Henry is starting to get suspicious that I secretly film him with my phone camera.

Please don't show him this.

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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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