Captain D's is currently running an ad campaign that should be considered a war crime. When my television starts chanting "Fish D'Lish," I have to drive for the remote's mute button before the repetition drives me mad (or madder than I already am, anyway).

Once upon a time, I heard Stephen Colbert suggest that the best way to kill an earworm is to sing a shorter earworm that "cannot loop." His example was "by Mennen" as sung at the end of Speed Stick commercials. John Oliver suggested the "Ricola" yodel, and that's the one that usually works for me. I've been singing "Ricola" a lot lately.

On a marginally related note, I've recently been playing with the Talkback accessibility option on my phone. Theoretically, I could use it to control my phone hands free, but I've been using it to read Wikipedia articles out loud while I walk the dogs. Today I listened to the story of the Second Peloponnesian War. I found it amusing to hear my phone insist on calling the Persian king "Xerxes Eye."

That led me to wonder what Talkback's narrator would call this website, which has a made-up name I brainstormed on a napkin in my first apartment in Athens. Everyone seems to get it wrong on the first try. To my surprise, the phone handled "wriphe" perfectly. (For the record, it's pronounced like "rife," which was Merriam-Webster.com's Word of the Day on Sunday, and I'm going to have to steal their explanation to be another tagline for this site: "Rife Wriphe usually describes things that are very common and often—though not always—bad or unpleasant.")

So of course you know what I tested Talkback on next. Hint: It rhymes with "dish o'fish." What can I say? Advertising works.

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No matter what the calendar says, spring is here. You can tell by all the thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado database, the city of Newnan, Georgia, has been hit by five tornadoes since 1974. An average of once a decade doesn't seem so bad, but three of those have hit since 2020. One of those brushed the entrance to my neighborhood. Another leveled the local high school.

Also according to NOAA, "Severe Storms" have accounted for over 50% of all the disasters to strike Georgia since 1980. (That category doesn't include "Tropical Cyclones" or "Flooding," which combine for an additional 23%.) Here in the Bible Belt, we like to thank Jesus when a tornado takes out our house but leaves us alive. Given how frequently the weather strikes these days, I guess that means Jesus loves us more than he used to.

I am not a climatologist, but given that tornadoes are driven by heat thermal energy in the atmosphere, it's probably no coincidence that the ten warmest years in recorded history are also the past ten years. This bodes poorly for the near future, especially in the current political environment where combatting climate change is taking a back seat to, well, everything else. (Which is why the current administration has proposed cutting the NOAA staff in half. Tornadoes might be more common than ever, but at least they're getting harder to track!)

I have started paying attention when the forecast calls for severe weather. Not that I can do a lot about it, other than make sure that I'm in the basement. Since I live in a basement, that's not too hard. But, as a famous slaveholder once said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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A friend of the blog recently had a birthday and told me they were now "old." That didn't seem right to me. Yeah, that person is older than I am, but "old" is always something in the future, a long way off. Mentally, we're always benchmarked to high school or college or whatever time when life was really hopping for us. No one really ever gets "old," do they?

To answer that question, I decided I'd do what everyone else does these days: I'd ask AI. Specifically, I asked Microsoft's Copilot.

PROMPT:

When does a person become old?

RESPONSE:

The concept of "becoming old" varies widely depending on culture, perspective, and personal experience. Biologically, aging is a gradual process, and people may feel "old" at different stages depending on their physical health, lifestyle, or societal milestones.

In some societies, old age is associated with retirement—commonly around 65 years old—or when one begins to feel the effects of aging in their daily life. Emotionally or mentally, though, "feeling old" can be tied to experiences, maturity, or even one's outlook on life. Some say you're only as old as you feel!

What are your thoughts on aging? Do you think it’s more about physical changes or a state of mind?

I know I shouldn't say such things about our new AI overlords, but that's some bullshit vague answer right there. If I wanted to know what I thought, I wouldn't have asked it.

Obviously we're building the future on discarded fortune cookies and horoscopes. Which I think answers my original question: "old" knows better.

Happy Birthday, smarty, whoever you are.

Interesting footnote: While I was typing this up, the Music Choice '80s channel on my television started playing Rod Stewart's "Forever Young." Coincidence? Or is the AI trying to tell me something? You be the judge! (If you choose the latter, know that the prior song was "It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls. Work that into your cosmology.)

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway Renamed

March 2025 — United States Highway 29 Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway will no longer be named in honor of the former president of the Confederate States of America.

Under the urging of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the highway was formally established in Virginia in 1922 as the South's response to the prior creation of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway running from New York to San Francisco in 1913.

Though the highway was never fully completed across the country, stretches of the road under its original name can still be found in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The new name of the highway will be the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, named in honor of the United States' 23rd Secretary of War. Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi native and West Point graduate, served from 1853 to 1857, during which time he championed the creation of America's first transcontinental railroad and was instrumental in the Gadsden Purchase, acquiring land from Mexico for his preferred route.

Now shut up about how racist government is.

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10/2442. Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Before there was To Kill a Mockingbird.... Actually, it's kind of surprising how much the two stories cover the same ground. Mockingbird does it with more style and grace, but Intruder, rough as it is around the edges, doesn't pull any punches. Good movie.

11/2443. Murder! (1930)
Does anyone ever talk about the worst Hitchcock films? Ok, so it's better than Marnie (and maybe The Trouble with Harry), and, yeah, sure, it's got some clever scenes, but overall I found it terribly, terribly boring with some of the worst written and delivered dialog. (How much of that is due to it being an early talkie?) Yawn.

12/2444. 3 Women (1977)
If there's anything worse than hearing someone describe their dream, it's watching a movie of it. In this case, the dreamer was Robert Altman, and he has filled it with enough "symbols" that he hopes your over-evolved monkey brain will have a field day trying to decipher as opposed to, you know, actually having a narrative or plot or meaning. For example, one of the women obsessed with superficial commercial things has a yellow car (and yes, the importance of the color is called out in the dialogue) and late in the film takes a delivery of Coca-Cola from this truck:

Is this somehow significant? You tell me. And then tell me how you feel about your mother.

13/2445. The Kid (1921)
Maybe I've been selling Charlie Chaplin short all these years. The Kid is actually pretty good cinema, even it if does jerk the tears a little too hard for my tastes in the third act that has a "comedy" dream sequence for no other apparent reason than the main story was just too short. (Obviously, I'm not willing to bury all my hatchets with the Little Tramp.)

14/2446. Appointment with Death (1988)
Watched with Mom. We had both read this Agatha Christie novel and remembered how the murder was committed (the movie certainly isn't shy about telegraphing it) but not the guilty party. It's not one of Christie's best, but any time spent watching Lauren Bacall is time well spent.

More to come.

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Young Men #1, December 1953

One thing we can all still agree on is that Hitler was evil, right? Right?

Goddamn it.

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By chance, while waiting for an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to start, I stumbled into the end of an episode of a series I'd never seen before: The White Lotus.

In particular, my first glimpse of any The White Lotus was a scene in which 53-year-old Walton Goggins put his tongue on the nipples of much younger Aimee Lou Wood. And it creeped me out.

I could go on at length about what I think creeped me out about that scene (in fact, I've spent the past hour typing and deleting as I grasp at straws), but all I can say for sure is that it makes me very uncomfortable thinking about how they rehearsed and shot that scene in real life.

If the actors both had input and were genuinely okay with their participation (as a Googled article at Elle.com suggests), well, they are both adults and professionals, after all. So long as they had agency to consent and/or refuse, more power to them, I guess.

But that doesn't mean that I'm going to be watching any more White Lotus episodes. They creep me out.

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