Over the weekend, a friend asked what I would do if I suddenly came into ten million dollars, no strings attached. My glib answer at the time was to refuse it. "What am I going to spend it on, art supplies?"

In hindsight I realize that when he asked the question, he knew something I didn't: a mutual friend had just received about the worst diagnosis a doctor can give. If there's anything money definitely can't buy, it's enough time.

As a wise general once said: "a death mark's not an easy thing to live with." But really, that's what we do every day. Life, by definition, is "the brief and futile struggle against inevitability." Not thinking about that truism is a psychological defense mechanism, a survival tactic. Skiing provides a good metaphor: look at the trees and you'll hit them, so we focus on the space in between instead. That's how we get by.

Being forced to look at the trees (memento mori as those pesky Romans say) is a good prompt to re-evaluate my current life choices. If I knew the end was near, would I be doing something differently? Are there experiences I'm missing? I have to say that even after some introspection, I can't really think of anything meaningful to me that I'm not already doing, that I've postponed, that I've sacrificed. I'm really lucky in that way, and I know it.

On the other other hand though, it's possible I'm wrong about why my friend was asking about the money. If he was actually thinking about giving me $10,000,000? Yes, please. I'll think of something to do with it. I'd hate for my obituary to say I passed up a fortune just because I aspire to nothing more than sitting with my dogs and playing video games.

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60/2492. South Pacific (1958)
I already knew I don't typically enjoy Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, so I had intentionally not watched this. I was right to be wary. The whole first act is people singing about how they wish they were in love, then two sets of them fall in love, sing about that, and suddenly and for no overt reason decide that they don't love love. And don't even get me started on the terribly ugly color overlays. I didn't even bother to watch the second act. Blech.

61/2493. The Undercover Man (1949)
I just had to Google this film to refresh my memory, as the title doesn't jog anything. And the reason for that is that the title is a little misleading: Treasury agent Glenn Ford doesn't really go undercover during his pursuit of the tax-evading Al Capone stand-in. It's not bad, but clearly its not particularly memorable, either.

62/2494. Playtime (1967)
This movie, essentially a silent pantomime comedy on an amazing city-sized outdoor soundstage, is truly a masterpiece. I'd say it's too gentle and self aware to be called satire (but it does have thorns!), so let's call it a brilliant parody of the aggressively impersonal "modern" world. Like all Jacques Tati films, it's a must watch for anyone who enjoys the art of cinema.

63/2495. The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
This puzzle box is easily the most Wes Anderson Wes Anderson film yet. This thing has so many layers, and I'm confident each layer has multiple meanings. I'm sure that many people who aren't totally enamored with Anderson's unique style (Philistines!) are chilled and irritated by the opaque artifice of it all, but I've thought about the symbolism of the characters, dialogue, and design elements for days. Wes Anderson films bring me joy.

64/2496. Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (2024)
I thought I knew what "yacht rock" was, but now I really have been schooled. This genre has some very specific boundaries in both time and space! Good music, though. (And kudos to the original musicians who participated despite some obvious irritation that their music may have become a bit of a punchline.)

More to come.

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Look, I know I have in the past said that there's nothing much more to a plumber's job than a willingness to enter uncomfortable small spaces and get dirty, but I'll at least admit that the secret to their job is knowing enough to enter any uncomfortably small space only once.

I, on the other hand, seem to be incapable of working on pipes without breaking something in addition to what I was trying to fix. For example, the last time I repaired the rotted drain pipes under the kitchen sink (in November 2018), I ended up needing to cut the still-serviceable sink tailpiece to get it to fit with the new pieces. But I cut it a little too short; it ended up just long enough to barely hold a washer with no room to spare. We got away with that for a while, but gravity won out eventually. So this week, when I spotted a leak for the second time in a month, I went to Home Depot, bought a replacement, brought it home, cut it to an appropriate length, went to screw it tight... and promptly broke the sink strainer basket.

Ok, technically I didn't break the strainer. I just torqued it hard enough to dislodge the old plumbers putty that was sealing it in place. Without the seal, it leaked much worse than the problem I was fixing. Too bad I didn't have any fresh plumber's putty. So another trip to Home Depot was in order.

The one smart thing I did was clean the old putty out out of the sink before getting in my car, and while doing that, I discovered that the nut holding the old strainer in place was also stripped and the whole strainer would need to be replaced. (How could that have happened? See November 2018 again.) Whew. I would have hated to have discovered that only after I came back with fresh plumber's putty. I draw the line at going to Home Depot three times in a day.

Of course, clearing out the old plumber's putty made my hands dirty, so I did what the pandemic conditioned me to do and promptly washed my hands... in the sink that was now missing both a tailpipe and a strainer basket. D'oh. No professional plumber would have made that mistake, either.

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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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I've been to a lot of Georgia games, but I've really never been to any game like this before.

The forecast for the rare Black Friday night game was for severe cold, so I lost my seat mate. Mom made the right decision. I've never been so cold in Athens, and for more than three quarters of football, the Bulldogs didn't do anything to help. (I didn't feel so cold in the fourth quarter, but that was because I really needed to pee and couldn't worry about both discomforts at once. When I finally went, I felt colder than ever.) It may have be the worst, the most inept football I've ever seen the Bulldogs play in person.

GA Tech led 17-0 at halftime, and I kept telling myself that if they stretched that lead any, I was going to go home. But they couldn't. Georgia finally started scoring, but when Tech scored with less than 6 minutes to restore a 2 touchdown lead, half the stadium gave up. I don't blame them. At the time, it seemed the sane decision. Sadly, that only made the rest of us colder because we lost our windbreak.

And then somehow, very late in the game, UGA came back to tie. So after a bad game, they played one overtime. Then another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. Eight in all. It was the most bonkers thing I've ever seen in Sanford Stadium.

Think I'm exaggerating? This is the ESPN Win Probability graph of the game.

The football was so crazy, I don't know that I have space in my brain for all the other notable things. Poor Uga (whose name is, ironically, Boom) tried to run away from the pre-game fireworks. The 50th anniversary of the Alumni Band played at halftime. Georgia's decision to go for 2 when down by 11. The crowd deciding that GT was faking injuries to slow the game down and booing those players when they were helped off the field. The failure to explain overtime rules to the crowd and their resulting confusion when Georgia didn't attempt a kick for the win in the second OT. The scoreboard gave up on counting overtimes after 5. And have I mentioned the cold?

When I thought I was going to be leaving early, I decided I would post a picture of the stadium at the moment I finally decided to leave. Ultimately, at three minutes after midnight, this is that moment:

Truth be told, I didn't even leave then. I watched the Tech players crawl off the field and waited for the presentation of the Governor's Cup (by the Governor). Then, when the Georgia student section finally left, so did I.

I'm home now (4:32 AM), and I'm still cold.

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New stickers for 2024. Now I feel like they're taking this thing seriously.

Two things of note:

Thing One: Following the flurry of law changes made in effort to appease the certain percentage of the country (and candidates for president) who still feel the 2020 election was rigged, I was under the impression that Georgia mail-in absentee ballots were only available to people too old or infirm to make it to their assigned polling places. However, according to the Georgia Secretary of State's website, "Any voter registered in Georgia can vote absentee by mail." The new law is that elderly folks only have to apply once annually, and us young 'uns have to apply for a new absentee ballot before each primary, general, and runoff election. Somehow, that makes everything safer. I guess.

Thing Two: In 2008, I decried early voting (which the state officially calls "Absentee Voting in Person") because it actually took longer than voting on Election Day (which the state encourages me to capitalize). My county has finally fixed that. They moved into a new building last year that was previously a movie theater until the Pandemic closed all of those. They now have a lot of dedicated space for early voting, sorry, Absentee Voting in Person, and I was in and out today with the only delay being the time it took me to silence my phone's ringer (in honor of the building's former use). So despite what you've heard in an endless stream of political advertisements, some things in this country are moving in the right direction.

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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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72/2383. Captains Courageous (1937)
I've never read the original Rudyard Kipling story, so I cannot say how well this hews to that. Is there a good reason that Spencer Tracy is playing a -- *checks notes* -- Portuguese sailor? He's too good an actor to let the film down, but he really does stick out a bit. Otherwise, I liked it.

73/2384. X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963)
To its credit, this Roger Corman movie avoids the common movie tropes associated with x-ray vision and lechery, but that's in party because it avoids just about anything that might be interesting. Yawn.

Coke looks tasty in the 1960s!

74/2385. The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)
Just like the book it's based on, despite including (too many) scenes of his younger years, this isn't a biography of Charles Lindbergh as much as a lightly fictionalized recreation of his most famous flight. Given Lindbergh's many personal controversies, it's not surprising that it lost money, though I mostly blame that on it being very, very boring, just as you would expect from a 33 hour plane trip across the ocean. As much as I like Jimmy Stewart, he is clearly wrong for the part.

75/2386. Armored Car Robbery (1950)
A tight film noir heist/police procedural in which the not-as-bright-as-they-think-they-are thieves are as unlucky as the conveniently-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time detectives are lucky. Very enjoyable B-movie fare.

76/2387. Sapphire (1959)
This movie's title doesn't do it any favors. Maybe something more memorable would help draw more praise to this quirky London miscegenation crime mystery. Perhaps it's the Agatha Christie influence, but I think no one does the whodunit as well as the Brits.

77/2388. The Right Stuff (1983)
Why had I never watched The Right Stuff? Because it was too long. Well, it's still too long, and to my disappointment, it's also so invested in the mythology of the Space Race that it doesn't really care about the actual history. (Style trumps substance in almost every scene.) But what a great cast!

Coca-Cola is the right stuff in the 1980s (pretending to be the 1960s)!

More to come.

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62/2373. Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)
A woman loves her man so much, she lets him believe that he murdered the policeman she shot. It's every film noir cliche in one movie! The ending is... well, even if you saw it you wouldn't believe it. True story: it put me to sleep.

63/2374. Family Practice Mysteries: Coming Home (2024)
The hardest part to believe about this Hallmark Mystery Movie (in which the murderer's motive is -- surprise! -- greed) is that the protagonist doctor (a former military doctor who seems to be the only person in town who has ever heard of poisoning someone to death) has so much spare time (and office space) on her hands that she can be up in everyone else's business.

64/2375. Tipline Mysteries: Dial 1 for Murder (2024)
This Hallmark Mystery Movie leans hard into being a Hallmark Mystery Movie, and I think that's the correct impulse. We don't watch these puzzle movies for realism. In fact, although there were several moments where the police procedure was questionable, the enthusiastic protagonists were always enjoyable to accompany as they stumbled their way to the solution.

65/2376. The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
I saw the Pierce Brosnan in theater on release, but this was my first time watching the Steve McQueen original. The first half is a heist film; the second is a romance. I enjoyed the heist (and the ending, which made me Google which was the first movie in which the criminal gets away with his crime), but the pacing is way too slow and McQueen's character and fickle love interest Faye Dunaway are way too unlikable to really enjoy spending time with them.

66/2377. The Babe Ruth Story (1948)
If you look this up online, you'll see many critics in its day called it the worst movie ever made. It's not that bad, but they've made a lot of movies since 1948. Personally, I thought it was a good time. It's a clearly sanitized version of The Babes life story intended for kids, and that's fine.

67/2378. Arsène Lupin (1932)
If you do Google which was the first movie in which a criminal gets away with a crime, the original British 1916 version of this movie will come up. (The Italian film Filibus beats it by a year, and the French Fantomas by three. I'm still not sure what the first American film to feature successful criminal was, though if I stretch the definition to short films, the answer is probably D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley in 1912.) The reason to watch this version is to see the two Barrymore brothers acting opposite one another, as cop vs. robber, in the same film. Boy, that family had some acting talent.

More to come.

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Sorry. I was going to write a post on Friday, but I got caught in Internet quicksand as I researched why the dorsal fin was painted blue on the original Star Trek Enterprise model. I know that probably doesn't sound like the sort of thing that should take up hours and hours of time... but it did. And I can only say I'm sorry.

And even since I started typing this, I keep getting distracted looking at U.S.S. Enterprise model kits. I've said it before, but one of these days, I really am going to let myself buy the Polar Lights 1/350 scale kit. Again, sorry.

But I dare you to watch this footage of the original 11-foot model shot for VFX shots in 1966 and not find it fascinating.

youtu.be/snTRfVfendw?si=U6dWpPc0YlI3OMwW

If you look carefully at the nacelle dome lighting tests starting at about 1:53, you'll see the blue paint on the leading edge of the interconnecting dorsal fin between the saucer section and the secondary hull. I assume it was never very visible on screen because of the matting process technology available at the time.

And if you don't want to look so carefully, the blue is very visible in the 2016 restoration by the Smithsonian Institution (pictures at airandspace.si.edu/albums/star-trek-starship-enterprise).

Golly, that's a beautiful ship.

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