Today, while sitting in stopped traffic waiting for a school bus to unload, I thought about how younger me would have been terribly inconvenienced by such an experience. I know in the past I would have argued that school buses should make fewer stops, as they did "back in my day," rather than divest each passenger to their own driveway. But just because I had to walk a greater distance than kids today doesn't mean society should expose those kids to a greater risk of traffic fatalities by making them walk along today's much busier roads. How many dead children is my convenience worth?

That made me think about how certain activities modify your chance of dying from moment to moment. ESPN charts play-by-play win probabilities in football games based on the statistical chance of either team wining given the current score, down-and-distance, and time remaining; imagine doing the same thing for a person, charting the second-by-second probability of your death based on your current activity and location. I have a non-zero chance of dying even as I sit here typing, but my graph probably has a much steeper slope when I drive a car or hold a toaster over a full bathtub. One day, my death probability will reach 100%. Once it gets there, you can stop graphing. The line's not coming back down from that. Game over.

That made me think about what the graph would look like for people living in war zones. Everyone's current death probability baseline is non-zero, but citizens in Ukraine have to be somewhat higher. Looking at some quickly Googled numbers, approximately 8.5k people, or 0.002% of the total population, die per day in the United States in 2026. The daily mortality attrition rate in Ukraine appears to be roughly 0.015% of the population. Generically speaking, just being in Ukraine, you're 7 times more likely to die each day than in the US. If you were graphing that moment to moment, I'm sure the line would swing wildly depending on whether or not a wave of drones was overhead.

That made me think about what the graph would look like if you were one of the conscripted Russian "soldiers" sent to the front lines. I've been reading that the average life expectancy of Russia's current Latin American mercenaries is about five days. From the moment they set foot on the Eurasian continent, their death probability graph has to look a lot like the win probability graph for Georgia when they played Division II Tennessee State back on September 5. It wasn't pretty. (Georgia's lowest win probability was 85.9% after TN State completed a 6-yard pass to set up a short second down at 9:11 remaining in the first quarter. For most of the rest of the game, it was 99.9%.) I sure hope someone is getting what they want from that meat-grinder.

I'm not a fan of this current era of unjust wars and corporate-driven AI intrusion into daily life, but I might come around if the AI could start calculating my real-time death risk quantification to help me know when I was doing something really foolish. I doubt it would help much. Humans are famously stupid, and I am human. If A and B, then C, so logically, I can already predict what number I might see while staring at my smartphone as I blithely cross the street in front of an oncoming school bus. In hindsight, I guess it's a good thing we didn't have AI or smartphones back in my day.

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109/2679. Caught Stealing (2025)
I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would. It's essentially a neo noir disguised as an action thriller. There's plenty of comedy and style. Honesty, it's worth a watch for the closing credits alone.

110/2680. Hoppers (2026)
I also really enjoyed this. The critical reviews I'd read seemed to have a problem with the second half, when, yes, the tone rather abruptly changes from sentimental environmental message movie to body horror. But its heart is always in the right place, and it's always a lot of fun.

111/2681. Stop the World: I Want to Get Off (1966)
This is a filmed British play with overt 60s counter-culture leanings. The songs are pretty good, but I struggled with the weak and generally unlikable characters slow to learn any lessons. (That's the point, yes, but I lack patience for nitwits.)

112/2682. Non-Stop New York (1937)
Mistaken identity leads to suspense on an utterly ridiculous flying boat over the Atlantic in this British production akin to the RKO B-picture murder mysteries of the era. The highlight is the attempted murder on the plane's external observation deck!

113/2683. Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause (2025)
TCM kicked off its new Friday night concept of movies themed around a film-related documentary with this, which wants you to believe that Grodin wasn't the curmudgeon he played convincingly for so many years on the set of late night talk shows. He must have been a pretty good actor.

More to come.

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UPDATE: 9:03PM. FYI: My power is out again.

This time it's my fault. After voting, Mom and I went to Culver's to celebrate democracy in action. I decided to buy four pints of custard to take home and put in the freezer for later. Mom said, "Now I know the power is going to go out again." And it did! Mothers always know.

For the record, Georgia Power's estimated time until restoration to clear this latest downed pine tree is... about three hours.

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FYI: My power is out again.

The remnants of Hurricane Isaias rolled through town four days ago, and the power never flickered. But just now, at 2:45 in the morning, after days of nothing but cloudless sunshine, still air, and record heat, the power is out again for the same 69 customers in my neighborhood as always. (Do we have the most fragile trees, or the worst line placement? You decide!) The current estimate for restoration is at least three hours from now, which means I definitely won't be finishing the Google Sheet I was working on.

If you're keeping score at home, this is the fifth significant outage (three hours or more) in the past four months.

They say you shouldn't go to bed angry, but it seems I don't have much choice. Better that than stewing in the dark until dawn.

UPDATE: Dawn has come and gone, so I can now stew into the afternoon. Apparently some of my neighbors have been posting on Nextdoor.com that no one even came to look into it until after a school bus got stuck and the fire department had to be called to clear the road. (I assume all the linemen are still out on loan to clean up Florida /Alabama?) So these "estimated time of restoration" alerts from Georgia Power are starting to seem pretty suspect. It's now 9:30 and the current estimated time of restoration? Still at least three hours from now.

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Mom sent me a link to the front page of The Atlanta Constitution on October 13, 1940, because it celebrated the debut of female cheer leaders at University of Georgia football games. But what caught my attention was this article:

Tom Mix Dies With His Boots On
By the United Press.

FLORENCE, Ariz, Oct. 12.—Tom Mix, the rootin'est, tootin'est, shootin'est cowboy there ever was, died today as spectacularly as he lived, in an auto wreck, when his green speedster turned over on an Arizona desert Highway at 80 miles an hour.

He was dead when passersby hauled him from the wreckage near here. His neck was broken.

Mix, who never was as good behind the wheel as he was at the bridle of his horse, Tony, tangled with a bridge construction job. There was a detour sign, but the 60-year-old cowboy—the originator of Hollywood's multi-million-dollar horse opera industry—failed to see it.

He died with his high-heeled boots on and his 10-gallon white sombrero still jammed on his brow.

(Other details on Page 10-A)

It sure sounds like Tom Mix hurt someone's feelings in Atlanta. Here's how the New York Times front page ran the story:

Tom Mix Dies With His Boots On
By the United Press.

FLORENCE, Ariz, Oct. 12.—Tom Mix, 60, cowboy-actor and hero of Western thrillers of the films, was killed eighteen miles south of here today as he was pinned under his overturned automobile on a highway detour.

Mr. Mix, whose colorful career as a circus performer, soldier, law enforcement officer and motion picture star make him the idol of millions the world over, was traveling alone from Tucson, Ariz., to Florence and Phoenix.

Serving as advance agent for a circus scheduled to show soon in Phoenix, he was carrying $6,000 in cash, $1,500 in travelers' checks and several valuable jewels.

Two highway employes [sic] discovered the upset car and called State patrolmen, who extricated the body. Coroner E.O. Devine said that Mr. Mix apparently died instantly after losing control of his car. There will be no inquest. The body was brought here.

The Times story continues for about another thousand words but none of them confirm Constitution's gorier details. So of course I had to go looking for more. The United Press-credited story on the front page of The Arizona Daily Star follows pretty much the same template as the Associated Press story in The Constitution and The Times but adds some additional facts.

Tom Mix Dies in Auto Crash Near Florence

FLORENCE, Ariz, Oct. 12.—(AP)—Tom Mix, 60, cowboy-actor and hero of scores of western thrillers of the silent film era, was killed 18 miles south of here today when he was pinned under his overturned automobile on a highway detour.

Mix, whose colorful career as a circus Performer, soldier, law enforcement officer and motion picture star made him the idol of millions the world over, was traveling alone from Tucson to Florence and Phoenix.

Coroner E. O. Devine said Mix apparently died instantly after losing control of his car. The body was brought here.

Body Is Found

Two highway employes [sic], John Adams of Oracle, Ariz., and E. A. Armenta of Casa Grande, discovered the overturned vehicle.

Martin Younkers, Beloit, Wis., and Anthony Monts, Rockford, Ill., who said Mix had passed them on the highway north of Tucson, helped pull the actor's body from under his racing model car.

Younkers and Monts said a heavy suit case had fallen against Mix's head, burying his face in the soft ground. A physician reported later the blow broke his neck.

Local investigators said Mix, who left Tucson at 1 p.m., was serving as advance agent for a circus scheduled to show in Phoenix shortly. The cowboy star was carrying $6,000 in cash, $1,500 in travelers' checks and several valuable jewels.

One of the things I was taught in high school journalism was to get people's names in the paper to encourage local interest. I wonder how Mr. Younkers and Mr. Monts felt about that tactic.

For the record, The Constitution was wrong about the color. The car was not green. It was a bright yellow 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged Phaeton (with California license plate 6C 90 61). It's since been restored. The same cannot be said for Mr. Mix.

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