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Tomorrow, the Wilmington & Western Railroad returns to Hockessin after nearly 4 years! I’ve been sort of on a train kick recently, and was surprised to go to the WWRR website and find out they’ve managed to completely repair all the trestles, bridges, and track that were simply wiped out by Tropical Storm Henry back in September of aught-three. Tomorrow, they celebrate the return of “service” out to Hockessin.

I remember the storm, and the destruction to the railway, pretty vividly; at the time, HW and I were living just off Greenbank Road, which is unsurprisingly only like 500 yards from the Greenbank Mills, from whence the trains leave on their meandering route out to the northwestern environs of New Castle County. Not more than a few days after the storm, I was driving around in the back roads nearby along Red Clay Creek and saw the damage; huge sections of track simply twisted and washed aside by the flood. All the wooden bridges were simply wiped out. Since the WWRR had basically just finished the repairs from the LAST damaging storm (Hurricane Floyd in 1999), I figured it was out of business for good, and was sad.

Which is how I almost got crushed under a steam locomotive.

Not more than a month or two after the storm, I was driving down Newport Gap Pike, and when I came up to the rail crossing, the lights were flashing and cars were stopped. I’m all like, “Um, morons, the flood DESTROYED the tracks. The place is out of business. The lights are just flickering ’cause of some mistake, or kids messing with them or something.” So I pulled around to the right intending to drive right through the intersection (which didn’t have those big arms to drop down and prevent such things).

As I did so, I casually looked off to my left and noticed that a large black object was moving in my direction. Now, usually when this happens, it’s my friend Courtney coming to do me harm of some kind (he occasionally gets revenge on me ’cause I may once have “accidentally” rubbed my genitals on him), and I know to get away as fast as I can. I wasn’t on the tracks yet, so I stood on the brakes, threw the truck into reverse, and backed up. I ended up sitting next to the person at the front of the line, who glared at me with great gusto.

What can I say? I’m an idiot.

Anyway, I wish the Wilmington & Western well (mmmm…sweet, sweet alliterations), and hope that nobody notices that they seem to get hugely damaging storms exactly every four years in mid-September, so at best they have 3 months of full service before it’s nailbiting time.

Seeing as how I’m a bit of a gadgetphiliac (which is like being a fecalphiliac but with marginally less, you know, poop), I cannot tell a lie: I love the new iPhone. I covet it. Deeply. Which is completely stupid because it’s a PHONE. A $600 PHONE. (Which I want.)

But I won’t buy it. (Not least because if I spent $600 on a phone there’s a non-trivial chance my wife would kill me with a thatching rake.) I just don’t need it, which is how I justify most of my expensive doohickey purchases:

• New acoustic guitar: $800. Needed because my sister wanted back her guitar, which I had been borrowing. Or something. (I’m not sure she noticed she didn’t have it.)
• New camera: $900. Needed to take pictures of my adorable infant. (The camera I already had, well, it just didn’t DO it right.)
• New 50mm lens for camera: $100. I totally needed it to take more pictures of my adorable infant INDOORS. (I will use a similar justification next year when I spend $400 on an external flash with wireless remote.)
• New 28mm-300mm zoom lens for camera: $250. I just wanted to take better pictures at baseball games, really. But I do take pictures of my adorable infant/toddler with it.

Spending money is like an addiction, though, and sometimes it takes a hard moment to break one of it, like when one checks one’s bank account and discovers that one has overdrawn same. Not that I have, of course. But in the last few weeks, I have discovered that I need new pants, so I had to buy those; I couldn’t find my softball glove, so I acquired a replacement; I needed new batting gloves, so I bought those too; it adds up! Luckily, when taxes come around, I will deduct all these expenses because I’m writing a new novel about them, or at least that’s what you’re going to tell the IRS on my behalf if you get subpoenaed during the audit. (Burning questions: can other people be subpoenaed? Is “subpoenaed” the hardest word I’ve had to type all day? If I sell a single picture of Charles to my mother for like 50 cents, can I deduct all the camera-related purchases?)

Free time is hard to come by these days, but I managed to broker a deal with HW in which she would get to spend Saturday night in New York, partying with her sorority sisters while I tried to keep Charles from flinging himself off of the furniture, in exchange for which I got to go golfing with Brian, Craig, and My Popz (aka Teh Grumpx0zrz) on Saturday morning. I hadn’t golfed in a while, so I figured I’d better hit the driving range on Friday to try and repair my hideous golf swing. (Seriously, you know how the swing is supposed to be in a “plane?” Mine is in some kind of 4th dimensional heptangle. It’s unbelievable to watch; during the downswing the head of my driver actually tesseracts across the galaxy for a split-second.)

There’s not really a range anywhere near me since we moved, but I wandered over to Delaware Park and got lost a bunch of times trying to find the White Clay Creek Country Club located therein. Their website said they had some kind of “golf academy,” which I figured meant they had to have a driving range, but if it exists, I sure couldn’t find it. After wandering around aimlessly for a while, I said “to heck with all this jaun” and went to the liquor store, where my time could more effectively be spent selecting single malt scotches and forgetting to replenish my wife’s Captain Morgan supply, for which she beat me with a shoe.

Our tee time was at 7:15am on Saturday, so I got up at 6am and made some breakfast sandwiches for the crew. Craig and Brian arrived at the house, and we all piled into Craig’s car and met my dad at the course. I won’t bore you with a complete play-by-play; I’ll just say that, having not played in 2 years, I played some of the best golf of my life. I shot a birdie on the par 5, a par on a 4 somewhere, and if I hadn’t had a really unfortunate 12 on a hole on the front 9, I might have broken 100. Clearly I need to play less frequently.

After that I entertained Charles for the evening, with the capable assistance of Craig, who got some practice in for when his own male progeny sallies forth in September. In other news, Happy Monday! Don’t, like, die or anything.

Listen up people: here is the big news. Me and Old Navy are BOYS. Or…boyz? Boyxi0zrzx? I can’t keep track anymore. Anyway, once again, Old Navy has saved me from a fate worse than death: not owning any pants that fit over my Beyonce-style derriere. (Note: this fate is worse than death for anyone who may meet me in their daily travels. For me it’d be fine; I’d go naked most of the time but for the restraining order and all.)

My pants situation has been worsening, ’cause I’m hard on clothes; my inability to eat without dribbling colored liquids onto my lap, coupled with general clumsiness and the fact that my junk and booty both apply TREMENDOUS pressure on anything attempting to contain them, means that pants just don’t last very long. I finally had to throw away one of my few remaining pairs of good khakis on Monday because I sat down to eat my morning omelette and split a hole right through the crotch, through which my various Bits attempted to fairly LEAP. I think I ended up putting on pajama pants to go to work.

The big issue is that I am just fat (38-inch waist) and tall (34-inch inseam) enough that nobody bothers to stock clothes for me. Target has fat kid waists up to 42 or so, but doesn’t carry any 34″ inseams once you get past about a 34″ waist, because apparently people over 6 feet tall are NEVER anything but completely skinny. The same thing happens at pretty much every store at the Christiana Mall, including Macy’s, Aeropostale, The Gap, all that good stuff. A notable exception is Penney’s, which does have a boss Big-‘N’-Tall section, if you don’t mind wearing Dickies, which I do.

Old Navy, however, has 34-inch inseams all the way up to 40 and 42-inch waists, and is therefore my solution for all fat tall kid pants. Yesterday, HW and I finally found time to go (I bribed her by also taking her to Red Robin for gourmet burgers; mine had guacamole in it and was SO GOOD (and yet I wonder why I have a 38 inch waist)), and I picked up two pairs of pants that make my ass look absolutely delicious. For reals: one of the sales girls got that look in her eye, you know the one where they’re all “I want to bite you on the butt,” but she managed to restrain herself, probably because she saw that my wife and son were there.

And no young boy should have to witness his father’s booty getting chomped on by someone other than his wife.

Listen, we need to talk about the state of rock and roll lyrics. ‘Cause it’s not good. And I’m talking specifically rock and roll, not pop, so for the time being we can ignore things like “The Glamorous…the Glamorous Glamorous The Glamorous…the Flossy Flossy” and “Once you pop lock drop it for me maybe we can roll,” neither of which make any bloody sense at all.

No, I want to focus on things like Hinder’s new song “Better Than Me,” which is a song about how the author’s girlfriend could probably find a better lover than he, which almost certainly true because it contains the following lyrical masterpiece:

I really miss your hair in my face
And the way your innocence tastes

Which is the stupidest thing to appear on the airwaves since Max Headroom. How exactly, Hinder, would you describe the taste of innocence? Is it tangy? DOES IT HAS A FLAVOR? Or is it more that you are completely an idiot?

(Don’t get me started on “Hinder” as a band name; it’s never been adequately explained to me how it’s pronounced, so either it’s “Hynder,” which may or may not be a juvenile reference to, you know, a Snoop Doggy Dogg album, or it’s “Hinder,” as in the band is “hindered” from producing good songs because of their staggering suckitude.)

Let’s compare it to an example. In the mid-80s, U2 released an album entitled “The Joshua Tree,” which is widely considered to be in the top 10 of best rock albums of all time. Before you protest “Hey man, making a comparison to some of the best lyrics of all times is totally specious, dude, that’s totally unrad,” I’m not planning to compare “Better Than Me” to, say, “Where The Streets Have No Name” or “With Or Without You;” I’m going to go with “Bullet The Blue Sky.”

Just the title is bad ass; it takes two rather strong images, bullets and blue skies, and combines them in a way that doesn’t make any sense and YET IT TOTALLY MAKES PERFECT SENSE. And when you examine the lyrics, you find gems such as:

See the face of fear running scared in the valley below

and the entire bridge, which is lengthy, but bear with me:

This guy comes up to me
His face red like a rose on a thorn bush
Like all the colors of a royal flush
And hes peeling off those dollar bills
Slapping them down
One hundred, two hundred
And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see those fighter planes
Across the mud huts where the children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street
Take the staircase to the first floor
Turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into a saxophone
Through the walls we hear the city groan
Outside its america
Outside its america

And Bono’s not even SINGING, he’s just TALKING, over weird ethereal angry guitar noises, and you’re saying “*(#&$ YES BONO I TOTALLY SUPPORT WHATEVER IT IS YOU’RE SINGING ABOUT” which apparently was just him complaining about the US intervening in the El Salvador Civil War, which I don’t even remember happening. The end result: mass panic and confusion.

The end result of listening to “Better Than Me” is that I want to read about how all the members of Hinder ended up living under a freeway underpass.

I have zero original ideas. Pretty much if you’ve seen something on here that amused you, it’s because I stole it from someone else and passed it off as my own. This is the professional writer’s way, I’m told. Nobody’s come up with anything interesting since Nabokov inspired three generations of child molesters. I mention this because I intend to steal from Bill Simmons an idea that he occasionally uses rather than come up with ideas of his own: the mailbag! I don’t really get interesting mail that I’m comfortable sharing with any of you, so I’ll just use the comments that people leave here on these here pages.

• Kyle A responds to my hairstyle post:
  Um, Kevin Mench…yes, it’s in the “water”. Right. I played baseball and soccer with him growing up and he was only slightly larger than me (’bout 6’0″ 135 at the time). I’m sure he had a 3 inch, 85 lb., and 1 hat size growth spurt in college though. Didn’t everyone? I’m not saying…I’m just saying.
  Well, OBVIOUSLY. The man has no neck. He went to parochial school, but apparently the nuns weren’t beating him enough. I bet the man has balls the size of chiclets.
• An anonymous response to some links from a few weeks ago:
  i hereby revoke your use of wordpress.com’s popular blogs.
  I’m not entirely clear on what this means; I don’t have a wordpress blog. And Sweet Baby Jesus knows, my blog ain’t popular. Am I not supposed to link to any wordpress blogs? Or can I not even read them? I need a ruling.

  Additionally, I hereby revoke your use of the English language until you learn to capitalize properly.

• Mike S weighs in on Robert Horry:
  Horry – the dude that… isn’t. During the Houston Rockets amazing mid-90’s run, Mr. Horry was a clutc.. gutless man that mad… missed all those 3 pointers. Thank God that one of the requirements for the Rockets is you HAVE to have a 7’2″+ center. Those guys rock (read: tower). The only bad thing about him going to SA was he screwed Robinson’s chance for a ring (well, not really, but I can wish). The General friggin DESERVED a ring. If only honorary (not Horry-ary).
  Here’s the thing: you don’t win 7 titles, playing reasonable minutes in most of them, by merely being lucky. Sure, Horry’s not going to be The Guy that wins the title, but he’s never been on a team that was weaker for having him there. Any failures he had in the mid-90s are more than cancelled out by the huge shots he made with the Lakers and Spurs. Never forget, though, that I have no earthly idea what I’m talking about most of the time, particularly when it comes to the NBA.

  The Admiral (or General, or Field Marshal, whatever you want to call him) did win a title with the Spurs in ’99, thanks to Big Timmy.

  Mike goes on:
  Dude, video games are the thing that keep us sane. Believe it.
  For REALS, though.

That’s, um, about it. ‘Cause I don’t really get a lot of comments. ‘Cause I have, at least count, 4 readers. To make up for the fact that this post is about as funny as a myocardial infarction, I give you: bacon placemats.

I’m a picky guy, but only in the stupidest ways. For example: I’m picky about certain foods; macaroni and cheese for example, which I only like if it came from a box with a powdered cheese mix that you mix with a half-cup of milk and a half-cup of butter and then eat straight out of the saucepan after between 7 and 12 beers while watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I’m picky about my clothes, and yet own a blue shirt that you can see my nipples through. (And I don’t mean you can see the shape of them when it gets cold; I mean literally you can tell that I have a weird hair issue in which my right nipple is dramatically hirsute and my left nipple has a total of 3 hairs, one of which is at least 4 inches long.) I’m picky about what grosses me out, in that I can watch movies in which nuns are decapitated and spray gore onto schoolchildren, but the House episode in which a guy’s testicle exploded made me curl up into the fetal position and whimper softly for a good 10 minutes.

One thing I’m picky about is women’s hair. Mostly, hair doesn’t bother me; even if it’s bad, I usually find it very amusing, such as this fetching look, which probably cost that woman over a hundred dollars (money that would have been better spent in a money market account, saving up to have her nose reduced by 75%). But there’s one thing about women’s hair that annoys me, and it’s bangs. I don’t know why they drive me crazy, but they do. The feeling they give me is mostly “Wow, that girl has such beautiful hair, it’s too bad that she feels necessary to chop off most of the front rather than investing in a 50-cent barrette or something.”

Let me draw you some pretty pictures to show you what I mean.

This is Margaret. She’s very pretty, is she not? She spent roughly $150 getting her hair done, including removing the grays to get back to the jet-black mane she grew up with, and a set of stylish bangs that hang down just ever so slightly into her eyes. It’s all layered, and very well done. She tipped her hairstylist, Alejandro, $25. Now let’s look at her sister:

This is Molly, who has her husband Joe cut her hair with a Flowbie. She hates having hair hanging over her ears, so she just leaves it long in the back and short in the front and sides, a classic mullet.

As you can see, the only difference between having bangs and having a mullet is maybe 2 extra inches of hairline on each side. In fact, were you to tuck your hair behind your ears, there’s a good chance you’ll get embroiled in a conversation about Dale Earnhardt Junior driving for Hendrick Motorsports and whether or not this is a travesty. (Yes.)

In case you’ve visited here over the last few weeks and, instead of seeing my beautiful, beautiful words, saw a message saying that my website had been suspended for overambitious CPU utilization, rest assured that the problem has been isolated and we are in the process of resolving it.

Well, not we, it’s just me. Because it’s my fault, you see. When I arranged for my site to be hosted by my current service, hostmonster.com, I paid for a nearly unlimited amount of bandwidth and disk space, and proceeded to upload scripts and databases and images and hilarious posts about hairstyles for head-fatties and everything was super happy: me, because my website was still online despite my previous hosting service deciding to close up shop; hostmonster, ’cause they gets the dollaz dollaz; and the internet, because let’s be frank, the loss of my website’s content would send shockwaves that might well destroy the economy of Nigeria or perhaps the entire Indian subcontinent. (Which just wouldn’t do. OBVIOUSLY.)

What I didn’t realize was that, while hostmonster certainly was happy to have my business and store all of my crap for me, apparently they don’t much care for me to actually SHOW it to people. Every time a person would look at my website (specifically the picture gallery, about which we’ll hear more directly) it required a computer in Utah to do some processing, or “thinking,” and respond to the user with pictures and words and all that good stuff. Well, supposedly my site, which receives all of maybe 25 hits a day, 5 of which are me checking for new comments (there never are any), and at least 8 of which are googlers trying to find pictures of Dave Chappelle’s Hott AZN Wife, was overloading the CPU of the computer in Utah and causing smoke to come out of its ears, if it has ears, which it probably does not, but who knows what Mormons might do to computers when they get them alone in the Tabernacle.

Long story short: the online gallery had to go, because while the pictures contained therein weren’t getting me anywhere close to my disk space/bandwidth limits, the processing power required to get them out of the database was angering the CPU gods. On the other hand, I was never terribly happy with that gallery software anyway; it seemed to do about 18,000 things, and I basically needed it to do one: display pictures in a pretty format, which it didn’t do very well. So I’m working on my OWN, much tamer, online gallery program, which will basically give you a list of albums to view with pictures located there up ins, in a pretty format that doesn’t distract from the image on the page. Totally boss! As soon as it is ready, I will be certain to alert the media. Until then: go to Charles’s site, since roughly 97% of my photography is centered on him anyway.

I’ve been sick all this week, which has been Unpleasant. Like most males of my generation, even the slightest cold sends me into a spiral of whininess normally only seen if you kick me in the harblz. It started last Friday with a major league sore throat, and was exacerbated by a HUGE weekend of frivolity, starting out with a performance of the National Anthem by the Cathedral Choir at the Phillies game on Friday night, continuing with Charles’s birthday party on Saturday, and then finishing up with a Sunday involving three lengthy church services, a piano recital, and a banquet celebrating our collective churchy awesomeness. Let’s tackle each item in chronological order:

The Phillies game was both awesome and totally unrad (and also anti-tubular), in that our performance was sweet, and James Earl Jones was there reading “Casey At The Bat” to a bunch of kids in the infield, but that the Phils ended up losing 13-0 (I left in the bottom of the fifth ’cause my throat felt like someone had poured battery acid into me) and JEJ, who got old while I wasn’t paying attention, seemed particularly hunch-backed and mildly Alzheimery. It was very depressing to see Darth Vader in this state, being led around the stadium with a big dopey grin on his face.

Or maybe he was just drunk, I dunno. That would be AWESOME.

I took along my camera, and got a few decent pictures of the game, but I couldn’t get close enough to the field to really get anything totally supersweet, and I lack a 300mm zoom lens, something I intend to rectify before I go to another sporting event.

Charles’s party on Saturday was HILARIOUS. I made a half-decent cake (half of it was chocolate (the decent part), and half of it was boring-ass vanilla ’cause that’s all my wife will eat), cut Charles a piece of the chocolate side, and let him rub it in his hair and ears for a while. Great times. We got a bajillion pictures which I intend to post, possibly later today when I have time to get them off the DVD and do some editing. (Note: we finally bought a DVD burner and have been steadily moving pictures onto DVDs, which is totally kick-ass because I have 4GB worth of cards for my camera, and every time I load them onto a laptop I completely max the hard drive. Plus the long-term storage prospects are pretty pimp.) Charles also got a huge number of presents, most of which he didn’t get a chance to open before he got so unbelievably sleepy we had to put him down for a nap. We’re saving the rest of his toys for later opening when he gets bored with flinging his new enormous-lego-style blocks at the cats.

Sunday was a LOOONNNNGGGG day, starting with an 8:30 christening service for Charles’s buddies Tori and Rowan, whose parents decided to baptize them simultaneously in the interests of time. Charles got a little angsty during the service, so I took him out in the hall for a diaper change and a little crawling around, which was nice because it got me out of the rest of the service. (I’ll never argue with anybody’s right to worship in whatever way they choose, but the service featured a little too much arm-waving during hymns for the liking of a High Church dweeb like myself.)

After that service ended, I ran over to the Cathedral for our usual Sunday service, which on this occasion featured a period to recognize and reward all the choristers, acolytes, and other participants, which meant the service ran to about 105 minutes, which caused my ears to bleed a little bit, but that’s nothing but a thang. After THAT completed, those of us who take our piano lessons from the Cathedral Choir School’s various teachers (even if we don’t actually get lessons through the choir school’s scholarship program) performed the piano recital, which was of course completely ridiculous because they had me performing last, normally the spot reserved for the best student, which I am not. Also it was rather embarrassing because I’m roughly twice the age of the other performers. At least I didn’t screw up too badly. Wooooooo.

Then we had the choir school banquest, which was fine but chaotic, and I gathered up my various robes and music and headed over to Christ Church (where my father is coincidentally the Deputy Organist-Choirmaster (I’ve been considering getting a little tin star made for him)) for an evensong, which wasn’t too bad. Our clergy doesn’t much enjoy doing the officiating at such services (it involves a great deal of chant-singing), so I’ve been doing it, and I managed to get through it without coughing up too much of my lungs. (I was sick; you may recall me mentioning that earlier.)

I stayed home from the office on Monday and Tuesday, attempting to recover my wits; I even went to the doctor on Monday, something I rarely do for myself, because my mother was diagnosed with a case of bronchitis last week, and homey don’t play that.

Yay! DelDOT (The Delaware Department O’ Transportation) is finally going to do something about the hellish I-95 traffic!

Wait…crap. They’re doing the wrong bloody thing! Boo!

Everybody agrees that traffic on I-95, particularly southbound in the afternoons, is ridiculous; apparently the bone of contention is what the actual cause is. DelDOT seems to be of the opinion that the problem is 95 itself not being wide enough, which would appear to be the obvious issue. However, what they are overlooking is the fact that where the worst of the backup on 95 occurs in a three mile stretch where 295 and 495 (souhtbound) rejoin the main interstate, and storied Route 1 exits. And as anyone who has recently driven through there during a high traffic situation, the number of cars decreases dramatically after you pass Route 1. What this says to me is that maybe, just maybe, you might eliminate some traffic on 95 if there was more than a single-lane exit for 1, which is of course the main artery to Middletown and points south, also known as the FASTEST FREAKING GROWING AREA IN THE STATE? Don’t you think maybe this warrants an improvement of that particular junction?

Don’t believe me? Try going north on Route 1 to 95 north some morning, around 8:15am. You can’t. I mean, eventually you’ll get through, but it’ll be closer to 9am before you’re actually on the interstate. Might it perhaps be time to upgrade this route to look more like the 495 exit, which features three lanes for traffic and even during the worst of the rush hour is never clogged up, except by idiots driving in the left lane? Perhaps!

But nay, the State has decided to just add a 5th lane to each side of 95, the biggest waste of money since Paris Hilton got her sex change. (I refuse to believe that she wasn’t once a dude. Her jaw is squarer than a ceramic floor tile and her boobs are smaller than mine.)

Argh.