matthearn.com

One of the side effects of the amoxicillin that’s clearing up Charles’s ear infections is that it tends to give him diahrrea, which if he doesn’t tell us about, sits in his diaper until we do a regularly scheduled change. This gives him devastating diaper rash, and is unfortunately a vicious cycle: because it hurts when we wipe him clean, he is resistant to diaper changes, which means he sits in feces that blister his taint until we finally have to hold him down and get it cleaned up.

As you can imagine, nothing about this is pleasant for anyone. It is how our week has been. Welcome to Friday!

Well, I tried to do this smoothly, and as you can see I was about as successful as the Bay of Pigs invasion.  (Too soon?)  Anyway, I’m converting the whole thing to a WordPress format.  I did it in a subdirectory with a copy of everything, and then moved the whole thing into place in the public directory and it was like I had taken a dump all over everything.  It didn’t work, um, at all.  So in short: I’m very nearly starting from scratch. Bear with me while I get everything working, and feel free to tell me if you spot anything that doesn’t work (broken links, for example).

As I said a few weeks ago, the plan is for more frequent, smaller updates, rather than the previous format of “once a week with something long but boring.” Word up.

Update, 2115EDT: I’m basically done. Got all my links up, posts are imported, Twitter is there. The old “quote” functionality, when installed, makes everything go to hell; I blame WordPress, or perhaps Linux, or something. I’m still not sold on the header image I made, it seems to completely describe me and yet also be ugly as hell. (What that indicates, I refuse to say.)

I’ll probably futz with it for a while, particularly if I can get my quote thing working, I would miss that.

This warms my heart every time I look at it:

But then, so does this:

What does that say about me?

Oh yeah. It’s heck of xmas, yo.

Some linx0rz! Woooot!

• I pray to the Sweet Good Lord Baby Jesus every day that something like this would happen. Can we get some Youtubeage of the “two-day shoot” in question?
• I wish this had been televised; I might actually have peed into my pantaloons.
• Here’s a healthy family for you. 7 kids; unmarried; no jobs! I love this country!
• Sometimes, just sometimes, things go right in the legal system. Maybe just in the UK, though.
• Uh…oops.
• And finally, for all of us that love pirates: the real scoop.

Hey great, I look mostly like a chick.

Most of you were already aware of this on some level, but I have proof! I ventured over to MyHeritage.com at my wife’s suggestion, uploaded a picture of myself, and said to it, Sir, please tell me which celebrities I look most like!

It responded with 5 chicks, 3 dudes, and 2 little boys. I’m stoked! In order, I look most like:

• Cameron Bright – 78%
• Julie Andrews – 64%
• Andy Kaufman – 61%
• Neils Bohr – 60%
• Richard Pryor – 57%
• Piper Perabo – 55%
• Christina Ricci – 54%
• Yoon-Jin Kim – 54%
• Minnie Driver – 54%
• Jonathan Taylor Thomas – 53%

That’s, in order, a 12-year-old boy, a nearly 70-year-old woman, a dead man, a VERY dead man, a dead black man, various broads, and a child actor who is not aging well. I’m looking forward to when I can go to ShootMeInTheDamnFace.com!

OMG WTF XMAS IS S0 LIKE JUST 2 MONTHZ AWAY!!!!1!!!! LOL

As usual, I am stoked, and plan major decorations that can be seen from space. Also as usual, I will probably get a few lights up and spend too much money on presents. I love Christmas.

I’ve done some shopping, but of course I feel unbelievably behind. My main problem is that I never know what to get people. No one should have this problem with me, because I maintain a truly comprehensive Amazon wish list of stuff that I want. Since no one else bothers to do this, you’re all getting John Mayer CDs!

Haha! Just kidding. I’m sure you all already own all his CDs.

I need to come up with some fun stuff to get my wife. I’m pretty sure I know what big things to get her, but she and I have an annual competition in which I spend a lot of money, but still “lose” because in the end I give her like 2 pricey presents and she gives me roughly 3 dozen individually wrapped gifts, most of them fairly inexpensive, each of them unbelievably thoughtful and useful.

It’s also hard buying stuff for my parents, because if they want something, they go out and buy it. So I’m left with trying to find things for them that they wouldn’t be able to find themselves, which is increasingly difficult because of the internets and QVC. They’re both getting thong collections, I think.

I think what I’m going to do is just buy a bunch of presents for Charles, and let everybody open them. Not because he won’t be able to open them himself; I fully expect him to be able to open each one in turn and fling them at the cats.

Ye gods, two political posts in a row? Sorry! Come back tomorrow, when I get back to my usual discussion of various wangs.

I was reading Tuesday Morning Quarterback today, and came across something I think needed a response. TMQ is penned by Gregg Easterbrook, with whom I agree on most football topics (he likes to see more running and less passing in the NFL, for example), and disagree on most political topics. I am coming around to his side of things a bit, since it’s becoming clearer that the Bush Administration is single-handedly destroying the fundamental freedoms of the greatest country the world has ever known, but I found this a bit, well, unfocused:

A few months ago President Bush said the estimate he has been given by military intelligence is 30,000 Iraqi deaths caused either directly by our military or set in motion by our invasion. . . by invading Iraq we made ourselves responsible for what happened next, and what has happened next is killing of the innocent.

And here’s my emailed response:

Now, I’m no defender of the President or his tactics; I believe that our invasion of Iraq was justified, but GROSSLY, even criminally, mismanaged by this administration. However, I don’t think that we’re responsible for every dead non-combatant Iraqi any more than we’re responsible for those who were killed by Saddam while we made no effort to stop him.

I think we can categorize civilian deaths thusly:
a) Those who died of natural causes, and can be ignored for this discussion.
b) Those who were killed accidentally by American military action (happened to be standing nearby when a laser-guided bomb took out a weapons depot, etc.). Obviously, America bears the bulk of the responsibility for these deaths (although the use of “human shields” by Saddam certainly didn’t save a lot of innocent lives).
c) Those who were killed purposely by American military action, which obviously is murder. Obviously this happens, although I don’t think it happens much. (I don’t have any statistics to bear this out, so I’m willing to admit I’m wrong if I turn out to be so.)
d) Those who were killed by Saddam’s loyal troops and/or insurgents (which I believe to be the bulk of the of the deaths).

I agree that category B is sad, but a necessary consequence of war. I’m no professor of military history, but I think a major bungle in the Vietnam conflict was the government’s attempt to soothe open public relations sores by halting the bombing of targets in North Vietnam. Attempting to prosecute war and making the lives of non-combatants the first priority results in the deaths of Americans. Am I placing the value of the life of an American soldier over that of an Iraqi child? Yes. Yes I am.

Category C is murder, and everyone involved in it needs to be brought to justice. I believe that this is what happens in those few situations.

Category D is, flatly, not our fault. In WWII, the Nazis made a practice of getting revenge for successful missions by the French Resistance (and other underground groups) by simply grabbing innocent citizens and gunning them down. Knowing that this would happen didn’t stop the Resistance from operating, nor should it have.

Put a different way, if a Mafioso gets convicted of a crime and sentenced to jail, and in response he has the prosecutor’s family killed, is that the prosecutor’s fault?

This email is ridiculously long and needs to be edited, but since I just read all 8742 words of TMQ, I feel no guilt.

Your thoughts? Keep in mind, when it comes to political discussions, I am completely out of my depth and basically an idiot.

I have mixed emotions over the Cardinals’ big win over the Mets last night. On the one hand, I hate the Mets. On the other hand, I’m fond of both the Tigers and the Cards, so picking someone to root for in the Series will be difficult. It almost would have been easier if the Mets had won; then I could root for the Tigers (the likely champs anyway) with great gusto. Still, any time the Mets lose, I get a warm feeling in my belly.

I think I’ll probably root for the Cards. They and the Phils are both in the National League, so there’s a whole “Bros before Hos” thing going on (the NL teams being Bros, and the AL teams being Hos). Also, the Cardinals have been fighting through the playoffs for the last 4 or 5 years in a row and haven’t won a championship yet (memorably getting swept by the Red Sox in 2004), so I think they’re due. Plus, they’re considered the underdogs, which means they find a soft spot in the heart of most Americans. Lastly, every time Albert Pujols comes to bat, my wife giggles.

I don’t know if all of you have been watching any of the baseball postseason, but if you have, you’ve undoubtedly seen Tommy Lasorda’s playoffs commercials. For those of you that haven’t, here’s the basic gist: Tommy shows up (in a tux?!?) at a house in which there are between 1 and 5 baseball fans hiding in trees or cabinets because their team(s) didn’t make the playoffs. Tommy exhorts them to come out and watch the games anyway, because while they are [Indians|Cubs|Phils] fans, they’re “bigger fans of baseball!” He then yells “TO THE TV!” Kills me.

My favorite one is the guy in the tree, in which Tommy asks the guy’s wife, “Who’s his favorite team?” She responds, “The Cubbies,” and Tommy makes a sound like somebody had just wiped a turd on his shirt. I’ve nearly wet my pants every time. (It’s funny ’cause the Cubs suck.)

In other sports news, the Flyers have lost four straight, but luckily it’s hockey so nobody cares.