The hiccup in today's voting was that I had to do it twice. The first time I went all the way through the very long ballot for 31 local and state positions and studiously reviewed my choices only to have the system tell me it could not print my ballot, that I should remove my card and speak to an election officer. I did as instructed. The officer consulted another officer and together they decided I should just try again from the beginning. I cannot tell a lie: I selected a lot fewer boxes the second time through. Sorry, non-denominational candidates for Judge - Superior Court Coweta Judicial Circuit (To Succeed C. Jephson Bendinger).

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40/2610. The Naked Gun (2025)
Do you remember how they used to say that Airplane! ruined Leslie Neilson's career? Will this do the same for Liam Neeson's post-Taken money train? In any case, it's a worthy successor to the Zucker/Abrams/Zucker originals (superior, even to 33-1/3), but it stuck in my craw that this movie that does not shy away from poking many other influences with a sharp stick never mentions the fact that it's core plot is essentially the same as The Kingsman.

54/2624. Take This Job and Shove It (1981)
It so happens that I watched this about a month before David Allen Coe died, and I'm glad I did so that I had that mental reference when reading his obituary. The film suffers from a weak budget and some rather obvious re-editing, presumably to make a messy script work, but I'm happy to say it's plenty of fun as a silly working-class comedy of its era.

Although Take This Job and Shove It is drenched in beer, there's still time for the Pause that Refreshes! I suspect the Coca-Cola soda fountain in the background of one of the protagonist's many internal struggles between his professional and personal ideologies was already installed in the shooting location as opposed to paid product placement, but much of the plot is made of the cultural value of American brands (which I found somewhat ironic in an age where Budweiser is owned by a Belgian conglomerate), so it's possible that this obvious bit of background imagery could be intended by the director as an intentional, somewhat subtle in the context of the film, reinforcement of the Good Ol' USA.

41/2611. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
TCM airs this all the time, so I finally made myself watch it. I'm glad I did. It's very good, an atypical Scorsese movie that proves he's capable of so much more than just gangster films.

Speaking of questionable product placement, there's no way that the Coca-Cola Company approved their IP being used in a gory death scene, which reinforces that the dead man being a lazy Coca-Cola delivery driver was probably a choice by Scorsese to dramatize the pitfalls of the commercialization of the American Dream, a key element in spurring Alice's Campbellian hero's journey of self discovery. In other words, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a (bloody) Coke!

42/2612. Operation Crossbow (1965)
A pre-cursor to the formula perfected by The Dirty Dozen, the Brits and Americans work together on a suicide mission to scuttle the German rocket program. Sophia Loren gets top billing for a small and completely pointless part that exists only to attract (and, I'm sure, disappoint) her fans.

More to come.

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Did you know that print journalists are trained to put the most interesting bits of any news story at the very end of the article?

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The NFL has released its 2026 schedule, and to give you an idea of how bad they expect the Miami Dolphins to be, the League and its media partners have scheduled the team for exactly zero primetime games. Neither have they scheduled the team for any of the nine international games nor five holiday day games. The Dolphins will only play on Sunday afternoons between 1 and 4PM, where discriminating viewers can choose to look away.

In addition, the NFL has told Dolphins ownership that their stadium is no longer eligible for future Super Bowls because changes to the area since 2020 do not leave adequate "room for hospitality events around the stadium." Which sounds to me like a polite way of saying they don't want people to have to spend any more time than is strictly necessary participating in NFL football in Miami.

As a longtime Dolphins watcher, let me say: I strongly agree with them.

I have a whole category of posts here on my website under the heading "dolphins quarterbacks suck," but even by 21st-century Dolphins standards, the 2026 squad looks uninspiring. Quinn Ewers, Mark Gronowski, Cam Miller, and Malik Willis: If you recognize two of them, you watch far too much football, and I encourage you to seek professional help. Based on what I've seen so far, I suspect that only Ewers will be memorable, and only then as the answer to the trivia question "Who was the quarterback at Texas before Arch Manning?"

I think it's right kind of the NFL to spare its viewers from the nail-biting contest to find out which of them gets to be the one the Dolphins bench for whomever the team selects in next year's draft. Will I be hate-watching the 2026 Dolphins only to see if Arch replaces Quinn again? Signs point to yes.

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Watery, itchy eyes; sinus drainage; sneezing/coughing. I either have the worst allergies of my life, or I have a cold. If I'm having bad allergies, how did they get this bad? Is it time for me to consider moving to the desert? If I have a cold, "Friend" Ken gave it to me. I told him two weeks ago when he was coughing in my car that if he got me sick I was going to be very angry at him, and I am a man of my word. Better hope it's allergies, Ken.

UPDATE: Good news! Ken has kindly apologized for any role he may have played in my illness. Better news! After adding parosmia to my list of symptoms, I gave myself an OTC COVID test, and it came out negative. So probably just run-of-the-mill sinusitis, then. Great. I feel better already.

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Because Cam asked for it: here's CeCe's new playmate, Cydney!

Cyd is pushing five months and, as you can see, she is still a fluffy puppy with a personality to match. I'd've mentioned her sooner, but I was supposed to be keeping her a secret so that Mom didn't get too mad at her sister for helping her ex-husband get another dog. Oops.

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Justice League America #81, October 1993

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35/2605. Odd Man Out (1947)
I read that Roman Polanski, Sam Peckinpah, and Gore Vidal considered this to be among their favorite noir movies, but I agree with some of its contemporary critics that after a fantastically engaging start, it loses its way as it staggers (and then crawls) to its unsatisfying (but necessary?) conclusion.

36/2606. Critic's Choice (1963)
Sixties sex comedies are not my bag, baby, and it doesn't help that Bob Hope and Lucille Ball don't really have any sexual chemistry. But it's a mild enough example of the genre to be an inoffensive way to pass an afternoon.

37/2607. Toy Story 4 (2019)
Purposelessness. Abandonment. Loneliness. Death. Toy Story movies go hard and are always worth the effort to watch (though my fingers).

38/2608. Two Weeks with Love (1950)
The A plot of this MGM musical with Jane Powell and Ricardo Montalban is fine, but "little sister" Debbie Reynolds steals every scene she is in, especially singing "Aba Daba Honeymoon."

39/2609. One Battle After Another (2025)
Now that I've seen this, Paul Thomas Anderson's recent Oscar feels more like a career retrospective award. I do not think this is his best work, certainly no better than Licorice Pizza or Inherent Vice. Full disclosure requires I admit that I am no particular fan of Magnolia or Boogie Nights, either, but I agree Anderson is a rare talent and I do not begrudge the industry eventually recognizing it.

For an underground militant revolutionary radio DJ, that's a pretty prominent Coca-Cola can.

More to come.

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As a child of the 70s, I have long considered myself a Star Wars fan, which is why I impulsively decided to follow the link to "The Best Star Wars Trivia Quiz Questions to See How Much You Really Know" at Mental Floss dot com. The quiz has 100 questions, only the first 19 of which are in the category "Classic Trilogy (Episodes IV–VI)." But that's about where my fandom ends, so I figured I'd do pretty well. And I'm happy to report that I did know the name of Han Solo's ship and Luke Skywalker's trainer on Dagobah. But then I got to question 15.

15. What is the Emperor called in The Emperor Strikes Back?

I know I'm getting old, but I don't recall a movie named The Emperor Strikes Back in the "classic trilogy." And I certainly didn't know the answer.

Darth Sidious

Again, I'm old now, but I do remember a Darth Sidious who was the Sith Lord master of Darth Maul and later (after Maul gets cut in half) Darth Tyrannus and later (after Tyrannus gets decapitated) Darth Vader. (As Luke's trainer says of the Sith, "Always two there are. No more, no less." By which he clearly means a top half and a bottom half.) Darth Sidious was the evil alter ego of Sheev Palpatine, the representative of the planet Naboo in the Galactic Senate who manipulated events to rise to Supreme Chancellor before disbanding the Senate and ruling the galaxy as Emperor. So, yeah, Darth Sidious and the Emperor are the same person, but technically speaking, since Sidious wasn't introduced as a character until the fourth Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, no one called the Emperor that in any of the "classic trilogy" films, especially one that doesn't exist. (Point of fact: the prequels played so coy about Palpatine/Sidious's future as "The Emperor" that I have often wondered if Lucas expected contemporary audiences to be unaware they were all the same person.)

So I call bullshit. But what else should I expect from a piece of Internet clickbait in the post-truth culture in which we now live, where every major technology and media company has turned their content engines over to poorly curated supervised LLMs that "hallucinate" up to half their facts? The fault is clearly mine for expecting reality to live up to my fantasies of living in a more civilized age.

Happy May 4th to those who celebrate.

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