matthearn.com

Link day, y’all! HECK YES!

• I got a new haircut yesterday, and trust me, I definitely considered this. It was simply fear of my violent wife’s wrath that kept me looking my usual self.
• It’s new! It’s fast! It…is it frowning at me? That’s an interesting marketing ploy.
• I admit: in an effort to understand this comic, I looked up the Ackermann Function as well as whatever g₆₄ is. I think the brain overload gave me cancer.
• This reminded me of my Recording professor at Peabody, Alan Kefauver, who had a reputation for making dumb freshmen believe that if you held a piece of recording tape to your ear and ran your thumbnail on it at just the right speed, you would hear the recording stored thereupon. He didn’t try to pull it on me, which nice ’cause I’m an idiot and would probably have tried it, but now I can pretend I wouldn’t have fallen for it.
• The beauty of socialised medicine! (Spelt all Britishly ’cause the story’s all Britishy.)
• Speaking as a Fat American, this is hilarious.

That’s all I got! So…bye!

I’ve been thinking a lot about vegetarianism lately, prodded by my friend Rachel and various other famous folks, and I think it’s time I joined the fray. Not that I have anything of value to say, really, but Lord knows if I can say something stupid and pointless about a subject that I know nothing about, I am going to do so, dang it.

It’s the American Way.

Anyway. I’m willing to concede that a vegetarian diet is undoubtedly healthy, even healthier than a meat-laden diet, assuming you make sure to get various vitamins that are found in abundance in meats and rather scarcely in veggies. I’m a little hesitant to concede that eating meat is unethical, because I am a bit of a moral relativist and I don’t like when people tell me where to draw lines. (What I mean by this is the following: my house has an ant problem. It hasn’t been bad the last few months, but usually they reemerge every spring in swarms until I pay a thin man with a truck full of noxious chemicals to arrange for their collective demise. I consider this to be vital to the health of my family, and I’d like to think that any vegetarian with any sense would deal with a pest problem the same way. Ants have brains, though. Why does a chicken’s brain have any greater claim to the continuation of life than an ant?) I’m completely supportive of the idea that animals should be treated humanely, and thus I do disapprove of large farms that stuff animals into small cages and inject them with horrific chemicals to counteract the effects of putting millions of barely-healthy critters into a small space. (Not gonna lie, though, KFC is hella good.)

I do get into arguments with veggie folks, though, over the idea that humans were or weren’t designed to eat meat. Humans may or may not have subsisted primarly on seeds and pine nuts 50K years ago, I wasn’t there taking notes. But they did eat meat when they could get it. And why? Because It Tastes Good.

My argument here is not that we should be permitted to eat on animals just because it tastes good. What I’m saying is that animals are designed/evolved/made by robots/whatever to eat certain diets, and to them those diets taste good. Carnivores eat meat not because they have made an objective decision that, ethics be damned, they believe it is their birthright to eat the flesh of their fallen animal brothers, but because IT TASTES REALLY DELICIOUS to them. Herbivores stick to grass and leaves and things not because they are tree huggers who drive hybrids with ACLU stickers all over them, but because to them that stuff is like prime filet, yo.

I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but to me, red meat tastes like there is a party in my mouth and stomach and NOBODY ELSE IS INVITED ITS ALL JUST FOR ME YOU BASTARDS. Tofu tastes like an elephant crapped and somebody rendered it into cube form. My tongue was designed to deliver pleasurable sensations to my brain when I eat meat, and thusly I intend to continue eating animals AND vegetables in massive amounts, as is my nature, until enough people disagree with me to make a law saying it’s illegal. I figure this’ll happen around 2032 or so, so I’d better get my fill while I can.

Do you ever completely irrationally miss things? Not miss as in “I tried to shoot my cat but she ducked,” but miss as in “I shot my cat and I wish I had not done so as I had not foreseen how much her peeing on me while I slept was part of my life.” I was chit-chatting with some coworkers about Accenture, a company with whom we frequently do business, and how they took over the old Wanamaker Building on Augustine Cutoff (the only image I could find is this one, which was taken recently and seems to feature crap).

I miss Wanamaker’s. They moved out of that building 1991 in favor of a massive new location in Christiana Mall, which subsequently sold out to the May’s corporation which turned it into a Hecht’s, which in turn became Lord & Taylor, which closed last year. I’m not sure why I miss it (this is the irrational part); it was no different than any other crappy clothing store, except by the time I knew it this particular store was stained. Literally and figuratively; the cheap panel carpeting looked like it had been lived on by an incontinent elephant, and the whole place had an aura, from as far back as I can remember, of “we’re probably going to close in a few months. Don’t put anything on layaway.”

Externally, though, the building is MAGNIFICENT, even if the inside had lost all luster decades ago. It has different levels, and a huge glass curving window with pillars on the outside, and it’s simply a mid-century architectural masterpiece. Not having a picture to show you is KILLING me. (I keep having to inject myself with small doses epinephrine to keep my heart going.)

I don’t have a lot of memories of the place. Just a few of going with my mom and sister and playing hide-and-seek among the racks of clothes and getting into trouble, which happened a lot, and one vivid memory of me making My First Purchase Of Any Kind. (I’m pretty sure this happened there, although it also could have happened at the Sears in Governor Square, another sad loss to the Wilmington economy.) I had scrimped and saved, and I had my $2.50, and I wanted a set of the Hot Wheels cars that had little swivelling parts that would simulate crash damage when you banged them into one another. (Ah, the simple tastes of youth.)

I remember a major point of discussion with my mother at the time was whether I should tell the cashier to “keep the change,” which would have been a penny. I apparently was quite the generous tipper at 8.

OMG I have TOTALLY figured out how to be thin, and I am going to share it You, The Reader! It’s very simple, and will TOTALLY WORK FOR YOU.

First, you must figure out how much you want to weigh. I would like to see if I can weigh 200 pounds, although in reality if I were to be that slender you would probably call 911 because I would look I just walked out of the desert.

Second, you have to figure out how many calories you need in a day based on the weight you would like to be. (Just do some googling, you lazybones, there are calculators EVERYWHERE.) For example, apparently a 200 pound man of average daily activity burns roughly 2600 calories per day.

Lastly, you have to figure out exactly how much roasted skinless chicken breast, baked potato with salt, and butter fits into that calories, and divide it up to eat all day! Super simple. You can even just blend all the potatoes and chicken and butter together and drink it in shake form throughout the day!

Using my example, I need to take in 2600 calories. Diet Authorities^TM (yeah, I don’t really know who either) tell me that you want to divide those calories up thusly: 30% protein, 20% fat, 50% carbohydrates. So I need 780 calories of protein, 520 calories from fat, and 1300 calories from carbs.

I’ll get my carb calories totalled first, since neither chicken nor butter have any, and I’ll know how many potatoes I have to eat tomorrow. 1 ounce of baked potato with skin reportedly has 24 calories from carbs and 3 calories from protein, with negligible fat, so I will need 1300/24=54.16 ounces of potatoes, or roughly 3 1/3 pounds! That sounds like a lot, but don’t forget: potatoes taste awesome.

The potatoes also contribute 54.16*3=162.5 calories of protein, so I only need to get another ~620 calories from that, which I’ll get from my chicken. 1 ounce of skinless chicken breast contains 16 protein calories, so I’ll just go ahead and roast up 620/16=38.75 ounces, or about 2 1/3 pounds, of tasty chicken. This will also give me 38.75*9=349 calories of fat, so I only need to get 170 more calories of fat, which is handly contained in about 1.5 tablespoons of butter!

All I have to do is eat 2 1/3 pounds of chicken, 3 1/3 pounds of potatoes, and a spare hunk of butter every day for the rest of my life, and I will weigh 200 pounds!

I’m all over it.

UPDATE: It turns out I cannot have any peppermint patties on this diet, so SCREW THIS.

I’ve been using Blogger for like 3 decades now, and I’ve been mostly happy with it (except on the once-frequent occasion in which a network problem caused me to lose an entire, 3000 word post, but that hasn’t happened in a while). Periodically I consider upgrading to Movable Type or Serendipity or something, but since I don’t have a lot of time to go about completely rebuilding my database of posts and columns, I’ve not bothered.

Normally this is the point at which I say, “Until now,” and relate some kind of sob story about how Blogger deleted my entire webpage and then peed on me, but THAT’S NOT SO THIS TIME. Stop trying to predict The Hearn, man, because I am DIFFICULT TO PREDICT. And how.

Blogger was recently purchased by Google, which of course made the Blogger creators a pooppile of money, and Google immediately set about improving Blogger in their own way. Not long ago they released “Blogger Beta,” which basically was a nifty update. This week they released it as a production doodacky or whatever so I signed up like they were giving away free bacon.

I’ll give them this: it’s new and improved. Is it so new and improved that it’s worth making a big deal about being a new release and omigod everybody has to sign up lol wtf!?!??!?!!!1one? No. Here’s a short list of stuff they added:

• Labels. Meaning you can categorize your posts (you’ll see be low where I have tagged this one as “geek,” for example) and group them accordingly. Other sites have called it “filed under.” Kinda nifty.
• Private blogs, in which you can post a bunch of crap and not show it to anybody. Totally new wave.
• An improved Dashboard (it shows all the various blogs I can post to).

Well, actually I guess that’s about it. Here’s the list of things they say they added that I can’t find any evidence of whatsoever:

• Instant publishing: “Say goodbye to the dreaded ‘Publishing…’ spinner. Now, when you make a new post or change any of your settings, your blog is updated and changes go live immediately; you don’t have to remember to republish.” All I know is if I try to republish my entire blog, it takes so long that Blogger actually puts up a little tag saying “It was taking so long to publish your blog that we got tired of showing you the dreaded ‘Publishing…’ spinner. Click here if you’d like to keep watching it, you weirdo.”
• Template customizing with drag and drop, which is simply not there. Maybe I have to create a new blog, or select a new template? Sorry, I’m not going to wipe out my current template settings to try and find out. UPDATE: Apparently this only works with blogs that post to Blogspot, and because of some lame technical deficiency they probably won’t ever change it. Would have been nice if this had been mentioned somewhere in the “OMG SWITCH TO THE NEW BLOGGER!” pitch, although since the upgrade wasn’t exactly challenging I would have done it anyway.

Finally, I have a list of stuff that Blogger should have put in, but didn’t:

• A way for me to view the posts that don’t have any labels so I can label all my old posts. As it is now my post listing screen only shows me the most recent 30 or so, so I have to jump to a different page to label something, and once that’s done it dumps me back on the most recent 30 posts again and I have to figure out where I was. Let me filter out all the labelled posts so it doesn’t take me 300 years to do this, you bastards!
• A way to change it so it doesn’t say “Labels:” at the bottom of every post, but instead says “Filed under:” which is standard everywhere on the web at this point and sounds much less lame-O.
• A way to view my posts as they will actually appear on the page, with all the headers and footers and sidebars and things, so I know BEFORE publishing that the picture of Justin Timberlake from the “D*ck In A Box” video is too wide and is making my page look like it was designed by a muskrat. Blogger used to have this and it was, oddly, taken away in favor of the new preview format, which shows me nothing.

I’m just SAYIN’, Blogger dudes, before you go announcing “monster release lol omg” you might want to fix some of the existing flaws.

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.

I hope everybody had a restful batch of holidays and didn’t kill any family members or anything. I myself killed no one, but my time to rest was sparer than a bowling scorecard with nothing but slashes on it.

Was that a stretch? It felt stretchy.

I did all the usual; 847 church services on Christmas Eve, though we found time to take Charles to the pageant at the cathedral, where he sang¹ along with the hymns and the sermon. Christmas morning we set up Sarah’s dad’s video camera, which had been lent to us for this purpose, so that we might videotape Charles doing amusing Christmas things, like eating wrapping paper and ribbons.

Then we went to Sarah’s parents’, where we had eggs and no kegs, followed by a sojourn to my parents’ where I think I fell asleep once. (Christmas is stressful.) It was a super successful day; Charles, as is his wont, was BEYOND happy all day. Seriously, I’ve never seen a child so relentlessly mirthful. The only time he gets really angry about anything is when he’s tired, although if he needs to sleep and doesn’t want to, his wrath is fearful. That boy can SCREAM. Most of the time, the only thing we can do is just let him lay there and yell, and eventually he falls asleep, but it’s not exactly easy on a parent to hear your child making those noises. If he had the capacity for language yet he would definitely be yelling “SCREW YOU BASTARDS!” at the top of his lungs over and over.

He is his mother’s son.

The rest of the week I was on call and had to work, which was boring. Nobody was in the office. I got almost nothing done except for when I got paged during off hours and had to reset people’s passwords or some such frivolity. You’d think I would have used that time to maybe post something on here, but no, I was just about wiped out, and conserving my energies for the weekend. We were marrying off a couple friends, so I needed to make sure my liver was well-prepared for the weekend’s onslaught.

Also, I sang the Star Spangled Banner (TEH BANZORZ!) at a Philadelphia Phantoms game on Friday night; I have a wav file of it made on Todd’s cellphone that I hope to edit and upload later, maybe even make it into a ringtone for when Ambassadors to the UN call me and stuff. (They, and other governmental employees, frequently ask my opinion on foreign affairs. That opinion invariably is “Heck yes we should invade!” I am a highly valued member of President Bush’s team.)

The wedding was beautiful and under 30 minutes, which are basically the two things all weddings should be. (Our wedding was of course nearly an hour long, but then we had a full choir and we sang hymns and things and there was a trumpet player AND a violinist.) The reception was DJ’d by notable local celebrity Dana McDonald, who has a nice radio voice. His tones were DULCET, I tell you. Dulcet.

I drank so much I nearly split my pants. Luckily, I have large friends who are not averse to carrying me home, and there was a shuttle back to the hotel so I didn’t have to drive anywhere. AWESOME.

When I say “sing,” I really mean “yelled at the top of his lungs.” It was stellar.

This cold is WEIRD, man. You may remember a few weeks ago when I noted that I was sick; that cold followed its normal course of a day of scratchy throat pain, followed by a day of complete sinus blockage, followed by a couple days of drippiness and general malaise. With the help of Zicam (remind me to tell you a story later about how apparently my father-in-law’s friends discovered that zinc cures colds), I got over it quickly and sang the Messiah concert the following weekend with great ease.

On Sunday, the cold came back, but it appears to be working in reverse. The past few days I’ve been clogged up and drippy, and then this morning I awoke with agonizing throat pain, but my sinuses are clear. It’s a mixed-up, mashed-up, cuhRAZY world, kids.

More annoying is the fact that Charles seems to be going through the same symptoms; he spent the last few days sniffly, and I think the throat pain hit late last night because he awoke screaming and we had a hard time calming him down. (He’s a jolly fellow, but like any baby, once he gets revved up the crying is more for the sake of continuity than actual pain or anguish.) He seems fine this morning, which was good because I was in no mood to deal with his anguish, because apparently Sarah spent the night pouring Comet into my mouth.

Anyway, the interesting story involving my father-in-law’s friends: apparently he worked with a couple of guys who were interested in what might kill regular rhinovirus, aka the cause of the common head-cold. Back in the 70s, Their lab had a storage closet where they kept leftover chemicals, so these guys would score some rhinovirus germs (I’m assuming they knew a guy on 32nd street) pour various chemicals on ’em, and watch.

Finally they hit upon something; they had a dirty jar of some kind of acid, I forget exactly what it was because it was a big word, poured it on the germs, and noted that they died in screaming agony. This was a good sign. So they organized a serious study, and one of the guys decided it would be best if they cleaned up the chemical to get the dirty gunk out of the jar, so they ran it through a filter. They ran their test, and nothing happened. The acid wasn’t killing anything.

They went back and grabbed the filter they’d used, scraped off some of the mung, put it in the germs, and watched with great glee. Unfortunately, they weren’t sure what the mung WAS. They ran a bunch of tests on it and discovered that it was mostly zinc, so they organized a study involving human subjects.

It was a bit of a failure; the sick folks would take a chewy zinc thing, and nothing would happen. The only person that seemed to consistently get better was a little girl who insisted that the tablet tasted really bad and refused to swallow it. She just kept chewing on it. (Personally, if something tastes bad, I want to get it AWAY from my tongue, but miniature females are even more stubborn and immune to logic than the full-size versions.) The scientists realized that folks had to keep the zinc in their mouths so that it would somehow get breathed up into their sinuses and kill the germs in there.

In the end, the company decided that since zinc was widely available (most vitamins contain it, for example), it wasn’t something they could patent, so they didn’t bother to market it. Still, it’s interesting to note that Science knew about the magical healing powers of zinc almost 30 years before Zicam started making their chewables/tablets/sprays/etc.

I have acquired an organ.

Seriously, you have to click the image to see the full glory of it. Particularly the missing leg on the right. It sounds kinda sickly (I’ve been trying to create an mp3 of myself playing it, but I can’t find the drivers for my little recording doodacky), and just feels, uh, dusty.

I love it.

If I can figure out how to make my recording doodacky work, I’ll post a sound file of the joy later.

Man, weird weather up in this mix. The temps are going to hit 60 today, and we’ve had this disturbing fog hovering over us, now in its third day. I can’t say I’m thrilled about it, since I keep having to drive all over creation. It’s like God farted, dude, and it’s just LINGERING.

We had our office holiday party the other day; there was much merriment. I baked a shoo-fly pie and some cinnamon rolls and brought them in. I had baked so many cinnamon rolls (in an effort to get rid of frozen bread dough) that I left two trays for the party and brought two trays up for “UNIX Team holdbacks,” as it were, of which my teammates ate maybe 5 rolls. Since there are 12 rolls in a tray, this mean I ate, by myself, over the course of 2 workdays, 19 cinnamon rolls. And yet I wonder why I don’t fit into any of my winter pants.

Our well-traveled high school pal Stefan is in town for a few weeks, over from South Korea, where he’s been living for a few years, teaching English to small children. This may seem rather innocuous information, but if you knew Stefan, you’d be as terrified as I am. Rest assured: these children will be well versed in good ol’ American profanity. We met him for dinner last night at a nice Mexican place in North Wilmington, where I had fajitas with shrimp (pronunciation: skrmzpz) in ’em. He gave me a small bottle of Korean liquor, which he described as sort of being like vodka. Apparently over there they do shots of it until they suddenly find they are speaking Mongolian.

For those of you with Sephardic or Ashkenazic ancestry: Happy Chaka Khan! Or however it’s spelt. My grasp of the English language is more tenuous than you might assume.