matthearn.com

Two links you need to investigate:

Things are screwed up. Read back through all the previous entries.

A good way to help.

mstevens: so u jam with mark corrigan.. he’s my ‘mentor’
MattHearn: Is he?
mstevens: indeed
MattHearn: He plays a mean blues harp.
mstevens: heh
mstevens: he was talkin about how they couldn’t get together much this summer cuz the bass player was in a play..
mstevens: i’m like wait a second
mstevens: does he have a big head and blonde hair

OMG lol more pictures of my favoritest nephew EVAH wtf lol!1!!!!!!1!!!one

(Click ’em to see ’em hell of bigger.)

I hate toilets. Or, for my from-downstate readers, terlets. They are not nice appliances, which I think is a result of having to do such a dirty job. If you had to handle the vast amount of waste that I produce every day, not to mention periodically have to stare up at my winking browneye, I think you’d be a little surly as well. Which is why they try to break and operate inefficiently as much as possible.

We have two in our house, one on the entry level, and one on the top floor near the bedrooms. The one downstairs malfunctioned first; about 6 months ago, the connection between the flapper (which keeps the water in the upper tank and flips upward when you want to flush, releasing all the water into the bowl) and the handle broke. On most toilets it’s a sturdy piece of chain, but on this particular commode it was a piece of plastic, and it meant I had to replace the whole flapper instead of just replacing the chain.

The new flapper I bought turned out to be pretty crappy (forgive the pun); once installed, you either had the option of holding it down for several seconds in order to ensure everything flushed away, or flush normally and deal with the issue of floaters. This was a problem because 1) I’m not smart enough to remember to hold it down when trying to rid myself of a nasty deuce, and 2) I’m definitely not smart enough to remember to advise guests how to do it. So I finally broke down and replaced it with a more expensive flapper; this new one actually has a dial in it so you can control how much water is used when the toilet is flushed. Since I’m not a hippie and I regularly produce butt-biscuits that would choke a whale, I set it to the max.

The upstairs toilet was more complex, and the story actually starts with the sink, which had developed a serious clog. I took apart the trap and cleaned out the hair (just a nasty, nasty job) and all was well. Unfortunately, to gain access to the trap, I had to sit on the other toilet, and apparently all my sink-trap-related jostling loosened the toilet from its base. With moist results. A slow leak developed that put about 1/8″ of water over 2/3 of the bathroom floor, so I turned off the connection to the upper tank, and gave it a few flushes to drain it as much as possible. Then I consulted a toilet expert (my brother-in-law) and he said I probably needed to replace the wax seal. This didn’t sound difficult, so I went to Lowe’s and picked one up.

When I got home, I began trying to unbolt the toilet from the floor, and ran into an issue. The bolts holding it on were a bit rusty, which wasn’t unexpected, but the fact that the heads underneath weren’t well secured was; I couldn’t loosen the nuts on the top because the bolts were just spinning freely. And I didn’t have any way of getting underneath to grab the bolt because there was a 75+ pound toilet sitting on it. I figured I could replace the bolts, so I decided to cut them, which is when I realized I had left my Dremel tool in the back of Brian‘s car after using it to help him cut a space for his new CD changer. Argh.

So, I had him drop off the Dremel, and got to cutting. I got the left-hand bolt off easily, but the right one was more problematic; due to its proximity to the wall, I couldn’t get in there to see what I was doing, so I couldn’t get the right angle to cut the bolt beneath the nut. In the end I managed to cut through the nut, but only after cursing a fair bit and chipping away a sizeable area of porcelain. Then I lifted the toilet off and set it aside.

What was underneath was one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. Mushed up wax and fecal matter surrounded a dark hole in the floor. I lack a proper putty knife, so I began scraping the wax and goo off the floor with my bare fingers, periodically pausing to retch for a while and choke back bile. After a while, I had all but bare traces of the poopwax off the floor, and began to wipe down the whole area with some disinfecting wipes, which turned out to be a bad idea, because I accidentally pushed a small piece of porcelain into the baseboard, and it pushed back. Into my skin. About a quarter of an inch.

Hm, I thought, I just allowed fecal bacteria into my bloodstream. AWESOME. Then I threw up in my mouth, and ran into the bathroom and washed my hands about 13 times, periodically stopping to squeeze blood out of my finger in hopes it might carry small particles of poopwax out with it. Just foul. Horribly foul.

Then I had to clean the bottom of the toilet, which meant tipping it over; I tried to pour the remaining bowl-water into the tub, but most of it just went onto the floor and my bare feet (I’m not very smart). I cleaned that off, put the wax seal onto the drain, pushed the toilet atop it, mushed it into the wax, and put the new bolts on and tightened them down.

The nastiest part was that the room smelled like crap and wax for almost two weeks, even after scrubbing the bejeebers out of it with the harshest chemicals I could find in my house (mostly Miracle Gro and paint remover, I think).

Awright awright awright okay now LADIES.

Here’s the new thing I’ve been working on for like 8 years, it seems:

Kate’s South Pacific Photo Galleries!!!!!11!!!!!!!one

One of the other nice actors in the show with us, Kate Wright, took something like 800,420 pictures with her phat digicam, and gave us CDs chock full of JPEGS or GIFS or PR0N or something, I can’t figure it out. Anyway, I shlunked them down to manageable sizes, uploaded, did some coding and captioning, and VOILA you have art. Do check check it, before you get wreck wreckèd. I didn’t post ALL the pictures, just a selected few of about 120. I also was kind enough to divide them up into various galleries so you can view one chunk of stuff at a time and not spend the next 2 days examining closeups of my bling.

Enjoy! And feel free to leave commentation here about how awesome it all is.

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.