matthearn.com

My homeskillet Craig normally doesn’t send these around, of course, but this was so awesome he just HAD to. Which means, DUH, that I had to post my reply online, because this is one of the few things I do in which I’m actually semi-funny.

1. What time did you get up this morning?
About 7:35, when I reached over to hit the snooze button for the 6th time (my alarm clock, unlike any other made by man or beast, has a 7-minute snooze instead of a 9-minute one) and knocked a glass off my bedside table, which shattered on the floor. The morning started out AWESOME.

2. Diamonds or pearls?
That’s a toughie: with Diamonds, you know you’re getting something that was dug out of the ground by African slaves; with Pearls, you know you’re getting something that was forcibly torn from the shell of a screaming mollusk. Diamonds are usually more valuable, of course, and are Forever. I’m gonna go Diamonds, I think.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
I broke my almost 6-year theater boycott to go see “Failure to Launch” with Hearnwife. This is a lot like saying “I broke the Montgomery Bus Boycott because I needed to get to a sale at Ed’s Bait and Tackle.”

4. What is your favorite TV show?
Ooh, that’s a toughie. There are so many! Scrubs, The Simpsons, 24, Good Eats…right now I’m gonna have to go with Scrubs, because every single time I tune into that show I become happy. THE SCRIZZLE…yeah, boo, that’s my doggle.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

6 eggs and a Diet Pepsi. Let’s sing The Cholesterol-Sodium Blues!

I woke up this mo’nin’
Had six eggs, dat’s de troof
Washed ’em down wit’ a soda
Now my blood pressure’s through da roof
Oh I got da blues
Sweet Lord Almighty, I got da blues
I’m gone have a heart attack and diiiiiie
But I’ve lost 30 pounds so I’ll leave a pretty corpse, oh YEAH

6. What is your middle name?
“The Balls.”

7. What is your favorite meal?
Hm. That’s a toughie. I eat almost everything, with some minor exceptions, and I get random cravings for just about everything. When in doubt, I’ll usually make myself a steak, but really, I could eat roast duck at almost every meal. Mmmm…make my quacker medium rare, baby, with extra crispy fat chunks.

8. What foods do you dislike?
Don’t much dig on nuts; that’s about it. Even with nuts, if they’re already in the brownie, I probably won’t pick ’em out, although I used to.

9. What is your favorite Potato chip?
Grandma Utz’s. No question. Ever since the sad demise of King’s and the relative unavailability of Stehman’s (who may also have gone out of business, I’m not sure), Grandma Utz’s are the way to go. Potatoes, lard, and salt. That’s all I need. I have a bag of them at home, unopened, that has been calling my name for weeks, but I need a special occasion to get up ins those bad boys.

10. What is your favorite CD?
Lordy, who knows. This is like asking about my favorite fried chicken joint. So many are so good, that it’s hard to choose. I’ve been listening to the same Joey Eppard CD, “Been To The Future,” for a while. Honestly, though, I’ve mainly been listening to one track on it (“Balloon”) over and over, trying to figure out how a guitar with 6-strings can have that many harmonics.

11. What’s your favorite word?
“Malfeasance.”

12. What characteristics do you despise?
People who simply have no understanding of the concept of “not getting in other people’s way.” This can include people who park their carts at the grocery store such that nobody can get by; this can include people who sit in the left lane of the highway so no one can pass. Makes me go batty.

13. What’s your favorite movie?
Who knows. I quote “Anchorman” and “Napoleon Dynamite” quite extensively. Also on the list: “Bull Durham,” although it’s not as quotable.

14. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you
go?
I’d like to go back to England. There’s a metric butt-ton of stuff I’d like to see there; I got a taste back in 2003 and have been hoping for a return trip ever since.

15. What color is your bathroom?
We haven’t really done anything with either of them. Basically cream-colored with wooden cabinets and mirrors. The upstairs will probably get a ladybug theme if I ever get around to painting it on.

16. Favorite brand of clothing?
Probably Old Navy, although mostly just for pants. Last time I went I got two really awesome pairs of jeans, although unfortunately I was kind of between sizes at the time, so I bought the larger size, and then they stretched. So now I have two awesome pairs of jeans that bunch up in the back when I cinch my belt. I wanna go back for the next smaller size, but Sarah keeps dissuading me. She’s hateful like that.

17. Where would you want to retire to?
Actually, I’d like to continue to live around here, where my friends and family are, while maintaining flats in New York and London and traveling frequently to remote locations. Clearly I need to figure out a way to acquire extreme wealth.

18. Favorite time of day?
The afternoon. I can look forward to hours of daylight, get things done in the yard, have time for a cheap cigar and a beer in the backyard.

19. Where were you born?
I was born in 2074, the first child born in the newer dark-side moon colony. It’s cold there. Wait…no, that’s not true. I was born in Upper Darby. It was cold, though. There was a blizzard.

20. Favorite sport to watch?
Right now? Baseball. It changes biennially, though; back in the late 90s it was NASCAR, for most of this millenium it’s been football.

21. Who do you least expect to send this back?
This is SO not a valid question, since I haven’t sent it to anyone. I’m going to have to say James Lileks won’t send it back, because he’ll have no idea that I posted it.

22. Person you expect to send it back first?
I expect my father to post the first comment pointing out a spelling error, that’s probably the next best thing.

23. What type of detergent do you use?
We are a Tide family.

24. Coke or Pepsi?
Diet Sunkist. I go through a 12-pack every 2 days.

25. Are you a morning person or night owl?

I wish I was a morning person, but the truth is I have a hard time falling asleep and an even harder time waking up. So I end up staying up late and getting up late. This would make me a night owl. That is all.

26. What size shoe do you wear?
It varies widely (haha! a pun!) by manufacturer, because the width of my feet is rather extreme. If they have a EEE or EEEE, like New Balance, I can wear a 12. If they do not, and I’m trying to force my toes into a C-width, I’ve been known to buy a 14. Fitting clothes to my body is a losing battle; I have a huge butt and big thighs, wide feet, and the largest head in Christendom (size 8).

27. Do you have pets?
Four increasingly annoying cats: Pete, Poly, JD, and Veronicat, aka The Cheat.

28. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share with everyone?
Gimme a few days.

29. What did you want to be when you were little?
Dame Judy Dench.

30. Favorite Candy Bar?
Three Musketeers. Chocolate and nougat, how can you go wrong? Man, I want one of those.

31. What is your best childhood memory?
What is with this list? How can I pick one thing out of 12+ years of highly enjoyable things? Probably any one of a dozen Christmases. Let’s make with teh non-suxx0rz questions, list.

32. Nicknames?
That’s better. I’ve been called many things: Waffu, That Leviathan, The Hearn, Oliver “Junk” Bonds, “He Who Dare Not Be Named,” J. Crispin Featherworth IV. I’m hoping that at some point in the next week to acquire a new one: “Daddy.”

33. Piercings?
No; I’d prefer not to be blamed for the premature demise of my grandparents and in-laws. I think my father-in-law is already getting concerned about the length of my hair.

34. Eye color?
Azure.

35. Ever been to Africa?
I have never blessed the rains down in Africa.

36. Ever been toilet papering?
Yes, many times. Marching Band tradition. Shut up, I know I’m a dork.

37. Love someone so much it made you cry?
Every single day.

38. Been in a car accident?
Yeah, it’s getting to the point where giving me the keys to a car is like giving a nonagenarian…well, the keys to a car.

39. Croutons or bacon bits?
Bacon bits all the way, man. Croutons have their place. That place is a trash bin.

40. Favorite day of the week?
Saturday, obviously. I’d say Friday, but I have to go to work. Any day I have to work is a bad day.

41. Favorite restaurant?
Probably the Corner Bistro up in Wilmington. Totally awesome.

42. Favorite flower?
Bright-ass red geraniums.

43. Favorite ice cream?
Anything, with about 2 cups of Hershey’s syrup on top.

44. Disney or Warner Brothers?
Warner Brothers, no doubt, with Hanna Barbera taking second place. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck vs. Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto? No contest, man.

45. Favorite fast food restaurant?
McD’s. Can’t argue with the $1 double cheeseburger, doggle.

46. What color is your bedroom carpet?
I despise wall-to-wall carpeting, so we pulled it up to reveal nice hardwood underneath.

47. How many times did you fail your driver’s test?
Zero, surprise surprise. Although in DE you don’t really have to take a regular test; if you take driver’s ed through the public school system (which everyone does), you get judged on performance through the week of on-the-road driving, and unless you are completely retarded you get your “license” after that. (License in quotes because it’s basically a learner’s permit that automatically upgrades after two months; you can’t drive without a parent or at night, no non-family members allowed in the car with you, all that good stuff. Now they’re talking about limiting teen drivers even more, which sounds like a great idea that’s going to reduce teen driver accidents by like .05% in Delaware while forcing more parents to drive their kids around. And yet it’s still technically legal (as far as I can tell) in this state to drive in the left lane without passing anybody. I love this place.)

48. Before this one, from whom did you get your last email?
My father-in-law. He sent me a funny joke about a redneck that went to Paris to purchase furniture. It’s rather lengthy, so I won’t duplicate it here, but rest assured, it wasn’t up to Charles’ normal standards.

49. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card?
Target. No doubt. I may end up outfitting an entire room in cheap-ass Target furniture, not because I can’t afford anything better, but because I just LIKE it.

50. What do you do most often when you are bored?
Get impatient and start wandering around aimlessly. Really goes over well in staff meetings.

51. Who are you most curious about their responses to this questionnaire?
No one really. I’m not gonna lie, most of these questions are boring and trite. I wanna see questions like “if you had to have sex with a midget, what gender of midget would you pick?” and “What if Elvis came back to life and recorded a cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ wouldn’t that be weird?”

52. Last person you went to dinner with?A large group of college friends and extended family. We went to Kahunaville, which was surprisingly good, although, like most restaurants, understaffed.

53. Ford or Chevy?
I have no congenitally implanted preference, although my mother-in-law’s father sold Fords for like 8,000 years, and I bought a Ford truck a number of years ago. Never owned a Chevy, other than the Caprice Classic that Stefan gave me after it died so I could take it apart.

54. What are you listening to right now?
My coworkers arguing. I need a radio or something.

55. How many tattoos do you have?
I plead the fifth.

56. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The egg. The first chicken HAD to come from an egg, but the first egg did not necessarily have to come from a chicken; the first chicken-producing egg was a genetic mutation of something that was a non-chicken.

57. How many people are you sending this to?
I guess it depends how many people read this. 10 or so, probably.

58. Time you finished this e-mail?
12:38pm.

And there you have it! Sorry that this particular batch of questions was so crappy. Let’s come up with our own questions. In the comments on this page, leave your suggestions, such as the ones listed above, or even crazier ones like “If you woke up one morning and discovered that you had miraculously switched gender, what would you do first? Call the doctor? Test out the apparatus, if you Catch My Drift?”

Computers are frustrating devices. Sometimes they work; sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, it rains. Think about that for a minute.

Sorry, lost my train of thought. Anyway, I’ve been having problems with my laptop at work, based on the fact that it was hand-me-down when I got it, and that was in late 2002. So this is probably a 5-year-old machine, and the performance lags a bit, although a memory upgrade I got early on helps.

I realized the other day that the disk is probably fragmented; what this means is that files and free space are broken up wildly and spread all over the disk. This does bad things for performance, because the computer has to search all over the place to find things. So I figured I’d run a defrag. I opened up the tool and ran an analysis. So you can figure out what’s happening, here’s the legend:

And here’s the pre-defrag analysis:

Basically, all the parts that are red are defragged, and all the parts that are blue are fine. Ideally everything is blue (and green). So I fired up the defragger, which chugged along for the better part of an hour (making the laptop pretty much useless in the process), and when it finished, here’s how the analysis looked:

I think I’m going to be running this for days.

Still no baby news, although Sarah got some good news about her job yesterday; one of her favorite people is coming back to work her project, and it looks like she might get a really nice payraise. Also, my old Brigadoon buddy Dave Munch came through in a big way and gave her a signed photo of Scott Bakula, so it’s actually a wonder she didn’t go into labor right there. She’s due on Sunday, so I think it’s safe to say that sometime in the next 2 weeks we shall have us an infant. AWESOME.

Baby production update: no change. Sarah went to the doctor on Friday, and nothing much is happening in The Area, as it were; no dilation, no dropping of baby, none of that good stuff. Of course, that can all change in a matter of hours. The best the doctors can tell is whether the baby is definitely going to come out within the next day, or if the baby MIGHT come out in the next day. So we’re still basically at DefCon 4 all the time.

The good news is that Sarah completed her class last night, and right now she’s working a big conference. Once these things are done, she has no scholarly or employer-related responsibilities that would keep her from having the baby guilt-free. This is a good thing; while your wife is laboring, you don’t want her thinking “Dammit I wish I’d gotten that report finished.” You want her thinking “Ow this hurts.” Focus is very important, or so I’ve read.

Her mother came over last week and the two of them teamed up on completing the nursery while I puttered around in my newly electrified garage, so now the nursery is pretty much done. We’ve got enough washed baby clothes to last few at least the first week or so, and I’ve got dozens of baby bottles cleaned, even though we hope to be on a boob-only feeding paradigm for the first three weeks. We even picked up a breast pump on Saturday at Target, along with a speaker thing for her ipod so she can listen to the Indigo Girls while screaming.

It’ll come in handy during labor, too.

Speaking of Target: I love Target. I love the selection of men’s clothes (they focus more on the “young and hip” demographic, which is nice; if you go into Kmart and Walmart, they focus on the “middle-aged, immigrant, and poor” demographic, which means they have a wide selection of jean shorts and ersatz sports tshirts); I love the dark cheapo furniture; I love how they have all kinds of kitchen supplies; I love how we furnished our entire nursery there.

The only thing I hate about Target is the fact that the nearest one is 30 minutes from us. Although really, that’s probably for the best; every time I go I seem to spend at least a hundred dollars on Crap That I Absolutely Must Have But I Didn’t Know It Until I Went To Target. For example: do I really need a paper shredder? Do I deal in espionage and have thousands of classified documents laying around the house that I need to destroy on a moment’s notice in case Homeland Security pulls up? Nay nay. Did I drop $24.96 on one? Of course.

Mother’s Day was a resounding success; we went to my parents’ place, handed out gifts (including a New Kids On The Block towel that I got at the Booth Corner Farmer’s Market that appeared to be made out of roughened, bleached burlap), ate ribs. I made Créme Brulée for dessert, which was delicious, and there was much laughter and drinking of wine.

Yesterday I awoke with a migraine, which may have been the result of red wine, or it may just have been my body saying “Please stop moving.” So I used a sick day, slept in, did some light cleaning about the house, picked up a bunch of balloons for Sarah’s conference today, and printed out a great many photos on the nifty printer that Sarah got with some birthday money.

And that is the story of Matt’s life as of Tuesday, 2006/05/16. And you should be DAMNED glad I let you read it. (Just kidding.)

After 4 months of low-carb dieting, here is what I have been reduced to: this morning, I ate chocolate pudding for breakfast.

No sugar, no calorie pudding, but pudding nonetheless.

When I started the diet, I was almost looking forward to it: eggs and bacon every morning! Woohoo! I love eggs!

I no longer love eggs. I loathe eggs. I have 3 18-egg cartons in my refrigerator that I bought 6 weeks ago and haven’t had the nerve to throw out yet, even though the yolks inside must, by now, have all the consistency of whale oil.

I still have nothing but love for bacon, but bacon is a hassle. You can fry and egg in about 2 minutes, but bacon, at its fastest, is going to be an 9-10 minute job (if you don’t mind it spongey and teaming with trichinosis critters), and the cleanup is another 5 minutes while you scrape burnt pig chunks out of the pan. For a while I was making it in a huge batch once a week, but that’s a hassle too; either you bake it on cookie sheets, which works pretty well, but leaves you with 2 massive bacon-encrusted metal sheets (adding a fun flavor to all your Christmas cookies), or you fry it, which takes 45 minutes because a pan can only hold so much bacon and you don’t dare leave it for fear that it will burn.

So this morning, I walked downstairs, opened the refrigerator, spotted the oozing bowl of chocolate pudding that I mixed up on Tuesday, and said “heck yes this is breakfast of some ilk” and watched a Daily Show while ladling chocolate dessert into my mouth like a 4-year-old fatty watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. All I needed was jowls.

On the other hand, I look pretty. So there’s that.

Not surprisingly, I have allergies. Seems like everybody in America has them, which I think is one way you can tell that Darwinism has been pretty much wiped out by modern medicine and the welfare state. Someone who periodically finds they can’t breathe isn’t going to make it past age 10 in 18th century New Jersey. I guess this is a good thing, despite overcrowding and all.

But back to me. I didn’t always have allergies; I first noticed them when I was going to school in Baltimore. Due to the air pollution, I got a cold in January 1997 that lasted until approximately July 1998. Ever since, I’ve basically suffered a certain amount of sinus cloggage, interspersed with periodic bouts of downright sinus blockage. Every so often I’d be blessed with a remarkable nasal clarity, usually as a result of getting a cold and treating it with massive amounts of decongestants and occasionally sticking an oiled pipe cleaner in there. (Just kidding.)

I finally got fed up with it and made an appointment to see an allergist, Dr. Gregory Marcotte, who is very tall. This morning I appeared at the healthcare center, he took my history and gave me a short examination (including having a nurse weigh me: with clothes on, a healthy 234 pounds, meaning that naked I’m probably around 225, which is about a skinny as I’ve been since before I ballooned up to 260+ a few years ago), and left me in the car of a nurse, who stabbed my forearms with some small needles and bade me sit and watch TV (they had a video of “As Good As It Gets,” which I hadn’t seen in a while; oddly enough, I had forgotten that one of the characters is stricken with very bad allergies and asthma, which I assume is not coincidental with the tape being in the allergist’s office).

After 20 minutes, she came back and said everything looked pretty much normal. She had injected me with saline as a negative control, which hadn’t puffed up at all, and histamine as a positive control, which puffed up normally. The spot where she had stabbed me with undiluted cat dander solution had itched for a while, which concerned me, but it didn’t puff up. By this time I’d been there for about an hour, and was assuming that the next step was to have the doctor come in, tell me I wasn’t really allergic to anything, and that I should suck it up and blow my nose every once in a while. The nurse, however, told me that now they would do the SECONDARY test, in which they would squirt a heck of a lot more stuff under my shoulder skin to REALLY test how allergic I was.

I was thinking, “So what was the purpose of the first test?” but I didn’t ask, because the nurse was nice, and because she had a lot of hypodermic needles. (I’m pretty sure the first test was in very small amounts so they could make sure I wouldn’t react to the much larger amounts that they injected into my shoulder, which still, after 4 hours, is red and puffy.) Anyway, she shot me full of stuff again, and left me to enjoy the comedic genius that is Helen Hunt.

After 20 more minutes, she returned, looked at my arm, and said “Wow, you are REALLY allergic to dust mites and mold.” Good to know. The doctor came back in said the same thing, although it turned out I am NOT allergic to shrimp. I had specifically mentioned that as a possible allergen because a number of years ago I ate something like 300 cold shrimp at a Christmas party and broke out in hives. He said it might have something to do with sulfites, but then asked about wine and beer, and lord knows I’ve drunk that in vast amounts and haven’t had any horrid reactions other than the time I threw up on a Senator.

The nurse gave me some pamphlets on reducing dust mites and mold in the house, and the doctor gave me a prescription for Nasinex, which apparently will help reduce my decongestion which would return me to my pre-1997 nasal status, which would be EXTREMELY rad. So I’ll get that filled this afternoon.

Brian and Mary’s son, Nolan Michael, was born yesterday afternoon, so last night Sarah (who is so pregnant that she can’t roll over in bed without a crane) and I went to visit them all at the hospital. It was the first time I have ever held an infant under 8 hours old, which I guess is something I’ll have to get used to, but I still get nervous about the whole “supporting the head” thing. Everyone else seems to think I’m afraid of dropping a baby on its head, but even my ungainly arms can grip onto a baby. My problem is it’s never been adequately explained to me how far forward a baby’s head can go before it can’t breath, or how far back it can go before things start pushing on soft brain tissue in an uncool way, so once the baby has been placed in my arms I can’t move it, or hand it back effectively. I have to wait until someone who’s moved past these neuroses to come rescue it.

They are cool, though. Nolan didn’t seem to respond to my humming, but then, he didn’t respond to much of anything. I liked him.

We had us a busy weekend, yo, seriously serious. Saturday Sarah had a shower, so I planned to have all the guys over to watch sports and grill things. But I had a rehearsal on Saturday morning, which meant that Thursday and Friday were spent cleaning and organizing and in general making the house into a little less of a dump. Just a little.

We partially succeeded; I got a lot of the kitchen stuff put away into the new cabinets, swept and vacuumed, got all the baby crap out of the foyer, all that stuff. There’s still an unkempt bag o’ CDs laying on the floor in the living room because I just pulled them all out of my car and haven’t had a chance to go through them. And of course there’s a fine matting of cat hair on every surface of the house, not much we can do about that, other than simply shaving the cats, and don’t think I haven’t considered it.

Anyway, we got the place into semi-non-crappy mode, I had rehearsal on Saturday morning, and we had a riotous time inhaling meat hunks and grilled corn and beer. Sarah’s shower was also fun times, although at this point it’s not like we need more stuff. Speaking of showers: baby. Speaking of baby: I’ll get to that momentarily. Back to the timeline summary!

Sunday I got up and went to church, then came back to the house and printed out photos with the new printer/scanner/copier Sarah bought with some birthday money. She had picked up frames during AC Moore’s sale last week, so we had 8x10s of wedding photos and a large black 8-panel 4×6 frame array that I filled with pictures of the cats. Sunday night: sang a cool concert with the First and Central Presbyterian Chancel Choir. Among other simpler pieces, we sang a 20th century Requiem by Alfred Desenclos. Very jazzy, very French, is the best way to describe it.

And that’s the weekend.

Back to baby topics: I keep dreaming about the baby (which is, btw, officially due Any Time; we’re at 38 weeks and 1 day, so if Sarah starts contracting, we go into Red Alert Here Comes The Baby Mode, and I may disappear off of here for a while), in a variety of ways. In some dreams, the baby is just sort of there, while other strange dream things are going on. Like, I’ll have a dream about hunting wildebeests in Antarctica or the like (or penguins in Venezuela, whatever), and I’ll have the baby in a backpack. Nothing happens to the baby, but it always seems to be there.

A really weird one I had last week was one in which the baby wasn’t to term yet, but we wanted to make sure that it was going to be normal and healthy, so we actually took it out of Sarah’s uterus, admired it, and then were making preparations to put it back in when I woke up. That one haunted me all morning.

Oh, and Brian‘s wife, who is technically due about the same time as Sarah, is getting induced on Tuesday, so let’s all give her a holla: HOLLA!

Leave your hollaz in the comments. Preferably on Brian’s site. I’m tired of having my site show up at the top of google searches for “dude your mom is totally a skank.”

Note: this column was originally written at about 1am while on last week’s business trip.

I am an adventurous man. When opportunities come a-knockin’, your man Hearn gets to a-rockin’, and also quite possibly a-poppin’ and a-lockin’, with just a soupcon of a-jockin’. For example, there was the time in ’82 when I went to the Azores to stop terrorists from blowing up a banana boat filled with finely minced cocaine bound for the CIA. There was also the time that I went back in time and personally kicked Adolph Hitler right in the frankfurter. Even better, there was the time I made all that crap up and wrote it down in hopes I’d be able to use it in a column. This is why I decided, when the opportunity appeared: dude, let’s get drunk and write lengthily about it.

Well, obviously, there’s more to it than that. I don’t get drunk for no reason. Stop snickering! It’s true! There has never been a time I got hammered that I haven’t been able to justify it in some way at some later date. And this time, I can even blame the Jews!

Wait, that didn’t even REMOTELY come out right. Let me start over.

During my stay in King of Prussia, I found myself with a free evening, and one of my coworkers wanted some beer. So we went to Michael’s Jewish Deli, which, among other delights, is purported to have some 500 different kinds of beer. I stood before the beer cooler in great awe. It was an awesome sight. I decided then and there: pick 6 beers that I’ve never had, and preferably never even HEARD of, drink them, and describe the experience.

I also decided, since I was unlucky enough to have to have a smoking room at the hotel, that goldarn it I’ll show ’em what REAL smoke is, so I picked up a little packet of cheap cigars that I may or may not like, depending on if I can breathe (my code was stiww goig strogg at da tibe).

Here are the beers in question:

I started with the Corsendonk Abbey Brown Ale, from Belgium. It comes in a transparent brown bottle, and eschews the normal paper/glue label; instead, the necessary graphics are painted directly onto the glass. It was the most expensive beer I bought, so I figured that means it’s probably the best; better to start with it, rather than drink it last when I’d be too hammered to describe it.

Here is how I describe it, while fully sober in mind and spirit: frothy. Seriously, this beer is like quintuple carbonated. It tastes pretty good; it’s very dark, but rather mild, without too much bitterness. It’s hard to say that I enjoyed it much, though, because every time I took a sip I had to immediately swallow it because the sudsing bubbles released so much gas I thought I’d be spraying it across the room. I shudder to think what the gasses are doing inside my belly at this point. I expect there to be much farting as time goes along.

Corsendonk Abbey Brown Ale: $6. Grade: C+, mainly because it was too carbonated to taste, and paying $6 for a bottle of beer at the liquor store is akin to paying $27 for a rum and coke in a bar in New York. (Which I have done.)

Next up was the Dinkel Acker CD-PILS, which I assume means it’s some kind of Crack Dirigible Pilsner. Germans like lighter-than-air flying machines, don’t they? I think it was in a movie once. Obviously, this is from Germany, based on the “Brewed with all natural ingredients in strict accordance to the German purity law of 1519,” which is a law I fully support. It’s a good flavor, although it’s hard to tell what’s going on; things taste a little mottled. I don’t get a lot of hops flavoring, and I don’t really get a yeasty aftertaste, but they’re sort of there, somehow. It’s hard to explain. It’s definitely a lighter beer in all respects, compared to the Corsendonk; almost a lager, I’d say, but not quite as refreshing.

Dinkel Acker CD-Pils: $3. Grade: B-

Next on the docket is Lagunitas “Censored” Rich Copper Ale, from Californ-eye-yay. Another dark beer (what can I say, when it comes to beer I got the jungle fever), this one doesn’t have all the carbonation of the Corsendonk, so I can enjoy the full flavor without worrying if it’s going to come spurting out of my mouth like a contrived Jon Stewart-style spit take. And a rich flavor it is, although once again not too bitter.

I just remember that I probably have remnants of DayQuil in my system, so it will be interesting to find out how the beer reacts with that. Probably not going to be good times.

Lagunitas “Censored” Rich Copper Ale: $3. Grade: A-

Out of the fridge comes the Augustinerbräu München Münchner Bier Edelstoff, which purports to have had been being made since 1328AD, a year which I have carefully researched and I have discovered the following tidbits of information:

• It was the year in which England recognized Scotland’s independence following the wars of, uh, Scottish Independence.
• It was the year in which Avignon Pope Benedict XIII was a-borneded.
• They weren’t playing, they’ve really been around since 1328, which is just freaky old.

The beer? She is a tasty wench, and a worthy adversary.

Augustinerbräu München Münchner Bier Edelstoff: $3.75. Grade: B+. Would be a solid A but I can’t pronounce the name because I’ve drunk four damn beers already.

Before we can continue, an aside: Patsy Cline is awesome, I think we can all agree, but WHY, exactly? I’m willing to admit that her recordings were some of the greatest in the history of country music and basically helped create the entire genre, but I see her more as a kind of 1950s Tim McGraw: the right look, with the right songs, at the right time. I think she’s basically famous because the greatest country music songwriter of all time (Willie Nelson) wrote a song (“Crazy”) which someone realized would work best as a woman’s song. Patsy recorded her version and BAM now she’s regarded as one of the top 5 country recording artists of the 20th century. When I listen to her, though, I just don’t hear IT, you know? Of course, it’s very likely that Patsy’s skill was in understating things just right, and I’m not sophisticated enough to pick up on it. I have had four beers, after all. Okay, sorry, back to the drinking and talking about beer. (Yes, I’m playing “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” and the soundtrack just launched into “Two Cigarettes.”)

Now we have officially reached the point in which the brewers feel the need to put the alcohol content of their beers right on the label, to taunt us. This is the Morland “Old Speckled Hen,” y’all, and its 5.2% alky content is up there with that most ghastly of American drunkeners, “Ice House.”

Let us speak not of OE800.

I’m hoping that actual Hens aren’t in the beer, let alone speckled ones.

Morland “Old Speckl’d Hen”: $4.75. Grade: This beer gets an A. Even if it does taste like chicken.

This last beer, La Fin Du Monde (The End Of The World?), is French, which is just wrong. The French aren’t allowed to make beer, are they? Isn’t it against international law for them to make anything but hardy Burgundies and aspersions against anything non-Gallic? I’m behind confused. However, I am happy to report that this beer is 9% alcohol, which is why I saved it for last; if I had drunk it first, this report would be nothing but gibberish and aspersions against whoever decorated this hotel room (soft stucco walls, is all I’m sayin’).

Of course, because I said rude things about the French, this beer had to turn oout to be really really good, although still a bit fizzy. (It took me roughly 4000 keystrokes, half of which were backspaces, to type the previous sentence.) Every time I take a sip it attempts to expel the rest of the bottle onto my lap via the magic of carbonation, although it’s not as bad as the first one, whatever that crap was, I can’t bother to scroll up and see what it was called.

All I’m saying is: I like beer.

La Fin Du Monde: $3. Grade: D for drunkenizer. A for Awesome. M for, uh, Monde, I guess. N for Natty Light Is Not Good. What’s that spell? DIZAAAAAAAAAAMN, if you take some liberties with the spelling, as I am wont to do.

My job doesn’t require me to travel much, which is nice, but when it does it’s never timed well. The first time was last December, a week or so before Christmas, which is a tough time to be traveling into the New York area, even though I did get to see my old buddy Josh and venture into Brooklyn. Last week, as Sarah entered her 9 month of pregnancy, I had to go up to King of Prussia and work long shifts interspersed with periodic naps at a hotel. (Hence no updates.)

In the end, actually, I only had to work a few days before we declared victory and they sent me home, which was very nice. I got to spend Wednesday at Valley Forge, riding my bike around and taking pictures of old huts and pretty landscapes, and then I was home Wednesday night. Plus, our old Protege hit 100,000 miles on the way north, and I got some pictures of that too. PLUS, I had some free time on Tuesday night to drink a bunch of beer and write a post about it, which I’ll throw up (not literally) later this week. But first: picturesez!!! (All of which are heck of clickable if you wanna few ’em in WIIIIDDDDEESCREEEEEEEENNNNNN.)

First, a picture of the interior of my car as it passed 100,000 miles. (Next, a picture of the wreck that was my car at 100,000.2 miles when I drove into a tree ’cause I wasn’t looking at the road. Ha ha! Just kidding! The car’s fine!)

I was completely blown away by my hotel room. It kinda smelled faintly of dog-flavored cigarettes, but it had a bedroom, and a living area, and . . .

a freakin’ KITCHEN, and . . .

Dude, a full size fridge! I immediately stocked up on the essentials.

The rest of the photos are from my little day trip to Valley Forge. You’ll find I enjoy taking pictures from a post-Warholian perspective (I don’t know what that means) in which I try and juxtaposition old things with new things. Like, here, a pretty countryside with an 18th century hut and a cannon, with a bunch of really lame glass buildings in the background (you may have to view the pic in full-size to see ’em):

Ha ha! I’m dork. Next, another hut, with what appears to be smoke from a nuclear plant in the background:

Then, a hut with cars! (Valley Forge has a metric butt-ton of huts.)

This is the interior of the hut. I could find no 20th or 21st century artifacts within. I should’ve held my foot up to the picture or something, since I was wearing 21st century bike shoes.

After a while I got bored of trying to be artsy, and went back to being standard American touristy. I don’t remember exactly what these doodackies were, but I think they have pictures of 20th century US Presidents on the bottom, and they were on the driveway leading to . . .

the National Memorial Arch. Note the stop sign in the foreground: I’m like Herb Ritts, if Herb enjoyed amateur photos of landmarks instead of deep character studies of wangs.

One side of the inside of the Memorial Arch.

The other side thereofs.

A patriotic shot of the Arch with the flagpole in the background, thwarted by the fact that the wind wouldn’t lift the flag up so you can tell what it is. I’ll just have to inform you that it is the Stars and Stripes, beotch, and you had best represent.

A cool shot of the Arch and the surrounding vegetation. Some of these photos were taken with an eye towards printing them out with our new righteous photo printer and putting them on up on our walls so when people come over they think “Wow, dude, Team Hearn sure knows decent art,” which is a major improvement of what they usually think, which is “Wow, Team Hearn hasn’t cleaned this toilet since the Reagan Administration.”

I call this one “Hut and Tractor, 2006.”

This is the Artillery Park, which was developed so that children would have a place to play that they could hit their heads on solid cast iron. Ha ha! Just kidding. It’s named the Artillery Park because it’s where they parked the artillery so it could be moved reasonably quickly to wherever in the camp the British might be rolling up all muskety and bayonetty.

A cool old covered bridge. Probably doesn’t date from 1778, but it’s still pretty dope.

This is a monument placed near the grave of the only soldier who died at Valley Forge whose grave was actually labelled. I do not remember his name.

Detail of the grave monument.

This is the Washington Memorial Chapel, which was built in the early 20th century as an Episcopal Church, which meant they probably had scotch on the premises, but darn if I could find it.

The entrance to the chapel contains a tall room with a big bell in it. This is the ceiling of that room. (The photo of the “Justice Bell,” which had some bearing on Women’s Suffrage back in the day, came out heck of blurry.)

The interior of the chapel. You can probably tell I had to rest the camera on a pew on the back to steady it, because the room was dark, and my camera’s flash doesn’t really do anything on subjects more than 15 feet away.

Some righteous woodwork in the Choir.

The baptismal font.

This is some kind of weird culverty thing near Washington’s Headquarters. I just thought it looked cool; the creek is the “Valley Creek,” and on the other side of the culvert is the Schuylkill Ribbah. This might be a printer-outer as well.

This is Washington’s Headquarters, and surrounding buildings. I think I terrified the poor tour guide ladies inside because I was wearing my bike shorts, which make no effort to conceal my MASSIVE package.

A bunch of the rooms within the HQ.





The kitchen:

This is a train station that was built in the early 20th century to bring visitors to Valley Forge. The advent of the automobile made it as obsolete as figgy pudding.

I hate bacteria. You hear me? Bacteria SUCK. Or perhaps viruses. Or both. I don’t really know. I hab a code, and I hate it.

Woke up Monday morning with the tell-tale agonizing throatache, and now I’m all drugged up and stuffy headed and bad times, damnit, which explains why my grasp of the English language is tentative, and also horfwit mccombs allegory.

Also, I’m working on a project that has me awake at bizarre hours; I was up all last night until about 6am, at which time I was permitted to nap until 9, and then went home and slept for 6 hours, only to return to work at 4pm. Between the minimal sleep and the Dayquil and the fact that I haven’t been able to draw a natural breath through my nose in 36 hours, well, let’s just say I’m going to pee on somebody soon, I think.

And it might be you.

You never know. I could find you.

Anyway, I don’t really have any useful information today, other than to note that the Flyers suck big hairy donkey, uh, tail, and that I purchased two new pairs of jeans yesterday that look flat-out PHENOMENAL on me. News at 11. Bitches.

Wait, what? What the heck is this? Rain? Cold? Wind? Oh, nay nay, ye Gods of The Weathere, back thy jaunpiece OFF.

Although I do need the rain, because watering my new flowerbeds and my dead grass has become Tedious. (The capital T is how you know I am not playin’.)

Luckily, last night had no such nastiness, it was warm and sunny and windless, so my parents and I went to the Phils game, with great seats about 18 rows back from Ryan Howard’s enormous butt. (Sarah, who doesn’t fit in any normal human seat at this point because of the enormous wiggling creature that takes up most of her frame, took a pass.) It would have been a really great experience, but Ryan Madsen gave up roughly 8,000 runs in one inning of work (he actually pitched to four guys in the 2nd inning, but got no one out, so his effort technically consisted of 1.0 inning). That put us in a surly mood for most of the rest of the game, such that I realized why I avoid going to sporting events most of the time.

When it comes down to it, I just don’t care for people very much. I like to be around my friends, but when it comes to the “unwashed masses,” I come away with one realization: the average person, or at least the average American, has absolutely no concept of the idea of unselfish behavior. It’s not that we, as individuals, go out of our way to make other people’s lives harder, but that we never even consider that perhaps, standing up in the middle of the section with your cell phone, waving to some other idiot in another section to convey the vastly important message that “Yes, I can see you, can you see me? I’m right down here! In section 114! Standing directly between Matt Hearn and the activities occurring on the baseball diamond!” might be really, really annoying to others.

I realize that merely making this generalization makes me a selfish snob, but it’s worth noting that I really can’t stand being in another person’s way. When I make a mistake while driving, and realize I’ve blocked an intersection of some kind that a person needs to turn into, I pull forward, even around other cars in an effort to get out of the way. Meanwhile, some jerk at the ballpark yesterday blocked an entire staircase to the seats while arguing with the usher about why he couldn’t take his lit cigarette down there with him.

This is to say nothing of the general behavior of people my age when you get 2 or 3 of them together in public. There was once a time when using foul language in a public place like a baseball game would get you removed from the premises. The stadium rules say that you can still ask to get people kicked out for cursing, but where do you start, when everyone around you is dropping f-bombs like they got paid for it? (In the interests of full disclosure: I curse. A lot. In the privacy of my home, the general conversation would cause sailors to weep. But I turn on the filters in the presence of the general public and my wife’s relatives.)

I would no sooner take a child to a baseball game these days than I would take him to a strip club. The discourse is about the same, anyway.

We did have fun, though. My parents hadn’t been to CB Park before, so they got to enjoy the new stadium, as well as get Bull’s BBQ (I had a smoked turkey leg, totally righteous), and we all got free Jimmy Rollins knit hats. Mine, of course, fits on my head like a beanie.

Tonight: Baby Birthin’ Breathin’ and Belchin’ Class!