Watching UGA baseball's run through the Regionals and Super Regionals on their way to the College World Series for the first time since 2008, I noticed the PA and crowd seemed to really love one particular song. I commented as such to Mom. She said "What song?"

This song, Mom:

The Stroke

Mom listened to it politely for about 20 seconds before declaring it was "awful" and leaving the room. (Mom was never a big fan of 96 Rock. She's more of a Jackson Browne/Carole King kind of girl.)

Technically, this isn't a one-word wonder, as Billy Squier gave his masterpiece a two word title, but I'm just going to do what all good librarians do and ignore the The to stick it in my "one word wonders" keyword. (They're my rules; I get to break them whenever I want!)

Go Dawgs!

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48/2618. Miss Pacific Fleet (1935)
There's not a lot of substance to this frivolous film comedy, but its leads are Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell, and that's good enough for me.

49/2619. Whiplash (2014)
There are only two characters of note in Damien Chazelle's star-making study of an abusive relationship. I've thought a lot about it, and I'm still not sure if I enjoyed it. Music's good, though.

50/2620. Honeymoon Hotel (1964)
Following a wedding-day disaster, womanizer Robert Goulet tricks his friend (the jilted groom) into following through on his honeymoon plans to visit a Hawaiian resort strictly for couples so the two men can meet more women. Screwball hijinks ensue. Goulet is good as the cad, but I really watched the whole thing for Jill St. John, who, as usual, is given too little to do.

51/2621. 711 Ocean Drive (1950)
This noir tells the story of the rise of an ambitious telephone technician through a life of crime. The house at 711 Ocean Avenue is one of many locations, from underworld bars to warehouses to penthouses to swimming pools and horse tracks, all of which pale in comparison to the backdrop for the climactic gunfight in the guts of "Boulder Dam." That would have been a better title.

Now that is a well-framed Coke bottle.

53/2623. Lord Love a Duck (1966)
It's a very rare thing in life when I encounter something more cynical than I am. This dark, dark comedy chock full of WTF moments passes that bar easily. It's clearly a takedown of the shallowness of commercially-driven pop culture and the pervasive attitudes of the Swingin' Sixties era, but there's a unique condescending anger at its heart that borders on hatred. I liked it quite a bit. For a taste of its poisoned madness, check out the sweater scene on YouTube.

More to come.

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Superman: The Man of Steel #54, March 1996

Technically speaking, nothing can hold back the darkness forever. For a Spirit of Vengeance, the Spectre can be a real downer.

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Welcome to the 20th annual Wriphe.com Superman Month! What a nice, round, mature number.

This time last year, DC Comics was celebrating the impending release of their latest Superman movie with the "Summer of Superman" publishing initiative. One year later, Superman is literally nowhere to be seen in the DC Universe. Earlier this year, the Man of Steel won a tournament to the death and then disappeared from existence. His comic books are still being published with various children in his stead in a storyline that DC is calling "Reign of the Superboys." DC tells us it is selling very well, but the Superman fans I know don't seem very enthusiastic. I don't blame them. Who wants to pay $5 for a comic that doesn't feature their titular hero?

"Who wants to pay $5 for a comic?" I hear you asking. You make a good point. But this month is about Superman, not the economics of nostalgia.

I also hear some of you you asking, "Who cares about Superman?" I do, for one, and not just for nostalgic reasons. Superman might be a morally inflexible overgrown boy scout in bright pajamas, but at my advancing age, I increasingly enjoy the company of strong characters who still believe that Truth, Justice, and the American Way aren't all mutually incompatible.

Superman: The Man of Steel #80, June 1998

Yeah, he can be a bit preachy. Nobody's perfect.

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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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The hiccup in today's voting was that I had to do it twice. The first time I went all the way through the very long ballot for 31 local and state positions and studiously reviewed my choices only to have the system tell me it could not print my ballot, that I should remove my card and speak to an election officer. I did as instructed. The officer consulted another officer and together they decided I should just try again from the beginning. I cannot tell a lie: I selected a lot fewer boxes the second time through. Sorry, nonpartisan candidates for Judge - Superior Court Coweta Judicial Circuit (To Succeed C. Jephson Bendinger).

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40/2610. The Naked Gun (2025)
Do you remember how they used to say that Airplane! ruined Leslie Neilson's career? Will this do the same for Liam Neeson's post-Taken money train? In any case, it's a worthy successor to the Zucker/Abrams/Zucker originals (superior, even to 33-1/3), but it stuck in my craw that this movie that does not shy away from poking many other influences with a sharp stick never mentions the fact that it's core plot is essentially the same as The Kingsman.

54/2624. Take This Job and Shove It (1981)
It so happens that I watched this about a month before David Allen Coe died, and I'm glad I did so that I had that mental reference when reading his obituary. The film suffers from a weak budget and some rather obvious re-editing, presumably to make a messy script work, but I'm happy to say it's plenty of fun as a silly working-class comedy of its era.

Although Take This Job and Shove It is drenched in beer, there's still time for the Pause that Refreshes! I suspect the Coca-Cola soda fountain in the background of one of the protagonist's many internal struggles between his professional and personal ideologies was already installed in the shooting location as opposed to paid product placement, but much of the plot is made of the cultural value of American brands (which I found somewhat ironic in an age where Budweiser is owned by a Belgian conglomerate), so it's possible that this obvious bit of background imagery could be intended by the director as an intentional, somewhat subtle in the context of the film, reinforcement of the Good Ol' USA.

41/2611. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
TCM airs this all the time, so I finally made myself watch it. I'm glad I did. It's very good, an atypical Scorsese movie that proves he's capable of so much more than just gangster films.

Speaking of questionable product placement, there's no way that the Coca-Cola Company approved their IP being used in a gory death scene, which reinforces that the dead man being a lazy Coca-Cola delivery driver was probably a choice by Scorsese to dramatize the pitfalls of the commercialization of the American Dream, a key element in spurring Alice's Campbellian hero's journey of self discovery. In other words, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a (bloody) Coke!

42/2612. Operation Crossbow (1965)
A pre-cursor to the formula perfected by The Dirty Dozen, the Brits and Americans work together on a suicide mission to scuttle the German rocket program. Sophia Loren gets top billing for a small and completely pointless part that exists only to attract (and, I'm sure, disappoint) her fans.

More to come.

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