10 blowout. Good Dogs.

I hope that some other team will be nice and give Georgia a chance to play in the SEC title game. If that happens, I'll happily watch that game with my dogs beside me on the couch.

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During the drive into Athens, during the walk into the stadium, during the wait for the game to start, everywhere Friend Ken and I looked and every stat we considered augured bad omens for UGA's chances against Alabama. I wish I could say that we were just being pessimistic after losing nine of the last ten meetings, but... final score UGA 21, Alabama 24. Now ten of eleven.

The above picture was taken 40 minutes before kickoff. In over two decades of home games, I cannot tell you when I have ever seen that many people in the stands that early. Sure the prospect of playing Alabama in Athens (for only the 3rd time in 21 years) in a nationally televised night game was a draw, but I assume most were early because they gave away blinking wrist lights to the first 65,000 in attendance. For the record, by the time I got inside the stadium, they were all gone.

Many in the stadium were Alabama fans, and they were keen not to let us forget it. I know that UGA fans have an SEC-wide reputation for being assholes, so I guess that we must have been real jerks to Bama fans in the weeks leading up to the game following Alabama's season-opening loss to Florida State, because once Alabama won (ten of eleven, mind you), their fans were fucking awful about rubbing it in our faces. I mean, on the way back to the car, we were passed by at least four groups of Bama boys yelling at the top-of-their lungs at every Bulldog within earshot about how great Alabama was, is, and always will be. They made Tennessee fans look like gracious winners by comparison, and if you know what lousy winners Tennessee fans are, you know that's really saying something.

I was reluctant to attend this one for several reasons, and after struggling through three hours of traffic to get to Athens and then three more hours of sitting amongst a sea of drunks (alcohol sales now being allowed in Sanford Stadium), I cannot say that I had a great time watching UGA play poorly and lose yet another game to Alabama (ten of eleven, I hear). Maybe it really is time to let go of my season tickets. I'm sure I would have been utterly miserable if Friend Ken hadn't accompanied me. Thanks, Ken; you made a shitty experience tolerable.

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"The deportations will continue until morale improves."

According to multiple generally-trustworthy news sources, that was the response that a spokesman for the Governor of Florida gave today concerning a court order that the state's immigrant detention camp in the Everglades must be closed within 60 days.

Variations of the common quip "The beatings will continue until morale improves" have existed since at least Voltaire wrote Candide in the 18th century. The sentiment is always meant satirically, as (surprise, surprise) beatings will always have the opposite effect of improving morale.

So the question becomes: did the spokesman intend his comment satirically? Is he a subversive in the unwitting Governor's employ? Does the governor want Floridians to have bad morale? Or did he read Candide and decide, like Pangloss, that we really do live in the best of all possible worlds? I think it's most likely that the spokesman only knows the phrase from ironic t-shirts. Which is a shame, as Candide is very, very good.

In any event, if the job of a spokesman is to communicate ideas with clarity, this person is bad at his job. But I suppose that if being good at your job was a requirement for governments, they would definitely be much, much smaller.

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Our house guests hadn't been gone for a whole 24 hours before Mom decided that she needed a vacation and headed to Florida, leaving me behind to take care of the dogs. For how long? She wouldn't say.

Which is fine. She needed it. I can't speak for anyone else, but getting our house ready for guests is hard work.

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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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78/2389. Rumble Fish (1983)
Francis Ford Coppola's self-defeating tendency towards artsy-fartsy bullshit is the defining attribute of this beautiful but hollow ode to teenage angst. Coppola obviously wanted this to be French New Wave, and his great cast certainly nails the style. However, his characters are barely-sketched caricatures, and their interactions are disappointingly meaningless.

If Coca-Cola is cool enough for Tom Waits, Coca-Cola is cool enough for everyone!

79/2390. Tell It to the Marines (1926)
Lon Chaney in a rare leading role where he isn't the monster. I don't know that I'd call it "good," but mostly because cinema and cultural mores have changed so much in the past century. Chaney and his rubber face are, as always, greatly entertaining.

80/2391. When We Were Shuttle (2022)
This documentary is an historical look back at the often overlooked Florida ground crew that built and maintained the space shuttles between missions. If you have any interest in the Space Age, especially the Space Transport System that defined the American space program for three decades, it's worth a watch.

81/2392. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018)
This documentary is a biography of the very influential (and very controversial) 20th-century New Yorker film critic as told mostly by her very sympathetic allies. I'm more familiar with Kael the antagonist (via the stories told by the many, many people she went out of her way to offend), so I'm reluctant to accept everything this would have me believe about her motivations and accomplishments. But it is worthwhile to hear both sides.

82/2393. The Color Purple (1985)
My rule is that I have to watch at least half of a movie before I will put it on my "watched" list. This is a rare exception. Steven Spielberg is up to all his old tricks trying to pull tears from a stone. I made it about thirty minutes through a nonstop series of incest, rape, child abuse, and murder before I had to tap out. Life is too short to spend with people this awful, even if they're fictional. (Maybe especially if they're fictional.)

More to come.

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Week one of this college football season, I told friend Randy that we should go the National Championship Game if his team, Florida State, ended up playing mine, Georgia. Well, we got half of that.

Randy didn't want to spend the time or money it would take to get us to the Orange Bowl (which is understandable since he's dealing with family medical issues), so we compromised instead on the Camellia Bowl played in the Cramton Bowl stadium in Montgomery, Alabama, where we saw the Northern Illinois University Huskies defeat the Arkansas State Red Wolves 21-19.

Maybe it didn't have the weight of an SEC vs ACC contest, but I can't argue with the price or location. We even had great seats. Well, pretty good seats, anyway. The banner in front of us did block our view of the near sideline, as you can see in this screenshot of us from the ESPN broadcast. I have helpfully illustrated the best looking Georgia fan in the stadium.

Last year in Birmingham, we were very cold in the evening air. This year, we were very warm in the midday sun. As much as I dislike the cold, I also dislike noon kickoffs that require 9AM departures. Maybe next year the time and temperature will be just right.

Highlights of the experience include the Arkansas State crowd booing when the PA announcer suggested everyone should get COVID boosters, Randy's calling a fake field goal prior to the snap (by the position of the kicker), and Randy's recognition that the late game onside kick attempt was doomed to failure (by the position of the kicker). That Randy sure knows his kicking game.

Speaking of kicking, Randy also had a lot to say about the Camellia Bowl Queen who played football on her high school football team. Her position? Kicker.

I'm glad we went, and I already wonder where we'll go next year.

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After winning 2 consecutive National Championships, the University of Georgia football program has rewarded its loyal season ticket holders with a schedule consisting of traditional rivals Auburn, Vanderbilt, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia Tech... all on the road. (Florida is the "home" team when the World's Largest Cocktail Party is played in odd-numbered years at the "neutral" site inside the state of Florida).

By comparison, the home schedule is UT Martin, Ball State, South Carolina, UAB, Kentucky, Missouri, and Mississippi. This is, without a doubt and by a very wide margin, the worst home schedule I've seen in my two decades as a season ticket holder. Mississippi is the only game with any promise of being a worthwhile watch, and I'm sure I could get pretty damn good seats to that for much, much less than what I paid for the entire slate. ($1,720 this year, if you're keeping track at home.)

I figured if any of those unworthy cupcakes was going to make for a fun experience, it would be the opener against UT Martin, with the debut of UGA XI "Boom" (following this week's unexpected death of Sonny Seiler), a rare 6PM kickoff, and a crowd eager to celebrate the 2022 National Title.

I was wrong.

In November of last year, I made a note to myself that games like the 2022 contest against Tennessee (ranked No. 1 at the time) were the reason I annually buy season tickets. Games like this are the reason no one should.

UGA rightfully treated the game against the NCAA Division I FCS Skyhawks like a glorified practice, with Mike Bobo's patented vanilla play-calling and an offense that looked like they could have used a few more weeks of minicamp. The shadows advanced down the field faster than either team. The word "boring" doesn't quite describe how uninspiring it all was. I've had more fun watching Pop Warner drills. If Georgia played like that against an SEC opponent, well, no one would be talking about three-peating, that's for sure.

What was worse was that UGA has now closed Gillis Bridge overlooking the West end zone on game days, which also closes our traditional route into the game. When we did finally arrive inside Sanford Stadium, Mom quickly overheated in the blaring late afternoon sun. So we left as the band cleared the field at halftime, having had a simply dismal experience. Given that a total time of 3 hours and 40 minutes would pass before the final whistle was blown (in a game that was televised to a very limited streaming audience but with a full complement of television commercials), I'm certain we made the right call.

Maybe I'll go back when a competent SEC team comes to town... in November.

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The 18th Annual Wriphe.com Batman and Football Month got off to an inauspicious start last night when my cable provider Spectrum unexpectedly dropped ESPN from its lineup without warning just as Florida was preparing to kick off the season against Utah.

Apparently Disney wants Spectrum to pay a boatload for the privilege of sharing the same content you can get directly through a subscription to Disney+, and negotiations have stalemated as Spectrum rightly fears trying to pass that charge along to their subscribers like me, who are already paying $110 a month for a package that somehow no longer includes ESPN or ESPN2 or the SEC Network (or Disney or FX or nearly a score of others I can't say as I watch much).

I assume this tactic is intended to make me call Spectrum and demand they raise my rates to get ESPN back. Given that Disney and the other Hollywood producers don't seem very interested in paying writers or actors to create other content — today marks day 122 of the WGA strike and day 49 of the SAG strike — they rightly recognize that live sports is currently (and perhaps for perpetuity in the age of AI) their most valuable commodity.

While I respect Disney's right to try to negotiate for Spectrum's 15 million subscribers, I'm not particularly happy about becoming a pawn in these hardline tactics or the timing of all of this coming at the dawn of football season, especially since for the foreseeable future, it looks like I'll have to leave my house if I want to watch Monday Night Football or a wide selection of college games. It sure seems like Hollywood doesn't really care who they inconvenience in their quest for the biggest possible buck, and that just plain sucks. I won't forget this. As my father always says, pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered.

And Gators... Gators lose 11-24, according to my local evening news. So it's not all bad. The University of Florida football team losing is a good start to any season.

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Dad had Rambo put down today. Rambo was almost 14 years old, and in the past year he was diagnosed with laryngeal paralysis, which made it harder and harder for him to breathe. Apparently the hot August air was the last straw.

Rambo in better times.

I always lead these dog obituary posts with the cause of death, but that's not how I remember any of them. What I'll remember Rambo for is his single-minded determination to do whatever it was that he wanted to do.

Rambo was appropriately named. He bit his dad on several occasions, and bit me once or twice when he didn't want to do what we wanted him to do (or as fast as we wanted him to do it). While living on a ranch in Florida, he went toe-to-toe with bulls who were standing in the wrong places. I wouldn't say that Rambo won any of those encounters, but he might have said so.

Yeah, he could be sweet. He liked to sit beside me on the sofa while we watched football games, and he was a total bed hog. But what I'll remember is his orneriness. I think he'd be happy with that, too.

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