In Metro Atlanta, all cars are required to pass an emission inspection each year in order to renew their tag and stay street legal. In theory, this is a good system to maintain our air quality. In practice, it has some problems.

I own my grandfather's 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue (which he explicitly told my father never to give to me) with only about 104,000 miles on it. For many years, I've spent too much money keeping it running. Right now, it has a broken smog filter system. I'd fix it, but parts are hard to come by, which is no surprise considering that GMC retired the entire Oldsmobile brand in 2004. After consulting with the local GMC dealership, my mechanic found and tested several potential aftermarket replacements, but none worked. Oldsmobile, it seems, didn't do a great job of documenting the parts necessary for a car they were discontinuing.

In their infinite wisdom, Georgia lawmakers foresaw this problem and allowed the Georgia's Clean Air Force (GCAF), which is responsible for oversight of the emissions testing, to give a car a waiver if it can be declared Non-Complying Obsolete. I applied for such a waiver. They denied my request. They spoke to my mechanic who explained the problem, and then they said their much more knowledgeable researchers could find suitable parts online, though they declined to share which parts they found. They suggested I look at Autozone, which I think was their way of politely telling me to go to hell. (I looked. Autozone does not have the part.)

The GCAF offers that I can still apply for a Repair Waiver if I spend a total of $1,176 on repairs. To date this year, I have spent $816 on parts from eBay and mechanics bills before we ran into this availability problem. What's the point of paying a mechanic another $360 to remove and reinsert the old parts over and over? Even if I did, I expect the GCAF would still find another polite way to tell me go to hell.

The "good" news is that there's another way to bypass the emission requirement: cars 25 years old and older are exempt from the requirement. By my math the Oldsmobile will be 25 years old in 2027. Although the tag expires on my birthday, I wrote a letter to my local tax commissioner's office asking if I could simply wait to renew in January. They said no. Apparently the 25-year exemption is somehow tied to my birthday, not the year of renewal. In response to my repeated pleas, they insist that they will not let me renew it with an emissions exemption until next September.

So, my options are

1. Donate to my mechanic $380 for a car that is increasingly not worth repairing and hope the GCAF will issue a waiver;

2. Cancel my insurance and mothball the car in my driveway for a year;

3. Try to sell a car with a permanently on "service engine soon" dashboard light to someone born in January; or

4. Move myself outside the Metro Atlanta area.

That last option is looking increasingly attractive.

I'm frustrated that despite my best efforts, I haven't found a solution that doesn't require me to buy a new house or a new car. But that's why everyone hates government, isn't it?

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98/2668. Dames (1934)
You have to watch an hour of not very entertaining romantic comedy to get to the giant Busby Berkley finale play-within-a-play. But it's worth it.

99/2669. The Kid Detective (2020)
A dark, dark take on the elevator pitch "What happens to Encyclopedia Brown when he grow up?" It shares the cynical comedic sensibilities of Inherent Vice, and I'm sure it would horrify most Donald J. Sobol fans (which is kind of the point). I enjoyed it.

100/2670. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)
Despite what I'd read in reviews, I found this sequel more engaging than the first, probably because it leans harder into Easter Eggs from games deeper in the Mario Bros. canon.

101/2671. Gunga Din (1939)
I was constantly distracted by the studio's choice to have Indian Gunga Din played by a 40-year-old white man, which makes him seem more like someone with a mental handicap as opposed to an adventurous boy. Otherwise, Cary Grant is fine as a British sargent.

102/2672. Destination Tokyo (1943)
Cary Grant is also fine here as a U.S. Navy captain, though the too-long picture felt unfocused for a wartime submarine slice-of-life melodrama.

103/2673. The Man Who Laughs (1928)
This is the movie Bob Kane credits in his 1989 autobiography, Batman and Me, as the inspiration for the Joker in 1940's Batman #1. Specifically, "a 'photo-play' edition of [the Victor Hugo source novel], made from the screenplay," illustrated with a "photo of Conrad Veidt as Gynplaine." Given that almost everything else in Batman and Me is bullshit, this story probably is, too. (Kane couldn't even be bothered to verify that in the original French, Hugo named his character "Gwynplaine," which is how it is spelled on the silent film's English intertitle cards.) I don't care for the Joker, and neither did I care for this movie. Pacing is too slow in all the wrong parts, and I learned only after the fact that the unearned "happy" ending is a Hollywood rewrite of Hugo's original (but not particularly better) intent. At least now I've seen it and don't have to watch it again.

More to come.

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Happy birthday to me! Look, I'm not saying 51 is old, but this past Saturday I wore a cotton sock slightly sideways inside my sneaker and the toe seam left a bruise on my foot that would make you think I dropped a safe on it. A cotton sock was tougher than my foot. That never happened when I was 49.

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I had vowed to myself that I was not going to mention the Miami Dolphins again during the 2026 season, but ESPN quotes Miami Dolphins linebacker Jordyn Brooks saying "Miami has the 'right guys' in the locker room and things will not 'unravel' as the season progresses," and I cannot let that go. I just don't know what that's supposed to mean.

Does having the "right guys" mean the NFL's cheapest active roster is the one the General Manager wanted? Maybe you haven't realized it yet, Jordyn, because you're the third highest paid player in the locker room, but if management gets its way, they're just going to replace most of those "right guys" with different, more expensive guys who are actually competent at football. Why, with a little luck, in just a few more seasons the Dolphins might actually be back to a roster capable of winning 8 games a season again. That'll be cool.

Does "not unraveling" mean the players will maintain level heads as they "compete" to lose every game? Sure, the team is only two games into the season, but they already have a pretty good grip on the second worst for/against points differential in the NFL (behind only the Atlanta Falcons, who literally have no starting quarterback) with no evidence they even want to improve. There's already ample evidence the coaching staff is calling plays to ensure the other team wins, a strategy traditionally called "tanking."

(To be fair to the coaches, this intentionally losing strategy is likely mandated from the top of the organization. Owner Stephen Ross has a well-documented history of meddling to ensure his team has the worst possible performance. I wish I was kidding about that.)

Anyway. I will redouble my efforts to ignore the Dolphins until such time as they are once again worth watching. At the current rate of "progress," that should be sometime in the 2030s.

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Today is the official "Batman Day" as declared by DC Comics, whose press release encourages you to celebrate by buying their newest Batman comic, Batman of Two Worlds, for the surprisingly reasonable price of $2.99. That's not bad for 2026. I mean, these days $3 will barely buy you a half gallon of gas (or half a copy of any monthly issue of Detective Comics). Take what you can get, Bat fans.

Here at Wriphe.com, we will celebrate with the best One Word Wonder in television history:

Batman

Whap! Biff! Oooof! Take that, Matlock.

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