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.)

In case you've visited here over the last few weeks and, instead of seeing my beautiful, beautiful words, saw a message saying that my website had been suspended for overambitious CPU utilization, rest assured that the problem has been isolated and we are in the process of resolving it.

Well, not we, it's just me. Because it's my fault, you see. When I arranged for my site to be hosted by my current service, hostmonster.com, I paid for a nearly unlimited amount of bandwidth and disk space, and proceeded to upload scripts and databases and images and hilarious posts about hairstyles for head-fatties and everything was super happy: me, because my website was still online despite my previous hosting service deciding to close up shop; hostmonster, 'cause they gets the dollaz dollaz; and the internet, because let's be frank, the loss of my website's content would send shockwaves that might well destroy the economy of Nigeria or perhaps the entire Indian subcontinent. (Which just wouldn't do. OBVIOUSLY.)

What I didn't realize was that, while hostmonster certainly was happy to have my business and store all of my crap for me, apparently they don't much care for me to actually SHOW it to people. Every time a person would look at my website (specifically the picture gallery, about which we'll hear more directly) it required a computer in Utah to do some processing, or "thinking," and respond to the user with pictures and words and all that good stuff. Well, supposedly my site, which receives all of maybe 25 hits a day, 5 of which are me checking for new comments (there never are any), and at least 8 of which are googlers trying to find pictures of Dave Chappelle's Hott AZN Wife, was overloading the CPU of the computer in Utah and causing smoke to come out of its ears, if it has ears, which it probably does not, but who knows what Mormons might do to computers when they get them alone in the Tabernacle.

Long story short: the online gallery had to go, because while the pictures contained therein weren't getting me anywhere close to my disk space/bandwidth limits, the processing power required to get them out of the database was angering the CPU gods. On the other hand, I was never terribly happy with that gallery software anyway; it seemed to do about 18,000 things, and I basically needed it to do one: display pictures in a pretty format, which it didn't do very well. So I'm working on my OWN, much tamer, online gallery program, which will basically give you a list of albums to view with pictures located there up ins, in a pretty format that doesn't distract from the image on the page. Totally boss! As soon as it is ready, I will be certain to alert the media. Until then: go to Charles's site, since roughly 97% of my photography is centered on him anyway.

Yay! DelDOT (The Delaware Department O' Transportation) is finally going to do something about the hellish I-95 traffic!

Wait...crap. They're doing the wrong bloody thing! Boo!

Everybody agrees that traffic on I-95, particularly southbound in the afternoons, is ridiculous; apparently the bone of contention is what the actual cause is. DelDOT seems to be of the opinion that the problem is 95 itself not being wide enough, which would appear to be the obvious issue. However, what they are overlooking is the fact that where the worst of the backup on 95 occurs in a three mile stretch where 295 and 495 (souhtbound) rejoin the main interstate, and storied Route 1 exits. And as anyone who has recently driven through there during a high traffic situation, the number of cars decreases dramatically after you pass Route 1. What this says to me is that maybe, just maybe, you might eliminate some traffic on 95 if there was more than a single-lane exit for 1, which is of course the main artery to Middletown and points south, also known as the FASTEST FREAKING GROWING AREA IN THE STATE? Don't you think maybe this warrants an improvement of that particular junction?

Don't believe me? Try going north on Route 1 to 95 north some morning, around 8:15am. You can't. I mean, eventually you'll get through, but it'll be closer to 9am before you're actually on the interstate. Might it perhaps be time to upgrade this route to look more like the 495 exit, which features three lanes for traffic and even during the worst of the rush hour is never clogged up, except by idiots driving in the left lane? Perhaps!

But nay, the State has decided to just add a 5th lane to each side of 95, the biggest waste of money since Paris Hilton got her sex change. (I refuse to believe that she wasn't once a dude. Her jaw is squarer than a ceramic floor tile and her boobs are smaller than mine.)

Argh.

In which I hate technology, and technology hates me right back.(All up in my grill, yo.)

It's heck of warm out today (low 60s), so, being a forward-thinking individual, I thought to myself yesterday "I should TOTALLY go running at work and try to eliminate the enormous amount of fat located between my crotch and my boobs," and brought in running clothes and a towel to store in my locker downstairs in the poop room that has showers. And lo, I took an early lunch, went out, and ran 2.75 miles before the agonizing chest pain and developing foot blister made me stop.

Have I reached my point yet? Not even remotely.

So I came back in, showered, and grabbed lunch, which consisted of a Salisbury "Steak" made of, as far as I can tell, pressed gerbil cremains, along with green beans and cheesy potatoes au gratin (a quality side, to be sure). A few hours later, I realized I was still pretty hungry, so I said to myself, oh man, the SNACK machine will hook me up with FLAVOR.

So I wandered into the snack room, bought a bottle of Diet Coke, and then studied the snack machine for delectables. Sure enough, they had some kind of Apple/Cinnamon-flava'd Danish, all over which I desired to jump. I attempted to stick my dollar into the machine, but was foiled! It would accept no bills. And I had just used the bulk of my change on my drink. Bemused, I pressed a few buttons on the front of the machine, which showed no sign of even being powered on. Argh!

I wandered aimlessly around the halls, looking for another snack machine, and finally found one. Sadly, it had no Apple/Cinnamon-flava'd Danish. It did, however, have a three pack of chocolate cupcakes of the type I subsisted on in high school, so I inserted my dollar and pressed the proper buttons. The machine whirred for a moment, then beeped, and a small light appeared next to some words reading "Please make another selection."

"What?" I replied. "But the other selections are not what I desire. Don't mess with me, machine, I COLD RAN 2.75 MILES EARLIER AND AM NOT ONE WITH WHICH YOU SHOULD TRIFLE." And I pressed the buttons again.

"Please make another selection."

I tried to outwit the machine by requesting my dollar back, which came back in quarters, and inserting exact change, but I came to the conclusion that whoever inserted the latest supply of foodstuffs had improperly loaded the chocolate cupcakes. In the end I realized that the machines were involved in some kind of conspiracy not to sell me anything that might increase the amount of lipids bonded semi-permanently to my stern. I relented, bought a small package of peanut butter crackers, and went back to my desk to weep silently.

Just a few short notes for today:

• They still haven't plowed my neighborhood, and so now the ice has sublimated and refrozen and is perfectly slick. I basically sledded out to the main highway today. Note that the 1998 Mazda Protege is NOT equipped with runners. I'd make some calls, but you know me, I don't like to create a fuss. Plus I have a sneaking suspicion the guy in our neighborhood who is in charge of such things has probably taken 37 calls on the subject and might strangle me through the phone if I call him up and employ Sarcasm. So I'm gonna let it slide. For now. Unless I'm driving home with my son and I slide into a parked car at 5mph.
• My homeskillets Ped and Andy have started themselves a blog in which they intend to ridicule all things artsy. I fully support this, and not just because I've known the two of them for like 8,000 years.

  In fact, it's an odd story, woven through the millenia: I knew Ped when I was like 8 or something, in public school. I think we ran across each other in Math League every year all through middle school and high school. Andrew I knew because we were in band in high school, but he also may have done dorky science and math stuff with me before then. And then we were all in the Ychromes together in college. Delaware is a small place.

  Anyway, check out their site, it's highly amusing.

• I'm setting myself up for a serious amount of abuse here, but on the advice of my attorney Josh, I have invested in a neti pot. The idea, and this is really gross, is that you make a saline solution, and then you pour it into one nostril while it drains out of the other one. Then you switch nostrils. It's very new age. It cleans out your sinuses, and then you get to spend a few minutes spraying water out of your snozz and spitting out nasty wet loogies.

  It's almost as fun as it sounds, but I can report that my sinuses are so clear it's disturbing. I've used it twice a day for about 3 days (although not this morning, 'cause I was in a hurry, yo) and have achieved major awesome results. There are downsides, however:

  1. The sensation of water pouring into your sinuses and back out the other nostril is pretty disturbing. It goes against all my principles of "avoiding sinus burn in the pool." Doesn't burn a bit, though, unless you're an idiot and double the amount of salt in the solution.
  2. Sometimes the saline gets sort of trapped in your sinuses, and you can't really feel it in there, then later on, you bend over for some reason, such as to kiss your wife, and salt water pours out of your nose all over, say, your wife's face. Her response to this may be unpleasant.
  Still, it's given me a reasonably clear schnozz for the last few days, and I'm looking forward to finding out if it improves my singing noticeably.

Man, local civic associations are AWESOME!

Wait, did I say awesome? I meant POINTLESS, ANNOYING, AND LAME.

We have a nice neighborhood civic association to whom we give twenty bucks a year, in exchange for which they operate some kind of community watch and send out monthly letters begging deadbeats to send in their dues. (They've actually started publishing the addresses of folks who don't send in the cash, which I find greatly amusing; so far my block has been pretty good about paying up, because the monthly flyers seem to imply I'm expected to join a roving band of vigilantes to walk up to miscreant households and torch them to the ground.)

From these monies they also pay for mowing of the community park areas, and snow plowing in the winter. Which would be great if the plowing was done. It ain't gettin' done, son. You may have noticed on Wednesday that we had a pretty significant snow/sleet/freezing rain "event," resulting in 2-4 inches (depending on where you measure it) of rock-hard ice on our streets and lawns. My wife spent about an hour yesterday chipping it off of our cars. (I would have helped, but it was HECK of cold out there.)

Now it's been sitting for a day, and is thusly not going to melt until August, so we get the joy of driving over it for a few months. AWESOME! Er, LAME!

Okay, sure, the community watch does seem to deter crime; we haven't had a murder in our neighborhood in 2 or 3 years (true story). And I do approve of them getting the grass mowed rather than, you know, letting it overgrow the jungle gym. Now if they could just find a way to prevent my across-the-street neighbors from parking all their crappy cars in front of my house. (Sadly, it turns out it's illegal to slash their tires! Who knew?)

Hi y'all...I was going to post something more substantive today, but I just don't have it in me. My world is shattered.

I love cars. Also, I hate cars. Or rather, I love cars that work or can be easily diagnosed and fixed, and hate cars that defy all attempts to repair them. At the moment, my Bomb@ZZ whip, the venerable Izzy B, has but one functioning brake light. The one in the rear-view window. I guess that's better than none, but try to tell that to the guys at the Motor Vehicle Inspection Lanes. I did. They weren't terribly amused. I'm assuming all the carbon monoxide has destroyed their senses of humor.

Anyway, I went to Pep Boys to get new bulbs for the brake lights. But Pep Boys had none. So I went to ANOTHER Pep Boys, which had them. I installed them. No change. So I bought some new fuses and tried those. No change. So I kicked the car and threatened to bring wrath upon it. No change.

I gave up after that, but the long and short of it is that I have a car with fewer then the recommended number of brake lights and my registration expires in three weeks. CAN MATT GET THE CAR REPAIRED IN THREE WEEKS, GIVEN HIS BUSY SCHEDULE? STAY TUNED!

Oh, and go here and check out a bunch of crappy pictures I took of Ye Olde Newe Castlee last month.

I enjoy me some fine pomp and circumstance, with the possible exception of the widely known Pomp and Circumstance March #1 by Edward Elgar, which over the course of my high school career I had to play roughly 483,384 times during graduation ceremonies. (I do like the fast part, which never gets played at graduations, that goes deet deet deedledeedledeedledeedle etc., you know what I mean I'm sure.) Thusly I set my Digital Video Recorder (it's like Tivo, but not as well branded!) to record President Ford's funeral proceedings yesterday, and sat down last night to watch them and enjoy me some egg drop soup and beef with broccoli.

Imagine my frustration: they're showing the National Cathedral, and periodically showing the inside, which is filled to the brim with dignitaries, along with Cathedral officiants, the combined Cathedral choirs, and the Armed Forces Choir, which is singing a Copland anthem; meanwhile, Brian Williams refuses to Shut The F&$# Up. We've always been a bit of an NBC family; we usually watch the Today show, and on Thursday nights Sarah is most frequently found glued to the TV watching the usual prime-time fare. (I personally lost all interest in ER a few years ago when it stopped being a great show about an emergency room and became a left-wing political drama, but it does have its fun moments.) I assumed that NBC would do a nice job of delivering the funeral to me with a minimum of stupid discussion. I was wrong.

The various musicians inside played at least 20 minutes of music that I would really have enjoyed hearing, but unfortunately Williams, along with Tim Russert, Campbell Brown, and some other moron refused to Shut The F*#$ Up. They're babbling about legacies and scandals and strength and blah blah I don't care I want to hear the beautiful music please SHUT THE F@$# UP.

I nearly threw the remote at the TV. At least they did have the good sense not to inject silly little comments once the casket came out of the hearse, or else there's a strong chance I would have driven to New York and kicked Brian Williams in his miniature gonads.

The moral, for any NBC executives who might be reading this, is: when televising a funeral, it is always important to Shut The F#$% Up. Thank you.

To all of my liberal, semi-hippie friends: I surrender. I concede. I confess. You win.

I don't often discuss politics in this space, for the simple reason that I disagree with almost everyone, and no one would really bother reading my stuff if all I did was rail about the Drug War, or the Iraq War. I'm more interested in discussing human interest stuff like the Pee War, which is a game my son likes to play during bath time in which he pees all over the kitchen (we wash him in the kitchen sink) and we attempt to block the urine stream with our hands. This is Fatherhood in a nutshell: getting pee all over your body in an effort to prevent said pee from getting in the toaster.

Nevertheless, those who know me well know that for a long time I have espoused fairly libertarian views. My thoughts have long been, well, if it doesn't hurt anybody, who cares? What I hadn't considered, unfortunately, was how completely incapable the average American is of knowing when he might be hurting someone else.

Until recently, I believed that if you want to talk on your cellphone while driving, and you don't drive into anyone, you should be allowed to do that. Personally, I try to avoid it, but then I talk on the phone as little as possible anyway. I have changed my mind on this subject, because I realize now that the the majority of Americans are simply too flat-out stupid to be allowed this privilege. I was caught behind a guy on the way to work today who:

1. Pulled out in front of me, causing me to have to decelerate to avoid hitting him.
2. Drove significantly under the speed limit.
3. When the next light turned yellow, he, despite being about a 1/2 second away from it, actually braked as if he was going to stop, causing at least 2 people behind me to miss the light.
4. Didn't use his signal once to indicate any lane change or turn.

He had his cellphone to his ear the entire time. I'm not sure if the cellphone CAUSED him to drive like an idiot, or if it's just an indicator of his general stupidity. What I do know is this: of the various idiots that ride in the left lane when they aren't passing, fail to signal lane changes and turns, and cut me off in traffic, at least 85% of them are on the phone at the time. Of course, 85% of drivers are usually on the phone at any given time, so this might be statistically pointless, but it still makes me want to beat them to death with my bare damn hands.

So yes: I will probably vote Democrat in the next election because a jerk cut me off in traffic. I am one fickle bastard.