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Apropos of nothing, here is a list of song titles you will never hear:

• “I Love You So Much (I Shat Myself)”
• “Bacon Me All Over”
• “Once, Twice, Three Times a Single Bit Memory Error”
• “I Heart Urinal Cake”
• “The Eva Braun Blues”
• “I Want To Taste Your Kidneys”
• “You Broke My Heart (And Also My Penis)”
• “Roll That Fattie In Flour”
• “I Stapled Our Hands Together”
• “That Pain In Your Heart Is Probably An Infarction”
• “I’m Bleeding Everywhere”
• “Drinkin’ Drano With Art Linkletter Again”
• “My Heart Belongs To Kissinger”
• “Our Love Is Like Fish Entrails”
• “Grease Me Up, Grandpa (That Dog Won’t Milk Itself)”
• “Upperdeckin’ The John For Jesus”

I’m a little apprehensive about sharing this, because, to be frank, I basically poured my heart and soul into it for the better part of two weeks, and I’m still not sure if it’s good. When I listen to it, I’m greatly disappointed, but I usually am when I listen to my own stuff. I’ll stop fishing for compliments. Check check it:

Matt Hearn – Doubting Thomas.mp3

Original song by Nickel Creek; arrangement by Teh Hearn; all voices are Teh Hearn; produced by Teh Hearn.

As you can see, I’m pretty involved in the process.

Just a quick note: if you like photography at all, check out 2008 in Photographs at boston.com. Some of them are mildly graphic, but they make you click before they’ll load the really nasty ones (a dude with a seriously gushing head wound, and a dead child). Some of them are simply awe-inspiring, but all of them are “make-you-thinkers.”

Get on it.

Oh, and don’t forget parts two and three, the links are on the site.

Over Thanksgiving, we watched “A Christmas Story,” featuring Peter Billingsley, Scott Farkus, and Bumpus’s Dogs. Great film, which even after watching it all the way through, my wife insists she’s never seen the entirety of. I noted a few strange things (warning: lists within lists a-comin’):

• Miss Shields, Ralphie’s schoolteacher, is kinda sneaky hot. Sure, she’s overweight and dumpy and middle-aged, but she’s got that stern schoolmarm thing going on. That doesn’t turn anyone else on? Just me, huh? Okay, nevermind.
• I don’t know what kind of insanely superpowered BB-gun Ralphie got, but I’ve had lead pellets bounce back at me directly from a wooden target placed roughly 15 feet away, and it was about as painful as getting flogged with a shoelace. Admittedly, lead is soft; BBs are steel (BB does not stand for “Brass Ball,” in case you were wondering). Plus, idiot-boy put his target over a piece of metal, whereas my ammo was bouncing off impact-absorbing plywood. Still. I’m just sayin’, maybe Ralphie could man up a bit and take a round to the face without flying backwards like he’d been hit by a bus. PART OF GROWING UP IS GETTING HIT IN THE FACE BY THE OCCASIONAL PIECE OF FAST-MOVING METAL.
• Did it never occur to the fire department that, instead of yanking or cutting Flick’s tongue off the flagpole, they might simply have poured warm water over it? He showed up back in class looking like they’d freed him with a bandsaw.
• Why don’t men wear hats anymore? I mean, I know the story about JFK giving his inauguration address, or some speech of similar gravitas, without a hat on, and after that hats sorta petered out. But c’mon, dress hats are FANTASTIC. I’d wear one with suits and nice clothes all the time if I could find one that fits my head for a reasonable price. This also got me thinking of a bunch of other things that you never see anymore (and in fact haven’t really seen in my lifetime):
  • Men wearing suits all the time, including to sports events and while gardening. Now you can get a seat in a Michelin 3-star restaurant wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt featuring a picture of Calvin pissing on Che Guevara. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING, people.
  • Drunken department store Santas. Time was, every Santy was soused to the gills and nobody thought anything of it; dealing with that many unruly children basically REQUIRED it. If St. Nick even has a beer at lunch these days he’d probably be stoned to death by a platoon of Soccer/Hockey/Polo moms while their nannies scurried the children over to the Build-A-Bear workshop so their little Christmas hearts don’t get broken by watching Father Christmas die a messy death.
  • Nobody says “soused” anymore, either. And whatever happened to three-martini lunches? And surreptitious bottles of rye in big mahogany executive desks for a little on-the-job tippling? Nobody drinks rye, for that matter, with the possible exception of me and one other (and he knows who he is, the lush).
  • A few things we DON’T need to bring back from the forties/fifties: pointy brassieres (those’ll REALLY put an eye out), polio, Joe McCarthy, and the various wars in Europe and Asia.
• Last thing: if my next-door neighbors had a pack of dogs that broke into my house and ruined my Christmas turkey, the dogs would be dead and the neighbor would be burying them in the backyard while I ate HIS turkey and drank all his rye.

Wow, it’s been like 3 weeks and a day. That is pretty sad, for someone who prides himself on…well…I’m not sure what I pride myself on. Food consumption, I guess, and I’m also remarkably good at growing zits.

Anyway, you might be curious about what’s been going on, but probably not. The new job really has me hoppin’, and I’m loathe to do anything but, you know, actually work, because I’d like to keep my job. (At CSC getting fired would have been almost a pleasure, so I did a significant portion of my blogging from the office.) The Brandywiners show (“Oklahoma!”) has me at one rehearsal or another almost every night, and we haven’t even gone out to Longwood (the location of the outdoor theater) yet. Things are gonna get mad hectic. MAD. HEC. TIC. TAC. TOE.

That went to a weird place.

Anyway, some quicky notes:

• I love my new MacBook. (You may have read about it in an earlier post.) There’s all kinds of radness associated with it, and I finally managed to get all my favorite programs installed. Woo! Woo. If you’ve got the means (they’re roughly twice as expensive as a comparable PC), I highly recommend picking one up.
• I finally got around to starting to use Shutterfly, bringing me into approximately 2004. I’m catching up, I swear! Anyway, you can hit up matthearn.shutterfly.com to look at some recent pictures, and even download or order quality prints of ’em if you’ve of a mind to.
• While I’m in the picture-editing mode, hopefully I’ll have new pictures of Charles to put up in the next day or two. I mean, I have the pictures; hopefully they’ll be up. If you’re curious, he’s the size of a prize calf. It’s like feeding a full-grown St. Bernard, except blonder and louder.

Yeah, that’s what I got. Hopefully I’ll see you in less than 3 weeks. No promises, though.

So: my homey Shaun TC is in the cast of “In The Heights,” which you may or may not know is up for something like 11,304 Tony awards. (Okay, it’s just 13. Still.) You know what that means? Running diary. OH HECK YES. I should warn you; I was hard pressed to keep up with events, what with Whoopi being out of control and HearnWife constantly talking to me. So things are a little…”stream of consciousness.” Also I may have been drinking.

• The Lion King…meh. Meh? Yeah, meh. It was a great Disney Movie because James Earl Jones, Matthew Broderick, and Jeremy Irons were involved. As a musical with a bunch of no-names? Meh.
• Laurence Fishburne adds nothing but class. He’s like Sidney Poitier 2.0. Except where Mr. Poitier played Detective Virgil Tibbs, Laurence played Cowboy Curtis.
• Crybaby: The Musical? Really? Wow. The only redeeming thing about the movie was Johnny Depp, and I remember being sadly disappointed that he didn’t get shot. I have to say, the guy playing Crybaby would NOT enjoy prison. Because of all the RAPE. He would definitely be somebody’s TOTALLY SWEET GIRLFRIEND.
• Nice to see that the guy that played Will’s boyfriend on “Will and Grace” is still working as something other than an EMT or cop. I think he played a blue-collar public servant in 34 straight crappy TV dramas.
• The one guy that apparently missed a memo and showed up in white tie just made me think: why isn’t anybody wearing a white jacket? It’s after Memorial Day, right? I think everything that’s wrong with American can be traced to folks not owning and wearing formal wear when warranted and men not wearing hats.
• HOLY CRAP BISHOP BRENNAN FROM FATHER TED WON A TONY! Seriously, being one of maybe 3 Americans that recognized him has made my life worthwhile.
• Boo Counting Crows guy. Holy over-rated. (Sorry, all my friends that are huge Crows fans.)
• Who, uh, is Stew? And what is this “Passing Strange?” Because it’s, uh, not so great. The best I can say is that the one girl’s “English” accent made me laugh a little. Amsterdam seems to be involved. Does this makes sense if you’re high? Per…haps. HW: “This is stupid. Fast forward.” Done, and done.
• Nice! John Lithgow! Crap, he started talking, that ruined it. Oh good, he’s being ironic; that saved it. A little bit. Nice, the first Tony that In The Heights is up for! Boo, South Pacific’s guy won it. (Best Director.) Why does this guy sound like the creepy guy from “Back To You?”
• Jack Klugman? I thought he was dead! Oh, he just SOUNDS dead. Does he even have lungs? I think I saw a gill.
• Diesel, here comes “Gypsy.” I have heard incredible things, and plan to try and seduce a producer for tickets when I visit NYC later this week.
• Patti LuPone…uh…holy crap. Yeah, gonna try and see that, and soon, before she blows out a kidney singing that.
• Now that we’re on commercial, I can note the following: everyone talks about Patti LuPone’s acting and star power, but I gotta tell you, based on what she just sang, she is a simply fantastic musician. Diction, pitch, dynamics, all that. Spectacular.
• Hehehe Whoopi in “Phantom Of The Opera.” C’mon, go for the high note! Wow, I can’t believe they bothered to rebuild that set just for 15 seconds of gag.
• Hot. They’re going through the stuff they gave out before the telecast started, and “In The Heights” won for Best Choreography and Best Orchestrations! I can say firsthand: both those things were phatty phats. I have seen them. And then I walked and danced on the stage. People were impressed.
• Good to see Nathan Lane getting work. He’s so…shy.
• Wait, Duncan Sheik scored “Spring Awakening?” How about that. And here I thought he was a one-hit wonder. Here’s what I can say: he’s not even remotely funny. He just tossed a joke out that the audience wasn’t sure what to do with, because he had all the comedic timing of MY SCROTUM. (Actually that’s not true; my coin-purse is hilarious.)
• Nice!!! “In The Heights” just won for best lyrics, and the guy is rapping. Fantastic. He needs his hat, though. Nice! A shout-out for the hat AND Stephen Sondheim. The whole thing was actually kinda touching; normally you want a winner to act like I’d been there before, but his whole “holy crap this is unpossible” rap came across mad authentic. That’s right: he’s the Barack Obama of the Broadway Stage.
• South Pacific: Emile. Uh…that particular Emile wouldn’t have looked at Nellie Forbush twice. Or even once, because he would have been trying to have vicious animal sex with Lieutenant Cable. There’s nothing wrong with that, but next time let’s try and find someone a little more manly? The guy has a hot voice, though, I’ll give him that. (Update: later on he won best actor in a musical production, which is actually probably true because acting heterosexual was a SERIOUS stretch for him.)
• Did Nellie Forbush just smell a hat? I’m kinda thrown here. She sounds a little old. And the one girl in the flesh-colored bathing suit appears to be simply naked. Which is disappointing, compared to actual nudity.
• Whoopi just came onstage as Mary Poppins in the worst-disguised flying wires ever. Giggles all around.
• Kristen Chenoweth just made a “Defying Gravity” (a “Wicked” reference, if you were heretofore unware) joke that pained me. Then she stuck her hand in her armpit as if she thought that was a Polish Knee-Slapper. I’d assume she was high, but no, she’s just stupid.
• Barry Bostwick! I could not be more excited! He once played George Washington. Did you know that? I did. I bet you did not. He’s introducing “Grease,” which means I hate him! Hate him. I hate “Grease.” Have I mentioned that? Yeah. You know how you hate racism, or terrorism, or Hitler? I hate “Grease.” Watching this may well give me a stroke. Even worse, they’re doing a number that was NOT IN THE ORIGINAL SHOW. IT CAME FROM THE MOVIE. CAN YOU BE ANY MORE CRAPPY. I say no.
• I hate Grease so much.
• One of the Grease actors appears to have POLISHED THE ASS OF HIS JEANS. Hate.
• Dang! The “Gypsy” guy beat out the “In The Heights” guy for “Featured Actor.” Now I have to see “Gypsy” ’cause the “In The Heights” dude SLAYED. Gotta love the Gypsy guy for bringing back the Hitler moustachio, though.
• Marisa Tomei came out to introduce something with what could best be described as a “natural” look, and said: “One of the wonders of theater is that it is a shared experience.” HW: “Yeah…makeup can be a shared experience too.”
• Oh good. Disney didn’t irritate me enough with “The Lion King,” they had to do a “Little Mermaid” show too. It’s sad that there so many starving actors that they can staff these ABOMINATIONS. HW: “I thought [Ariel] was scary. And boring.” Yeah, even the red hair couldn’t save her.
• “A Catered Affair:” I don’t know Kate Prince, but I can say that she hit a loud note of some kind and my left ear started bleeding. Bad times.
• Megan Mullaly! I’ve always been fond of her. Heheheh…she made a penis-related joke. “Deep Love.” I like. HW is not as much a fan, ’cause she hasn’t seen “Young Frankenstein” (the movie), which is sad for her.
• Whoopi’s introducing a bunch of sets from plays I didn’t see…makes it kinda hard to keep up. Luckily, as it turns out, she’s funny! Has no eyebrows, though.
• David Morse! YES! I love him. Dunno why, just do. ACCEPT IT.
• There’s a play of “The Thirty Nine Steps?” Somehow I missed that. Looks…freaky. Exciting. I’m excited.
• I feel similarly about Gabriel Byrne as I do about David Morse, except FAR more overtly sexually.
• Hee..the chick that won for best Director of a Play has a tattoo that she deeply regrets. I think it was something commemorating “Where Eagles Dare.” Somewhere, Richard Burton is DRINKING HEAVILY.
• Mary Louise Parker is hot, but she’s either stoned, or that glittery black thing on the side of her head is a REALLY BORING alien that has rooted into her brain and taken it over. Because she’s about as lively as the chunks of hair and flesh stuck to my wife’s leg-razor.
• Is it just me, or is it totally awesome refer to The Scottish Play as “The Scottish Play” even when they aren’t involved in a production thereof? Fantastic.
• Mark Rylance of “Boeing-Boeing” SLAYED me. Sarah found him boring. This resulted in an argument. Yay marriage!
• Lin-Manuel is up ons! GO TC GO GO TC Yes. That show is ridiculous. Compared to all the other stuff, I don’t see how it could miss on a big win, even up against Gypsy.
• Wow. “South Pacific” is tearing it up, which is kind of a pity, because that show is SO 1946. Right? I mean, what could it really bring to the table? Wow, racism against Indonesian natives! That really speaks to me! (No, it doesn’t.)
• I like the guy presenting with Harry Potter. He’s quick. ON THE BALL, if you would believe it.
• Whoa! Look at Mandy Patinkin’s face! That beard is…nautical.
• I gotta say; Sondheim. Certainly interesting. But doesn’t do much of anything for me, to be honest. It seems like he sacrificed melody for a feeling of “Hey! Listen to how weird this is! I would like another Tony!” People are willing to let this slide, for some reason. Me? Nay.
• HW on Glenn Close: “Severe.” Uh…yeah. She looks like she’s been sharpened.
• Lily Tomlin’s not dead? Wow!
• Can’t say I’m excited about “Xanadu,” since the movie was, at best, homicidal. (Everybody that watched it died of suck.) Oh good, rollerskates. I…uh…am fast-forwarding past this horrific crap. Uh…why did that guy walk up from the audience? And now there’s a pegasus dropping from the season? I need a grenade. Was that supposed to be ironic? That was bad.
• Oh, that’s Anthony Rapp? I just remember him from “Road Trip.” I don’t hate Rent as much as I hate Grease, but it’s reasonably close. Take it from me: if you want to see Rent, just go get tickets to La Boheme at the Met. Or even at a local regional opera company. It’s just like Rent, except not stupid. Though, I gotta say; the 525,600 minutes song is catchy. Hellacatchy. Not “Quando m’en vo” catchy, but clearly good enough to hoodwink thousands of Musical Theater fans. Seriously, if you’re willing to drop $60 to see Rent but won’t drop the same amount to see opera att the Met, you’re basically saying “I want to seem like I enjoy culture without actually having to expose myself to it.” You probably also like Jack Johnson, who I’d like to see reenact the rock-crusher scene in “The Temple Of Doom.”
• “Liza Minelli” and “Short Skirt” are not phrases that should EVER go together. She is definitely turning into her mother as she gets older; Judy had the good sense to die young, though. HW: “Is her bra supposed to be hanging out like that?” Yeah…I think that was intentional. In a related story, I just threw up on my socks.
• Wow, the chick from Xanadu is BEAT. She needs less teeth and more lips. I kept wondering if a second mouth was going to come out, all Alien-style.
• Go Patti LuPone! HW: “Yeah, like nobody knew that was coming. Certainly wasn’t gonna be that Xanadu b****.” Don’t let anybody tell you HW isn’t profound.
• Best Musical to “In The Heights!” Hell yeah! Fantastic. If “Xanadu” had won I might have torched something. I’d just like to poit out that I saw the show that wont the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical before it actually opened because of my connections.

A successful night! “In The Heights” pulled down Best Choreography, Best Orchestration, Best Original Score, and Best Musical. Mad shout-outs to Shaun and his castmates for being AWESOME.

So I finally broke down and got myself a recording setup. It is PIMP. It is centered on a PreSonus Firebox, which connects via Firewire to my HP desktop. I also got microphones, mic cords, a pop filter, and 2 mic stands which of course have not yet arrived so I had to hold the mic and a pop filter like a putz to record my first jam. This is just an experiment, really, just the first 20 or so bars of William Byrd’s “Nunc Dimittis,” Gradualia I No. 4, whatever that means. We’ve been singing it in Cathedral Compline Choir for the last few performances, so I had a handy copy, and when transposed down a third it actually fits reasonably well into my voice. I’m still learning, but comments are ALWAYS welcome. I hope to heck this works:

Well, dang, it didn’t. I was trying to embed it in a thing so you could totally just click and be all WHATUP. Darn. Oh well, here’s a regular link to it.

Update: I got it working. Check it out! You can still download it from the link above if you wanna throw the awesomeness on your Ip Od.

In my never-ending quest to develop SOME kind of visual artistic skill (I draw about as well as my son, and he’s mostly interested in eating the crayons), I have taken some new photographs. Feel free to ridicule them. I’m particularly fond of this one:

So: Heroes. HW and I are about halfway through the DVDs of season one, usually knocking out 2 or 3 episodes a night while cleaning, or working on our lappies, or whatnot. So far, here are my thoughts:

• I am on the freaking edge of my seat. Seriously, it’s all we can do to get to bed by 11pm, and invariably when there’s any doubt, we watch another episode. We’re starting to reach the point, though, where keeping track of all the various plotlines is taking its toll on our sanity; about 10 episodes in, they introduced yet another new character, and Sarah paused the DVD, looked at me, and said, “Oh hells no.”
• The show is deceptively gruesome. Early on we watched a few episodes with Charles in the room (not that he pays attention; the only things he likes on TV are “The New Yankee Workshop” (he likes to say “Morm!” when Norm Abram appears) and “Days Of Our Lives”), but after a few episodes I realized that the despite the fact that there’s very little actual violence in a given episode, there’s a heck of a lot of shots of the results of violence. For example, in an early episode (mild SPOILER ALERT), Niki rips a couple of mafia goons to shreds, quite literally. You don’t get to see it happen, but you do get a couple of glimpses of corpses with significant limbs in alternate locations. Later on, some people get their heads sawn open; you don’t see it happen, you just see the results. Pretty gritty stuff. IT’S AWESOME.
• HW extols the acting of Ali Larter, who plays (another SPOILER ALERT) a chick with multiple personality disorder, but I don’t think it’s that hard. There’s no real subtlety between the two characters; one is timid and nice, and the other is insane and likes to tear people limb from limb. It’s interesting to see her switch back and forth in the span of a few seconds, but I think any actor outside of Keanu Reeves could probably do that. None of the acting is really that exceptional, although that’s mostly because the characters just aren’t that deep. They all have funny abilities and are conflicted about them. The best of the lot is probably Adrian Pasdar, playing politician Nathan Petrelli, because he’s the only one with more than 2 layers. (I don’t count Ali Larter here because she’s basically playing two separate characters who happen to look identical.) Nathan has his politician mask, his win-at-all-costs shark persona, his mild confusion and conflict about his abilities, and underneath all that, there’s a foreboding menace that’s hard to describe because we’ve only gotten to see glimpses of it yet.

  Hayden Panettiere is a little disappointing, mostly because her half-hearted attempts at a Texas accent falls WAAAAY short. On the other hand, she’s so hot that I have to put on loose pants to watch the show. So I can’t be truly objective about her acting. And don’t remind me that she was probably only 16 when season 1 was taped; I already have to counteract my shame and guilt with massive amounts of high quality English gin. Although I don’t feel so bad, now that she’s dating Milo Ventimiglia, who is 8 months older than I.

• The inside jokes and shoutouts to other films and TV shows, usually involving Hiro Nakamura, are SLAYING me. When he tries to travel backwards in time a few minutes, and accidentally goes backwards approximately 6 months, he says “Great Scott!”, an obvious reference to “Back To The Future.” Later, we noted that his father was played by George Takei (aka Mr. Sulu), who rolls up in a limo with the license plate “NCC1701.” It’s also worth noting that Hiro is the most amusing character in a prime-time drama since Thomas Magnum. And Hiro’s cuter. All the nerdgirls I know crave his hott parts.

Right now our DVR is choked with episodes from Season 2; hopefully we can wrap up Season 1 in the next week or so and start to get caught up. If only to see what happens when Hayden Panettiere’s character hits her slutty college years.

I dunno about you, but any time I go to the Arden Fair, I feel the need to document the goings-on. Unfortunately there’s only about 5 pictures, because I am a rank amateur, still learning how to use my tools, and a significant number of the pictures were blurry beyond belief. Arrrrrrrrrgh.

The weather for the Fair was perfect, though. Just warm enough to wear shorts, not quite warm enough that the moisture in my groin was a bother. We ate kettle corn, and I wandered into the book sale and started making selections. After I had tucked 10 or so books under my arm, a nice gentleman volunteer came over and asked if I would like a box.

“I would LOVE a box,” I replied, and he fetched me one. After 5 or so more minutes, I had completely filled the box and was balancing even more books on top.

“Sir, would you prefer a bigger box?”

I agreed, and he got me another one. I ended up taking away about 2 dozen books, including a host of fiction (Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Trilogy, consisting of A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, all of which I’d been planning to order from Amazon soon anyway, along with the Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher), poetry, books on photography, and a few medical textbooks. Total cost: $16. I love used books. I don’t understand how people can get rid of books; I have three 6′ bookshelves at home completely stocked, and dozens of books laying around my basement with no shelves on which to reside. When we get our new house, I’m going to try and reserve one room as my library, assuming my wife permits such a thing.

Sarah and her mom looked over some crafts, most of which were a tad overpriced, and little was bought. But the food was decent, like it is most years, and the Diamond State Concert Band played marches and things in the “Beer Garden,” and all was riotously fun.