matthearn.com

This column originally started out: What is it about Tuesdays, people? Yesterday was the second Tuesday in a row I had to make an emergency run to the data center to deal with something.

Then on Wednesday, the same thing happened, so I didn’t get to post.

Thursday: also found myself at the data center frantically putting out fires. Not literally, though, as I am ill-equipped for heat, what with my total lack of training and my bizarre preference for highly flammable fabrics.

It’s been a long week, and it’s not getting much shorter; I have to do some minor work tonight, plus some work in the morning, plus spending all of tomorrow night working the monthly outage for one of our clients. Plus I couldn’t get out of church on Sunday morning because Darryl is desperate.

Plus, Hearnwife is going out of town, so I have to be very careful not to let the house become a wasteland of fast-food wrappers, unopened mail, and other various detritus, since if the house isn’t spotless when she returns on Tuesday, I will be killed.

But you didn’t come here to listen to me whine about how busy my life is. (At least, I hope not. That would be kinda scary, and moderately stalkerish. Of course, that’s most of the internet for you.) You came for humor, for giggles, for pictures of me in a skirt. And because I feel your love all over my face, I give those things to you freely.

I say “freely” only because there are no ads on my site. And there are no ads on my site only because no marketing agencies have offered to put any up. Rest assured, however, that I feel your love. And I love you back. Maybe not in a “sharing fluids” kind of way, but it is definitely love.

Except, possibly, for Kyle; with him it’s more of a lust thing.

Ladies and gentlemen.

The picture page that will change your life.

I present to you:

Halloween Party 2004

I may have mentioned that the repairs to the support beams here on the first floor of The Mill at White Clay Creek continue. They have now finished the drywall enclosure very close to my desk, so I can report the following amusements:

• A great deal of welding. I can see the light reflecting through cracks in the drywall. I’m assuming it won’t blind me if I’m not seeing directly. Either way, I’ve contacted a lawyer.
• Enough banging and bashing of metal objects to cause me to start twitching like my Ritalin ran out.
• The sound of very loud drilling, followed by someone saying, “Just keep pressure on it,” which could mean either they are having difficulty getting into the concrete, or that someone has managed to run the drill bit through their own foot and are trying to stem the flow of blood with a flannel shirt.
• Someone behind the wall spontaneously bursting into song: “I’m in the Mood for love . . . simply because you’re near me!!!” I swear to you, this really just happened.
• Okay, he just did it again. I’m getting kinda scared.
• Additionally, there is a heated discussion going on involving Murphy Brown. Something involving Kramer being a secretary. I don’t know what it means, but now I’m truly terrified.
• Someone behind the wall has apparently dropped an entire bag of either screws, tuna cans, or 3rd century Roman coins all over the floor. They’re doing it again. And now they seem to be dancing on the detritus. I’m both frightened and confused.
• Uh-oh…a mistake has apparently been made. There are hushed tones, periodic “oops”es, and a complete lack of audible work.
• Now it sounds as if someone is crying…I’m not sure what’s going on, but I need to get out of here. Oh, there goes another bag of Roman coins.
• It occurs to me that someone may have been injured inside that little drywall room, and they are currently chopping the body up and hiding it in the concrete. Note to self: don’t ask any questions.

I think it would probably be best if I closed this up and snuck the hell out of here before someone comes out of the walled-off-area and asks me what I may or may not have seen and/or heard today. If nothing appears in this space over the next few weeks, tell Carl that we have a love that will transcend death.

So I was starting to think, “Maybe I should change around the format of the site.” Luckily, Blogger was kind enough to help me out by destroying half my template! YAY! MY ENTHUSIASM IS OVERWHELMING!

For right now, you’ll have to deal with whatever this craptaculousness is until I can try and save my links, blogroll, etc. Give me a few days to recover.

[UPDATE as of about 2pm: I managed to bring back all the usual links on the right, and things seem to look pretty cool. The upside to losing my whole template was that I finally had to redo the basic look, which is now greatly improved. There are still a few kinks to work out, primarily: why the hell the “Wir haben keine Bananen” up there is atop the picture, rather than to the left of it; the Blogger preview shows it to the left where I want it. As usual: Blogger sucks.]

Last night HW and I went to see Bette Midler, much to Milo‘s chagrin:

MattHearnCSC: Where do you actually work? At the Wachovia? Or is there an office building somewhere?
MiloBloom34: no, i’m at the wachovia.
MattHearnCSC: I was there last night myself.
MiloBloom34: oh christ, you were not.
MiloBloom34: you did not come to that s&#t.
MattHearnCSC: What?
MiloBloom34: why were you here?
MattHearnCSC: To see Bette Midler.
MiloBloom34: I repeat, you did not come see that s*@t.
MattHearnCSC: Yes, yes I did. It was rad.
MiloBloom34: Jesus.
MiloBloom34: At what point did you realize that you’d become gay, and does sarah know?
MiloBloom34: I mean, was it the manpurse?
MattHearnCSC: She came with me.
MattHearnCSC: It was fun.
MattHearnCSC: Although the parking situation needs some work.
MiloBloom34: I’m aware she came with you, but does she know you’ve made a complete transition to fag?
MiloBloom34: you didn’t actually pay money for the tickets, did you?
MattHearnCSC: Sure.
MattHearnCSC: They were like $60 apiece or so.
MiloBloom34: that’s horrifingly disturbing.
MiloBloom34: and for the love of god, I’d be much more concerned about doling out $120 to see that circus act.
MiloBloom34: I felt sick to my stomach every time I walked past that f#&$ing gaudy-ass stairway that she rides on.
MattHearnCSC: It was totally sweet.
MattHearnCSC: I daresay “Supersweet.”

The concert really was quite incredible. Bette puts on a hell of a show, and her backup band was incredible. I enjoy watching drummers; hers was very grood. She also had what appeared to be Tina Turner playing piano and directing the band.

Bette, amusingly, drops more F-bombs than Chris Rock. I enjoy a good bit of ribaldry, so I was pleased, although some of the old ladies sitting near us were slightly put off.

My only complaint about the evening was that parking at the sports complex is still pretty poor. I would have thought they could devise a better way to get everybody into the parking areas, but unfortunately no, you still end up stuck in traffic on the Girard Point Bridge. It took us 30 minutes to get from our house to the Broad Street exit, and then 30 minutes to get the additional mile from there to where we parked. Getting out wasn’t great either, although it was a bit easier because we ended up being parked right next to a lot exit on South 11th Street, so we were home about midnight.

Okay, I better get back to trying to recover as much of my original website as I possibly can, probably while weeping. I’ll try and keep you updated as to what’s going on.

Sorry for leaving everybody hanging yesterday; my normal workday of periodically checking my tickets, answering email, not responding to voicemails, and working frantically to staunch the flow of blood from my coworker’s ravaged neck was interrupted by a nice fellow who needed to watch me work on tickets and things all afternoon. So I had postpone anything fun, like watching the exit polls, or updating this dreck, until I went home.

Then a server broke and I was stuck at the data center until 7:30pm, and by the time I got home, pork chops and beer took priority over updates. Mmmm…pork chops.

As I write this, it looks like President Bush is going to continue to be President until 2009, and I can’t say I care either way, really. Neither candidate really had anything to say that I care about, so it matters little to me which of those idiots is in office. The only thing that scares me is that 11 states banned gay marriage, but I just won’t go to those states for my gay marriage needs.

What topics DO I care about? Gee, I’m glad you asked! Although you won’t be.

• Gun Control – Statistics prove that gun control prevents crime. Unfortunately, statistics also prove that gun control causes crime. So clearly you can trust statistics about as far as you can throw them (not very far, if the book is long and thick). So if gun control can’t be proven to prevent crime, then basically it restricts a right based on the fact that many Americans, usually Democrats, are scared of guns. Many Americans, usually Republicans, are scared of gay people. We shouldn’t control either.
• Abortion – What a woman does with her body is pretty much her affair. I don’t think a handful of cells in a uterus is a child any more than I think that the large hairy growth I just burned off my ass with a soldering iron is a child.
• Morality – Anyone who feels that “morality” is the primary issue when selecting a FREAKING POLITICIAN should be prevented from voting ever again. Why? Because morals are the most subjective thing ever. Your morals may say that homosexuality is wrong, and black people should stop being so uppity. My morals seem to follow along the lines of “do whatever you want, as long as you don’t prevent me from greasing up and wearing leather gimp outfits to work.”
• Education – I’m starting to think I should homeschool. Not because I necessarily think the public schools offer a bad education; I went to public school and I learned as much there as I did in college. But unfortunately, the government schools have a slight tendency to turn people awfully liberal, and I don’t need my kids coming home and telling me “Daddy, it’s wrong that you own guns!” because the teacher browbeat it into them. True, not all teachers are like that, but it’s not as if I can pick and choose.
• Porn – Porn should be legal. And if you want to show nudity on TV, do it on HBO. And tell Paris Hilton to cover up, because girlfriend is nasty skinny. It’s foul.
• Drugs – If I’m snorting cocaine in the comfort of my own home, how exactly does that harm anyone else? And if you say, “Drug gang violence blah blah blah,” then slap yourself upside the head. Right now. There wouldn’t be any drug violence if the Drug War didn’t make drug violence so lucrative.

I think that’s enough political manifesto type stuff. Moving on. I have a bunch of pictures from the Halloween party last Saturday, but I haven’t found time to edit and put them up; I’ll try and get to that soon. In the meantime, I leave you with this bit of wisdom, courtesy of The Family Guy:

“Hey Americans, you like movies? I’ve got ‘Dude, My Car Is Not Where I Parked It But Praise Allah We Are Not Hurt!'”

Okay, lesson learned: it is far better to have excess candy on November the First, than it is to have too little candy on October the First plus Thirty.

Actually, we started out well; we had 3 big bags of candy, including the unholy trinity of Reese’s Cups^TM, Butterfingers^TM, and Kit Kats^TM. We even managed to not eat all of it ourselves in the days leading up to Halloween. And yet we still ran out. Twice.

I blame Sarah, for the following reasons:

1. At the beginning of the evening, she was deeply into the festivities, and apparently began blacking out and handing out 3 or 4 candies per child. Since we started with 3 bags, and each bag contained roughly 20 pieces of refined sugar products, we were going to run out after approximately 20 children.
2. At approximately 7pm, we realized we were going to run out, so she ran to the store to pick up more candy. While she was gone, we DID run out, and so I found myself handing out strawberry granola bars to young children. I felt like some kind of hippie dentist. Sarah returned at approximately 7:20 with one bag of Butterfingers^TM. We ran out again by 8.

In the end, we were forced to turn off all the lights and huddle under blankets in the back room of the basement, muttering incoherently to the furnace (which replied by periodically warming our home slightly), and hoping the eggs that children were throwing were reasonably fresh.

They weren’t. Oh, the horror!

Luckily, we had blown out the candles in our Trogdor and The Cheat pumpkins, so they went unnoticed by the midnight hordes of surly teenagers and are still sitting on the porch, gathering slugs and mold like nobody’s business. I’ve already posted a picture of the Trogdor punkin, but one of The Cheat is forthcoming.

Speaking of The Cheat, she has developed yet another amusing nickname: Don Cheadle. Why? I don’t know.

And speaking of pictures, we had a riotous time at Kris Ungkasaahgaslksky’s party on Saturday night, and I have many, many disturbing photos. They shall hopefully be posted this evening, although I may decide to spread them out over the week to whet everyone’s appetite and add to the terror.

My buddy Doug sent me this earlier today and it made me giggleth, so I’m sharing it with all o’ y’alls:

Sacrilege rules.

Tonight: Game 3!
Tomorrow: I talk about why I hate fantasy football!

UPDATE: The above is not sacrilege. I know sacrilege, sir, and that is not him.

This is him:

Props to Embly for sending that over.

Okay, James Lileks better fear my wrath. Him AND his oustanding writing skeelz. I was all ready to write a nice long post about the flu, and the flu vaccine, and why the American news media is absolutely crapping its collective pants, and why this is completely retarded. Then I go through my daily reading and BOOM, good ol’ Jimmy (he hates nicknames almost as much as I hate him for scooping my column idea) has a nice Backfence about it.

So he better be glad he lives in Minnesota instead of, say, next door to me, or else his house would be SO egg’d on Mischief Night. Except that I plan to be in Hoboken on Mischief Night, causing great deals of mischief. So he better be glad he doesn’t live in Hoboken, by cracky!

Anyway, I got nothing, so I’ll just share a few high-larious links with all of y’all, starting with the AOLer translator. In short, it translates anything you might ever want to say to someone into the language a 12-year-old AOL chatter would use. Examples:

• Greetings, I am Matt! I enjoy long walks on the beach, late night Cinemax, and Resolve Carpet Cleaner Martinis!
  GRETNGS IM MAT11!!1! OMG WTF I ENJOY LONG WOKS ON TEH BACH LAET NIGHT CIENMAX AND RASOLV3 CARP3T CLEAENR MARTINIS1!1!1!! OMG WTF LOL
• Dear Sir: Please be advised that your account has been turned over to a collection agency, “Plank’s Bail Bonds, Collections, and Altamont-style Biker Security Incorporated.”
  DAAR SIR PLZ B ADVIESD TAHT UR ACOUNT HAS BEN TURNAD OVER 2 A COL3CTION AEGNCY PLANKS BALE BONDS COLECTIONS AND ALTMONT-STYLE BIEKR SECURITY INCORPORAETD!!111 OMG LOL
• Hey Jill, John is hot.
  H3Y JIL O IS HOT!11!11! OMG

My buddy Matt, who told me about it, believes that the AOL Translator is the greatest website of all times, and I tend to agree with him.

In other news, they’re doing more work on the support beams in my office building again (Long version: here. Short version: the building I’m in is 150+ years old, and many of the support beams are merely 12″ oak pilings, many of which are rotting, which they are replacing one by one with massive I-beams surrounded by drywall.), right next to my desk, so per the norm they’re installing a large drywall enclosure to keep dust in and to keep us from having to be blinded by arc welders. I’d like to share with you the following two conversations between two of the workers. Conversation 1:

Caucasian worker: “Didn’t you get my message?”
Hispanic worker: [mumbles something incoherent in a heavy spanish accent]
Caucasian worker: “You know I can’t understand a G*ddamn thing you say.”

Conversation 2:

Caucasian worker: [some kind of fake pidgin spanish, followed by] “No espanyol.”
Hispanic worker: “Si espanyol.”
Caucasian worker: [pause] “Shut the hell up.”

It’s also worth noting that one of the hispanic workers almost got decapitated about 5 seconds ago by a hanging lamp when the rolling platform on which he is standing was unexpectedly rolled down the hallway by his buddy.

Safety: always our first priority. Oh wait, no, that’s not right . . . not safety . . . what’s the word? Oh right, stupidity, that’s it, thanks.

AND THE TROGDOR COMES IN THE NIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!

First of all, we should get one thing straight. The Red Sox did not “make” history.

History already existed. In fact, for the Sawx, there’s over a century of history, large portions of it filled with it disappointment, and angst, and depression, and quite possibly scurvy. History has been with the Sox this whole season, whispering in their collective ears like a ghost,

86 years . . .

Pedro, Lionel Ritchie ca. 1984 wants his hair back . . .”

Then, at some point the ghost, or whatever, noticed that Jesus was playing for the squad, and stopped whispering so loud. Until the Sox found themselves down 3 games to naught to the Yanks.

BABE RUTH IS YOUR DADDY!
Well, I dunno if the Sox had a team meeting on Sunday or what, but they dug Babe Ruth out of the ground and took turns whaling on his ass with a pair of baseball spikes. Right now his rear end looks like a blue and black golfball.

Last night’s game 7 was supposed to be the nail in the coffin for the Sox. Come back from 0-3 and win everything? It can’t happen. It’s not possible. Oh wait . . . I forgot, the Sox have Jesus. My bad. I guess he’ll just hit a grand slam, then. Okay. That’s cool.

Then, of course, Derek Lowe finally gave up a run, and you could feel the weird gravitational effects of the entirety of New England slumping into their chairs, thinking, “Uh oh, here we go.” (Seriously serious, it was like some kind of freak earthquake. It knocked over a candlestick in our dining room. Or maybe it was a cat. I dunno. I’m not a damn earthquake-ologist.) But then Lowe gets out of the inning, and Jesus comes up and knocks another pitch into the stands to score a couple runs and make it 8-1.

I’d have to say that the Derek Lowe (©Bill Simmons) face has been permanently retired and replaced by the A-Rod face. I really enjoyed every shot of A-Job that they showed in the last 3 innings; absolute confusion would be one way to describe it; complete consternation might be another. His thought process was clearly, “Wait . . . I gave up the opportunity to be the greatest shortstop of all time for THIS? Oh wait, I forgot I’m also getting a buttload of money. Nevermind.” Classic.

Clearly I’m not much of a sportswriter, so rather than continuing to ramble incoherently, I’ll just leave you with this: I want to make sweet, sweet love to Curt Schilling.

Sweet love.

NOTE: This rules.