Jared has alerted me to the existence of Diet Cherry Vanilla Doctor Pepper. As he put it, “Talk about [very bad word] complicated.” I’d have to agree. I’ve never been a huge Doctor Pepper fan to begin with; I find it tastes like some horrible mutated love-child of sarsaparilla (pronounced “root beer”) and denatured brake fluid. So you can rest assured, Diet Cherry Vanilla Doctor Pepper (hereafter referred to by “DCVDP,” which can also stand for “Diseased Cat Vomit: Duck Poop,” which I think you should know before you buy a 6 pack of it) is not something I will voluntarily “enjoy.”

But it got me to wondering what other kind of unholy combinations the soda companies are working on next. I did a little “research¹,” and I have discovered the following tasty concoctions:

• Cheezy Coke: “All the natural Classic Coke Flavor™ you’ve loved for over 100 years, with just a hint of brie rind! Mixes well with crackers and pimiento loaf.”
• Meat: “We took Pemmican® Beef Jerky, ground it into a fine powder, and then snorted some! Then we took the rest and infused it into 7-Up! The result is surprisingly horrifying flavorful!”
• Land of our Fathers: “An ancient Cherokee recipe, this tasty beverage contains 475% of the Daily Recommended Allowance of ox hooves! It may also have cocaine in it. Chief Sycamore won’t say for certain.”
• Lo-Carb Triple Mochachino Grape: “So here’s the thing: Bob in R&D got really hammered on Jaeger Bombs, and came up with this. We’re not thinking it’s gonna be a huge seller, but Bob won a bar bet that forced us to spend $14 million marketing it. Enjoy!”
• Mangotastic Orange-Love Juicy Friend, With Beaver!1!: “Straight out from Japan, get yourself’s readiness on for a fruitistic autism! Humbly, we triple-time-mixed Hungarian ‘flavaz’ to 9 times caffeine! For drink. With LOVE we bring it ON, all of the night’s LONG!”

Personally, I plan to stick to Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi; I try and limit the amount of “natural foods” I imbibe. My view on the matter is this: humans ate nothing but “natural” stuff for a million years, and for most of that million years had average life-spans barely reaching 30. (Less, if you were not well liked and thusly frequently used as mastodon bait.) Within the past few centuries, however, we have seen a rapid influx of “Cheez” and “Fruit Roll-Ups” and “Pasteurized Milk,” and not coincidentally, the average life-span of a human nears 80 years. Of course, the average weight of a human, particularly Americans, and especially the ones in the Walmart near my home, is pushing two bills², but if extreme obesity is the price I have to pay to outlive my children, I’m willing to pay that.

¹I made some stuff up.

²200 pounds, you dolt.

Late update today! Here’s the lowdown: the Comcast tech, through the power of his touch, fixed my cable modem. I’m now using my awesome-tastic and highly reliable Linksys modem, so things should be up and running for grood now. The Comcast tech just checked the signal strength, which was fine, and then plugged in the Linksys modem, which immediately came right on and started working. Magic, I tell you.

Okay, not really. Here’s what I think happened (some of this you saw already on Wednesday, but I wanna make sure everybody’s up to speed; pay attention, this is important). I’ve been running on my RCA cable-modem, the one that responds badly to vibrations ’cause something’s loose in it somewhere, for about 3 years. Last year, when HW bought me the wireless setup, it came with a Linksys modem. So I was all, let’s switch since the RCA is ghetto.

So I called up Comcast, gave them the MAC address (the number that identifies network objects), and they tried to set it up. No dice. The nice Indian on the phone informed me I probably needed a signal booster, ’cause my signal strength was weak.

So I went out and bought a signal booster, but then the RCA box started working pretty reliably. It would go out periodically, but a few whaps on the top of it, and it’d start working fine. Until this week, when the RCA started giving up the ghost. So I put the booster on the line, plugged in the Linksys modem, and called up Comcast.

They still had the Linksys MAC address on file, but it turned out they had one digit wrong; where I had said “A2,” they had heard “82,” ’cause they were Indian and I don’t speak English very well. So they corrected that, but STILL couldn’t get the modem to work. So they scheduled the tech to come out today, some time between 10 and 2. I took the booster off the line, plugged the RCA box back in, and made do for a few days.

So today, the guy comes out, and everything works. He informs that regular cable boosters don’t work very well with the cable modems, because they screw up the signal going in both directions, which the modem requires. So what had really happened was that a year ago when I had tried, the Linksys box didn’t work ’cause they had screwed up the MAC address. On Wednesday, it wouldn’t work because my booster box (that I thought was HELPING), was screwing everything up. Today, with the corrected MAC address, and no booster, it fired right up.

Argh.

So now I have to figure out why my router won’t let me in. It works (in that I can get to the internet from all my various computers), but it won’t let me access it to make changes and update my IP (if it has indeed changed). I better drink some Sambuca first.

First of all, my apologies to those of you who may have been attempting to download any of the Y-Chromes alumni songs, or view certain things that are hosted on my server at home. My RCA cable modem appears to have finally given up the ghost. It had always been very flaky; there’s something loose in it, such that if you move it, it completely spazzes out. It’ll be very reliable for a couple months, and then something will make it freak, and I’ll spend 2 days going down there and hitting it, unplugging it, hitting reset, or any combination of the three, trying to get it back into shape, and eventually it sort of comes back to life. Well, not this morning.

The truly annoying part is that I already have its replacement. When Sarah got me the wireless setup for the house a year ago, it came with a Linksys cable modem. I immediately slapped it in there and called up Comcast to alert them to the new box, but they couldn’t connect to it. The very nice Indian gentleman on the phone commented that sometimes Linksys cable modems are very finicky about signal strength; if my cable is split more than once before it hits the modem, it’s likely not to be powerful enough. He advised if I want to use it, get a signal booster. In the meantime, we switched back to my old RCA modem.

At some point over the weekend, it went out again, so I slapped it back into shape, but then it went out again late last night, so I slapped it back into shape again, and then this morning I woke up and it’s out AGAIN, and no amount of slapping was going to fix it. I took the opportunity this morning to finally install the cable signal booster I bought (with great trepidation; I didn’t want the added voltage to cause my DVR cable box upstairs to explode and lose me all my episodes of Doctor Who), and all of my TVs still seem to work, although the cable modem still wouldn’t reset. Tonight the Comcast Indians and I will switch to the other cable modem, and hopefully we’ll have a totally awesome signal. And then y’all can go back to downloading copies of Prayin’ for Daylight.

Okay. That’s enough excuses. It’ll be fixed tonight, that’s all you need to know. Possibly sooner, if I continue feeling like I’m going to blow chunks all over my cubicle. (I shouldn’t have put on sunless tanner this morning; it has a rather distinctive stench, and it’s making me nauseous.)

Next, I want to talk about two major media sensations, one of which is probably well known to you, and the other is probably not. The former: “Napoleon Dynamite.” The latter: “Strange Love.”

Sarah and I watched “Napoleon Dynamite” last night, and there are only two things I can say about it:

1. WHAT. THE. #$*&. WAS. THAT.
2. Man, I’m glad I drank most of a bottle of Sambuca before I put this DVD in.

The movie was jaw-droppingly weird, and had all the production value of a snuff film. Needless to say, we loved it. Vote for Pedro, indeed. Most of the people I talk to are like, “Man, I totally knew guys like that in high school!” or “Oh man, that guy is just like me!” I should tell you, that’s not true for me. I don’t know what kind of weird kind of radioactive mutant dorks everybody else had in high school, but the two biggest nerds at Brandywine High School while I was there were me and my best friend Josh Lewis. We were in the Math League, the Computer Club, Bridge Club, D&D Club, all that stuff, not to mention of course Band and Chorus. And we were still way cooler and had much more luck with Da Lad33z than Napoleon.

Sadly, neither of us were Mexican. Josh was Jewish, though. Technically I suppose he still is, unless he’s converted to Baha’i; anything’s possible.

The plot, basically, is that Napoleon digs this girl, and then he meets Pedro, who transferred up from Juarez, and then Pedro asks out the head cheerleader and gets shot down, and then Pedro asks Napoleon’s love interest to the dance, so then Napoleon asks out the daughter of one of his skeevy uncle’s customers, and they all go to the dance, and Napoleon likes his girl’s sleeves, and then Pedro runs for class president, and a bunch of stuff happens, and then it’s all good when the Uncle leaves town and Napoleon gets to play tetherball with the girl he likes, who turns out to be kinda hot if you get her out of her stretch stirrup pants.

The other totally awesome tidbit of entertainment that’s sucked us in like a college girl after a 4 pack of Bartles & James is Strange Love, which is a spin-off of the Surreal Life. If you missed Surreal Life (I sure didn’t, although I never watched a single show), it involved getting a bunch of has-been C-list celebs into a house together for two weeks. It had Charo, Brigitte Nielsen, Flava Flav, and a bunch of other dorks. Well wouldn’t you know it, Brigitte Nielsen and Flava Flav fell in love. She: tall, buxom, blonde, Danish. He: Short, black, American, over-the-top. After Surreal Life broke up, Brigitte went back to Milan to live with her fiancee Mattia, and Flav went back to New York to mix up a really poor album.

In Strange Love, Flav decides that he misses Brigitte, so he flies to Milan to find her. He gets her address from a guy who believes he knows where she lives, which of course is wrong, so Flav starts walking the streets of Milan, asking random strangers if they know where Brigitte Nielsen lives. Of course, he does this while wearing a massive clock around his neck, and a large Viking helmet on his head. Absolutely priceless. Mix this with his propensity for periodically yelling “FLAVA FLAV!” at the top of his lungs, and you have comedy that knows no equal. It’s on VH1 just about every day at some point, find it and Tivo that jaunpiece, it seriously is the best thing on TV.

There’s really only one way to put it: The Onion-style.

HOLY #*$&ING #*$&
THE EAGLES ARE GOING TO THE #*&$ING SUPER BOWL

I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to win this game. Somehow we have to beat the two-time Super Bowl MVP, the best head coach in the NFL, one of the top 8 running backs in the NFL, and a defense that gives up points like a fat kid gives up his bag of Doritos. But we’re gonna do it.

I’m told that the Patriots are favored by 6 points. Lame. We’re gonna crush them, and then I’m going to laugh, and possibly pour beer on myself and others.

I have to figure out where I’m going to watch the game. In a bar in Philly would be ideal, although difficult; inexplicably, Christ Church scheduled an evensong for that afternoon at which I’ll probably be expected to sing. I’m all, “What the hell, man? Jesus is gonna be watching the game! And probably wagering heavily on the over!” But nobody listens to me, because I’m just a little bee in a big hive. Also, I’m one of the sexless drones, according to Sarah.

So anyway, I’ll be stuck at church until 6pm, and I think the game “starts” at 6:30, which means 15 minutes of interviewing random players, followed by 7 minutes of commercials, followed by 5 minutes of watching the National Anthem be sung by a cancerous child backed up by 17 amputee midgets, followed by 11 minutes of commercials (featuring a new Aflac commercial where the duck gets decapitated and eaten by Raquel Welch, who not surprisingly was available), followed by kickoff at around 8pm, give or take 14 Coke commercials featuring polar bears with serious caffeine addictions. So hopefully I’ll have time to strip out of my robes and into my McNabb jersey, followed by driving at a highly non-recommendable rate of speed to a place with a large TV and a massive supply of cheap, low-carb beer.

Hm. Mikey has a widescreen. Note to self: purchase widescreen. Or at least go to Mikey’s for the Super Bowl. In which, I may have forgotten to mention, the #$*#ING EAGLES ARE PLAYING.

(Amusing side note before I run: I’m considering purchasing a new car for my wife, ’cause her transmission squeals like an altar boy in an S&M club. So I’m poking around the Mazda website. Mazda appears to be going for the “hip,” mid-20s demographic of which I still barely count myself a part. Their current ad slogan is “Zoom, zoom,” and all their cars seem to be designed with “performance” in mind: nimble suspensions, powerful engines, sleek lines. I find it amusing, therefore, that their website is slower than VW Bus with a parking boot on one wheel. That is all.)

A great number of people have asked me, “Hey MattyMatt, what do you want for your birthday?” (Okay, only two people have asked me. It’s cool…I know you all don’t really like me. You just love my doggy style.) In the spirit of Christmas, which of course happened almost one month ago now, here are my wishes for the commencement of my 28th year:

• I want to pay off all my outstanding credit card debt. I’m tired of owing money to organizations that charge interest only slightly better than you can get from a bookie.
• I want to finally finish up with puberty. Ya know? It’s been like 13 years? I think it’s time for my acne to clear up and perhaps for the missing patches of facial hair to go ahead and fill themselves in. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
• I want a set of totally rockin’ abdominal muscles. Something with which to teaze the ladeez.
• I want to bring peace to the world via the expedient of slaughtering all those who disobey me. Wait, I mean, um, via prayer. Yeah. That’s it.
• I want another soda . . . be right back.
• Okay, got it. Mmmm…that’s good Diet Pepsi!
• I want to get in better shape. I’m tired of being overweight and lazy. Who’s with me? Okay, not Sarah. But I’m all about it. After this soda.
• I want a copy of Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

And that’s about it. (Sorry this didn’t make it up yesterday; Blogger was on the fritz, and I got TOTALLY sucked in to Wikipedia reading about English Royalty.)