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I’m an uncle!!! Meet Nathaniel Thomas Hornberger, born August 23rd, 2005:

I was hoping to have the South Pacific galleries up today, but I showed them to a couple of my so-called friends, who have informed me that they look like edit because I designed them on a 1600×1200 21″ monitor. So I must do some resizing. Hopefully they’ll be up later in the week. Meanwhile, check this out, but put on a diaper, first:

The Carl Soundboard. Carl. From Aqua Teen Hunger Force. What, do you live in Zimbabwe? Pay attention to pop culture! And watch some more cartoons.

I wasn’t planning to do any updates today, ’cause I’m lazy and fat, but I wanted to throw a quick thing up. I am currently holding a “BIG TEXAS® Cinnamon Roll” from a vending machine here at work. It’s unclear what, exactly, makes it “TEXAS” (or more properly “Texan”), since

1. I have been to Texas two or three times now and have never heard that Cinnamon Rolls are a major export, and
2. The product is made in Chicago.

Still, it’s a tasty little snack, it is indeed big, and it gives me 200% of my daily requirement of “Foods That Change The Color Of My Poop.”

I did not realize, however, that what I was purchasing is an Award Winning Food Product. According to the little blue graphic on the wrapper, the BIG TEXAS Cinnamon Roll has been voted the 2005 Automatic Merchandiser Readers’ Choice Pastry of the Year. This begs several questions:

1. Vending machine supply companies have a trade magazine? Yes, yes they do. I haven’t read deeply into it, but topics near and dear to the heart of the “Vending and Office Coffee Service Industry” include:
   • Rising Speed Limits Threaten Driver Safety; Professionals
   • Industry Sows Seeds of Recovery as Customer Downsizing Subsides
   • How To Pick A Vending Machine Off Of A Stupid Customer Whose BIG TEXAS® Cinnamon Roll Got Stuck So He Pushed The Machine And It Toppled Over On Him
2. The manifold readers of this trade magazine feel it necessary to vote for favorite food products? Who cares? I didn’t select my BIG TEXAS® Cinnamon Roll because it won awards. It’s not a freaking violinist. What the hell, people.
3. The BIG TEXAS® Cinnamon Roll won the top Pastry award for 2005 over Tastycake Chocolate Cupcakes and Blueberry Pop Tarts? And what about Hohos? Not allowing Hohos to be part of the discussion is just flat out gerrymandering or something. Totally not cool.

Ah, screw it. I’m hungry.

In which Comcast does me a solid:

Saturday morning, Sarah and I were packing for a short overnight trip, and cleaning the house a bit, and watching a bit of TV. Every so often, the DVR cable box would blip off and immediately turn back on, which was annoying; we didn’t really think anything of it, because our house was wired by dyslexic trolls with SEVERE dementia, and we have short power outages at least once or twice a month. It didn’t occur to us at the time that the only thing seeming to suffer on Saturday was the cable box; nothing else in the house was even flickering.

When we returned on Sunday afternoon, the box was simply off. This was odd; we leave it on at all times so that it might record the New Yankee Workshop and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, etc. It wouldn’t respond to commands from the remote for love nor money, so I unplugged and plugged it back in. The little channel readout on the front flickered “8888” for a few minutes, and then went dark. This did not seem promising.

Monday morning, bright and early, I called Comcast and said “Hey. My DVR doodad appears to have asploded. Please fetch forth another one, forthwith.”

“Is it flashing all 8s on the front?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Yep, the box is fried. We’ll schedule a guy to come out . . . can you be there tomorrow?”

Service within a business day? “Heck yes! What time?”

“He’ll be there between 1pm and 5pm.”

“Then so will I! Thanks!”

Yesterday, I bolted from work and headed home. The repair guy, a tall gentleman named Paul, arrived at 3, brought the new box in, and just as a matter of policy, tested the signal strength on the cable.

“Wow . . . that’s really weak. Did it give you any problems before?”

“Not really. I mean, the occasional digital flicker, but nothing that really angered my humours.”

“Where’s the cable come from?”

I led Paul downstairs to the basement, tiptoed across a floor littered with cat excrement (I hate cats), and showed him where I had put a splitter in the cable to run a line up into the living room.

“Okay, where does it come from to get here?” he asked, so I led him back into the dank depths of my basement, where yet another splitter sent cabling off to the cable modem.

“It comes in to the house here?” he asked.

“Well, yes, but it splits once outside and sends connections into the family room and upstairs to our bedroom.”

“So it splits three times before it even gets to the digital box?”

“Um, yes. I realize that’s probably not good, but most of the cable connections here were installed by drunk and blind Brazilians, I think. There’s not much I can do.”

Paul thought for a moment. “Let me, um, see what I can do.”

With that, he launched into a flurry of cable stripping and splitter replacing, which took about 30 minutes. Then he went upstairs to the living room, plugged his tester into the cable line again, and reported that the signal was still awfully weak, but it was at least a little better. Then he plugged the new DVR cable box in and ran it through its paces. Everything was just fine. I offered to let him sleep with my wife, but he declined. (Paul was a classy guy. Didn’t want to nail my wife, didn’t complain about the filth in my basement, and didn’t even mind when one of the cats tried to feast on his foot.)

And the clincher: the new DVR, a more advanced model, needs a different remote than the one we had. Paul was even more disappointed than I was that he didn’t have a spare remote in his truck, but at some point that evening while Sarah and I were test-driving cars and eating pasta, he came BACK to the house and dropped off a new remote. I don’t think I’ve had service that good since the Happy Ending massage club in Taiwan.

I think I’m basically a good person. I don’t kill people, I don’t steal things, I don’t run people off the road for driving slowly in the left lane of the interstate (although when I get elected Supreme Emperor, one of the first things I’m going to do is develop a device to be installed in all automobiles that causes increased amounts of electricity to a driver’s buttocks the longer they sit in the left lane of a road). I don’t adopt crippled orphans or anything, but I’m not specifically agitating for their euthanasia. So I think I can safely say I’m on Saint Peter’s good list, and will be entering Heaven with Mother Teresa and Sting and everybody.

What I’m hoping is that there is a kind of program up there in which, for a nominal fee (paid in manna, I assume), one can take a short road trip down to hill to visit the folks there and remind them that if they hadn’t been such tools, they could be hitting it nightly with 72 virgins, as opposed to getting railed by Satan’s Wang every day. After I die, I want to go on a field trip, find the guy that installed the light at Airport Road and Old Churchman’s Road, and kick him so hard in the groin that my weird up-pointing pinky-toenail stabs through his taint and he cries.

I live near Airport Road, and so thusly travel on it fairly extensively. For example, when Sarah and I were driving out to Longwood Gardens for the show (I have mucho pictures, going up next week, courtesy of Homegirl Kate), we needed to get to 141, so Airport Road was on our route, almost every day for three weeks. And every single time, we got caught at the new red light at Old Churchman’s Road. It’s a short light, but it changes about every 40 seconds, and so it’s almost impossible to avoid stopping for it, and it’s a major reason why traffic backs up on Airport Road all the way back to Commons Boulevard. It’s frustrating to the point of great violence on my part.

Here’s the thing, though: approximately 8 people live on Old Churchman’s Road. Something like 3/4 of the time we have to stop at the red light in question, nobody is actually waiting at the intersection for their light to turn green. It’s entirely timed, which is interesting because I can see in the asphalt where the sensors are installed. Somebody just decided not to turn them on. And when I meet that somebody, the pain will be broughten.

By me. To that somebody. Care of my foot. And my pinky toenail.

So we closed up South Pacific this weekend, and I’d like to report that it was FREAKIN’ HOT. I don’t mean hot in the sense that the show itself was spectacular, though this was so, but in the sense that it was something like 85 degrees and 70% humidity every bloody night.

My costume for the first act consisted of blue jeans (hot), a white tshirt, and a blue chambray shirt. Thursday and Friday it was so hot that I ditched the chammy shirt and did my dancin’ in just the white tshirt and jeans (and too-small Sailor hat, which sat on my head like a very comical yarmulke; pictures shall be forthcoming). I still had rivers of sweat running down the crack of my ass into The Sweetness (aka My Taint). Luckily the amount of time I had to spend onstage this year was somewhat limited, so I could sprint for the safety of the air-condition’d dressing rooms.

Despite the heat, the shows went off with nary a hitch, and now we can relax in the evenings and look forward to the after-party on Saturday evening, at which certain folks intend to drink heavily, but not me, of course, as I am a teetotaller. Yeah. That’s the ticket. Right.

Meanwhile, Sarah and I are in the market for a new automobile, as her Protege is starting to make disturbing noises, and it’s almost 8 years old. We figured we’d go out on Sunday afternoon and look at a few automobiles, so we headed over to the Nissan dealer on route 13 and admired the Altimas. Then, to our great consternation, we realized that the dealership was closed. This surprised the hell out of me; I had assumed that the only thing stopping a car dealer from being open 24 hours a day was federal regulations or something.

Still, it was probably for the best. We were able to look at the cars without having some assmaster salesman breathing down our necks, and got a good feel for MSRP and options. I was frustrated to discover that the Toyota dealership nearest us doesn’t seem to carry any V6 Camry models, or at least, we couldn’t find one. There’s always other dealerships.

BTW: Now that the show is done, I’m going to endeavour to return to a more normal schedule. That is because I am rad.

I’ve been off the Atkins Diet for about 3 months now (and of course have gained roughly 30 pounds), and I still haven’t gotten over how delicious cereal tastes. I missed it so much, and now I’m eating stuff that I never had an interest in before. Who’d’ve thought that Apple Jacks (or the Acme-brand equivalent) would be so tasty? Here’s a shortish list of all my favorite cereals:

• Frosted Shredded Wheat – All the healthy benefits of fiber and wheat grain, plus a goodly dab of solidified cake frosting in each bite! I can quite seriously eat like 3 bowls of this stuff in a sitting. This is one that I buy almost every time I go to the store.
• Corn Pops – My mother’s all time favorite, I buy a box occasionally. I have one at home that I’ve eaten most of, and should probably finish soon. One question: what’s up with the weird semi-metallic inner bag? Corn Pops have always had it, but it’s never made sense to me. Most other cereals just have a standard plastic bag, but apparently Corn Pops are prone to radioactive decay or something.
• Grape Nuts – Haha! Just kidding. Grape Nuts taste like reconstituted fart.
• Apple Jacks – I don’t think I’d ever had these before. With occasional exceptions (mostly Corn Pops and Captain Crunch), my mom avoided buying us sugary cereals. I figured I’d give them a try. They should probably change the brand name to “Sugar Coma.” Simply phenomenal.
• Captain Crunch – A one-time favorite, but I ate so many bowls of it in high school and college that I can no longer stomach it. Also it tears the flesh from the roof of your mouth.
• Froot Loops – Basically Apple Jacks with a jungle vibe and some additional colors.

One thing that I was never permitted in my youth was chocolate cereals or ones with marshmallows in ’em. So I plan to give those a try soon as well. I’m looking forward to weighing 260 pounds again. Yay!

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.

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.

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.”