*Note to self: Today was a very good day. It so rarely occurs to me in the moment that I'm having a "good time," so I think it is probably important to make note when it does. I woke up to watch UGA win, then gave haircuts to both Henry and Louis, then all three of us rode the Jeep over to Dad's to play with Cece, then I had Chinese takeout (vegetable lo mein and white rice) and played a video game (Borderlands 3) with an online friend (Brian) and watched even more football until the wee hours of the morning. I enjoyed all of those activities, many of which I partake in regularly, but football season is here now and football is just the best.

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One of the best parts of the annual Little League World Series on ESPN is seeing how the latest crop of 10- to 12-year-olds answer the questionnaire about their likes and dislikes. I've never played organized baseball, but because I'm an egotist, I wonder how I would answer those questions if I was in their place, by which I mean how would I have answered these questions when I was 12... in 1987. Let's find out together!

1. What is your favorite MLB team?
Atlanta Braves. (Yes, they were the local team, but I actually liked pro baseball in 1987. I went to games a few times a year until the strike of 1994, which completely killed any desire I had to watch MLB games. I haven't been back since. I'm not mad about it anymore; I've moved on to just not caring.)

2. Who is your favorite MLB player or non-MLB athlete?
Bruce Benedict, catcher, Atlanta Braves (because when the Fulton County Stadium announcer called his name, the crowd howled "Bruuuuuuuuuuuce!").

3. What is your favorite movie?
Star Wars. (Don't ask which one. Everyone knows there's only one Star Wars.)

4. What is your favorite television show?
Bionic Six. (You have probably never heard of Bionic Six. It wasn't even popular in my school at the time. But I still occasionally use Rock-1's catchphrase: "So-LAR!")

5. Who is your favorite actor?
Han Solo I mean, Harrison Ford. (Note: This was almost Michael J. Fox because Family Ties and Back to the Future, but it was not because Teen Wolf. And Han Solo was also Indiana Jones, so he wins.)

6. Who is your favorite artist?
"Weird Al" Yankovic. (It might still be "Weird Al" Yankovic.)

7. Who is the person you'd most like to meet?
"Weird Al" Yankovic. (It is definitely still "Weird Al" Yankovic.)

8. What is your favorite food?
The french fries that came with a Chili's Oldtimer. (The Chili's on Memorial Drive in Stone Mountain is where my parents would take me on special occasions, like birthdays. The chain is a shadow of its former shadow, but back in the day, their french fries and chocolate shakes were *amazing*.)

9. What is your favorite animal?
I've always really liked dogs, but I don't know that's what I would have said in 1987. My family had a Scottish Terrier named Jammie back then. Jammie was great. So let's just say I would have said dogs.

10. What is your favorite emoji?
The only emoji that existed in 1987 was a smiley face, so even though I hated it, I guess... smiley face?

11. What is your dream job?
Architect. (Given that I didn't know much about construction, I suspect that was largely due to Hollywood using "architect" as shorthand for someone who had a job that was creative, lucrative, and allowed plenty of free time. That "dream" would die when I ran into high school calculus.)

12. What is your favorite hobby?
Collecting comic books. (Some things never change.)

13. What is your favorite school subject?
By far, my favorite subject was whatever we were doing in my "gifted" class, which was essentially a period of structured creativity practice, like math games and creative writing. (Do they not have gifted classes in schools outside Georgia? None of these modern Little Leaguers ever answer "gifted class." Although, come to think of it, none of us were great athletes, either.)

14. Do you have a special talent?
Drawing. (I suppose that's been supplanted by "sarcasm." Although, come to think of it, I always had a bit of a smart mouth. At my 7th grade graduation, when my elementary school principal told the assembled cafetorium that my class was all such good well behaved kids, he made a point of looking me in the eye when he appended "most of you." So maybe always "sarcasm.")

15. What would you do if you win the lottery?
Honestly, I have no idea how I would have answered this In 1987. The kids often like to say they'd buy cars, but I was never really a car guy. Money was... an issue between my parents (who wouldn't divorce until 1990), so I probably just would have given it to them. After I bought a bunch of comic books, of course.

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A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.

That's always seemed like sage advice to me. I'm not quite 50 yet, but sooner or later, everyone needs something to take the edge off life's endless march of crap. However....

Not so long ago, my aunt brought over some Baileys mini bottles, you know, the size that college students smuggle into football games to "surreptitiously" pour Fireballs into the Cokes they buy at concession stands (shhh, it's a secret!). I thought I'd give one a taste test by adding it to a cup of coffee, or, as my aunt says, my cup of coffee-flavored milk.

Fun fact: I also wasn't a coffee drinker until comparatively late in life. I started some time around 2016, I guess, when my aunt bought me a red Keurig for my birthday. And now my teeth are the color of Grey Poupon. In other words, it's never too late to pick up a bad habit.

Anyway, as I was saying, I had concerns that I would enjoy alcohol in my coffee, as I have rarely had an alcoholic drink I enjoyed. I couldn't finish even one of the 6-pack of Boston Lager my Mom bought me my Senior year of high school; the Screwdrivers so popular in my Freshman college dorm only made me sick; the Mind Erasers my waiter coworkers drank at the local bar had the flavor of poison; and the Tom Collins my girlfriend made to ease my nerves the night we lost our virginity only made me think about the terrible taste her tongue left in my mouth. ("Sex is not worth a Tom Collins," would make a good title for my autobiography.)

It took me months to work up the courage to try a Baileys Irish Coffee, and when I finally did, well, it tasted as bad as I feared. Each sip tasted more medicinal than the last. After four, I poured it out and had a Coke instead.

It's probably for the best. I'm an angry drunk anyway.

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Want a sneak peek at an in-progress yard sign in my studio right now? Feast your eyes on this (first-coat) primed sheet of plywood!

In animation, they say good character design is a figure you can recognize by its silhouette. So I probably don't have to tell you who that will eventually be a painting of.

Speaking of design, I was often asked in art school why I would bother doing so much prep work before I painted, as if suggesting there was no point in painting something if I already knew how the finished product would look. (I was also told my work was often "clever in a bad way," whatever that means.) Maybe the finished work of abstract expressionists reveals deep truths about, er, something to its creators, but even if that's true, maybe I just don't like surprises or, as the inimitable Bob Ross would call them, "happy accidents."

I have a good friend from college who still believes that my work is craftsmanship, not art. To be fair, he doesn't mean that as an insult. We both have nothing but respect for great craftsmen. I once knew a very impressive young draftsman at J.C. Booth Junior High School who could recreate freehand anything he could see at any size. He was a craftsman, and I still think his work was pretty darn good.

I'd define craftsmanship as the ability to execute a plan skillfully. But someone has to create the plan in the first place, and the ability to visualize that plan is what makes someone an artist. The greatest artists lie in the Venn Diagram intersection of craftsmen and artists. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Bob Ross... they could all think up a great idea and execute it. That kid in junior high lamented he couldn't draw anything from imagination. I hope he kept trying. I happen to believe that while not everyone has the natural tools to be a craftsman, anyone with an idea can be an artist.

I don't mean to suggest that I'm the equal of Bob Ross, and maybe I do tend to overthink (and underexecute) my pieces, but I will insist I'm an artist.

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56/2367. Denial (2016)
This is a courtroom drama about the libel lawsuit brought in the mid-90s against a Emory University professor by a British Nazi-sympathizing Holocaust denier. That's interesting, sure, but the reason I watched it was because I was a student at both Emory University and DeKalb College (renamed Georgia Perimeter College while I was there but is now a satellite campus of Georgia State University) in the mid-90s when the principle action takes place.

The 2016 film begins with an attempt at verisimilitude with establishing shots on Emory's quad in Decatur, GA (purporting to be 1994 and not doing too bad a job at pulling it off)...

...then follows our antagonist as he travels west away from Emory towards downtown Atlanta on Freedom Parkway (a road originally planned as the very controversial Presidential Parkway which was still under construction in the mid-90s)...

...then south along the Downtown Connector ("connecting" US Interstates 75 and 85) through the Grady Curve, so-called because Grady Memorial Hospital is just off camera to the right. (There's a giant neon Coca-Cola sign just off camera to the left.)

Side note: Turner Field, seen on the sign above, is also an anachronism. It didn't exist in 1994. It was originally opened to the public as Centennial Olympic Stadium for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games. After the Atlanta Braves abandoned it and moved north to Cobb County in 2016, it was sold to Georgia State University to become their football stadium and renamed again to Center Parc Stadium.

Side note 2: That billboard in the bottom right of the frame is advertising then-new (in 2015) news team of Sharon Reed and Ben Swann for WGCL CBS46 News. In 1994, WGCL was calling itself WGNX and after many years as an independent UHF station had just become the local CBS affiliate (after Atlanta's original CBS affiliate, WAGA, became a Fox station). Since 2022, WGCL has become WANF (for "Atlanta News First") but both Reed and Swann are long gone (in 2018 and 2019 respectively).

The antagonist must have been headed south down the Connector to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (called just the William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in 1994 as former mayor Maynard Jackson wouldn't die and get his name added until 2003) because we next see him pull up to -- I had to Google Image Search this -- the Elmsbridge Civic Centre in Esher, England.

Google Maps tells me that Esher is a suburb of London, where most of the movie is set and filmed, so it's easy to see why the filmmakers would use it here. For the record, according to Wikipedia, the Civic Centre was constructed in 1991, so it is at least period appropriate!

However, in the very next scene, by means of movie magic, we're transported back to the States inside an unidentified lecture hall disguised as DeKalb College (by means of a banner on a podium)!

I have no idea where this last bit was filmed, though I suspect it is also in London. It doesn't match any hall I sat in off Emory's quad in 1993-95, and if there were any lecture halls like this on Perimeter's Clarkston ("Central") or Decatur ("South") campuses in 1997-99, I was never inside them. They never used wood paneling when concrete blocks would do.

That's just the first 5 minutes. The rest of the movie takes place in Europe. I never went to any schools in London or Poland, so for all I know, all those locations are perfect.

More to come.

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About a week ago, I took the boys for our usual walkies. It was unusually blustery, and I stopped to check the weather radar on my phone. At exactly that moment, a golf carts drove by.

Despite the fact that we live just across the highway from our local country club, golf carts used to be rare in my neighborhood. Back when I started walking the girls, there were only two carts on my street. The gas-powered one belonged to the people who teach horseback riding and use the cart to ride along the street and collect the horse droppings, like a motorized version of the street sweeper at the end of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I only saw the batter-powered one occasionally when the kids got bored and took it for joyrides, doing donuts in their yard.

(Side note: I personally don't think golf carts are more fun than watching Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I doubt those kids have ever seen it. Back in the day, there really wasn't that much to watch or that many channels to watch them on, so everyone knew everything on television, making pop culture references the coin of the realm. You made friends in school by quoting reruns of shows that had been first runs for our parents' generation: Leave it to Beaver or Gilligan's Island or Monty Python's Flying Circus. I have no idea what tweens watch these days after school, but if I threatened a kid today with a loaded banana, they'd think I was brain damaged.)

There are lots of golf carts in the 'hood now. The boys love 'em. They go crazy when they see one. I don't know why. So long as I've had the boys, they've never been within five feet of a golf cart. A golf cart has never brought them a treat. But I guess they do drive by slower than cars, making them easier to chase, and the ones in my neighborhood often have other dogs on board, making the chase worthwhile.

Anyway, as I was saying, the golf cart drove by while I was half paying attention, and Henry and Louis went berserk, and their leashes damn near pulled off the fingernail on my left index finger. Not totally. It just bent it back halfway. It hurt a lot the first few days, but it's gotten better. Or at least I thought it was getting better. I showed it to Mom earlier today, and she nearly swooned. So maybe not all better. I'm just taking it one day at a time. (Boy, that Schneider was a card.)

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Google has added an "AI Overview" to the top of its search results, and I don't like it. It's not that I don't like having a quick response for queries likes "define calumnies" or "weather radar newnan ga," it's that I don't trust the AI's fact checking abilities yet. And I especially don't like any response that starts "According to a Facebook post,...".

In my high school history classes, when I wasn't being told that I would fail Georgia's statewide standardized tests if I didn't say that the South fought the Civil War over "States Rights," I was taught to consult primary sources for accurate answers. (In hindsight, I'm sure this was the teacher's way of telling me the whole "States Rights" thing was bullshit, but we didn't have easy access to actual historical transcripts of the South Carolina Declaration of Secession in the days before the Internet.)

I've played around with Chat GPT enough to know that it is less reliable than a Wikipedia page. So when I already have to Google at least 6 different variations of "lg washer inlet valve" to find the correct replacement part number, I'm not inclined to believe whatever word salad response the AI scrapes from untrustworthy websites in response to even my casual queries asking for things like "children's television hosts atlanta 1950s 60s" or "who wrote transformers tv episodes."

I know that I'm in the minority here. I don't like explainer YouTube or TikTok videos, either. I happen to enjoy research. I grew up with libraries and printed periodicals, and I can read pretty quickly. Just give me a list of links, Google, and let me do the hard work of finding the right answers. I'd much rather have open questions than wrong answers.

If I have to get my mother to fact check all of Google's responses, I might as well start my own website called Ask My Mom. I don't want to have to do that if I can avoid it. Mom's smart, but there are definitely some queries I'd just never ask her, if you know what I mean. (I'm looking at you, "dua lipa acm awards dress.")

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As I type this, the South Park episode in which Cartman inherits a million dollars and uses it to buy an amusement park (which causes Kyle to lose his faith in God) is on the 33-inch 16:9 ratio flatscreen LCD television beside my computer. According to Wikipedia, that episode, "Cartmanland," first aired on July 25, 2001. That's almost twenty-three years ago!

I distinctly remember watching the broadcast of the debut episode of South Park ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe") on Comedy Central on basic cable via our communal 24-inch 4:3 ratio CRT TV in the apartment I shared with friends and former classmates Matt and Randy in unincorporated North Druid Hills. Matt had invited our old high school classmate, Tabitha, over for the evening, and she was absolutely appalled by the course humor, which, of course, only made it funnier. That was August 1997, and I was already in my second college.

To put those dates into perspective, I also distinctly remember watching the 20ish-inch wood-paneled TV in our family's basement as channel 46 (on the UHF dial) weatherman Denny Moore, wearing what we would now call Trekker cosplay, hosted a New Year's Eve 1980-something marathon of original Star Trek episodes. Although I'm not entirely sure of the year, I am sure that whatever year it was was definitely prior to The Next Generation being a thing.

The point of that being that in hindsight, there was less time between the date of that rerun marathon and the original broadcast dates of those Star Trek episodes than there has been between between now and 9/11.

Honestly, I'm starting to think that the real difference between the past and the present is that there were barely 3 seasons of Star Trek and South Park has a contract to keep making episodes into its 30th season. The Good Old Days were a very brief time indeed.

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My father is enthusiastically following all the news stories about American college campus protests against Israel's ongoing campaign against Gaza. I'm not sure what the appeal of that story is for him other than the fact that's what Fox News is broadcasting all day to distract its viewers from the ongoing trial of The People of the State of New York v. some guy who used to be president. (According to Dad, those damn Yankees are being very unfair to that nice, smart man.)

When I think of college protests, the first thing that comes to mind are the protesters who stood just outside The Arch of my (not particularly liberal) college campus decrying Bush Junior's invasion of Iraq in 2003. I seem to recall no one was particularly kind to them at the time, the prevailing general sentiment being "how dare they stand up for those bastards after what they did on 9/11." To hear the locals talk about it, the only rational explanation for the protesters' behavior was that they hated America.

That's my father's stance on pretty much all protests. To hear him complain about Colin Kaepernick kneeling or Occupy Wall Street, there's nothing less American than protesting. (To be fair, he thinks events in, outside, and around the Capitol on January 6 were also wrong; he just thinks that unjustly persecuted fellow facing a kangaroo court in New York didn't have anything directly to do with them.)

I hate to be inconvenienced as much as the next guy, but I respect nonviolent, peaceful acts of civil disobedience in the style of Gandhi and MLK, even when I'm not particularly sympathetic to the protesters' cause, like that guy who stands on Gillis Bridge overlooking Sanford Stadium on game days yelling through a bullhorn that everyone in the crowd is going to Hell for worshipping a football instead of Jesus Christ. Sometimes, you've got to do what it takes to make people aware of your opinion.

It would be great if the kids camping on their college quads could restrain themselves from graffiti and spitting in the faces of the men who have come to arrest them, but it would also be great if Arabs and Jews could find a way to stop indiscriminately killing one another in ever increasing numbers. As Dad tells me a great man once said, "there are very fine people on both sides."

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I've decided I'm in the market for Peter and the Wolf on CD. It's been recorded many, many times, and I'm not sure which one I want to get. (I don't want to buy them all).

Obviously I grew up familiar with the 1946 Disney version narrated by Sterling Holloway, but the Oscar-winning 2006 stop-motion Polish animation is good, too. I have good childhood memories of attending an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra presentation hosted by Monica Kaufman; I'm sure that one wasn't taped. (Did I ever see it at the Center for Puppetry Arts? I vaguely feel that the answer is yes.)

The only version I have in the house is Weird Al's on cassette tape; it's out of print and prohibitively expensive on the secondhand market. Besides, I think I want something different anyway, something more traditional.

Does anyone within eyeshot have any recommendations? What's your favorite Peter and the Wolf?

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