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They say I complain about everything. They might be right. I'm a pretty sour individual who's no fun at parties. But tonight I have a new reason to gripe:

For most of the past two decades, I've made a point of turning on WXIA-TV at 11:30PM on Sunday nights to watch their weekly Sports Extra recap of Georgia sports. On tonight's episode, host Maria Martin announced the show has been canceled to make way for a longer regular newscast.

What terrible timing. Football season is finally just around the corner! I was anticipating another delightful season of watching each weekly Atlanta Falcons meltdown slowly grind Maria and company's determined optimism into a more appropriate pessimistic fatalism. It's the annual rite of passage in Atlanta sports!

I'm sure that WXIA has its reasons for making the change. At least it had The Pandemic to blame when it canceled Wake Up with Chesley in 2022. (For about a decade, it was the show I watched while getting ready for bed.) Television shows come and go, of course, and they keep telling me that no one watches late night television anymore. They might be right, but it still sounds like self-fulfilling prophecy when the networks are the ones canceling all the content that's worth watching. All I can say for certain is that I'll not be making the same weekly effort to watch an extra thirty minutes of "if it bleeds it leads" local news.

Such is life, sadly. Everything you love abandons you eventually, if you don't leave it first. Which perfectly summarizes a season of Atlanta Falcons football. I found my way to Sports Extra once upon a time. I can only assume I'll eventually find my way to another source of weekly local sports coverage. Turn, turn, turn.

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75/2645. Stolen Face (1952)
A mad scientist gives the face of the woman he loves but can't have to a criminal whom he marries and tries to reform. It does not go well. The ending feels very unearned.

76/2646. The Eagle-Shooting Heroes (1993)
A bit like Airplane! for martial arts movies, the further it leans into the absurd the better it is.

77/2647. Stand By for Action (1942)
This war film thinks its a drama, but it's really a comedy. Amazingly, it crams every Hollywood naval cliche into one film.

78/2648. Texas Carnival (1951)
The setting and plot of this Red Skelton musical farce doesn't really have much to do with carnivals, but I think that's pretty standard for most Red Skelton films in which the "plot" is just a loose framework for typical Skelton shenanigans. I thought all the best bits were performed by others (Ann Miller, Ester Williams, Howard Keel, Keenan Wynn).

79/2649. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Not to be confused with The Hitcher, this one is about a hitchhiker who is really a gleeful murderer who seeks to torture the driver. What's that you say? Still confused? This is the one directed by Ida Lupino.

More to come.

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"I hope you two learned to be more careful around dangerous bottles!"

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I've lived in Coweta County for 24 of the past 36 years, and this is the first time I've seen something like this:

Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2026 21:28:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Coweta County EMA
Reply-To: Coweta County EMA
Subject: Coweta County Public Safety Alert
Coweta County Public Safety Alert: Black bear reported near Oak Shores Dr in Summer Grove. Secure pets, avoid the area, and do not approach the bear.

Bears? Roaming the subdivisions of Coweta County? It seems the deer have new allies in their Great Uprising, and there can be only one reason for this: they've come for our data centers.

Well, they can have 'em.

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I have recently been wondering if I'm too hard on movies. The public seems to really enjoy some films I just can't stand. Recent examples include Project Hail Mary, Tom Holland's Spider-Man franchise, and anything by Christopher Nolan since Memento. Do I hate them only because they're popular? Am I watching them wrong? Is the problem me?

With that in the back of my mind, I just tried to watch

95/2665. Poor Things (2023)

And I really didn't care for it.

I'm still stinging from the ending of the previous Yorgos Lanthimos/Emma Stone collaboration, 2018's The Favourite, which featured an extended sound ("music" is the wrong word) crafted to make the audience as uncomfortable as possible, so I was never particularly enthusiastic for this. When Poor Things opens to a very similar noise, I knew I was in trouble. It killed any excitement I had mustered toward the 2+ hours in front of me, and from that point forward I was looking for a convenient exit, which I eventually found shortly after the one-hour mark (still several minutes short of halfway) when The Monster watched a sailor strangle a seagull for shitting on him.

Soundtrack aside, my bigger complaint is that Lanthimos and I strongly disagree on what should and should not be shown. Prude that I am, I'm still not talking about that bird or the many, many sex scenes. (They are not designed to titillate, but I did begin to question why so many of them? I would not be surprised if The Monster screwed that seagull killer in the next scene.)

This is self-evidently a cold fairy tale of a naive girl's coming-of-age story in a funhouse mirror society built to turn women into slaves (Frankenstein meets Jane Eyre, if you will). But if the goal is to engage the audience in a philosophical study of autonomy and feminism, take a lesson from, say, Edward Scissorhands and gloss over the details instead of spending the first quarter of the run time grounding The Monster's creation in quasi-science fiction. Like learning how hot dogs are made, the knowledge of pig intestines and rat assholes kills the magic, stripping away the allegorical veneer and leaving only an unresolved uncanny valley of the ethical questions about the nature of consciousness, control, and consent in the sexual behavior of those unable to understand those basic concepts. No, thank you.

Obviously, Ms. Stone had the time of her life acting her heart out in a one-of-a-kind role. Good for her. However, it has become increasingly clear that the parts that interest her to play are no longer the parts I care to watch. (I'd say "Never go full retard," but she did win her second Oscar for this. So you do you, girl.) Stone and Lanthimos have combined for two movies since this one; I have no intention of seeing either. Oh, well. At least I'll always have La La Land.

Sure, I could endure the second half to see if the movie sticks the landing. But this is an adventure story, and all adventure stories are move about the journey than the destination. If I'm not having fun or learning anything along the way, why should I bother going on that trip? Maybe I do just hate everything I see these days. Maybe I need to just get comfortable with that. But I definitely don't need to waste any more of my time on other people's crappy journeys.

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