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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86/2518. Hi, Nellie! (1934)
This movie has a weird structure. It's mostly a light comedy, with a haughty newspaper editor supposedly being taught a lesson by being busted down to the lonely hearts desk. There's less misogyny on display than you might expect (unusual for the era), and there's also a big story to break. I enjoyed it.

87/2519. Blondes at Work (1938)
Fourth (of nine) Torchy Blane movies. Hard-nosed newspaper reporter Torchy breaks a lot of rules (and laws) in this one as she races her detective fiance to break the story of a dead department store magnate. Enjoyable as all the ones that came before it (in no small part because of Torchy's mischievous irresponsibility in determined pursuit of a headline).

88/2520. The 400 Blows (1959)
This French film is much lauded, and I get it. It's incredibly modern in its sympathetic presentation of a much disturbed adolescent who is treated very poorly by the self-absorbed adults in his life. I wish I'd seen it at 14.

89/2521. Torchy Gets Her Man (1938)
Sixth (of nine) Torchy Blane movies. (I skipped 5 because Torchy isn't played by Glenda Farrell in that one.) Here the dramatic tension comes from the audience knowing more than Torchy or her fiance about the counterfeit ring they're chasing. Plus there's a police dog that only answers to German commands. Who doesn't love dogs?

90/2522. Torchy Blane in Chinatown (1939)
Seventh (of nine) Torchy Blane movies. New York's Chinatown doesn't have as much to do with the story as the title would suggest. Instead, Torchy (and her fiance) are on the hunt for a Chinese gang that implies supernatural force to extort money from a family of art collectors in possession of ancient Chinese family jewels. It's all a bit far-fetched, and the mystery is incredibly easy to crack. Still fun.

And since we've already covered three Torchy Blane movies, let's just skip ahead a bit and get to

96/2528. Torchy Blane Runs for Mayor (1939)
Eighth (of nine) Torchy Blane movies, and the last one to star Glenda Farrell. To tackle a corrupt political racket, Torchy does, indeed, run for mayor of New York on a campaign platform that would probably still work today. Not my favorite, but still worth the watch as Farrell's last Torchy.

More to come.

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I received in the mail an envelope with an unexplained check from my bank. I hadn't been expecting a check, so I called the number on the stub to find out why I had received it. The lady who answered the phone, who I'll call Uma, seemed new at her job. She was polite and friendly but completely unable to identify why I had received the check. I should have called the policy department, she said, not the banking department. She kindly proposed to transfer me to the policy department.

However, I had a secondary reason for calling the bank, specifically that I could not use the bank's app to transfer funds into or out of my savings account. I was certain that this was definitely an issue for the banking department, but Uma couldn't identify the source of this problem, either. She proposed transferring me to the IT department for an investigation. Deciding that the mystery check was the bigger issue, I asked Uma to transfer me to the policy department, which she did after encouraging me to have the policy department connect me to IT after I was done there.

Pause for hold music.

The lady answering the phone in the policy department introduced herself — I'll call her Susan — and asked what she could do for me. But when I started to tell her, she warned me that my voice was much too hostile and I needed to calm down immediately. Now, I know I can be both loud and aggressive, but in this case I wasn't trying to be either; I was just curious about a mystery check. I tried to explain that I wasn't mad and if I sounded loud, maybe it was because I had been on a speaker phone during the hold music and now my mouth was too close to the speaker. Susan didn't sound satisfied with my explanation, but she also didn't waste any time tracking down the information that my check was a refund for overpayment of an insurance policy, which, she said, if I had read the letter that accompanied the check, I would have known. Except I didn't get a letter with my check, just a check. Susan blamed this on the banking department.

Mystery solved, I passed along Una's instructions that I should next be transferred to IT. "We don't have a plain IT department," Susan explained. Turns out the company has many different departments that deal with many different techologies, and Susan needed to know which one I wanted so that I didn't get "the runaround." I repeated my conversation with Uma for Susan's benefit, and she decided that I should talk to the website troubleshooting department. That sounded good enough to me. Away I went.

Pause for more of the same hold music.

The woman who answered in the website troubleshooting department, let's call her Alice, asked what my problem was, and I explained that I thought it might be a problem with my savings account not being configured for transfers. Alice must have been an experienced debugger, because she asked me to duplicate the problem on the app and tell her what the error message said exactly. So I did. "There has been a system error," it said. I relayed this information to Alice, and she said this message wasn't particularly helpful.

After poking around a bit more, Alice decided that there wasn't anything *technically* wrong with my account, certainly not my savings account, and that if anyone could solve the problem, it would be the banking department. Runaround averted. Transfer, please.

Pause for even more of the same hold music. It's not even a whole song, just a television jingle that repeats over and over and over. Amazing that Corporate America has found a way to make me miss Muzak.

A calm, deep male voice answered for the banking department, and I'll call this guy Albert. When I explained the problem to Albert, he immediately said, "oh, your savings account must be set as inactive in the system, let me fix that for you." And he did!

Three women to do the job of one man? Insert misogynistic joke of your choice here!

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I know I just reviewed a batch of movies two days ago, but when I wrote that, these two felt like they should get a separate post. So they did.

103/2112. The Single Standard (1929)
Greta Garbo's capricious protagonist suffers through a series of romantic misadventures that illuminate how differently men and women are treated by society. There are a surprising number of suicide attempts, all of them by men, suggesting that maybe women aren't the weaker sex.

As it happens, I just a few days ago watched a surprisingly similar movie:

119/2128. The Grasshopper (1970)
Jaqueline Bisset's capricious protagonist suffers through a series of romantic misadventures that illuminate how differently men and women are treated by society, this time adding race and homosexuality and youth culture and drugs into the mix. I'm inclined to call this an exploitation film, both for its slapdash craftsmanship and overly sensational subject matter — Jim Brown beats a racist pedophile for raping his wife and is then shot to death in a revenge killing... on a basketball court!

Despite their stylistic differences (which, frankly aren't so different considering the cinema sensibilities of their eras), both The Single Standard and The Grasshopper ask their female leads to carry most of the emotional weight. The former seeks to showcase Garbo's protagonist's 1920s strength while the latter wallows in Bisset's 1960s weaknesses.

Did society change so much, or did Hollywood? Frankly, the key difference is probably that Garbo's movie was written by women, while Bisset's was written by men (including Garry Marshall of Happy Days and Pretty Woman fame). Everyone loses when their opponent is allowed to tell the story.

More to come.

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Disappointment is a side effect of expectations.

I liked Executive Producer Mike Richards as Jeopardy! MC. I thought he was among the best of the "guest hosts" who have been substituting for the late, great Alex Trebek. I wanted Richards to have the job permanently.

But Richards (or his bosses) made a mistake. When they told the general public that the new host would be "one of the guest hosts," that set the expectation in the minds of the public that the job would go to the host they personally liked best. Hence the widespread disappointment from LeVar Burton's legion of well-earned fans when the least known (but best connected — and probably also the cheapest) of all the temporary hosts got the gig.

Thus the door was opened for the inevitable amateur yellow journalists digging up every negative thing Richards has done or said in his 46 years on the planet. Sadly, not everyone can be as perfect a person as Alex Trebek.

If any of Richards' innumerable sins (mostly misogyny & bad jokes) is truly unpardonable, it was that as Executive Producer he had the inside track on selecting and auditioning hosts. Even if he didn't have the final say himself, he should have known that when you're in the race, you can't also be the referee. Americans expect their game shows to be fair, and they're always disappointed when they aren't.

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Last night, Turner Classic Movies ran Robocop proving that it's a classic movie. Move over Citizen Kane.

In the year 2006, I ran my first post on Robocop, lamenting that the movie was then 17 years old. That was 15 years ago. I have to say that Robocop is aging better than I am. All of its themes about the runaway corruption of Capitalism, a government failing to protect its citizens, and the militarization of the police force are all still relevant today. Maybe more so.

And, of course, we still drink Coke.

Dead or alive, you're drinking a Coke!

Sooner or later, someone in Hollywood will remake this movie (again) with a female lead. And there will be a public outcry, because some things — like misogyny — are simply timeless.

P.S. Turner Classic Movies followed Robocop with an airing of Robocop 2, which is not as timeless. (I distinctly remember being very disappointed when I saw it on first release in the theater.) The first movie is a satire of modern society; the second, a parody of the first. You can tell it's an inferior model as soon as you see that the soda company product placement has been changed from Coca-Cola... to Pepsi. Ick.

P.P.S. I thought to myself, wouldn't it be fun to see all the Coca-Cola product placement screenshots I've taken in one place? Yes. Yes, it would be fun. So I made this page. Fun! (I even uploaded shots from both Clueless and Murder by Death I took only last week.)

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The 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote was approved in 1920. How many of those women 100 years ago would have voted for someone who bragged he could "grab 'em by the pussy"?

Based on the suffragette art of H.M. Dallas. (And yes, I know she was British.)

You know who the bad guys are. Exercise your rights this year, girls.

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Movies are a great form of escapism even in the best of times.

49. (1703.) Black Panther (2018)
I admit it: I didn't love it, mainly because it was far too familiar. It's functionally a thin retread of the first Iron Man film in African masks. I think Marvel movies have become a brand I can live without (at least until the Fantastic Four yet another reboot).

50. (1704.) Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
Speaking of familiar, the latest Jay and Silent Bob knows it's just revisiting old material, and it leans in, essentially parodying itself. I found it delightful, but I'm a sucker for that sort of metatextural comedy, especially in service to a film franchise I have really enjoyed.

51. (1705.) Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache (2018)
This documentary of the first significant female movie director spends a great deal of time investigating why her contemporaries remain world famous but she slipped through the cracks of history. In two words, it looks a lot like jealousy and misogyny.

52. (1706.) After Office Hours (1935)
Clark Gable stars in this romantic comedy/murder mystery mash-up. In other words, it's the Great Depression equivalent of a Lifetime Mysteries movie.

53. (1707.) The New Gladiators (1984)
If The Running Man had been made in Italy and taken place in the Colosseum you'd have this, originally released in Italian as I guerrieri dell'anno 2072! There aren't a whole bunch of nice things to say about it, but sometimes that's the fun. (You know, The Running Man was made 3 years after this, so maybe The New Gladiators deserves credit as a rough rough draft.)

54. (1708.) The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
Some humble, naive son of immigrants named Lew Gerig was apparently a pretty good stickball player in the 1920s until he got old, lost his coordination, and stopped playing. Sometime fiction is stranger than truth.

More to come.

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In honor of Valentine's Day, today's blog post is about abortion.

There's been talk here in Georgia that the state legislature has been working on a new resolution to finally pass the long languishing Equal Rights Amendment. The local paper reported that one of the resolution's sponsors recently withdrew his support after talking with "people I know and people I trust" (who are, presumably two separate groups of people).

Before we go any further, to refresh your memory, this is the whole text of that very controversial proposed amendment to the United States Constitution:

"Equality of rights under law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

That's simple enough. Why would someone want to go on record as being against that? To answer that question, I did a little Googling. You may be surprised to know that the Internet is full of opinions on the topic.

Some people say that the ERA isn't necessary because it duplicates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which promises "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." If that were true, women wouldn't have needed the 19th Amendment to cast votes.

Some people say that the ERA would prevent women from receiving favorable bias in paternity cases. They say it could also force women into the draft. Are either of these such a problem? I would hope that women would have to prove their fitness to be a parent in court. If a war is so damn important that we have to force our citizens into the armed forces, it seems to me that women should serve their country just as men do. (If the thought of your daughter going to war makes you think twice about the need for warfare, all the better.) And God forbid that anyone should have to use a uni-sex bathroom.

Some people say that the ERA is bad because it is just another example of the federal government stealing rights from the states. That's true. Granted, the "right" it would be stealing is the states' ability to treat women like second class citizens, but it's the principle of the thing!

However, the "people" who talked our representative out of supporting the ERA didn't use any of those arguments. No, the persuasive argument against guaranteeing women and men equal rights was — you guessed it — abortion. They said that if we give men and women true equality, they can no longer tell women what to do with their bodies. Horror of horrors!

Frankly, that strikes me as a bullshit reason to deny or abridge equal rights for women. I'm no girl or priest, and I'm generally pretty good at "keeping it in my pants," so I try to have no opinion on the subject, but the logic seems simple. If abortion is murder as the bumper stickers tell me, it should be illegal whether a man or woman is carrying a child. If it's not, then what difference does it make what gender does it? Neither case should have any bearing on whether women should have the same rights as men.

But what do I know? I try not to have an opinion, remember.

If you ask me, the best argument against the ERA is the existence of Valentine's Day itself. If women and men are so damn equal, someone should be buying *me* chocolates today, dammit.

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Chapter seven of child psychologist Fredric Wertham's infamous 1953 book Seduction of the Innocent is titled "I Want To Be a Sex Maniac: Comic Books and the Psycho Sexual Development of Children." Can you guess what it's about?

At the close of that chapter, after explaining how Batman and Robin "help fixate homoerotic tendencies" in young boys, he warns that young girls have similar examples.

The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman and Black Cat. The homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable. (pg 192)

To drive home his point, Wertham specifically calls out this panel from "Mr. Zero and the Juvenile Delinquent" in Black Cat #27, 1951:

If I squint hard enough, I guess I can see where he was coming from. What girl would ever choose to sleep with child-abusing premature-ejaculators named "Crowface"?

Wertham goes on to complain about another page in the same issue headlined "Black Cat Shows You How To Do Judo Tricks," a step-by-step guide to self-defense tips in the unusually specific case when "a gunman should surprise you from the rear and you don't feel the gun muzzle against you." Look out, girls! If you act in self-defense against gunmen, you might be a lesbian!

Even if I was inclined to believe that reading stories about Batman hanging out in a cave with his young ward encouraged little boys to love Dick — that's a Robin joke! — I remain unconvinced that empowering young girls to fight back against gangsters is the first step on the slippery slope towards tribadism.

I'm not going to say that Wertham was wrong about everything. He makes a good case that American superhero comics books were (and still are) incredibly, perhaps irredeemably, violent. However, in hindsight, it's hard to take anyone's word that comics are destroying society when he's overlooking panels like this, also from "Mr. Zero and the Juvenile Delinquent":

Clearly, in Wertham's 1953 America, homosexuality was an abomination but racism was just fine. The more things change....

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