Thursday 13 February 2025




Never read the comments. Unless...
Yes, Atlanta was one of the "Several markets." Yes, I saw the commercial live. And no, I did not go to the website. I'm starting to feel like I missed out.
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Wednesday 12 February 2025




Breaking news! My 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue, which cost me $1,728.86 in mechanic bills to keep running in 2024, has already cost me an additional $1,254.43 in the first six weeks of 2025 alone (for valve gasket covers, power window assembly switch, and wheel bearings). And it *still* needs that new set of tires. This is becoming a problem.
My first car, by which I mean the first car to which I held the title, was a 1985 Crown Victoria Country Squire station wagon. Mom gave it to me when I went to college. (She bought herself a Mazda Miata. Mid-life crisis much?) I drove it until the transmission broke. It wasn't the only thing on the car not working, and I made the decision to sell it rather than spend thousands I did not have to repair it. We all loved it, and in hindsight, I might have done things differently, but maybe not. I'm sure I really thought I was making the best decision I could at the time.
My second car was a used 1990 Honda Acura. It soon developed a leaky sun roof that was more expensive to repair than the Country Squire's transmission. I didn't fix it, either. Eventually the cabin smelled of mildew which I tried to hide with vanilla air fresheners. You can begin to understand why my fourth car was an open-top 1995 Jeep Wrangler.
(Honorable mention to my third car, a very '90s burgundy and beige pregnant egg, a 1992 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, which I inherited from my late grandmother. I didn't keep it long before selling it to my father after he wrecked whatever his latest car was. I borrowed it back from him for a 24-hour road-trip down to Jacksonville for a Jaguars/Dolphins Monday Night Football game on October 12, 1998. That trip is most memorable for B) the terrible headache I had on the entire 8-hour drive home because my poverty and anxiety kept me from stopping to get anything to eat, and A) my yelling "I'm going to kill him" at the highway patrolman who pulled us over for a broken taillight. The "him" in this case was Dad, who had assured me the car was in perfect condition for driving, but the cop certainly didn't know that. Thankfully, my companion on that trip, Matt, has always been a fast talker, and we're both white.)
The point here is that I really need to start thinking about throwing in the towel on the Oldsmobile. Is it time I draw a line in the sand? How much is too much? If I have to be spending so much money on a car, I'd rather be spending it on the Jeep.
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Tuesday 11 February 2025




Note to future Walter: Mom has owned a Ford Escape for six years. At the end of the first three years, the battery died, and I replaced it. It was a total pain in the ass.
In their infinite wisdom, Ford decided to hide the battery deep under the cowling for the windshield wipers, which means that the wiper assembly has to be disassembled before the battery can be removed. Because of the amount of labor involved, my local Advance Auto Parts refused to do it.
I mention all that now only because it's been three years, and the battery died again, and I was wondering how long it had been since the last time I had this particular pain in my ass. Apparently I didn't mention it here on Wriphe.com at the time. I guess I thought I'd remember. (That was awfully careless of you, past Walter!) Therefore, I post this here so that when I look back from 2028, I can see when I last had this particular pain in my ass.
For the record, Mom's beaux changed the battery this time, and he did it by removing the air cleaner assembly in front of the battery instead of trying to take the wiper assembly apart. He says it was a total pain in the ass.
Maybe in 2028, we should just have it towed to a mechanic.
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Monday 10 February 2025




Saturday 8 February 2025




"The Monkey Has a Popcorn Bucket..." reads the headline in my Google new feed.
I assumed it would be a story about the sorry state of creatively bankrupt Hollywood studio executives making bad decisions that are somehow still celebrated by undiscriminating audiences.
But no. Apparently, there's going to be another of those "collectible" popcorn buckets to promote a movie based on Stephen King's 1980 short story, The Monkey.
Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the same thing.
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Tuesday 4 February 2025




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Sunday 2 February 2025




Groundhog Day always means new year, same old rules. So let's get started.
The following list is an update on movies that I have recently watched for the first time. The first number is the order that they were watched in 2025, and the number after the slash is the order they were watched since I started tracking them on my blog way back when there was still joy and hope in the world in 2012. A complete list of all movies I've seen can be found here, with links to capsule reviews, when available.
This list is kept largely for my personal use, and you may find it helpful to remember that my suspension of disbelief is tenuous in the best of times and my default setting is to hate everything. The odds of you liking a movie more than me are high. Seriously, I'm no fun to watch movies with. Or, frankly, to spend *any* time with. But let's not get too far off track.
1/2433. Repeat Performance (1947)
The Groundhog Day of 1947. A murderess has to relive not one day but the entire year leading up to the murder. And that year is a slog. It is designed such that by the end the audience is begging for her to kill the guy. What's taking you so long, lady? He's a real bastard! The movie is pretty good, actually, even if Twilight Zone has conditioned modern audiences to expect this sort of story to clock in at under an hour (a lesson M. Night Shyamalan has never learned).
2/2434. Nightmare (1956)
The titular "nightmare" is that Kevin McCarthy (who you know from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or, if you're really my kind of people, Weird "Al" Yankovic's UHF), keeps experiencing deja vu about a murder case, and it soon becomes pretty clear he's the murderer. I won't give away the gimmick, but it's a better movie before you know what the gimmick is.
3/2435. Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935)
I first encountered a movie based on this mystery play back in 2021, and at the time apparently I read something that convinced me the '47 version was the only time this was treated as a comedy. Bullshit. The '35 version is also all comedy all the way. Even a romantic comedy, no less. I do think the '47 version was better, though I would guess it also had a bigger budget (and better cinematographer).
4/2436. Scarface (1932)
The original! And boy, is that Alphonse Capone Anthony Camonte despicable! I've read that this film's glorification of gangsters stirred up accusations that cinema was making crime look good, but it really doesn't glamorize much. (To quote from the website of the Mob Museum, "Prohibition practically created organized crime in America," so I suspect that contemporary pearl-clutching had more to do with fear of current events in the depths of the Great Depression than Hollywood's take on psychopathic mobsters.) It feels like someone is murdering someone — or threatening incest(!) — in just about every scene. If this is how crime pays, get out while you still can!
More to come.
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Friday 31 January 2025




To whom it may concern:
On Tuesday, I wrote
The lady who answered the phone, who I'll call Uma, seemed new at her job.
Doug wrote in to say that I should have written
The lady who answered the phone, whom I'll call Uma, seemed new at her job.
Doug is usually right about such things. This case, I thought, was the rare exception. The second who modifies the same lady as the first who, and since lady is the subject of the sentence, I determined that both should be who and neither whom.
But, as I said, Doug is usually right about such things, so I decided I would consult some other sources to be sure. I simplified the sentence a little to make it easier to describe because Doug and I agree that the first who is correct and I didn't want to confuse our Artificial Intelligence overlords.
1. Microsoft Copilot confidently told me I was right:
2. ChatGPT seemed to want to appease us both before obsequiously declaring me to be perfect:
3. Google Gemini decides to ignore the parts of speech that it doesn't like on the road to ruling in my favor:
That's three of the most widely used AI's on the planet telling me that I'm right. Which can only mean that I was wrong. Who is not the subject of that relative clause; I is. (Boy, that was a fun sentence to type!)
After a little old-school Googling, I found the best explanation of this situation was provided by the Writing Resources Center at William & Mary (which taught Thomas Jefferson how to write English so they must be pretty good at it):
Introducing a Dependent Clause:
Within the clause alone (not the whole sentence), if the pronoun is a subject, then who is correct; if the pronoun is an object, then whom is proper. For example:
Many people dislike the new chairman whom we have elected.
[In the clause "whom we have elected," the pronoun whom is the object of the compound verb have elected. One would say, "We have elected him."]I am scared of the old woman who lives on Main Street.
[In the clause "who lives on Main Street," the pronoun who is the subject. One would say, "She lives on Main Street."]
Someone should tell AI the same thing my high school English teacher would have told me: go open a dictionary. In this case, I recommend specifically Merriam-Webster, whose detangling of who and whom at merriam-webster.com/grammar/who-vs-whom-grammar-usage tells the story of a sandwich, the dog who apologized for eating it, and the lying cat who set him up. Must read. 5 out of 5. And, as expected, in total agreement with Thomas Jefferson and Doug.
Sorry I doubted you, Doug.
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Thursday 30 January 2025




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