"My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd...."

     Say it along with me:

     "My name is Elmer J. Fudd. I am a millionaire. I own a mansion, and a yacht."

     If you are of a certain age, you easily remember those lines from "Hare Brush," the  Merry Melodies cartoon where our bald-headed, shotgun-wielding nincompoop is morphed into a corporate CEO (not that the two conditions are mutually exclusive; remember Dick Cheney) who thinks he's a rabbit. A psychiatrist becomes involved, and a dazed Bugs Bunny ends up repeating those declarations over and over. It's the rare, perhaps unique Bugs cartoon where Elmer is victorious at the end.

     Words ground into us on countless Saturday mornings, sprawled in feet pajamas before our black and white television sets.

     It's an odd brain worm to have, but these are odd times.

     "My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd..."

     With that line tickling my ear, I regularly check my 401(k). I used to ignore it for weeks at a time. Now I look every day, sometimes more than once a day, rooting it on toward the empyrean.

      Not without a few speed bumps. A week ago Monday, the words echoing in my head, I logged on, or tried to.

     "My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd ... I am ... a millionaire..."

     Instead of the latest update, I got this message:

   
     What the heck is Cloudflare? No idea? And when had I blocked it? I didn't recall. I asked AI what I should do to unblock Cloudflare, and it told me to start wiping out caches and eliminating cookies. I'd just done that, a few weeks earlier, trying to correct some other unwelcome situation, and it's a pain in the ass. You have to sign into stuff all over again.

     Instead I deployed one of my special magic strategies that often work with computers and everything else. I waited. And was rewarded by catching a news report on the radio that mentioned Cloudflare, some huge server system the specifics of which elude me, was down, sending ripples. It wasn't just me. Which is always a comfort. Indeed, as I went about getting my column ready, fact-checking and such, I got several of these messages:

     Now that, if I may, is a useful graphic, in that it tells me what is working —me —what is not working —them — and what I should do: wait. Which I knew to do anyway. Kudos to whoever came up with that one. A human, certainly. 
     Eventually I got into my 401(k), and had my traditional morning lick-lipping glance at the room of pillows I plan to flop into midway through 2027. Not as much as that milestone used to be, but not bad either. And Elmer's voice whispered once again, tantalizingly, in my ear.