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Archive for July, 2005

July 28th, 2005 No comments

I’m feeling a little guilty for going silent for the better part of a week and then giving you a weird one-man-show transcript and a link to some monkey videos. Somehow it just didn’t feel right, even as I hit the publish button and walked away whistling the tune to “Loser” by Beck. So I thought it would be best if I spent a little time today letting you know about the amusing things that have occurred in my life.

South Pacific is coming along nicely. We had our preview on Tuesday, and of course I flubbed one of my lines a little bit, but it came off okay anyway. Jared and Nora and Brian and Art came to laugh at us, and apparently nearly peed themselves when I did a little leap during “Nothin’ Like A Dame.” I cain’t hardly blame ’em; it is great hilarity to see someone of my size leap into the air like Nureyev, but more gracefully.

Sarah’s having a great time with the show as well. Last year she didn’t have to do much but wear an ugly dress apparently made from 14th century German tapestries and carry a yarn tree around, which is about as much fun as health class. This year she’s a nurse, which means she gets to dance around in tight clothing, and even has a line in the first act that never fails to produce applause. She’s like Baryshnikov with hooters.

We open tonight, and I fully expect to be phenomenal. I’ll fill you in on any interesting details later.

One annoying side effect of the show is that I’m usually not home in the evenings, so I don’t get an opportunity to exercise except for the occasional late afternoon, when it’s roughly 104 degrees in the shade. There’s no way I’m running or riding in that. It was about a month before I could bring myself to mow the lawn, and even then I only did the front so the neighbors would stop leaving me threatening voicemails.

Anyway, I think I’ve gained roughly 18 pounds in the last two weeks. I’m definitely back to my fat man pants, and I’ve had to loosen up my belt a few notches. This displeases me greatly. Hopefully after the show is done, things will cool off a bit (literally) and I can get my road bike back together and take up lengthy rides all over New Castle County. That would be freakin’ sweet. When we drive up to Longwood Gardens for rehearsals and shows, I see a lot of guys on road bikes on 52. It looks like a fun ride, and the shoulders on that road are like 15 feet wide. I may have to start hauling the two-wheeler up there for some exercise.

Hopefully I won’t have a heart attack or get taken out by a Jaguar XKE.

Anyway, I may have more tomorrow, or not, depending on how late we’re up for opening night tonight. STAY LOOSE, you crazy kids.

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July 27th, 2005 No comments

Hi, Mom! It’s me! Matt! Uh, your eldest child? Yeah, I get it, I never call anymore, right. I’m calling right now! And I called last week! I’ve been busy, is all . . . yeah, the show . . . no, Mom, Brigadoon was last year. This year we’re doing South Pacific. Yes, I have a part, I told you this already. Did you get your tickets yet?

Good, good. We’ll see you on Saturday, then . . . what? No, I’m not in a hurry to hang up. What’s wrong? I’ll try and come to visit in a few weeks when I don’t have a rehearsal or a show every night. You’ll make pot roast? Great, great. Looking forward to it. Now I really have to . . . oh, Dad went fishing again? Left you alone at the house for three days? That’s, uh, too bad. Maybe Liz could come over, hang out . . .

::sigh:: Mom, stop crying.

and . . . Scene.

Genius, I know . . . thank you. It’s been a long month. Meanwhile:

Trunk Monkey.

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July 20th, 2005 1 comment

Fun links day! WOOOOOOO!

  • Political Correctness continues its inexorable march towards the complete destruction of humanity.
  • I really hope this is true and verifiable. Not that I’m particularly eager for people to die, but it seems like that’s the only way to demonstrate to people that their ideas suck. They certainly don’t listen to reason. (Of course, they don’t necessarily listen to dead bodies, either, which is sad and not terribly surprising. See also: Washington, D.C. and Gun Control.)
  • I like the sound of this . Anything to force me to pay credit cards off faster is a good thing, since I don’t have the discipline to just do it.
  • Uh . . . what?
  • Sigh:

    “Ebonics is a different language, it’s not slang as many believe,” Texeira said. “For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language.”

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July 19th, 2005 1 comment

I’m going to stop listening to people who recommend movies to me, because apparently the only side of me they see is the cursing, farting, beer-guzzling fat man that enjoys nothing more than wet t-shirt contests and animated gifs of men getting kicked in the junk. Not that any of these things are false; but people, I’m a multi-layer dude. I’ve got an intellectual layer, not to mention a sensitive, emotional layer. I’ve got more layers than the OSI Network Model!

I can’t believe I just said that.

Anyway, on Sunday evening, having spent all morning trying to climb mountains on a pedal-less bicycle, I wanted to relax with a beer and some Fritos and watch TV. Sarah suggested, “Hey, we should rent a movie!” So we check out the various pay-per-view options, and decided on two: “Ocean’s Twelve,” and “Team America: World Police.” Unfortunately, it was just about 6:15 when we sat down to make our selection, and Ocean’s Twelve is apparently 125 minutes long. This would impinge on our ability to watch The Simpsons at 8pm. So we went with Team America.

Many of my friends had highly recommended it, particularly the uncut version. “Oh man Hearn, you have to see it, the puppets are hilarious, and the songs are freaking awesome.” “Okay, okay, I’ll rent it one of these days, let me out of this headlock before I pass out.”

I’m not listening to my friends any more. From here on out it’s all noir and Merchant-Ivory films, because “Team America,” dear reader, was the stupidest piece of film dreck since I swiped Sarah’s digital camera and made a short video of her eating pie.

Hearnwife was never able to get past the puppet thing. I think it works in situations like the Muppets, where there’s never any question that they’re puppets, and they embrace the fact that Jim Henson’s hand was wrist deep in their patooties. In Team America, it sort of works, mainly because you could never accept actual humans saying the things these puppets say without throwing up on your lap. Also it does make the sex scene between Gary and Lisa particularly amusing, since few human actors would be willing to do the stuff that they can do to the puppets (see: Golden Shower, and Hot Lunch).

I can certainly respect the screenwriters’ idea to parody action movies, and rip on a few political and Hollywood figures. The dialogue was meant to be very over-the-top. Unfortunately, “over-the-top” does not always mean funny (as Tom Green has discovered, to his great dismay), and it certainly doesn’t here. By the second half-hour, I was getting up and retrieving more food and beverages from the kitchen without even bothering to pause it.

I have to admit, I did enjoy the songs. “America: F#*$ Yeah!” was entertaining, particularly in the second iteration when it turned into a minor key depressing Ani DiFranco ballad. “The AIDS Song” made me giggle, mostly because it made me think of a truly horrible joke that I will not share in this public space because there’s still a strong chance one of my grandparents will happen upon it.

At the end of the movie, HW and I had the same thought: We just spent $3.99 and 90 minutes on that piece of crap. And then we cried.

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July 18th, 2005 1 comment

Since I’m sure so many of you spent Sunday morning at your respective places of worship, fervently praying that I would get through my mountain bike race without injury, I thought I would do you a solid and give you the rundown of the pain that I went through this weekend, in the form of a short (as if!) diary:

Saturday, 10pm – Other Matt arrived at our crib so’s he could sleep over and we could just get up and head straight to the race on Sunday morning. Well, not STRAIGHT to the race; we’d have to stop off at his apartment and pick up his bike, because it was raining when he came over, and his bike doesn’t entirely fit into his car, and he didn’t want it getting all wet.

11pm – We go to spleep.

Sunday, 6am – I awake and set to inhaling as many carbohydrates as I can, in the form of Corn Pops. (I also had taken in a lot of carbs the previous evening in the form of beer.)

6:30am – I wake up Matt and start loading my bicycle into the truck, along with the water-carrying backpacks that Sarah bought us, plus helmets and gloves.

7:10am – Matt and I leave for his apartment to pick up his bike. I realize, about halfway there, that I forgot both my camera and the ratchet tool I need to keep my left bike pedal from falling off. (Due to banging the hell out of it on a large log last week, the pedal tends to loosen up a lot during rides.) No big deal; I leave a message on Brian‘s phone to get him to bring his camera (he was planning to come and watch me injure myself in the hopes that he could laugh until he cried), and I figured there would be tools and things at the race facility so someone could tighten the pedal up for me if it loosened.

7:25 – Matt and I arrive at his apartment, and he realizes that he left the keys in his car, which is back at Casa De Hearn. We head back home.

7:40 – We arrive back at the house, so I take the opportunity to grab my ratchet wrench and look for my camera, which I could not find. Matt retrieves his housekeys.

7:55 – We get back to Matt’s place, he throws the bike in the bed of the truck and we drive rapidly to the Fair Hill Natural Resource Area.

8:00 – We unpack the bikes and get ourselves registered for the race, and head over to the starting location. Here was where several mistakes, due to getting unpacked in such a wild hurry, were made:

  1. We decided to leave our water-backpacks in the truck. We’d never ridden with them before and were worried that they would annoy us, and we figured hell, there’s probably a water stop every mile or so. We’ll be able to drink our fill and be just fine. For the same reason, I didn’t bother filling my bike-mounted water bottle at the registration area, because I was frantically trying to get to the start location so we didn’t miss the racer’s meeting. As it turned out, there were water stops at 2 locations: mile 5, and mile 9. (The race was 15 miles.) Things were not shaping up well for Team Matt.
  2. Since I wasn’t going to carry my backpack, I had no place to store my ratchet tool (it was too long for my under-the-seat bag), and my pedal didn’t feel loose, so I left it in the truck.

8:15 – We arrive at the starting location, where a man with a megaphone gets us lined up by age and skill, and explains where the various water stops and hazards are. Matt and I are going off with the first group, which is, except for Team Matt, filled with people who share the following characteristics:

  • They are all in astoundingly good shape, with thin legs and waists and chests that seem to be entirely made of lung. Matt and I are, of course, wider in the middle than anywhere else.
  • They are all extremely well equipped; everybody has “camelback” water backpacks (the extremely expensive version of the cheapo $10 things that Sarah bought for us that we stupidly left in the truck), expensive padded biking shorts and thin biking shirts, not to mention bikes that cost anywhere from $800 to $3000. (As you may remember, I got my bike at Walmart for $135.)

We were clearly in over our heads.

8:25 – Our group lines up at the start line in one long row, which somehow they expect to condense into a straight line of riders by the time we enter the “single track” about 200 yards away. This does not bode well. Also, Brian shows up, with his son Zachary, to laugh at us.

8:30 – We’re off! I accelerate hard off the line, which later struck me as the stupidest possible thing I could have done, since by the time we reached the single-track I was ahead of half the field, who then had to pass me on a race course barely four feet wide. Matt won the award for “first off the bike” when he took the first turn at a high rate of speed and realized too late that it was entirely mud. He slid off into a bush, which made me giggle greatly.

8:40 – Mile 1 – Hm. My pedal feels like it’s getting wobbly. This isn’t very good. Meanwhile, the better racers are flying by me like I’m standing still (which I was, some of the time; I’m averse to getting in the way of other people that know what they’re doing, so a few times I just got off my bike and stood out of the way to let the speedier racers go by).

8:50 – Mile 2 – Matt falls off his bike yet again. In a creek, this time. My pedal is getting worse and worse, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to die of exhaustion. The groups that went off 5-10 minutes after us are flying by me, particularly uphill, where I end up having to get off and walk the bike because I can’t pedal properly.

9:00 – Mile 3 – I get off and tighten the bolt a bit with my finger, cursing my decision to leave my ratchet tool back in the truck. By this time I’m walking the bike any time I’m going uphill, and only getting back on for the downhill portions.

9:10 – Mile 4 – We come across some kind of weird Army reservist picnic and ask a Sergeant if they have any tools. They do not.

9:20 – Mile 5 – Finally, the pedal falls off while I’m trying to meander through a field. I go back to retrieve it and the bolt that holds it on, and notice that most of the threads are stripped and the whole apparatus is coated in small metal shavings. At this point I realize I’ve done enough damage to the bike that I’d be hard pressed to ever get it fixed, let alone get it back together enough to finish the race. I come across two gentleman taking pictures of the riders as they go by; they furnish a pair of pliers and help me put the pedal back on enough so that I can get back to the parking lot. Matt rides on ahead and says he’ll meet me at the water station, but the photographers tell me the best way back to my truck is a different route; I ride off in that direction instead.

9:30 – I’m still half riding, half walking my bike on asphalt roads, following the directions given to me by the helpful photographers. Apparently, also at this time, Matt comes back looking for me and rides a mile or two after me before giving up and reentering the race. This waste of about 3-4 miles of energy and hydration becomes very pertinent later on.

10am – I make it back to the truck, load my bike in, and drink an entire 20-25 oz. backpack of water. I then drink some of the other bag as well, and also eat two powerbars, and I go to find Brian and Zachary and see if I can figure out what happened to Matt. Some of the faster riders are already crossing the line at this point. Very impressed am I.

11am – Zachary’s getting tired and hot and hungry, so he and Brian skedaddle. I wander down towards where the riders come flying out of the woods for the last couple hundred yards of climb to the finish line. I notice a young man of about 12 that clearly is in far better shape than I will ever be, pedalling up the hill without any apparent exhaustion. I hate him.

11:30 – Matt calls me on his cellphone, having had to bail out of the race not long after the 2nd water station. He got about 11 miles or so, which is annoying since he was 3-4 miles short, just about the same distance he wasted looking for my dumb ass. I feel guilty. He doesn’t care. We gather our stuff up and get out of there.

noon – We begin eating Boston Market.

So I have to say, it was a somewhat fun, very educational experience. Things I have learned:

  1. Get plenty of sleep the night before. 7 hours isn’t really enough. Go for like 10.
  2. If you have the means to carry water, carry it. Buttloads of it. Don’t worry about the weight. At least two full water bottles or a backpack full of H2O is minimum, and that’s assuming you can refill everything at water stops every 5 miles.
  3. Don’t cheap out on equipment. Bikes purchased at Walmart for $135 are not going to stand up to real mountain biking very long. I’m not sure what I’m going to do now; I can probably bolt the pedal back on with a hellacious amount of superglue and see if that holds it a bit better, but it’s probably still going to have an ugly wobble. I really need to get my road bike back together and do more of that, since I’m planning on Bike to the Bay in October. Anyway, before I do another mountain bike race, I plan to get a decent mountain bike costing at least $400. Which means it’ll be a while before I get another mountain bike.
  4. Intake as much crystal meth before you start as you can.

Tomorrow: I take the advice of some friends again, and watch “Team America.” Great disappointment ensues.

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July 15th, 2005 8 comments

Caption this, please, in the comments:

(My first suggestion is in the comments.)

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July 14th, 2005 2 comments

Two things you should see:

My 2 minutes of fame this week.

Milo‘s latest creation.

That is all.

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July 13th, 2005 2 comments

No, I’m not dead. No, I didn’t give up on the website or something. Y’all punks need to CHILLAX. I’m here, I’m weird, get used to it.

I just went on vacation, yo. I would have announced that I was leaving before I actually left, but that struck me as a singularly bad idea, since you’d all break into my house and steal my priceless collection of used condom wrappers picked up on lengthy bike rides. So I figured I’d just disappear for a week, freak everybody out, make y’all think that perhaps I had been shiv’d (aka shank’d) at work or something.

But now I’m back, so remain calm, and I shall share with you a daily blow by blow of my week on Le Vacay:

Saturday (7/2)
We couldn’t get into the house until after 2pm, so we decided to just take a leisurely morning and get packed and ready to go. We finally got on the road around 3, as I recall, and headed south in Sarah’s car, stacked to the freakin’ brim with clothes, CDs, and bicycles. We hit town around 5, got our stuff into the house, and began sitting around watching TV. Then the people from whom we rented the place showed up with leftover crabs, of which I ate something like 347. Then we got Dairy Queen.

Sunday
I woke to the smell of deliciousness, and discovered that my mom and my sister had made some hella grood Eggs Benedict, which is named after Benedict Arnold, who I believe was a character on “Good Times.” So I ate me some of that, and then we meandered over to the beach, where I darkened my skin for a bit and flung my flimsy body into the ocean over and over until the guards came down and asked if I might stop, as I was affecting the tide.

That evening Sarah and Liz (my lil sistah) and I went to the Rusty Rudder to meet some of our friends, and partake of a seafood buffet that left me fatter than a tick on a dead guy’s eyeball.

(What did that mean?)

Monday (Teh 1ndependenz D@y!!11!1!1 lol)
Things were a little cloudy, and Sarah and I wanted to relax, so we skipped out on the beach and sat around the house reading, watching TV, playing video games. In the evening we headed over to my father’s cousin’s house for some beers and some stuffing our faces. That was a good time; I saw some family I don’t believe I’ve run into in probably 10 years, and got to play with their explosives. We wanted to watch the fireworks, but unfortunately the clouds and fog obscured most of them. We could hear them, but listening to fireworks is like hearing someone else fart: not as much fun.

Tuesday
Tuesday morning, my father had to drive home and go to work, which was sad and depressing. Not long after he skedaddled, my aunt and cousin arrived to help keep us entertained for the week. That was the good times, right there.

Sarah and I drove up towards Bethany Beach to visit Todd and Jodi and Conner (collectively known as Jodder) at Jodi’s mom’s house. We went to the pool for a little while, and sat around their house chit-chatting. All around, it was good times. Conner, at roughly 18 months, speaks English better than my wife.

That evening we drove up into Dewey so we could go see Chorduroy play at the “Lighthouse,” only to discover that we had been misinformed: Chorduroy was to appear on Wednesday, and we were out of luck. So we traipsed back home and had ourselves a nice sob and a nap.

Wednesday
We decided to go to Rehoboth to do some shopping and sightseeing and plenty of eating, so I put on my rainbow polo shirt and headed north. We made some purchases of books and other trinkets, had Nic-o-Bolis (like a stromboli but balicious), and then headed back down to Fenwick. We hung around a bit, and then Sarah and I drove back to the Lighthouse to see Chorduroy and have Orange Crushes.

Thursday
Sadly, Thursday was cloudy, so our short trip to the beach was cold and windy. We came back to the house and concentrated on stuffing our faces with anything that would hold still long enough. My father returned to the party that afternoon as well.

Friday
After having rained all night, my dad and I were worried about our 10 am tee time, so I called the golf course to check on them. Three holes were flooded, so I cancelled and told them I’d call back in the afternoon. When I did so, they said not to bother making a tee time, just come on out and start swinging.

I planned to get there and hit a bunch of balls on the driving range to get into my groove, having not swung a club all summer, but sadly the driving range was under water. So I had to play without a warmup.

I shot a 59 on the “front” (we started on the 10th), and then found a bit of a groove and hit something around a 48 on the “back.” Good times. Plus it was a public non-governmental course so they had beer. Can’t argue with frosty cold ones when you want to cure your slice.

Saturday
We had to be out of the house by 11, so Sarah and I got up, showered, helped clean the place, and headed to Dewey. Some of our various comrades were expected to get into town that afternoon, so we found a quiet bar or 8 and whiled away the day until we could get into their house at about 3.

Having been up since 8, I figured I’d better get a strong nap in or else I’d never be able to stay up through all the partying, I went down for a nap around 5pm, and awoke at 9 when Sarah came in to jostle me. We got dressed and went to the Lighthouse again, where I lasted for about a half an hour before I realized I still needed more sleep, so I went back to the house and slept for about 9 more hours. (It was awesome.)

Apparently some things occurred while I was asleep. I didn’t witness any of it, but I’m told the stomach juices flowed with great gusto.

Sunday
We had time to get up, have some breakfast, and head to the beach for a few hours before we went home. On the way back we stopped at Texas Roadhouse and had so much food I couldn’t breathe properly for about 8 hours. Salad, steak, mashed potatoes, bread, fried onion thing, soup, potato skins…I think I gained 17 pounds in one day, to go on top of the 30+ I may have gained during the week.

If my poop could tell stories, man. Seriously.

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