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You may notice that there are a bunch of unnecessary "\"s in the quotes above. That is because my hosting service is a pack of unresponsive morons. I'm really looking forward to moving to a non-sucky host.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Holy Manboobs of St. Paul, I'm hungry. But before I figure out which of my officemates would be the most succulent and tasty, I wanted to share a few random thoughts:

  • You may have noticed I didn't publish anything yesterday. That's because I was having technical difficulties, after which I finally gave up and spent the afternoon attempting to adjust the steering alignment in my truck, which is off after I got the airbag worked on in December.

    So, I began by unscrewing the bottom of the casing around the steering column, only to discover that once you get all the screws out, it's still held in place by part of the dash. So I found two bolts that held the underside of the dash in place, and removed them. The dash was no looser than it had been before.

    So I pulled off the fuse-box cover, and discovered a bunch more bolts, some of which also held on the emergency brake and hood release gadgets. I carefully took those off, hoping that the truck wouldn't then go rolling backwards down the driveway with me half-in-and-half-out with my head stuck behind the clutch pedal. The panel STILL wouldn't pop loose, but I realized it was definitely being held somewhere at the top. Then I discovered the panel ABOVE it was only held on with little felt-covered friction-y brackets, so I popped that off, removed 2 additional bolts, and voila, wasn't any nearer to figuring out where the alignment adjustment occurred.

    So I took the top off the steering column casing, which necessitates popping out the ignition, which turned out to be rather disturbingly easy. (I'm pretty sure I could steal any late model Ford pickup with little more than a power drill. Admittedly, that's rather specialized information, but still.) Once I got the top casing off, I realized I STILL couldn't figure out what was going on.

    So I crawled down underneath and laid on my back on the floor, wedged between the seat and the brake pedal, to look up at the steering action. It was then that I noticed the massive bolt on a U-joint that appear to lead through the firewall and into the front-end steering mechanism. So I carefully loosened that up, and tried to twist the steering wheel to straighten it. No dice.

    I crawled back underneath, and wiggled the u-joint a bit, which caused it to completely separate from the steering wheel mechanism. AHA! Based on how things fitted, it was clear that there must be some kind of adjustment WITHIN the steering column. So I set about taking it apart.

    This is where you're probably hoping to read that I inadvertently set off the airbag and shattered my left arm, but in reality I didn't get much further because every remaining bolt on the damn steering column used one of those Star-of-David-shaped "Torx" bits, which I do not own. I spent about a half-hour trying to remove some of them with a regular allen wrench, but that didn't do much but strip a couple of the heads slightly, so I gave up and put everything back together.

    Hours spent working on truck: 2.

    Accomplishments: 0.

    I hate modern automobiles. I'm gonna buy a 67 Impala and drive it until I die.

  • So my wife is apparently meeting with some Education minister from Panama today. Seriously. HearnWife and her cohorts at work apparently are the Cat's Very Own Ass when it comes to their projects, so now they're getting consulted by other countries. Sure, it's not Germany, or the United Kingdom, or even Kamchatka (geography as I know it is shaped by my knowledge of the RISK boardgame), but it's still pretty damned cool, if you were to ask me, which of course you didn't, so let's just move on.

    All I know is that she dolled herself up for the occasion, and it got me a little chubby. Just so you are aware.

  • Some of you are wondering why I went with a particularly effeminate design for the ol' website this week. Come on, people, it's frickin' Spring! SPRING! Spring means flowers and totally righteous spring-y colors! Although I have to admit that the orange in the <BODY> background is a little Halloweenish. Perhaps I'll have to lighten that up.

    Anyway, I'd had the "Eagles" theme up for a month, and it was starting to look like I was in mourning. So it had to go. You'll probably remember I did a pretty righteous Spring theme last year, although of course it's long gone since Blogger basically forces me to make all the archives look like the mainpage if I want anything to work properly. Argh, says I.

I'm hoping to start working on some kind of short sci-fi story tonight; depending on how inspired I am, you might get to see that tomorrow. If not, I'm sure I'll manage to come up with some kind of boring drivel that I can post so Dave V. stops IMing me with "What, nothing to write today? Whatever will we do?!?" So look for either really poor fiction tomorrow, or really poor humor. It might even be both!

posted at 12:41 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

I think I'm beginning to understand why it is that most American musical theatre written after about 1960 completely turns me off. Pop music in the 1950s ruined it for everybody.

Let me backtrack a bit. Last summer, when I did Brigadoon, I remembered how much I enjoyed performing in musicals. I hadn't done it in many years, mainly because (as I revealed to everyone) the last one I had done was Grease, which is, in case you weren't aware of it, the worst piece of dreck ever to hit a Broadway mainstage. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I hate the original production, I hate the movie, I hate the soundtrack, there's honestly not one thing about it I can stand. Most of all, I hate the fact that the rest of the world seems to adore it, such that every year or so some local theater performs it, and invariably a friend of mine is cast in it, so I have to go see it again. And I sit there, and stare at the stage (which is invariably pink walls in every scene, with black checkerboard floors, as if every business and home in the continental United States closed down and became a friggin' sock hop on the weekend), and hate.

There are two basic reasons why my anger on this subject is so strong:

  • The "plot". Here's a basic outline, leaving out some of the more pointless stuff (of which there's a lot): New girl moves to town, sees the boy she met over the summer. He turns out to be a jerk when he's around his friends and spurns her. His friend buys a car. She makes friends with the local bad girls, who invite her over. One of them reveals she's quitting school to go to beauty school.

    The friend with the car starts nailing the baddest of the girls. The girl in beauty school discovers she has as much beauty-creating skill as a gerbil. Jesus comes down from heaven and sings a song to her about going back to high school. She crucifies him.

    Wait a second, I'm getting off track here.

    The bad girl tells the guy with the car that she might be pregnant, and it's probably not his. He is sad. The main boy and the main girl are still having issues 'cause she won't give up the punani and he's dirty.

    All this turmoil builds until the final scene, in which:

    • The main girl turns into a slut, and presumably gives up her virginity to the main guy.
    • The baddest girl turns out to not be pregnant.
    • The beauty school dropout starts a cult in Oklahoma and is killed when she sets off a nuclear device near Tulsa.
    It just makes me insane that they spend over 2 hours building up all this pressure on the characters, and then BOOM everything's fixed and they sing. Hate. It.
  • The "music". Why do we revere the music of the 50s? So much of it is painfully bad. My ears start to drip blood when I hear a lot of it. In the 40s we had swing music, much of which was brilliant and jazzy and fun, and inspired dance moves that required the athleticism of a starting point guard for the Pistons; in the 60s we had Motown and Rock and Roll and the Beatles and Joni Mitchell and lyrics from Bob Dylan that won't be topped in 500 years unless John Mayer gets particularly insightful. In between, we had horn-rimmed white dorks from Minnesota playing songs with 3 chords, screeching horrific falsetto death rattles, and crashing airplanes left and right. Worse, some idiot wrote an entire musical just to relive that decade. And if I meet that man, I will stab him in the neck.
I think most of what I don't like about musicals today is a direct result of Grease's immense popularity. The shoddy music ripped off from top 40 radio, the lame plot ideas, the bad writing; everything's gotten sloppy because playwrights and composers realized that all you have to do is throw some hack dialogue together with a big dance number with some poor idiot screaming notes that make her vocal chords spray blood into the first three rows, and the audience will eat it up.

Another problem is that the quality of the singing seems to have gone WAY down. Right now I'm listening to the original "Off-Off-Broadway" cast recording of "Godspell," and I'm not enjoying it terribly, although it's not the fault of the composer, whoever he or she might be. The recording I have features singers that are simply God-awful. Seriously, it's like they hired homeless people to record this album. And it doesn't make sense because I personally know a half-dozen or more singers with incredibly strong voices.

Here's the thing. When you're hiring performers, you want to get the best actors and singers and dancers that money can buy. Unfortunately, I think that casting directors tend to focus on acting, to the detriment of singing. And this is not a smart idea, because while I can tell the difference between a grade-A actor and a grade-B actor, once I get into the story I won't notice. (Example: "Napoleon Dynamite" did not feature actors of the caliber of Steve Buscemi and Al Pacino, but it didn't detract from the overall hilariousness of the film.) I can tell the difference between a grade-A singer and a grade-B singer before they finish their first measure, and I think most people can as well. The people on this recording of Godspell are approximately Grade-D singers. And I have no idea if they're quality actors, because you never see or hear that part. I wouldn't have even issued an "original cast" recording, I'd've just hired professionals to lay down the tracks.

Still, there's hope for Broadway, I think. Back in February HearnWife and I and some family folks went to see "Wicked," which I believe I described at the time as "OH MY GOD THAT WAS SO AWESOME I THINK I JUST POOP'D MY PANTS," which still holds true. The score is a delicious mix of classical and popular styles (the pit orchestra was a true ORCHESTRA, and yet it still had guitars and drums and all the fun stuff that audiences today dig), the melodies were fantabulous, the lyrics and book just right, the acting was righteous, and best of all they found two leading ladies with some SERIOUS pipes. Elphaba in particular could absotively WAIL. I haven't bought the soundtrack yet, but it's on my list.

So clearly it's possible to find writers who can really come up with quality shows, and the performers exist to make them memorable. Let's keep it up, Broadway, and prevent the musical theatre scene from becoming like Hollywood: the occasional gem lost in a sea of horrific pap.

posted at 11:01 AM | 2 comments

Monday, March 28, 2005

Last Friday evening, after church (it was Good Friday, you dolt), Sarah and I decided it might be fun to go check out the Karaoke that our friend John runs at a hotel near our house. We met our friends Fitzy and Rece there around 9:15, grabbed some brewskis, and quickly put a few song requests in.

Karaoke, if you've never done (what the hell is WRONG with you?!?), is a highly amusing form of entertainment. The quality of the singers can vary from "extremely good" to "painfully embarrassing," and it is the rare performer that thinks of him or herself as anything less than stellar, particularly some of the ladies. Friday's performances were no exception; permit me to share some of the more shining examples:

  • A nice gentleman named Gary, who had a clear preference for sexual partners of his own gender. He dedicated a song to some woman that may or may not have actually been present, and immediately launched into "Vacation," by the Gogos. Here's the thing, though: the guy sounded exactly like Belinda Carlisle. Exactly. As Fitzy put it, "That's just recockulous." (I don't know what that means, but I could not possibly agree more.)

    As an added bonus, Gary threw in some interesting dance moves that could best be described as "The Dance Moves That Buffalo Bill aka James Gumm Did In Front Of His Video Camera In The Basement After He Tucks His Package Back Behind His Squeezed-Together Thighs Just Before The Fat Senator's Daughter Knocked Precious Into The Pit." I can honestly say I have never seen anything like it, and I commend Gary on his showmanship.

  • 300 goth wannabes who sang songs from Syndrome Of A Down, or Hoobasuck, or Lamey Lee And Crapinescence, or some other such seizure-inducing screaming dreck. The first song of that ilk, I usually enjoy, but after the 17th straight song featuring some ham-fisted nutjob strumming an E-minor chord with his wang, through an amplifier with a volume dial permanently soldered to 11, I realized I was going to need a LOT more gin. And girls, if you have a voice like Joni Mitchell, Amy Lee songs are probably not the best selections for you. "Bring Me To Life" is not intended to sound like a Dan Fogelberg original.
  • One enterprising older woman who seemed to have kneepads permanently stitched onto her jeans invited us to, I think, remember the fact that it was Good Friday and we should be singing songs commemorating Jesus' passion and death. It was hard to understand her because she was drunk to the point of drooling some interestingly colored fluids onto her pendulous bosom. She then sang "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls.
  • Yours truly got up around 10pm and did a rousing performance of "How Am I Doin'" by Dierks Bentley during which I realized I am as stiff as a board when singing unless I'm told to move. It's very odd. I desperately needed a guitar to hold onto so I didn't look like an idiot. Luckily, by the time my next song ("The Way You Look Tonight" as performed by Francis Sinatra) came up, I had had a few martinis (HearnWife was driving), so I was somewhat looser. I may have removed my pants to amuse the ladies in the crowd. It's happened many times before.
  • The gentleman that took the cake (and rubbed it all over his naked, hairy body, metaphorically and metaphysically speaking) was a nice African-American gentleman, of about 50 years, with severe mental disabilities of some kind. He fancied himself an Elvis impersonator, and had fashioned a "jumpsuit" from a white shirt and pants onto which he had drawn a colorful eagle-shaped thing with the blood of squirrels he decapitated with a trash can lid crayons. He carried an old, horribly broken Fender Stratocaster (stringless, and covered with duct-tape) to use as a prop, draped on his shoulders via a long piece of yarn he tied to the ends. The final accessory, which made me pee my pants a little bit every time I saw it, was some kind of souvenir boxing or wrestling belt, about 25 sizes too small for him, that he had wrapped around himself as best he could and secured in place with duct tape.

    I forget exactly which Elvis tune he sang, mainly because not one lyric that came from his mouth was coherent, and he was spending a lot more time gyrating his pelvis and periodically simulating a sex act with the body of his guitar. "Memorable" does not begin to describe this. Sadly, I did not think of snapping a picture of him with my camera phone, but apparently he's a frequent performer. I recommend you hit the Best Western on 273 (just east of the 95 interchange) on some Friday evening and check him out. You will NOT be disappointed.

posted at 2:59 PM | 1 comments

Friday, March 25, 2005

Here come the Bill Simmons-style ramblings, at you like a HURRAKANE.

Don't be scurred.

  • I was in the shower this morning, carefully cleansing my taint, and singing "Moon River" very loudly in my best Andy Williams croon, when it occurred to me: has there ever been a bad song with "river" in the title? "Moon River," "Deep River," "Ol' Man River," "River" (by Joni Mitchell), "Across The River" (Bruce Hornsby), the list goes on and on (like most of my sentences) and sadly comes to a crashing halt at "River of Dreams" by Billy Joel. I hate that song.
  • While on the subject, is it wrong of me to dislike almost all of Billy Joel's songs? Some of them were okay when I was in high school ("Piano Man," "Uptown Girl," a few others) but have grown REALLY tiresome ever since. (I think the best thing he could do for me now is come visit Delaware and "accidentally" run over a few folks I dislike with his car.) What about Springsteen? Am I basically a communist because I think everything but "Born to Run" and "I'm On Fire" is pretty much a snore? I need this questions answered, dammit, I'm starting to question my manhood over here.
  • Do you ever wonder what must have been going through the head of the inventor of the urinal cake? I mean, first of all, what kind of crazy piss does this guy, or his friends and coworkers, have? Did he work at an asparagus farm or something? I just can't fathom what would make somebody say to himself, "Holy crap [no pun intended], this urinal smells gosh-AWFUL! I wonder what could be done to remedy the situation. I know! I'll make a minty tablet of material to put in there! And companies in New Jersey will vie for the licensing for it and the nifty plastic pee target that will contain it! I'll make millions!"

    And he undoubtedly did.

  • Today is Kyle's birthday. Yes, the Kyle from Kyle's New Girlfriend. In honor of these, and at the request of Milo, I have penned an ode:

    Ode to Kyle

    With shorten'd hair
    And flatten'd ass of furious fire
    He waits.

    and plots.

    and prays that when he gets his Tommy Hilfiger tattoo
                       (on his wang)
    the pain will not be too extravagant
    and he will be able to pee.
    and no one will take a picture of him (wi' cam'ra fone) crying in agony.
    like B-beef did on the toilet that time that Kyle nearly lost an O-ring.
    tommy->T O M M Y

  • The weather's getting warm. This pleases me. I'm about tired of my entire package shrinking deeply into my body, even when I wear my cold-weather pants, because it's hours before I can pee properly. (When shrinkage occurs, it's hard to shake out the remnants, and so you think you're done, and you put the tackle away, and it turns out you weren't done and you suddenly have a few ounces of stinky asparagus pee running down your leg. This is why I wear thick, absorbent pants.)

    Of course, with this warm weather has come clouds and rain, which I guess is good in that it gives me just cause to stab anyone who complains about the possibility of drought.

    "You shouldn't wash your car, Mr. Hearn, the water table is awfully low!"

    "Are you fricking kidding me? After we got something like 42 inches of precipitation last winter? Did it all evaporate? Shut up before I buff the skin off your face."

    So that'll be fun.

  • In case anyone's wondering how my NCAA Tournament bracket is doing: don't ask. I'm pretty sure I've set a record by being completely eliminated from contention by 4pm on the first day. After winning it all last year, this strikes me as patently crazy. My statistical analysis has done me little good.
  • Happy Easter, all a y'all. I'll have much to report on Monday, as we're going out for Sarah's birthday on Sunday, and I expect nudity to occur.

posted at 1:29 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, March 24, 2005

So I bought myself a bicycle, and let me tell you, I feel quite the badass. It's a relatively inexpensive Schwinn 26" jam, with 21 speeds, good brakes, and, most importantly, it doesn't have one pedal bent out of shape about 15 degrees like the last crappy Walmart mountain bike I bought.


My nifty bike, 'ceptin' that mines be red.
I bought all kinds of nifty accoutrements with it, like a water bottle and bracket, a tire pump and bracket, nifty gel-filled riding gloves (partially to cushion my hands against the rough rubber bike grips, but mostly because I'm pretty sure I'm due for about 3000 flips over the front handle bars, and it'd be nice to retain the skin on my palms), and a helmet. This last was a particular coup, since I have the largest head of any human I've ever met. I was fairly certain I was going to have to either not wear a helmet when I ride (particularly unsafe, given the 3000 hard crashes I'm expecting), or wear a motorcycle helmet (finding one of THOSE I could get over my cranium was difficult enough, and it still gives me a headache if I ride for more than 2 hours).

I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice foam helmet that I can fit over most of my noggin, and it's made by Bell, which is a reputable company for safety equipment. I was mildly concerned that it only cost $7.19, but I figure the government has established safety standards for helmets as part of their 80 year campaign to eliminate Darwinism in humanity, so I feel relatively safe in it. And let's face it, if I get nailed by a semi running a red light at 50-plus, I could be wearing plate and mail armor and it wouldn't save me.

I brought the vehicle home and made adjustments to the brakes (which were WAAAAY too loose) and seat, and took it out for a spin. Now that HearnWife and I actually live in a large development, there's plenty of places for me to ride around and hopefully not have to cross too many major roads. Sadly, I've been out for rides three times, and I've covered my entire development, the one adjacent that's connected by a small path, and one across School Bell road. I've also been across 273 to a small park, which, judging by the amount of graffiti, is routinely the site of major gang wars. Also, significant portions of the path are blocked off by Jersey barriers, presumably for the safety of the gang members.

So now I'm looking for nice places to ride, ideally with a place that I can park my truck for a few hours while I explore. One possibility that I'm considering is that if I find a decent bike lock, I can lock down the bike in the bed of my pickup and drive to work in Newark. Then, during lunch or after I sneak out early, I can take the bike for a spin around the college campus and admire all the extremely fine blond undergraduates.

There's also the possibility of the myriad state parks, although paying $4 to get in for a few hours sticks in my craw a bit. I suppose I could buy a yearly pass, but I think we've established that I am INCREDIBLY cheap when it comes to things like that.

Clearly I'm not cheap when it comes to dropping close to $150 on bicycle equipment, of course. I wonder how much those tight little neoprene shorts are. I feel the need to display my junk to the world next time I go out on two wheels.

posted at 9:38 AM | 2 comments

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Last night I went with my parents and our friend Tolly to New York to see the Bach B-minor Mass at St. Bartholemew's. We had a riotous time, starting with a lengthy meal at a restaurant in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel (we're some posh mofos, we are) named Oscar's.

Our waitress there was named Imolina, and had been working there for 37 years, after arriving from Puerto Rico at age 16. She was totally righteous, taking all of our bizarre requests in stride. The food was particularly good, although like most gourmet establishments, the portions were annoyingly small, and the prices were exorbitant. I think the meal for four came to $160, not including tip, and we didn't even have that much to drink (although I did have a Tiramisu Martini, which is as good as it sounds, and a reasonably value even at $9).

After scooting out of there, we headed to the church (which was handily adjacent) and sat down to enjoy the show. The performance was good; I won't bore you with the details. More noteworthy was the behavior of the individuals around us.

I'm sure you've noticed that some of the elderly population can be difficult to take, particularly in a public setting of some kind; I'm here (among other reasons) to inform you that the old folks of Manhattan are beyond comparison to whatever geriatrics you may have lying around in your home town. To be fair, some of these folks weren't technically OLD, but were of what might be termed "advanced middle age," but they were annoying none the less.

In front of me, slightly to the left, I had the "informative" gentleman who was intensely interested in every possible conversation near him. If you entered a discussion in which he felt he had some kind of useful anecdote or opinion, he felt obliged to share it with you, in a low mumbly voice that was all but incomprehensible. During the performance, he was kind enough to stop mumbling (mostly), but he kept glancing around with a strange look in his eyes that I can only describe as "I wonder how many savagely gored bodies I could store in the nave." Not crazed; just gauging.

To our right, we had a strange middle-aged fellow who, I assume, knew the people behind us, because he kept trying to get them to pass down some things he had left in a pew. It turned out the items were in OUR pew, and we had sat next to them while he wandered off somewhere, and he didn't want to squeeze by us, he just wanted to sit on the end of the row. Rather than asking US to pass the things down, though, he kept asking the people behind us, who didn't have the foggiest idea what he was talking about, and so he became more and more vehement about his items, until finally WE realized what was going on and passed them down to him. He then spent the entirety of the performance leafing loudly through a copy of the score he had brought along.

The couple behind us was extremely decrepit, and probably not long for this world. They also seemed prone to periodic outbursts of sneezes, snorts, hacks, coughs, and soft, sad moans. We're hoping they just had pneumonia, as opposed to tuberculosis, because I don't particularly feel the need to move to Arizona for the dry air and then spend 25 years wandering aimlessly from silver-mine town to cowtown, gambling for my living and shooting cardsharps with a pearl-handled sixgun.

The real big winner, however, was the gentleman in the row in front, slightly to the right, who arrived a few minutes before the performance was scheduled to begin, dropped a massive rucksack on the pew next to him (I swore he was going to set up camp and start cooking s'mores over a fire), and began asking loudly of everyone near him if they'd come to the lecture the previous evening. Apparently Peter Schickele ("biographer" of P.D.Q. Bach) had given a lecture on Monday that he'd been unable to make, so he wanted the full details of what it was all about. Most annoyingly, he sounded like a cross between Carson Kressley and Barbara Streisand. He was about 100 pounds overweight and apparently thought it was appropriate to come to musical performances in churches in a sweaty tshirt and ripped jeans.

After finally finding someone who had apparently almost made the lecture (the body-hiding old fellow in front of us), they discussed this at length, and at volume, until the performance began. Mr. Streisley then managed to remain relatively unobtrusive until the second half, when at the end of the creed he apparently had an orgasm and almost broke the pew. Then apparently he needed to go clean himself up, for during the Sanctus he got up and wandered off somewhere, we assumed to the bathroom, and then returned during the Benedictus and sat down, HARD, on the pew.

I guess he doesn't have a lot of interest in the last few movements of the mass, because in stark contrast to his pseudosexual response to "Et Vitam," he started getting out all his subway maps and shuffling them around, planning his route back to Castro or Queens or wherever the hell he dragged himself.

It's entirely possible that he simply went down into a subway station and assembled a pup tent, but we didn't follow him to find out. We skeedaddled back to the car, and then forged our way down to the Lincoln Tunnel (the amount of people and cars on the streets in New York at 10pm is baffling to me) and made it back to Wilmington by around 12:45. I, of course, didn't make it to bed until 1:30, since I had to purchase gas (and nearly got shot in the process, I think) and put a large washing machine outside by the curb. Still, the day was a resounding success, if only because I think I might have managed to get a picture of the hair of a woman three rows in front of us; it appeared that she had painstakingly ironed it straight, and then styled the crown of her head with a dremel tool. It was amazing. I dreamt about it all night.

posted at 12:13 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

I'm back on my Fantasmagorical Awesometastic "Lo-Karb" Diet™, which of course means that I take in vast, heart-clogging amounts of red meat, cheese, and unpasteurized sweet cream that I SUCK DIRECTLY FROM THE COW'S TEAT MWAHAHAHA - sorry, got carried away there. Anyway, I eat a lot of meat.

So when I get a craving for fast food, I have to go somewhere that I can get a lot of meat relatively cheaply. McDonald's has a great deal with the Double Cheeseburger, which is only a buck; I can get 6 of those and have 12 small burger patties for the price of one Super-Sized Big Mac meal (which they don't sell anymore because fat people keep suing, for which I think they should be given liposuction via flensing knife). Sadly, there's no McDonald's within easy driving distance of my route home (the one in East Newark, that technically I pass on my way home, is not easy to get OUT of; if I stop there I invariable have to make a large loop and go around half of north Newark, due to all the stupid one-way streets involved). There is, however, a Wendy's.

Wendy's also has a sweet deal for burgers; 99 cents for a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger. You only get one actual meat patty, but it's larger than those they put in the Double Cheeseburger at McD's, and you also have the additional enticement of bacon. So I routinely stop there on my way home and pick up between 6 and 8 of them.

The only problem with this is that I feel guilty for coming home and throwing away 6 full-sized hamburger buns, when people in Zimbaire or Mongostan or wherever are having to survive on as little as a thin piece of treebark and the juice of 7 horseflies every month. So sometimes, if I'm not in a particular rush, I tell the friendly Wendy's employees not to give me the buns.

Unfortunately, they put each burger into one plastic/foam container. Each of these containers can hold easily three burgers, so once again I'm feeling horribly wasteful, and wondering exactly how many penguins I've personally melted from the greenhouse gases emitted during the production of all this polypropylene.

So the other day, I actually walked INTO the restaurant, and made what I thought was a very clear request. "I would like 8 Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers please . . ."

"EIGHT?" the countergirl said incredulously.

"Yes, eight, with NO BUNS. And please put the burgers into as few toxic containers as possible."

"Eight . . . junior . . . bacon . . . anything to drink?"

"No thanks." I had soda at home. (For that matter, I also had a large box of frozen quarter-pound hamburger patties, 2 full pounds of bacon, and a 16-slice-pack of American Cheese. But I wasn't ready to face all that preparation.)

"Okay, you're order number 738, give us just a few minutes."

I spent a little while admiring the "Employee of the Month" wall, and then turned to discover my order was complete. Three bags of food, with each burger neatly placed inside its own container. I sighed heavily, and wandered over to the ketchup/straws/napkins table, where I set my three bags down, and set about putting all the biggers into as few containers as possible.

5 minutes later, I had 3 containers, one bag, and a pile of plastic and foam that I made a big show of putting into the trash, in hopes that the employees behind the counter (the store was thankfully not terribly busy) might notice exactly how much of their product was being wasted. They, of course, cared about as much about wasting material as I do about amateur Mexican soccer, so I huffed my way out of there and went home to gorge on my hard-earned lunch.

Oh, and also they raised the prices on the burgers from 99 cents to $1.29, the greedy bastards.

posted at 9:39 AM | 0 comments

Monday, March 21, 2005

Cinderella was a rousing success! Those of you that missed it, shame, shame. Quite truly, it was awesome, although if I were to say I wish we could do another show or two, that would be a lie.

And I am not a liar.

Opening night, Thursday, went very well, aside from a slight mistake on my part that resulted in the Prince and Cinderella having to stand around for a moment on stage while I conducted the introduction to the next song. Friday I managed not to screw anything up, but things were still pretty shaky: the actors dropped a lot of lines, and forgot the words to songs on a few occasions, and of course the amusing situation in which the godmother wasn't able to find the seam in the curtain so she could do her "disappearing" act and ended up wrapping herself in the curtain so that she "couldn't be seen," which resulted in much giggling from the audience.

By Saturday all of these situations had been resolved, and we did the final two shows with great perfection, even when the brass section left me a note in my score reading "RANDOM USELESS NOTE 'D" which makes sense only if you love Homestar Runner on the truly disturbing level that we do.

A big thanks to all the production staff, and the actors, and the crew, and the pit band, particularly my father; having a totally quality pianist definitely held things together. It was also nice to have an actual string section.

A few people have asked me what I plan to do with all my free time, which is a normal question, and which is of course rather foolish, since if they'd give it any thought they'd realized I plan to start sleeping 14 hours a day. Starting right about . . . wait for it . . . now.

(Tomorrow: why Wendy's is lame.)

posted at 9:55 AM | 0 comments

Thursday, March 17, 2005

I haven't posted, you may have noticed. I will be back next week, I swear. And I'll probably even be able to get rid of the Eagles logo which has had no bearing on anyone's life since early February.

Why I haven't posted:

CINDERELLA!!!

At Brandywine High School, 3/17-3/19 at 7pm, and a special matinee for the rugrats on Saturday 3/19 at 2pm! Tickets are $8 for adults and $5 for kids. Come one, come all! See the magical costumes! Observe the fantastic dancing (choreographed by the inimitable Hearnwife)! Watch The Hearn wave his arms frantically in an effort to keep the pit band at a consistent tempo!

Next week: updates on life in general, and Why Wendy's Sucks.

posted at 10:58 AM | 2 comments

Thursday, March 10, 2005

So, I'm not sure what the recovery time for a workout is really supposed to be for a beginner. I figured the chances were slim I'd recover enough to have a workout on Wednesday, but it's now Thursday, and I hurt just as bad as I did Tuesday morning. In fact, a NEW agony has emerged: my right shoulder.

Tuesday morning I had horrible pain in my triceps muscles, and a certain amount of hurt in my pecs. It was fairly manageable. But now my right shoulder has joined the fray and it feels like someone was beating me in my sleep. HW does have a tendency to do that, but she's out of town at the moment, and the cats aren't strong enough. (They do more damage with their teeth, claws, and constant insistence that they be petted.)

I'm hoping that in the future I'll recover more quickly from a workout, as right now I'm not entirely sure I'll ever be able to move my right arm again. In order that I might continue shedding unsightly wrinkly fat from my hips, I'm considering buying an inexpensive bicycle, probably at Walmart, because I need to lose a sizeable amount of weight very rapidly.

Auditions for the Brandywiners' production of South Pacific are April 17th, and the part I would like to audition for requires a degree of shirtlessness. So at the audition they want to have all the guys remove their shirts so they might be checked for rippitude. I'm not seeing myself having a lot of that, so I plan to lose as much weight as possible in the next month (luckily, I'm already through the induction part of the Atkins diet, so I should be shedding pounds already) and then invest in an Ab-Abber 3000.

I suppose I could do crunches, but that's just not how I roll.

posted at 9:46 AM | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

My arms hurt. A lot. And it's not 'cause I just flew in from Albuquerque or anything, although that would be AWESOME, 'cause it's warm down there, and even I've had about enough of winter at this point. (Sarah's flying to Florida tomorrow. I hate her.)

No, my arms hurt because I realized that I had ballooned up to my pre-diet weight of last spring, and that if I wanted to stop going back and forth like some mutant child of Oprah and John Kerry, I needed to start working out. This also has the side benefit of making me really chiseled and cut, so I can stop the bigger kids from beating me up all the time.

So yesterday afternoon, I dragged my weary carcass to the gym, where I warmed up a bit on an exercise bike, and then launched into a flurry of stretching, lifting, pulling, throwing, punching, humpty-dancing, drinking roughly 40 gallons of water, and having as many as three heart attacks, depending on whether that last one was just acid reflux from all the cheese I ate with lunch. Apparently I need to figure out a way of stretching my triceps muscles after the workout, because right now they are in agonizing pain. I can barely move them. I woke up in the middle of the night to use the john and thought I'd dislocated something. (In my arms, you perv.)

I was hoping to start a regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday workout schedule, but I may never be able to make my arms work again, which would make it difficult to exercise. Oh well. Perhaps I'll take up yoga. Except that it involves stretching and breathing, and I hate stretching almost as much as I hate breathing. WHY, OH WHY CAN I NOT GET MY OXYGEN THROUGH ALVEOLI ON THE SURFACE OF MY HEAD!!! The chicks would totally dig it.

posted at 10:41 AM | 1 comments

Friday, March 04, 2005

Ooh...yeah...that's it...here comes the random spouts of crap:

  • Go here. The first one is pretty good, but definitely listen to the second one. I peed my pants repeatedly. Seriously, man, my ergonomic chair is sopping.
  • I was reading the other day where some folks were arguing that the high gas prices we're currently experiencing indicate that we are in need of a "regime change," meaning, they think if we take Dubya out of office, gas prices will go back down?

    Um...wha?

    The people that I read saying these things are, almost to a man, the same people that for the past two years have been saying "We only invaded Iraq for the oil!" Well, if that's true, wouldn't we actually be experiencing cheaper oil prices? I'm no Alan Turing, but even my moldy brain can spot hypocrisy of that level. (My own hypocrisies are well known, particularly the one in which no one should be permitted to have a driver's license but me and the few worth individuals I designate, despite the fact that my own driving record is spottier than a leopard.)

    Interestingly enough, many of the same folks say that we shouldn't drill for oil in "wildlife preserves," despite the fact that the only thing that makes them "preserved" is some government entity saying so. Were I Lord and Master of All I Survey, I'd just say, "Okay, well, that part's no longer preserved. Get to drilling. This other part over here, where there isn't any oil, is now the preserved area. Good times for all."

    None of this changes the fact that I'm considering selling my truck because I realized it costs me upwards of $2000 a year to fuel it.

  • New washing machine = superw00t. Even better was that we were able to maneuver the washer and dryer in the laundry room to a position that makes more sense. When we arrived at the house, the existing washer was positioned in a way that we couldn't put the dryer next to it without moving the washer out of the way first, so I could have access to the dryer exhaust vent and stuff. We didn't feel like doing that, so we just slud the dryer in there sort of catty-corner in such a way that you couldn't actually stand in the room with a basket to unload and reload things.

    When we moved the old washer out, I moved the dryer to the ideal position, and then the new washer slud in right next to it. Bim, bam, boom, as Percy Faith would say. Now there's all kinds of room to stand in there, and as a benefit, one of the holes that the cats would crawl through to sneak into the laundry room and throw up on things is now blocked off by the dryer. So those little devils are THWARTED.

  • I have had my hair trimmed to look like this:

    And HW helped me install some highlights last night. (And I wonder why everyone thinks I'm gay.) I look totally hot, although the hair product I'm using today is kinda lame; it makes my hair all wet-looking and greasy, and it doesn't clump up like Jesse's does in the photo. I'll keep working on that, possibly with some hard core Butch wax type stuff I have left over from when I was spiking my jaunpiece up. What I really need is some Brylcreem . . . I've got my overhead lifters and four-barrel quads oh yeah . . .
  • I wrote a nasty gram to the OpEd page at the News Journal over this whiny tripe. Seems a bunch of people in North Wilmington are in an uproar over noise from planes flying into Philadelphia Airport, which, last I checked is roughly 20 miles north. Given the small amount I know about aircraft flight paths, that puts them over North Wilmington at a height of several thousand feet.

    My letter basically said, "Stop being whiny punks or I'll drive to your house and give you something to REALLY cry about." That's not a verbatim quote, but I'm hoping I still get published in tomorrow's paper. It might even be enough to convince me to buy one, although probably not.

posted at 2:27 PM | 2 comments

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

I guess I'm going to have to settle in to a "3 posts a week" cycle for a while, since things are just busy busy busy busy beeeee. Various important bits of info:

  • Sears is both cool and outrageously sucky. We got a guy to come out and look at our broken washing machine, with the following result: "We no longer make parts for that thing. What is it, like 25 years old? That'll be $65 please." Great. Upside: he gave us a coupon for $65 off any appliance at any Sears.

    "Does this work at the outlet over across from University Plaza?" I ask.

    "Should. At least, they told me it does."

    Ah, they. Someday, I'm going to meet they and kick they right in the jubblies.

    So last night we went to the outlet store and selected a nice Kenmore washer for $329, and discovered that the coupon was useless at the outlet store. Thanks, Sears; thanks a panload. That reminds me, I need to give the pertinent information to Hearnwife so she can call and yell at them. (I'm too meek and mild-mannered, don't you know.)

  • We ripped up all the carpeting, pad, tack strips, and various staples in our bedroom. The floor looks great, except for a few imperfections: the carpeting had covered up a hideous job of installing a marble floor piece in the doorframe to the bathroom, so there's all kinds of crumbling concrete visible; and the previous owners apparently didn't like squeaky floors, so throughout the room there's random nails and SCREWS (freakin' SCREWS? WTF?) in the floor, some of which stick out a 1/4" or so.

    I'm hoping to cover up the nasty concrete jaunt by the bathroom door by shaping a piece of wood to act as a small ramp (so I'll stop kicking the marble as I go over it), and hopefully I'll be able to get some of the screws out (many of the heads are stripped). Still, it looks totally awesome. Pictures to come, I hopes.

  • I haven't been to the high school for rehearsal in over a week 'cause it keep snowing me out. I'm going on Thursday to work the pit band over a little more; hopefully they won't be sucking. The chorus should be fine, their stuff is easy, they've known it for weeks. Bless my father for agreeing to play piano for this show . . . anyway, come see "Cinderella" at Brandywine High School, 3/17-19 at 7pm, with a 2pm matinee on 3/19. Tickets are 8 bucks, I'm told.

posted at 12:04 PM | 2 comments

Good cause of the month! Donate some money so that Jared and Venessa can walk to cure cancer of some kind. Between them, they need over 8 grand!!! Please donate whatever you can here:
Jared's Donation Page
Venessa's Donation Page