matthearn.com

Some linx0rz! Woooot!

• I pray to the Sweet Good Lord Baby Jesus every day that something like this would happen. Can we get some Youtubeage of the “two-day shoot” in question?
• I wish this had been televised; I might actually have peed into my pantaloons.
• Here’s a healthy family for you. 7 kids; unmarried; no jobs! I love this country!
• Sometimes, just sometimes, things go right in the legal system. Maybe just in the UK, though.
• Uh…oops.
• And finally, for all of us that love pirates: the real scoop.

I’ve been sick all this week, which has been Unpleasant. Like most males of my generation, even the slightest cold sends me into a spiral of whininess normally only seen if you kick me in the harblz. It started last Friday with a major league sore throat, and was exacerbated by a HUGE weekend of frivolity, starting out with a performance of the National Anthem by the Cathedral Choir at the Phillies game on Friday night, continuing with Charles’s birthday party on Saturday, and then finishing up with a Sunday involving three lengthy church services, a piano recital, and a banquet celebrating our collective churchy awesomeness. Let’s tackle each item in chronological order:

The Phillies game was both awesome and totally unrad (and also anti-tubular), in that our performance was sweet, and James Earl Jones was there reading “Casey At The Bat” to a bunch of kids in the infield, but that the Phils ended up losing 13-0 (I left in the bottom of the fifth ’cause my throat felt like someone had poured battery acid into me) and JEJ, who got old while I wasn’t paying attention, seemed particularly hunch-backed and mildly Alzheimery. It was very depressing to see Darth Vader in this state, being led around the stadium with a big dopey grin on his face.

Or maybe he was just drunk, I dunno. That would be AWESOME.

I took along my camera, and got a few decent pictures of the game, but I couldn’t get close enough to the field to really get anything totally supersweet, and I lack a 300mm zoom lens, something I intend to rectify before I go to another sporting event.

Charles’s party on Saturday was HILARIOUS. I made a half-decent cake (half of it was chocolate (the decent part), and half of it was boring-ass vanilla ’cause that’s all my wife will eat), cut Charles a piece of the chocolate side, and let him rub it in his hair and ears for a while. Great times. We got a bajillion pictures which I intend to post, possibly later today when I have time to get them off the DVD and do some editing. (Note: we finally bought a DVD burner and have been steadily moving pictures onto DVDs, which is totally kick-ass because I have 4GB worth of cards for my camera, and every time I load them onto a laptop I completely max the hard drive. Plus the long-term storage prospects are pretty pimp.) Charles also got a huge number of presents, most of which he didn’t get a chance to open before he got so unbelievably sleepy we had to put him down for a nap. We’re saving the rest of his toys for later opening when he gets bored with flinging his new enormous-lego-style blocks at the cats.

Sunday was a LOOONNNNGGGG day, starting with an 8:30 christening service for Charles’s buddies Tori and Rowan, whose parents decided to baptize them simultaneously in the interests of time. Charles got a little angsty during the service, so I took him out in the hall for a diaper change and a little crawling around, which was nice because it got me out of the rest of the service. (I’ll never argue with anybody’s right to worship in whatever way they choose, but the service featured a little too much arm-waving during hymns for the liking of a High Church dweeb like myself.)

After that service ended, I ran over to the Cathedral for our usual Sunday service, which on this occasion featured a period to recognize and reward all the choristers, acolytes, and other participants, which meant the service ran to about 105 minutes, which caused my ears to bleed a little bit, but that’s nothing but a thang. After THAT completed, those of us who take our piano lessons from the Cathedral Choir School’s various teachers (even if we don’t actually get lessons through the choir school’s scholarship program) performed the piano recital, which was of course completely ridiculous because they had me performing last, normally the spot reserved for the best student, which I am not. Also it was rather embarrassing because I’m roughly twice the age of the other performers. At least I didn’t screw up too badly. Wooooooo.

Then we had the choir school banquest, which was fine but chaotic, and I gathered up my various robes and music and headed over to Christ Church (where my father is coincidentally the Deputy Organist-Choirmaster (I’ve been considering getting a little tin star made for him)) for an evensong, which wasn’t too bad. Our clergy doesn’t much enjoy doing the officiating at such services (it involves a great deal of chant-singing), so I’ve been doing it, and I managed to get through it without coughing up too much of my lungs. (I was sick; you may recall me mentioning that earlier.)

I stayed home from the office on Monday and Tuesday, attempting to recover my wits; I even went to the doctor on Monday, something I rarely do for myself, because my mother was diagnosed with a case of bronchitis last week, and homey don’t play that.

Some late Friday links, because I just don’t have the energy left for extensive thought, and also ’cause there some shiznit y’all seriously need to see FOR REALS.

• This is simultaneously the grossest and awesomest thing I’ve ever seen. Jeff The Giant Orange Cat wreaks havoc! NOTE: if you are in any way squeamish and/or vegan, I would avoid clicking, as you may well puke on your keyboard.
• You may recall last week when I linked you to icanhascheezburger.com, the worlds most premieresty site for lolcats? I bring you: lolpresidents! (And for those of you who think this meme was old and busted 2 months ago, I say: suck it.)
• I can’t remember if I linked to this last week and I’m way too lazy to check, so peep this: Passive-Aggressive Notes. I would do this kind of crap myself if I wasn’t such a wuss.
• Are you a dork? Feeling like people are starting to think you might be turning cool, and want to blow them away with a project of such a dorky nature that they’ll stop bothering you and leave you to your “Magic: The Gathering” solitaire? Download these, print them out, cut, a little glue, and nobody will ever think of you as anything but a primo losoir! These, on the other hand, are the coolest thing since Sweet Baby Jesus invented glaciers.
• This is totally normal. Lord knows, I feel the same way about this fellow and we haven’t even MET yet.

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.

o hai fren ha ha its link day lets all enjoy the links

• First off, link to my own stuff: Some photos I took at the Ychromes concert last Friday. Some are good; some are not so good. None are hilarious, but they’re at least mostly pretty.
• For those of you that love yourselves some lolcat (and if you don’t, you need to reevaluate your sense of humor, ’cause it is teh suxz), you need to visit I Can Has Cheezburger, the premier lolcat resource on the internets. My favorite: Snakecat has bited before!
• Your dad, your mom, and your cat. (I shouldn’t joke; apparently the “woman” was mostly eaten by a tiger this week. Still…your mom.)
• AAAAAA! AAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
• Getting divorced? Let these folks help.
• Connected to the internets? Want to waste about 8 hours? Go here and browse through 70 years of newspaper photographs from the LA Times and LA Daily News. There’s lots of hippie beatings!

Woo!

I have a problem. Namely, I have a TRULY GIGUNDOUS HEAD. Being a totally hep (hip) guy, I like to make sure that my hairstyle is up-to-date and super-duper stylish. This is hard when one’s cranium affects tides, for a variety of reasons. Number 1, any short haircut, which was the style from about 1995 to 2003, looks ridiculous on me because you can see my scalp, which leads most folks to comment “Holy crap, look how much skull that guy has!” It’s depressing and said. And number 2, long haircuts make me look like a goddamn hippie, because clothes aren’t made to fit my frame, and I hate to iron, so I end up dressed like a 1992 fat chick, all hiding my frame with baggy sweaters and loose jeans and with a mop of unkempt hair.

This is just NOT cutting the mustard, people.

So, I’ve made a study (I ran “fat head” through Google Image Search) to get a sense of what other nogginly-blessed folks are doing with their hair. The following is the result of that study.

Here we have Alan, who is getting in some early combover practice in case he starts to bald, which is pretty smart planning, when you think about it. It’s not something I’d wear out of my bathroom, but then I wouldn’t do a combover outside my bathroom. In fact, if I ever go bald, I’m going to spend the rest of my days lying in the tub, having HW bring me bon-bons and cognac.

I like to think Ray here went to his hairdresser and said, “Listen, I’m starting to develop a little lazy eye problem here, is there anything you can do to cover that up?” And the hairdresser replied, “Oh honey, if I can hide the fact that Mrs. Nelson lost an ear to a rabid Great Dane, this’ll be easier than finding love at Club Fist.”

And Ray slowly sat down in the chair, and Ray prayed.

This is Jimmy. He may or may not be French. Either way, he walked into the stylist hoping for “Gordon Gekko” and walked out with “Joe Dirt“. On the other hand, he’s wearing an argyle sock as a tie, so his style is clearly rather avant garde.

Remember when I mentioned I can’t wear my hair short? Yeah, this is why. Also, Paul here appears to be 80% jawbone. I can’t imagine how he talks, let alone chews.

Or perhaps he got jaw implants? Now THAT’s a solution to a self-esteem problem! Here I’ve been considering tasteful liposuction to eliminate the ENORMOUS MASS OF FLESH HANGING OFF MY RIBS and I could just be getting collagen injected into the sides of my face!

When in doubt: take it back to the 80s. I don’t know what kind of band this guy is in, but I GUARANTEE it could have opened for A Flock of Seagulls, or maybe Devo. I also guarantee that it never, ever, EVER ever ever, would have opened for Styx.

This guy is clearly at a Styx concert, meaning he’s wearing a band’s shirt to go see that band, which makes him That Guy, which we can all agree is a bad thing to be.

Yeah, I dunno. I guess it’s your dad, or something? Search me.

If you can pull it off, add a gold chain to the mix. A necklace can make all the difference between “mildly overweight guy” to “guy named Tony who could probably make you disappear with a minimum of fuss.”

Alvin here is totally rocking the “Boring Literature Professor” cut. I say rocking because, as it turns out, Alvin is the largest collector of antique nursemaid rocking chairs in all of Devonshire. He even has a stuffed one that he sleeps with!

Shaving cool designs into a close-cropped cut is a hip way to show your support for the local football or cricket club, or even give a shout out to a recently imprisoned/murdered homey. Or, as seen here, your favorite walrus down at the inner-city zoo!

I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and HOLY COW AM I WHITE! I think a tanning bed would do more for Pat here than a haircut, so let’s just move on.

Oh, I’m sure that’s exactly what you want these people to believe. You know something, Bender? You ought to spend a little more time trying to do something with yourself and a little less time trying to impress people. You might be better off. All right, that’s it! I’m going to be right outside those doors. The next time I hafta come in here…I’m cracking skulls!

Did you think I’d leave out my African-American brothers? Of course not! That would be racist. This is Steve; he sports a classic black man’s cut, cropped tight around the ears, but without the careful trimming of the edges that indicates true sophistication. This haircut says: I’m not paying more than $15 for a haircut, and that $15 is COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS, BOY.

I know! It’s honestly just 8 hairs! I grew them all out, carefully curled them, and applied them around my face using approximately 3 pounds of spirit gum and enough hairspray to glue my entire head to the ceiling!

As far as I can tell, no, this is not Lou Diamond Phillips preparing to play Jaime Escalante in a prequel to Stand and Deliver. But I’ve been wrong in the past. Of particular interest here is the old “concealing the weak chin with a beard” trick, which has failed, as it always does. The joke’s on YOU, Lou!

If you really want to find a good hairstyle, look to professional athletes, right? Um…not so much. But you have to give this guy some serious props for trying to bring about some kind of dreadlocked Jheri curl.

Speaking of athletes, this fine fellow is Kevin Mench, a professional baseball player. He has what is widely regarded as the largest head in professional baseball, a size 8 (the same as mine!) noggin. He has the enviable sense to just cover it with hats and batting helmets as much as possible, and hope no one notices the fact that he doesn’t technically have a neck. Kevin also hails from Delaware, which basically means there’s something really nasty in our water.

I feel like I probably shouldn’t really burn this guy, since he’s, you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury and all, but come on, people, what better way to distract from the bald spot on the top of your head than by developing the most AWESOMELY OUTSTANDISHLY RIGHTEOUS pair of eyebrows EVER? If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think he was planning to grow them out so that he could comb them back over his head, totally putting the Combover Style Establishment out of business. I mean, who could compete with that?

Finally, we have what is probably the ideal big-head style; simply shave that crap off completely, and make sure there’s a pretty girl in all your pictures.

The graphic atop this here page sure is grim, ain’t it? It’s been up since winter, and I intend to put something more spring/summery up ons, but sadly my time at home with the computer has been SEVERELY curtailed by the fact that my wife is working on some kind of paper, and hasn’t let the laptop out of her grasp for 3 weeks. (I suppose it’s also possible that she’s developed a life-altering addiction to Teh Pr0n, but I don’t think so.)

It’s kinda sad, really, ’cause I have like 8 tons of totally hott photos I took with my camera over the last few months, featuring flowers and trees and geese and whatnot, that would be hella rad up there, but sadly I have not been able to edit and upload and make the necessary template modifications. Which is sad, really. Totally sad.

What is also sad is that, despite not having posted in roughly 9 days, I don’t have much interesting to say. I thought I did; I had in fact written four or five paragraphs of something that I thought was totally AWESOME when it was rattling around in my head, which of course turned into absolute pap when neatly typed into El Computador. So, I beg your forgiveness. I’ll give you a hint: it described my boy Kyle as “the fastest human being I personally know.” So, you know, HILARIOUS stuff there.

The weekend was pretty busy; I helped my dad move a piano to my sister’s house AND some of my grandmother’s stuff OUT of hers before she moves to Florida, and managed to do it without exploding my spine. We saw “Chicago” at the New Candlelight Dinner Theatre (it’s New!), which was outstanding. We went to a birthday party for our friend John, who is Old (not New!). Sarah went to the beach for a fun overnight with friends, and Charles and I joined her on Sunday morning because I was singing an evensong in Lewes that afternoon; it was windy and cold and I about froze my nads off. BOO TO THAT. We did get Nicobolis, though. Can’t beat ’em!

I’ve been keeping up with my jogging, although I haven’t been SUPER good about it; I try and get out three times a week, but sometimes it’s just one or two. I’ve basically been eating everything in sight, justifying this by saying “Hey, I’m jogging like ALL THE TIME!” As a result, I’m getting fatter and fatter, so now I’m back to my “eating nothing but vegetables and small amounts of meat with no sugar” diet, along with drinking buttloads of water. Great times! Not really.

Wow, I’m sure typing up the hilarity today. I’ll try and do better later in the week, really I will.

I love the farmer’s market. Other than Walmart, there’s simply no place you can go to get that warm, fuzzy feeling of smug superiority, and Walmart doesn’t feature Amish folks exhibiting their own special brand of eccentricity. At least, the Walmart in New Castle, Delaware doesn’t. (That particular Walmart is a true hotbed of intellectualism; did you graduate high school? 60% of the other shoppers didn’t, and as far as I can tell none of the employees. Also, it’s a good place to get shot, which every neighborhood SORELY needs.¹)

The farmer’s market is great because it’s always “THE farmer’s market,” not “A farmer’s market,” even if it’s not entirely clear which one you mean. It’s as if the place has such gravitas that it ALWAYS warrants the definite article (because you’re DEFINITELY going to see some shiznit up ins). We have two major ones available to us: the one in New Castle, only a few miles from our house, and one in Boothwyn, PA, which is all the way up 495 and through some backroads. Getting to the one in New Castle requires you to go through the intersection of routes 273 and 13, which takes a minimum of 10 minutes, plus another 15 fighting your way through the parking lot because most of the folks who go to the farmer’s market are no smarter than the average sea anemone and have no concept of “not getting in the way.” (More on this in a bit.) As a result, it’s actually faster to get to the one in Boothwyn, particularly if you know the sneaky back way in that avoids the bulk of the parking lot idiots. Also the one in Boothwyn (namely, the Booth’s Corner Farmer’s Market) has an “Amish BBQ” (whatever that is) featuring good rotisserie chicken and a potato soup that we’re fond of that they haven’t served the last 4 freaking times we’ve gone.

We went on Saturday, and oh man the fat emphysemics were out in force. I haven’t seen that many oxygen tanks since I helped bury Natalee Holloway behind a scuba shop in Barcadera. (Too soon?) It’s always fun to wade your way through the sea of inhumanity and see someone you know (we ran into a friend from church), or someone who clearly is as overwhelmed by morons as we are (anyone with a college sweatshirt usually fits the bill). We got food at the BBQ (Rotisserie chicken, enjoyed by all) and I found a place selling Phils paraphernalia so I coughed up $16.99 for a Mike Schmidt tshirt in the totally hideous 80s uniform color scheme.

I’m pretty sure most of the people who shop or work there have rusty above-ground pools and/or trampolines in their backyards.

I’m working one of those ridiculous jobs in which I’m up all night, sleeping all day, and drinking the blood of hookers I dump in the woods of South Jersey. I mean…well, dang. Anyway, the gist of this is that I have little time for such frivolities as “blog posts” or “pooping,” but because I’m a nice guy, I’m throwing this up on here as a sign unto you that I am rad and care deeply about your personal feelings towards, I dunno, stuff.

Anyway, I thought I’d talk about Old vs. New. Some people are what I call “conservative fuddy duddies” and prefer only the old; some people are what I call “liberal hippie forward-thinking types” and have an endless drive for All That Is New And Rad. Like most people, I fall somewhere in the middle, as evidenced by the following, um, evidence:

• In sports, old is better, like WHOA. The Designated Hitter: bad. Juiced baseballs: hella bad. Umpires wearing some kind of green shirt that makes them look like park rangers: craptastic. NASCAR’s “Car Of Tomorrow”: the stupidest idea since I started cutting myself to stop the crying. Football teams passing on 65% of downs: BOORRRRRIIINNNNNGGGGG.
• Technology: Dell Latitude D410 (my new work lappy) > Packard Bell Pentium 133. XM Radio > cassette tapes. PS2 > Ms. Pacman. The internets > libraries. CDs > vinyl LPs, despite the audiofreaks who say things like “digital recordings are just missing something.” They are, of course; they’re missing tape hiss. This is a good thing. Dorks.
• Women: modern sorority skanks dressing like 7th Avenue streetwalkers are a pretty solid improvement over the grunge-y sweater-wearing style of the early to mid-90s. Unless you have a 14 year old daughter, in which case I suggest you chain her to a radiator. On the other hand, apparently the 70s was the decade for hot chicks getting busy with no repercussions, so who knows. (I was, sadly, like 2 then.)
• Modern hotel keys suck, because invariably they are encoded to deactivate while I’m at work, such that when I return, completely exhausted, they don’t work and I have to take like 8 elevator rides back to the main desk to have them fix things. Argh. (It’s happened twice to me this month.)

In short, I’ve been awake for something like 32 of the past 36 hours and probably need to stop drinking caffeinated sodas because I haven’t blinked in a few minutes.