matthearn.com

I have an exclamation to make, and it’s very controversial, particularly among my liberal friends, but I think it really needs to said, and said loud and clear:

Yay for rich people.

Yay, I say. And here’s why: if it weren’t for rich people, there would be no designer clothing stores. And if there were no designer clothing stores, there would be no designer clothing store clearance racks. And if there were no designer clothing store clearance racks, I would have to buy everything I own at Walmart. And when I buy things at Walmart, I have to come in contact with a class of humanity that makes me wish to light myself on fire, if only to cleanse off the patina of absolute nastiness that the customers there seem to exude.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying that poor people are nasty. I have met a number of people who don’t have a lot of money, and yet are actually hard workers, who wash themselves at LEAST once per day, and who in many cases are quite smart and educated. The average Walmart customer, however, isn’t like this. In the interest of hyperbole, let’s do a quick comparison between the average Walmart shopper and, say, a customer at Harrod’s in London:

Every month or so, I say to Sarah, “Hey, let’s run to Walmart, get some stuff!” So we do. And 30 minutes later, I’ll be stomping out of the store, muttering incoherently, having purchased a jug of milk and two packs of Chiclets, vowing never to return. It is a rare occurrence when I can find an article of clothing there that doesn’t look like something I’d wear to a golden shower party, and yet every few months, I’ll simply forget, and meander over to see what they’ve got. And inevitably I come within two snapped synapses of poking out the eyeball of some stupid fat woman with eleventeen small children who has decided that, in order for her to examine the enormous bag of pork rinds (as if the nutritional content of it actually concerned her), she has to park herself and her car completely perpendicular to the flow of the aisle she’s in, forcing other customers to either try and squeeze by her enormous bulk, or go around her via another aisle, which has the inevitable result that she throws the pork rinds into her cart or onto the floor and hustles around so she can block that aisle too. (I mean, seriously. People that have absolutely no concern for the other people around them should be chained to the back of a circus elephant or something, right?)

Then I’ll go to the mall, and wander into Banana Republic. BR is always nice because they rarely have more than 2 other customers, because no one in their right mind would pay $175 for a pair of jeans. I have no idea how they make their money. (I think they’ve got some kind of protection racket set up with Ambercrombie and Fitch, wherein if they are having trouble paying the rent, they just grab people from the mall, drag them into A&F, and threaten not to let them leave the eardrum-rupturing store until they promise to come over to the Republic and buy a $380 linen blazer.) Anyway, I go straight to the clearance rack, where you can find nice designer shirts for under $25.

So thank you, rich elitist snobs, for making it possible for me to avoid serious prison time for going upside a fat man’s head with a display shelf bracket.

I’m considering turning Wednesday into a true “blog day,” as in, I grab a bunch of humorous links that catch my fancy and comment on them punks. So here’s where it’s at, hosses:

• Germans know a good hairstyle when they see it, dude. Seriously.
• The man tries to keep good games off the shelves. Amusing quote:
  

  But concerned mom Tori Cage, who was shopping with her 9-year-old son, Dquan, said the game should never hit store shelves.

  “They should ban them totally,” said Cage, 27, of Maywood, N.J.

  Really? Personally, I think people that name children “Dquan” should be banned. But that’s just me.

• Baseball . . . with a twist! A really lame one!
  

  The idea for the promotion came from the 6-year-old niece of Bryan Williams, director of community relations for the T-Bones.

  I don’t have any nieces yet, but I do have young cousins, and the odds of me inviting them to my office to lend UNIX-related advice are rather slim. I guess it’s acceptable for ballclub executives, though.

• This happened to Sarah and me once on our honeymoon. I’m still paying off the damages.
• Best ever band name EVER EVER: “Freak Wombat Accident.”
• “I only made love to the ewe twice using two condoms but I never do it regularly . . .”

  Which leads me to one key question: What kind of person would spot a sheep, think “Man, that’s hot. I’m gonna go hit it,” walk over, grab the sheep, drop trou, and then, just as he’s about to do the nasty with a farm animal, and finally think “Oops, better put a condom on.” What in the gamboling monkey hell? That’s like carefully washing your hands, including under the fingernails, before performing “goatse.”

  Gross.

Pictures from Mel and Craig’s Wedding are up! Be warned: I got into a very strange mood during the rehearsal dinner and kept taking close up pictures of people.

Extremely, extremely close up. It’s way gross in some cases. Which is, of course, why it simply HAD to be posted online! Check it out!

Seriously. Check it OUT.

Random thoughts while considering if Bugles are of the grain or vegetable food groups:

• Has anything ever been more effectively covered up than the actual album title of “Let’s Get It Started,” by the Black Eyed Peas? Nobody I know seems to be aware of it. I feel like Deep Throat just for bringing it up.
• You know how when you eat asparagus, your pee smells of it for a day or so? Why doesn’t this happen with other foodstuffs? Would it not be awesome if, for example, this also worked with apple pie, or nachos? I bet there’s a company out there working on a chemical that makes their food smell strongly in pee, just so that the day after the meal, you’re reminded of how delicious it was. Great advertising, that.
• New Teen Girl Squad!!! I’m so happy. We’re ointment!
• People who make or wear short-sleeved dress shirts (other than the super-casual stuff with fun bowling prints) should be forced to eat heaping bowls of staple sauce.
• XM radio is awesome, but seems to be even worse than regular FM when it comes to “playing the same crap over and over.” Sure, some of the stations are very specialized, such as the one that just plays the current top20 hits in order. But even the “mix” station, which ostensibly plays pop hits from the 80s to today (it’s the commercial free B101!), seems to play “Holla Back Girl” an inordinate number of times per day.

  Also they need to add more classical and Broadway channels. And they need to have a Matt Hearn channel that plays an eclectic mix. As it stands, I’m sure there’s a channel on there (either a rock or alternative or dance station) that plays The Postal Service, but sadly I’d probably have to suffer through a lot of stupid Trent Reznor crap before I got to hear “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.” Which is sad, really.

“You! Bring that penis here, or put it back where you found it!”

My popularity is without end, apparently. My comrade-in-arms Tim, husband of Jenny, last year’s Illustrious CostarTM, sent me an email the other day to alert me to my presence in the phonebook.

Of course I’m in the phone book, I replied. Most folks are listed in the whitepages, with the exception of people like my parents, who wish to remain unlisted and below the radar so the government doesn’t find out about their basement meth lab.

Did I say meth lab? I meant free puppy counseling center. That’s it.

Tim says, no dude, you need to check out page 8. So I checked out page 8. Here it is, in all its glory, along with page 9:

(You can click it and see it even bigger!)

It may be a little hard to tell, so here’s the detail:

(Again, click it for the SUPER closeup.)

Yesh, that’s me and Jenny. In the Verizon phonebook for New Castle County, Delaware.

Big ups to the Brandywiners for being brave enough to use a picture of my scary self as an advertisement. Whoof. (My face makes baby Jesus cry.)

Okay, here be the pictures and amusing captions from my trip to Dover International Jaunpiece on 6/4. Yeah, it took me 11 days to post them. THAT IS JUST HOW IT IS. EASE UP OFFS.

Oh, and thanks for stopping by.

Okay, if you can read this, I think the migration from omnis.com to sjtech.net went as planned. I’m still fixing a few issues here and there, but things went remarkably well considering I realized on 6/4 that my current hosting contract would be expiring on 6/9. Muchas gracias to Other Matt for his help setting me up.

Now I have to start getting pictures edited and uploaded, so expect to see them later this week. Hopefully today I can get most of the pictures from the Dover races edited, and ready to post tomorrow, and then by the end of the week I can put up the pictures from Craig and Mel’s wedding, at which there was much revelry, and at which I got to do a lengthy James Brown impression.

As it turns out, I am freakin’ sweet.

IMP0RTENT INFOMASHAN LOL WTF!!1!1!111!!

I’m migrating to a new hosting service since omnis is mildly irksome to me. I’ll have more room, and a bit more access to the system and thusly freedom to do def and rad things, as I am wont to do.

As a result, access to teh m@tthearn.com may be a bit spotty over the next few days. Sure, I could do this on the weekend, but as I’m sure you understand, that is just now how I roll.

This week I do plan to get some of the roughly 300+ pictures I took at the racetrack this weekend, including closeups of Tony Stewart in which he looks like the devil! Good times for allz.

Stay loose killers.

I’d just like to take this space to publicly thank my wife for not being very picky about the toilet seat. Partially this is because I leave the whole seat and cover down (I read that every time you flush an open toilet you’re spraying fecal matter into the air, and I keep my toothbrush a mere 4 feet from the bowl), but even when I was a little less Obsessive-Compulsive, she was pretty chill about the whole thing.

Which, from what I’ve seen, is not the norm. When I was in college I had a friend named Emily who was downright militant about the whole thing. She and her roommates left a little sign on the toilet, the exact verbiage of which I don’t quite recall, but the gist of which was that people who stand up to pee are evil, and if we don’t put the seat back down we can expect to be admonished. I was usually in full compliance, but once I forgot, and Emily nearly kicked me out of the house. She was screaming at me like I’d taken a dump in her shampoo bottle or peed in the soy milk or something. I was totally blown away. (This was clearly a larger issue for her and her roommates than things that I would have considered far more pressing, such as the fact that their bathtub never truly drained, so if you wished to shower, you had to stand ankle deep in murky water, portions of which were up to a week old. Just nasty.)

After that escapade, I got around the issue by just leaving the toilet seat down when I peed. I didn’t TRY to get any on the seat, but accidents do happen, you know.

Even my mother gets into the act a bit. She’s an extremely rational person, so she justifies her attitude on the matter in this way:

1. When women use the toilet, the seat will always be down.
2. When men use the toilet, half the time the seat will be down, and half the time the seat will be up.
3. Ergo, the toilet seat is down for 75% of all toilet-related functions.
4. Thusly, it makes more sense to just leave it down except in the 25% of uses, and then immediately it should be put back down.

I guess I can understand her reasoning, except for a few problems:

1. Everyone pees more frequently than they “drop the chalupa.” At least, most folks do, I think. If you poop every time you pee, you should see a doctor. Particularly if it’s some kind of thin gruel-ish substance.
2. By their own admission, girls do not poop at all.
3. I pee about twice as often as everyone else.

By my calculations, if I poop once a day, and a girl pees 4 times a day, and I pee 8-9 times a day (which is my norm), then the toilet seat has been down roughly half the times it’s been used. Just a thought.

However, all of this discussion is sadly just tapdancing around the true fact that I want to get across, which is this: any time a woman comes out of the bathroom, ranting and screaming about you always leaving the toilet seat up, it may sound like she’s saying this:

“Thanks for leaving the seat up again, you jerk! Why won’t you ever learn?”

But in reality, she is saying this:

“I am too stupid to remember to check and see if the seat is down before I plop my ass on the john!”

And the fact that my wife doesn’t do this indicates that she is one of the smart ones. Even if she can’t read.

Er, won’t read. Won’t. Not can’t. She can definitely read. I think.