matthearn.com

Today I’m going to be running all over the data center handling my BWEEEEEEEZNASS (my businassssss), so I don’t have the necessary block of time to sit down and write something coherent. (As if anything I post is coherent . . . har! I’m killin’ me.) So instead I’m going to periodically jump on here and post some bloggish type stuff. I won’t be posting it as individual posts, though, since that would artificially inflate my post-totals, and also I don’t want this site to actually turn into a blog, since it’s definitely more of a “one post per day” kind of jam, even if it does fulfill the “newest stuff at the top” paradigm.

Wait . . . got lost again for a second. Okay, I’m back. On to the randomness:

• 11:30am – The other day I was reading this post over at Sneaking Suspicions and it made mention of a variety of “readability” calculations that you can use to figure out how hard it is to comprehend something you’ve written. I did a little googling on the subject, and found this handy dandy php program that will calculate the readability of a document according to three standards: Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and the Gunning-Fox Index.

  For the first, higher numbers indicate better readability; for the second and third, LOWER numbers do the same.

  For example, I entered the phrase “I am rad.” A relatively short document, it scores high for readability: 92 (out of 100) on the FKRE (60-80 is ideal for web documents), a FK Grade Level of 1 (meaning the average 1st grade student could understand it), and a GFI of 6 (11-15 is ideal; anything over 22 is post-graduate level textbook stuff).

  To take another example, this column by Bill Simmons, ESPN’s funniest mofo, scores thusly: 62 on the FKRE, 8 on the FKGL, and 15 on the GFI. Everything right where it should be. Hence: he is awesome.

  I bring this up because I ran this post of mine from Tuesday through the readibility calculator, and got the following scores: 46 on the FKRE, 14 on the FKGL, and 21 on the GFI. My stuff is downright unreadable. (Yesterday’s silly short story fell right within established norms, though.)

  Either I’m waaaaaaaay smarter than everybody else, or I’m completely insane. Or it could be both. I dunno. Either way, I’m scurred (scared).

• 12:30pm – I’ve had two songs stuck in my head today, alternating back and forth:

  O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get the up into the high mountain!

  and

  Many a lassie, as everyone knows, ‘ll try to be married before 25.
  So she’ll agree to most any proposal, all he must be is a man and alive.

  I’m gonna snap soon.

• I feel I should note that my birthday is 2 weeks from today. I will be 27 years old. I am awesome. That is all.

Note: This is the first in a series of short stories I’m writing based on amusing pictures I find online. The reasons for this are manifold: 1) I want to improve my fiction writing, 2) I like looking for pictures online because sometimes the ladies are nude, and 3) I like making my readers suffer. Thank you.

Sung stared at her new, as-yet-unnamed turtle for roughly 2 hours, without moving a muscle, before Steve noticed and asked her if she was okay.

She wasn’t.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

It wasn’t the first time that a 23-year-old girl had suffered a stroke, but it was certainly the first time in the collective memory of the 1st Korean Methodist Church. The usual phrases were uttered: “so young,” “so beautiful,” “so much to look forward to.” Steve sat in a chair in the third row, barely paying attention, barely conscious. He didn’t cry; every ounce of emotion in his body had been drained from him in the 4 days since she died. All that was left was actual, physical pain; it felt like someone had hooked a crowbar under his sternum and ripped it from his chest. Or something like that.

He hadn’t bothered to ask if he could sit with Sung’s family. Her parents were tolerant people, and over the years had grown to accept that Sung might marry someone not of Korean descent, but moving in with a black guy had not even been considered. Her grandmother had been living under the delusion that Sung and Steve were just “roommates,” but Mr. and Mrs. Yun had seen their apartment, saw both sets of clothes in one closet, the unmade bed, the condom wrapper in the trashcan. Steve was reasonably grateful they had bothered to let him know when and where to come “celebrate Sung’s life.”

His father couldn’t get out of work, but his mother came along. He wasn’t sure if having her there made him feel any better, or worse. At least, for once, she had the good sense not to say much. Anyway, if Steve had driven himself, it was even odds he’d slammed head-on into a bridge abutment.

Suddenly, the congregation stood, as Sung Yun’s coffin was rolled into the church. As soon as he saw it, Steve’s knees began to buckle, so he sat down, which got him some dirty looks from other mourners. He knew that one of her strongest beliefs was that wasting space on cemeteries was a sin; when she died, Sung wanted to be cremated, so that her ashes could be spread on the Gulf of Mexico. He knew it, and her parents knew it, but they said she would go in the family plot, and that was that. The decision might have been partially affected by unvoiced suspicions of what went on during the “field trip” to New Orleans, but it wasn’t as if Steve could ask. “Hey, are you failing to honor your daughters wishes because she and I did it in a bus station in Baton Rouge?” Yeah, that’d go over GREAT.

The service was in traditional Korean, although one of the eulogists, a young cousin, said her piece in English. She and Sung had been close growing up, but when Sung went away to college, they drifted apart. Her speech talked about lost youth, and she didn’t have a lot to say about what might have happened after high school graduation. No mention of Sung’s summa cum laude degree in politics, no mention of the night she spent in jail for punching a bartender that called her “slanty,” no mention of stealing a golf cart from a country club in Arizona, and certainly no mention of her black boyfriend.

The congregation sang several hymns together during the course of the service. Steve spoke little Korean, only what he’d been able to gather from Sung in their 18 months together; mostly expletives and simple idioms. By the third hymn, he didn’t even bother to stand up, until he realized he recognized the tune of the introduction. He opened the hymnal in front of him to the same page as everyone else; he couldn’t read the title, but he could read the English words at the bottom:

Words and Music: Thomas Dorsey

While the congregation sang the Korean translation, Steve softly murmured,

Precious Lord, take my hand.
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.

Steve’s mother, who had been standing, but staying respectfully silent, during the hymns, joined him.

Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.

By the end of the first verse, other people, Korean people, were singing the English version as well. No one remembered the words to the second and third stanzas, so they just sang the first one three times.

As the song wound down, there seemed to be as many voices singing in English as there were in Korean, but for some reason it didn’t sound bad. The two different languages somehow meshed, in a way that added a syncopation to the song, something jarring, yet very joyous. The lyrics were tender, and the volume very soft, but throughout the last verse there was the hint of a wild woman.

When the hymn concluded, Steve sat heavily on his seat, and began sobbing uncontrollably. His mom wrapped her arms around him, and he collapsed into her, burying his head in her shoulder. There were no dirty stares from the surrounding people, just consoling glances, and not a few tears. Someone mumbled something, and Steve heard the muffled squeaks of the castors as they rolled the coffin out. He stood with the rest of the congregation, wiped his nose with the sleeve of his suit, and watched the family walk by. Mr. and Mrs. Yun had trouble making eye contact with Steve as they came up the aisle, so to make it easier on them he looked away as well and studied his cheap brown shoes.

“Um . . . Steven?”

Steve turned back toward the aisle. Mr. Yun was looking at him.

“Steven? Um . . . would you . . . could you please walk with us to the cemetery?”

Steve felt his knees start to give way again, but managed to stay on his feet and squeeze past the other people in his row. He could hear his mother following him, periodically coughing to hide choked sobs. When he got to the aisle, he and Sung’s father looked down at each other’s cheap brown shoes, before courage caught up with Steve.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. Mr. Yun looked up, and held out his hand. Steve took it. Mrs. Yun smiled.

People, we need to have, um, a chat. We have a problem, and I’m not sure how to fix it. For the roughly 19348th straight month, the top search that leads people to matthearn.com is:

Well, I can’t say it. Because when I do that, it makes it MORE likely that people will come here looking for things I can’t provide, and that saddens me. Let’s just say it involves a famous, and highly hilarious, black comedian, known best for imitations of Rick James, Lil Jon, and Prince, and for adding the phrase “I’m rich, BEOTCH!” to my daily repertoire. More specifically, it involves his wife, and whether or not she is Asian.

In fact, if you click here, you can go to a search for the young lady in question, and you’ll note my site appears on the second page. This scares me.

Some other interesting search strings:

It is worth noting that December was the largest month for matthearn.com ever in every category, which warms my heart and moistens my loins. I resolve to make 2005 the Year of Badassidnousocity, so keep checking here for more hilarity and references to obscure pornographic magazines.

So you thought I gave up on you, huh? Jigga please. I just didn’t want you stealing my stuff, you scurvy scalawags.

The low-down (on the down-low): I spent all of last week at a beach house in Bethany Beach, culminating in a New Year’s Eve party so totally unbelievably awesome, I can’t even begin to describe it. Actually, that’s mainly because there are significant portions of it that I don’t remember. If I called you shortly after midnight and left a lengthy message on your voicemail, um, I apologize if I said anything untoward. Which I undoubtedly did. (More on this later.)

I didn’t bother to tell you crazy fools where I was because revealing to the entire universe, through the medium of the Eentarweb, that nobody was at my house but four stupid cats and some mildew, would have resulted in the theft of all that I hold dear, namely, my computer, my TV, and my collection of plates from the Franklin Mint.

So ANYwayz, all I have to offer you today is a tidbit of rantage concerning self-checkout lanes, which I consider to be either the best invention ever, or the stupidest invention ever, depending on whether or not I’m currently using one, or in line behind other people to use them.

Kmart had self-checkout lanes for a while, but eventually removed them. When this happened I became angry, and wrote many the nasty email to Kmart, most of which read as follows:

What the F, mans? I used to be able to check myself out of your jams without any difficulty. It took me like 45 seconds to get through a self-checkout in your store with my copies of “Vogue” and “Boys’ Life” and “Handgun Times” and “The New England Journal of Medicine.” Now you’ve gotten rid of them, and so now I’m stuck waiting in lines with the rest of the proletariat! That’s so totally uncool, I’ve invented a new adjective to describe it: “crapflastic.” Bring back the self-checkout joints, mmmmBEYOTCH!

However, I have come to realize that, instead of being able to save money on pesky employees by making customers do the work themselves, they actually have to hire MORE employees to make the self-checkout idea work, and here’s why:

Most people are death-defyingly stupid.

I mean, I don’t understand how these people manage to walk upright. Yesterday, at the Acme, I bought four items: a pork roast, some seasonings, a new meat thermometer (I melted the old one), and a head of cauliflower. The Acme, in its wisdom, reacted to a sudden onslaught of customers by having only two cashiers. The line for the four self-checkout stations only had 2 or 3 people in it, so I headed over.

Station Number 1 had a woman who clearly did not understand the concept of “express.” She had roughly 4037 items, each of which she would scan and bag, until the bags were full, so she just took them off the station, which of course made the computer bitch and moan because it senses the weight of your stuff to make sure you didn’t scan, say, a can of DelMonte spinach, and instead place a 3 pound halibut in the bag. This woman was scanning items when I got into line; she was still scanning items and fighting with the machine when I left the store. She was also notable in that she had the ugliest child I have known since a guy in college revealed to me that his own afterbirth was, at first, thought to be his twin brother. This child, despite having the size and color of an 18-month-old, had no more hair on her head than I have on my right kneecap, and had been gnawing on the same drool-coated graham cracker for roughly 3 hours. She also was kind enough to attract the attention of Steve, the handi-capable bagger/gofer, who stood in my way and babbled incoherently at the child for roughly 27 minutes.

Station Number 2 had an old man that was determined to use his Acme key-fob-card to save 11 cents on the three items he wished to purchase, but it wouldn’t scan, and he couldn’t figure out how to key in the number, so he had to enlist the help of the self-checkout manager. He was 2 people in front of me in line, and was still trying to buy his three cans of unseasoned chicken stock when I left the store.

Station Number 3 seemed to have the only person in the place that knew how to operate the machines, except for the part where she kept getting interfered with by Handi-capable Steve, who just HAD to get the grocery baskets at her station, and he had to get them NOW.

Station Number 4 had a woman who had been in line in front of the old man, but left the line to “go look at something,” and returned roughly an hour later expecting to be able to reclaim her spot in line, and the kindly old chicken-stock-smelling man let her back in. (My ability to cause rapid, violent death through the power of my glare is as weak as ever.) She managed to scan in her items relatively easily, once she grasped the concept of “you have to put the item in the bag, not your purse,” and even managed to insert a twenty into the machine on the 17th try. Thinking that she was nearly done, I began to edge towards that particular station, but no, she stood there for a while and counted her change, and then checked her receipt, and then frantically started pressing buttons on the touch-screen, and then gave up, and then dropped all her spare change out of her purse onto the floor around the station, and then I was going to fling my pork roast at her head, but luckily the woman at Station Number 3 managed to fight off Steve long enough to pay for her items and run out of the store, so I meandered over there.

I, of course, already had my Acme and debit cards in hand, and set a new record for checkout speed: 4 items, totalling $16.64 plus $50 cash back, in 74 seconds.

Then I went out the wrong door and had to walk the long way around to my truck.

HAPPY CHRIMMAS!

Ychrome Alumni – Insomniac.mp3 – Solo by Seachris WessLEE

Why yes, now that you mention it, I WAS this close to Allen Iverson:

This is Kyle Korver; he’s tall. He can shoot the long three just like he’s ringin’ a bell:

Here’s a really good shot of Allen that I think he should endeavour to purchase from me for millions, what with me having a copyright on it:

Actually, I’m not sure of the legality of copyrighting something like that, since I took the picture within the boundaries of the Sixers game. The Sixers probably own the picture, the camera, and my testes. So forget I said anything.

Matt’s thoughts on Monday night’s game against the Utah Jazz:

• Allen Iverson has the skinniest set of chicken legs I’ve ever seen. I mean, even skinnier than Kyle. They’re like drumsticks, and not chicken or turkey drumsticks, but actual wooden sticks that one uses to bang a drum.
• Allen Iverson tends to be a LITTLE greedy with the ball. I’m no professional, but I’m just saying, I swear I watched the team run down the court probably 75 times, and he personally took 374 shots. Or something close to that, anyway.
• Aaron McKie needs to tuck his shooting elbow in on foul shots. (I learned that from a Tim Allen movie!)
• During the third quarter, Corliss Williamson got ejected because he and Matt Harpring got into an argument that ended with Williamson pushing Harpring into the expensive seats. Matt Harpring strikes me as a rather unassuming character, not the one that would incite violence from another player. Just a weird scene. It was like watching me pick a fight with a bouncer at the Stone Balloon.
• Allen Iverson became the 7th player in league history and the first in Sixers history to score 50 points on consecutive nights. Now if we could get him to pass the ball, that’d be so righteous.
• Kyle Korver hit a bomb from, I swear, Miami-Dade Airport for 3 points to close out the third period. It was the most incredible shot I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched Rick Smith hit nothing but twine, shot after shot, from like halfway down his driveway.
• I also watched Kyle Korver drive to the basket, and he was remarkably unawkward in doing so. I’m surprised they don’t let him do that more; he’s a big guy, seems coordinated, he can dribble without looking at the ball, and he can hit outside shots from, apparently, anywhere on the floor. His passing could use some work, but then, the Sixers as a team had roughly 4,983 (give or take a few thousand) turnovers in the first quarter alone, so I think it might be time for Coach Jim O’Brien to arrange for some passing drills in this week’s practices.
• Mad props to Milo for hooking us up with hell of good tix: Section 106, row 21. I’d never even been out on the concourse level seats before, and of course Milo then dragged us down to courtside to watch the shoot-around. I enjoyed that. Also big ups to Mikey for driving and buying me several glasses of fine hoppy beers.
• Oh, the Sixers lost by like 2 points. It was hell of annoying, but a great game to watch. I bet you wish you were there. HA.

Things are a little frantic at the office today, what with me having to go shopping this morning and not getting in until close to noon, followed by the consumption of really poor Wendy’s fries, and then I had to use the bathroom, and I’m trying to catch up on all my daily online reading, plus playing Silent Service on my Nintendo emulator. Plus what I’d really like to post are pictures from the Sixers game last night, but the pictures are currently stored on my camera, which is at my house, and I’m at work, so I can’t do anything with them until I get home tonight, so I’ll probably write a long post about how unbelievably kickass the game was, plus post the pictures I got of Kyle Korver practicing roughly 4 feet from me. (I know somebody.)

Meanwhile, the continuing adventures of the University of Delaware Ychrome Alumni:
Ychrome Alumni – Nebraska.mp3 – Solo by C. Christopher Wesley with backup from Ryan Case and Jared M. Smith the Poovy
Ychrome Alumni – Bouncin’ ‘Round The Room.mp3 – Solos by half of creation.

Double-yoo. Tee. Eff. It is colder than a polar bear’s ears (this is a family blog) outside. I left my house this morning sans chapeau so that my hair didn’t get messed up, but unfortunately my ears immediately froze and part of my right one broke off when I accidentally brushed it with my seat belt. So the hat went on right quick. (As a result, my hair now looks like I coated it with Crisco and combed it with a whisk.)

It goes without saying that I’m stoked beyond comprehension, even though my wife is less than thrilled about the whole thing. My truck has a thermometer, and the temperature it reported as 9 degrees fahrenheit. Last night, it even snowed! I’m glad we took the truck up to Lancaster yesterday, because the roads were pretty frozen on the way home, and the four wheel drive came in handy ’cause I kept almost spinning out in third gear. Well, technically, we were in no danger of spinning out because of my superior automotive skeeeelz, but every time the rear of the truck shifted an inch to one side under acceleration, HW moaned a little and put her head between her knees. So I went with the 4WD to limit the chances she might blow chunks and ruin my upholstery.

Saturday we hosted dinner at our house for Sarah’s parents and brother, featuring large amounts of Pork Chops a la Hearnwife, along with a mediocre effort at mashed potatoes from yours truly, and some green beans and macaroni and cheese. SuZann and Charles brought bread, and we made a skillet cake for SuZann’s birthday, which we duly coated with butter and inhaled like a bong hit.

Tonight I’m heading to a Sixers game and hope to have my picture taken with Kyle Korver, as he is apparently hot. But FIRST:

Ychrome Alumni – Better Man.mp3 – This is the only one I really made significant changes to, because the left channel featured some horribly out of tune Tenor 1 that totally screwed the recording. I basically dumped the entire left channel to get rid of it because it was that painful. Solo – J. Rod Smith
Ychrome Alumni – Prayin’ For Daylight.mp3 – Solo by DA HEEEEARN

Okay, before I give you the links to some more tunes from last weekend’s concert, I want to share the terror with you. My terror. Last night: total nightmare. Bad times.

Here’s what I remember.

I’m in some kind of beach house, reading a book by Kurt Vonnegut. What book it might have been I don’t recall, and it’s probably irrelevant because in none of the Vonnegut books I’ve read do I remember the world coming to an end in quite the way this book mentioned it: at 6:20 pm on a Saturday in April. I don’t remember exactly WHY the world was coming to an end in the book, which is frustrating because it becomes important when suddenly the dream shifts realities just a bit; I’m still at the beach house, but now the world is REALLY COMING TO AN END, and at 6:20 on a Saturday afternoon, however in October, not April.

Then I’m at my parents’ house, except that in my dream my parents live at the house currently owned by my wife and me. I dunno where she and I live. Sarah’s not even in the dream, as far as I can remember. Anyway, the world is coming to an end at 6:20, and for whatever reason Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his book. The fact that somehow he predicted this bizarre end of the world (I vaguely recall something about the world breaking apart in some way) and the time and place is discussed briefly.

Oh, and any time the sun’s rays directly touch your skin they burn you. At some point I find myself outside working on something, and it’s partly cloudy, and we have to keep our eyes on the clouds to make sure they don’t open up and subject us to direct sunlight.

Then we’re back in my house, where my parents live, with my parents and my sister, contemplating our imminent doom. We’re pretty laid back about it. Then I woke up.

Very confusing nightmare. And I rarely get nightmares, and even when I do they’re kinda like this one; I’m not really scared at all during the mental processing of the dream, but I still wake up suddenly and I’m all freaked out. Weird.

And now, in return for making you listen to that:

Ychrome Alumni – Pain Lies On The Riverside.mp3 – Solos by Chris Wesley and Matt Rickards
Ychrome Alumni – No Diggity.mp3 – Solos by Shaun Taylor-Corbett and DA HEARN (Billy Jean)

Oh, and yesterday’s jam featured solos by Peterson Curt and Andrew Seff. I probably should have mentioned that. I did not. I am lame.

Okay, I wasn’t going to bother with any real update today, since I posted the link to Between Us, but I had to share with you some deep emotional trauma that I’m having trouble with.

Yesterday we had our office pot-luck holiday lunch. It was not exactly an unmitigated success; we had a few breakfast offerings, but the only thing that showed up for lunch was a Crockpot full of pulled pork. Anyway, for dessert, I supplied a blueberry pie. I have a recipe for fruit pie that you can make in about a half an hour, because the only thing you have to bake is the pie shell; for the filling, you heat that on the stove and just pour it in.

So I showed up with my pie yesterday, and as usual, few people actually touched it. The cakes went quickly, but CSC people just aren’t pie people, I guess. I had 3 or 4 pieces of my own pie, and was looking forward to having the rest of it over the course of today.

This morning I got in to work, handled some bweeeeeznass (some bweeznass), and wandered over to the cafeteria refrigerator to snag me some delicious blueberry hotness, only to discover that the pie was gone.

Thrown out.

Half of a pie, completely thrown away.

My tears could not be stemmed. To add insult to injury, the pie appeared to be the only thing they had thrown out; some kind of nasty cranberry cake with the consistency of Crisco remained, along with a store-bought fruit bread of some kind.

I’ve been bitter about this all day. I really don’t know how I’m going to be able to move on.