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One problem with being a parent is that you occasionally find yourself semi-responsible for the acts of other people’s children. When your kid plays, he tends to play with other kids, whose parents may not be as…attentive as you are. You’re just trying to keep your kid from eating mulch, and suddnely a bunch of other halfwit rugrats are digging through trash cans and throwing old “forty” bottles at each other.

A few weeks ago, I took Charles to the park near our house, which has a nice little jungle gym with a couple slides. It’s usually a nice place to go because he gets bored with it quickly and wants to go home. On this occasion, while we were playing, we were descended upon by about a dozen children, ranging from a few months to 9 or 10 years old, and their grandmother, who was very friendly and nice but clearly overwhelmed. She focused mostly on the baby, while the rest of the terrors ran around injuring themselves and each other. One odd child decided the fun thing to do was to wait until my back was turned and throw a frisbee at my head. It was a pity that Granny was there, as I would have enjoyed dropping the kid out of a tree.

Charles played nicely, as is his usual wont, aside from occasionally trying to “borrow” toys from other children, which I corrected as needed. At one point, however, the older kids wandered to some nearby trees and started climbing them. Fine by me, they were 9 or 10, I was climbing trees when I was younger than that. Peer dynamics being what they are, however, most of the other kids wandered over to see what was going on. I convinced Charles that he was too small to climb trees, but by then the kids were picking up sticks off the ground and swinging them haphazardly. Hey, not my kids, not my problem, unless they came near Charles, in which case I’d start kicking butt and taking names. They didn’t, so I didn’t interfere.

This, of course, was when Granny swooped in, yelling at the kids to stop beating each other with flora, and giving me a nasty look for, I assume, having permitted her malignant seed to do such dangerous things. Because it’s my fault she showed up to a park with a plethora of idiots she couldn’t control.

I dislike other people.

Great job, “fans.”

Here’s the rule I propose: if you’re at a home game, don’t mess with the opposing fans. They’re the insurgents; you’re the US Army. Screwing with them is just like torture. It just pisses them off.

Let’s face it: Mets fans aren’t that bright. If they were, they wouldn’t be Mets fans. (Ha ha! Just kidding, Mets fan who might be reading this! Please don’t torch my car!) Now we’ll have thousands of them showing up at the Vault all season, rolling 15-20 deep, just itching to beat the crap out of someone. And some poor guy in a Cole Hamels jersey who’s taking his daughter to her first baseball game, and asked an idiot in a cheap David Wright knockoff jersey to stop dropping F-bombs, is gonna end up in the hospital. That’s gonna be so…great.

Some schmuck “fan” just created a baseball environment in which somebody’s going to get maimed. Thanks, douchenozzle.

Here is why I don’t normally watch American Idol: because of hacks like Allison Whatsherbutt, who deafened me for a while last night. She sang “Someone To Watch Over Me,” one of the best songs ever put to lined paper, like a pig in an abattoir. Good job, Allison: you can song really frickin’ loud. Is that all you have to offer? Really?

Here’s the thing that, if you’re lucky, you’ll learn somewhere down the line: singing is often about subtlety. Loud is merely the first step in learning how to sing. I know literally dozens of people who can sing loud. I know a very limited number who can sing softly, and more importantly, know which to do at any given time.

“Someone To Watch Over Me” is wistful, almost a bedtime prayer. Belting it out at the top of your lungs is like playing a lullabye on a piccolo trumpet directly into your baby’s ear. It’s like a Frost poem through a megaphone. It’s like waking up your sleeping spouse by kneeing him in the testes.

Sadly, <SPOILER ALERT>you’ll be there after tonight</SPOILER ALERT>, so next week perhaps you can commit voice rape on a Norah Jones song, or something. Color me “not watching.”

In Lancaster, California, Honda decided it would be fun to carve grooves in a road such that when you drive over them, the vibration of your suspension plays a song. They decided, for unknown reasons, to use the William Tell Overture, by Giaochino “Joey Chinos” Rossini. In case you haven’t watched the Lone Ranger recently, listen to this.

Then, go watch and listen to this.

Notice anything? Am I the only one? They spent heaven knows how many man-hours gouging grooves into that road and did it to produce the wrong fricking notes. This commercial gets played at least once every time I watch a Daily Show online and it makes me insane.

Just so you know.

Andrew Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow all took Karl Rove to task for this stupidity. I might as well join in! Let’s break it down like En Vogue:

What the Obama administration’s done in the last several days is very dangerous.
What they’ve essentially said is, if we have policy disagreements with our predecessors,
what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses . . .

. . . and what we’re gonna do, is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.

Is that what we’ve come to in this country? That if we have a change of administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements with-that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that’s run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that’s not the way we do things here in America.

Ignoring for the moment that I think Chicago is technically located within the borders of the United States, Mr. Rove apparently thinks that the matter of torture, which is against federal law and various international treaties, is merely a “policy disagreement,” like arguments over tax rates or deficit spending.

Hey Karl: shut the hell up. You’re a buffoon. What we’re talking about are crimes. Crimes that hopefully will be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Shepard Smith put it best (warning: uncensored F-bomb, if that bothers you).

It’s all Gerald Ford’s fault, I think. When he infamously pardoned Richard Nixon, he set a dangerous precedent that a Presidential administration should not pass judgment on the crimes of a previous one. Which is fine, if we were some kind of banana republic in which every new dictator spends the first week slaughtering everyone associated with the last one. I can’t remember any incoming President immediately telling the Department of Justice to go after the last guy because he didn’t like him. What would the benefit be? It’s not as if last guy is going to come back. The time of Grover Cleveland is gone, people.

By “closing the book” on the Watergate scandal, President Ford gave credence to President Nixon’s idea that when the President does something, it’s not illegal. Since we didn’t punish Nixon, now we can’t punish anyone, seems to be the feeling.

My ass. Mr. Holder, the only way to prevent these kind of crimes from happening again are to ensure that everyone knows they’ll be punished for it. As much as I hate the idea of “setting an example,” anyone who authorized or ordered torture tactics needs to be prosecuted and jailed. Go get ’em.

I do have to admit, however, that my judgment may be clouded by the fact that I’m giddy over the possibility that Dick Cheney might end up with a prison tattoo saying “If u reed dis, bubba kill u.”

I spent most of last week driving to and from King of Prussia, PA (hence the lack of posts), and here is what I can report to you: I-476 and I-76 are the worst system of roads of any place I’ve been to, and include both Staten Island and Boston in that statement. Pretty much everyone in southeast Pennsylvania, totalling several million people, uses one or both of those roads EVERY DAY, and yet they have only two lanes of traffic in each direction. It’s worth noting that this is the same number of lanes that route 87 has through Mason County, Texas, which has, as of the 2000 census, 3738 people in it. Even at 10am the traffic is stop-and-go. I find this infuriating.

I talked it over with my pops, and he says that The Blue Route (I-476) took so long to be built that, while it was completed in 1991, the original planning for it took place in the mid-50s, when much fewer people lived along it. And from the Wikipedia article on the subject:

As one of the most controversial Interstate Highways in Pennsylvania, construction of I-476 began in 1967, but was not completed until 1991 between MacDade Blvd.(Exit 1) and Interstate 76(Exit 16), and until 1992 between Germantown Pike east/Chemical Rd.(Exit 19) and Interstate 276 (PA Turnpike), due to litigation between the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and several communities in the road’s path over environmental concerns. An agreement in 1985 led to many environmental compromises in the road’s design, including a downsized four-lane design south of Pennsylvania Route 3, ramp meters, and federal scenic route status, prohibiting the erection of advertisement billboards along the entire freeway portion. While the redesigned highway was largely well-received, the constriction to four lanes has led to bottleneck conditions in the area, and many communities that originally opposed the road have now called for its widening.

The people in those communities should simply be set afire.

This is the worst short story ever. By me. Based on true events from Monday.

Robert didn’t think of himself as high-strung. He was a pretty relaxed individual. Which is why it was such a surprise when he killed that guy.

All he’d wanted to do was go for a bike ride. So he put his bike on the rack on his car, packed up his helmet and other associated gear, and went to work. Around lunchtime, he gathered up his stuff and changed in the bathroom.

“Damn it!” he said to himself. “I forgot a towel.” Hm. Robert was going to have to shower after the ride, but without a towel he’d have to stand around air-drying. Just then he thought, “Wait, I only live 5 miles from here. I’ll just ride home, throw a towel in my backpack, and then finish out the ride!” Good thinking, Robert.

So that is what he did. Sort of. Except for the retrieving a towel part, because Robert got all the way home and was pulling into his driveway before he realized he had forgotten his keys.

So, he spent a few minutes trying to figure out a way to break into his house, but being a security-conscious soul, every door was locked, and every window latched. “Well, that’s just great.” Robert considered his options, and realized there wasn’t much he could do. So he headed back to the office.

The sky grew ominous as he rode along route 40, and eventually turned into a torrential downpour. Robert was soaked to the bone, but didn’t slacken his 15-mile-per-hour pace. He stopped only to check his phone and make sure it wasn’t going to short out and melt or anything.

After 8 miles of being really pissed off about being stuck in the rain, Robert came back to the office, went to the bathroom and showered. He came out and prepared himself to just stand around while waiting for the water to drip off. Just then, a man came in to change for HIS workout.

“Rainy enough for you?”

So Robert beat him to death with a cycling shoe and dried himself off on the man’s pants.

Update: I did not get to kiss John Mayer on the mouth. All is sadness. Doubly frustrating, is that because the Tweeter Center sucks, I couldn’t get any pictures. Argh.

Our tickets said something about “NO PROFESSIONAL CAMERAS,” which kinda concerned me, but I thought, well, Canon’s own website describes the Rebel XTi as a “consumer” camera (the 30D is prosumer; the 5D is professional; and the 1D Mark III is “Holy Crap This Is Way Too Expensive To Take Out Of The Box”), and if I just put on a relatively tame lens (no monstrous zooms with lens hoods), they can’t really complain.

Incorrect.

Apparently when they say “No Professional Cameras,” they mean no detachable lenses, so despite the fact that my camera entered the building with a 50mm prime lens that wouldn’t allow me to get a shot of John any closer than “ant” view, it was confiscated (and returned later, worry not). This wouldn’t have been so troubling if the tickets had specifically said “No cameras with detachable lenses,” which would have been perfectly clear. It also would have been less annoying if they weren’t allowing people to bring in $800 Sony zoom 8MP digitals that were capable of getting pictures of the bass player’s ridiculous Village-People-Cop hat.

Anyway, we got in, and I immediately bought myself a large boring American beer, only to walk an extra 50 feet and discover they had a stand selling all kinds of quality microbrews. So my frustrations mounted. Then we got seated while James Morrison played his set, and I got even more pissed off, because the sound system at the Tweeter Center is so crappy it sounded like James was singing through a special filter designed to remove all consonants from every word. I couldn’t understand a thing. Even now I have no idea if any of his songs are any good; it might as well have been all instrumentals. I’ve heard better sound systems in an elevator.

The same goes for Ben Folds, who from what I’m told is a phenomenal musician and performer; all I can say is he has some amusing gimmicks and his songs often have pretty melodies. I’ll give him a B- because he kept throwing his piano seat at the keys, and at one point during a song he broke a piano string on a low note, immediately stopped the song, removed the string from the soundboard, handed it to a fan, and then restarted the song exactly where he’d left off.

Luckily, during his set I was able to run off and pee, and also buy a quality beer named something like “Circus Boy” or “Circus Penis,” or something. It was FANDAMNTASTIC, and I got back to my seat to listen to Ben Folds play 2 more completely unintelligible songs and then wander off to put on his neck brace (I’m assuming, since his head is roughly the same size as the rest of his body).

Honestly, the best part of the concert (up until John walked onstage) was making fun of other people with Liz. A quick rundown of the amusing people we saw:

• Between 8 and 27,000 skinny little high school/early college-aged skanks who seriously needed to go dig a sandwich out of the trash or something before their bodies collapsed in on themselves.
• An ENORMOUSLY fat woman in a wheelchair, attended by her fat husband and 2 fat daughters, getting wheeled around while sucking on what appeared to be a quart-sized glass of rum-soaked pixie-stix-sugar. There must have been 3,000 calories in that “drink,” which sadly was probably maybe 1/5 of this woman’s daily regular intake.
• A couple thousand guys who were clearly there because their girlfriends liked John Mayer. These were the guys who were probably annoyed because they kept wanting to sit down and dorks like me wouldn’t stop standing up and screaming.

Yeah, I was screaming. John Mayer gives me happy feelings in my pants. DEAL WITH IT.

There’s not much to really say about John’s performance; he was ridiculously spectacular. It’s difficult to grasp how good a guitarist he is by just listening to his CDs; you kinda have to watch him play on TV, or live, particularly if he’s not constrained by late-night/early-morning network TV timetables. And the best part about it is that he can solo pretty extensively, but it never starts to feel like it’s gone on too long. For example: if you go to see Phish in concert, which I have, they will play maybe 8 songs, each of which is roughly 25 minutes long on average. Only one of these songs will have an identifiable melody. Usually after about 7 minutes into each song, Trey Anastasio would slow things down, and you’d realize they were launching into another 10 minute build-up leading to some kind of climax that left you feeling unsatisfied. John, on the other hand, played something like 25 songs, some of which were 5 minutes long, some of which were 10, but each extended solo was melodic and interesting and WENT SOMEWHERE. Going to a Phish concert feels like a 3 hour free-form jazz symposium at Camden County Community College; going to a John Mayer concert feels like going to a rock concert.

On the other hand, going to a Phish concert usually guarantees you a pretty boss contact high.

John didn’t quite play all my favorites, which I guess just means I’ll have to go see him again. However: not at the Tweeter Center, which has incurred my almight wrath for all times to come due to their immense suckitude.

Listen, we need to talk about the state of rock and roll lyrics. ‘Cause it’s not good. And I’m talking specifically rock and roll, not pop, so for the time being we can ignore things like “The Glamorous…the Glamorous Glamorous The Glamorous…the Flossy Flossy” and “Once you pop lock drop it for me maybe we can roll,” neither of which make any bloody sense at all.

No, I want to focus on things like Hinder’s new song “Better Than Me,” which is a song about how the author’s girlfriend could probably find a better lover than he, which almost certainly true because it contains the following lyrical masterpiece:

I really miss your hair in my face
And the way your innocence tastes

Which is the stupidest thing to appear on the airwaves since Max Headroom. How exactly, Hinder, would you describe the taste of innocence? Is it tangy? DOES IT HAS A FLAVOR? Or is it more that you are completely an idiot?

(Don’t get me started on “Hinder” as a band name; it’s never been adequately explained to me how it’s pronounced, so either it’s “Hynder,” which may or may not be a juvenile reference to, you know, a Snoop Doggy Dogg album, or it’s “Hinder,” as in the band is “hindered” from producing good songs because of their staggering suckitude.)

Let’s compare it to an example. In the mid-80s, U2 released an album entitled “The Joshua Tree,” which is widely considered to be in the top 10 of best rock albums of all time. Before you protest “Hey man, making a comparison to some of the best lyrics of all times is totally specious, dude, that’s totally unrad,” I’m not planning to compare “Better Than Me” to, say, “Where The Streets Have No Name” or “With Or Without You;” I’m going to go with “Bullet The Blue Sky.”

Just the title is bad ass; it takes two rather strong images, bullets and blue skies, and combines them in a way that doesn’t make any sense and YET IT TOTALLY MAKES PERFECT SENSE. And when you examine the lyrics, you find gems such as:

See the face of fear running scared in the valley below

and the entire bridge, which is lengthy, but bear with me:

This guy comes up to me
His face red like a rose on a thorn bush
Like all the colors of a royal flush
And hes peeling off those dollar bills
Slapping them down
One hundred, two hundred
And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see those fighter planes
Across the mud huts where the children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street
Take the staircase to the first floor
Turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into a saxophone
Through the walls we hear the city groan
Outside its america
Outside its america

And Bono’s not even SINGING, he’s just TALKING, over weird ethereal angry guitar noises, and you’re saying “*(#&$ YES BONO I TOTALLY SUPPORT WHATEVER IT IS YOU’RE SINGING ABOUT” which apparently was just him complaining about the US intervening in the El Salvador Civil War, which I don’t even remember happening. The end result: mass panic and confusion.

The end result of listening to “Better Than Me” is that I want to read about how all the members of Hinder ended up living under a freeway underpass.

I’m a picky guy, but only in the stupidest ways. For example: I’m picky about certain foods; macaroni and cheese for example, which I only like if it came from a box with a powdered cheese mix that you mix with a half-cup of milk and a half-cup of butter and then eat straight out of the saucepan after between 7 and 12 beers while watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I’m picky about my clothes, and yet own a blue shirt that you can see my nipples through. (And I don’t mean you can see the shape of them when it gets cold; I mean literally you can tell that I have a weird hair issue in which my right nipple is dramatically hirsute and my left nipple has a total of 3 hairs, one of which is at least 4 inches long.) I’m picky about what grosses me out, in that I can watch movies in which nuns are decapitated and spray gore onto schoolchildren, but the House episode in which a guy’s testicle exploded made me curl up into the fetal position and whimper softly for a good 10 minutes.

One thing I’m picky about is women’s hair. Mostly, hair doesn’t bother me; even if it’s bad, I usually find it very amusing, such as this fetching look, which probably cost that woman over a hundred dollars (money that would have been better spent in a money market account, saving up to have her nose reduced by 75%). But there’s one thing about women’s hair that annoys me, and it’s bangs. I don’t know why they drive me crazy, but they do. The feeling they give me is mostly “Wow, that girl has such beautiful hair, it’s too bad that she feels necessary to chop off most of the front rather than investing in a 50-cent barrette or something.”

Let me draw you some pretty pictures to show you what I mean.

This is Margaret. She’s very pretty, is she not? She spent roughly $150 getting her hair done, including removing the grays to get back to the jet-black mane she grew up with, and a set of stylish bangs that hang down just ever so slightly into her eyes. It’s all layered, and very well done. She tipped her hairstylist, Alejandro, $25. Now let’s look at her sister:

This is Molly, who has her husband Joe cut her hair with a Flowbie. She hates having hair hanging over her ears, so she just leaves it long in the back and short in the front and sides, a classic mullet.

As you can see, the only difference between having bangs and having a mullet is maybe 2 extra inches of hairline on each side. In fact, were you to tuck your hair behind your ears, there’s a good chance you’ll get embroiled in a conversation about Dale Earnhardt Junior driving for Hendrick Motorsports and whether or not this is a travesty. (Yes.)