matthearn.com

Wow, I meant to post this earlier in the week and completely forgot. Who’s smart and has two thumbs? Not Matt Hearn. Ihavenowcutoffmythumbsaspunishment.Itmakesusingthespacebarsomewhat…challenging.

Okay, I figured out a way I can use my forehead to hit the space bar as necessary. So, where were we? After we had our 3,483rd child (possibly an exaggeration) last fall, we ran into a slight problem: Sarah’s 2005 Honda Accord could not fit three carseats in the back seat. This meant that either one of the kids was going to have to ride in the trunk, or we were going to have to buy a new car. We managed to get through the first three months of William’s life by simply having Sarah drive the van around, while I got to enjoy the Honda, but since I routinely drop off the kids one place and have Sarah pick them up, this was eventually going to be a problem. Plus, it meant that come summer summer summertime (summertime), our only means of vacationing was in a 13-year-old Grand Caravan with non-functioning air conditioning. Clearly we needed an upgrade.

Our original plan was to look into a Brand-A-New Honda Pilot, but I did a little research on Consumer Reports and discovered a lot of complaints about road noise. This doesn’t surprise me; our only complaint about the Accord was the road noise, which was pretty substantial at highway speeds. My guess is that Honda doesn’t bother to insulate their cars much, since insulation adds weight, which degrades fuel mileage. In my CR digging, however, I discovered the Mazda CX-9, a “crossover” SUV (Mazda no longer makes a normal minivan) that was rated well for power and road noise, and even had an “autostick” transmission (allowing you to treat it kinda like a manual, but without a clutch).

I looked into a new one, but in order to get all the options I wanted, we’d basically have to buy the top-of-the-line “Grand Touring” trim, which was running well into the $40,000 range, giving us a monthly payment of “a metric shitload.” Sarah test drove one at a dealer near where she works, but we decided we’d better start looking at used ones. I checked around a bit, and the best deals seemed to be at CarMax. The problem, of course, is that the nearest Carmax is in White Marsh, Maryland, roughly an hour from us. The bigger problem is that the Mazda we really wanted to buy (Grand Touring with nav system but no DVD, because I think DVD players built into cars are worse than terrorism) was located in Laurel, roughly another 40 minutes south. But the car had everything we wanted, so we dropped the kids off with my folks, cleaned out the Accord, and headed south.

The Carmax experience was great, and I doubt I’ll buy from them again. We’ll get to why in a moment. We met a very nice salesperson, the CX-9 drove great, they offered us a decent trade-in on the Honda and a great finance rate, so we bit the bullet and added a bit more debt to the pile.

I have to say, the car is fantastic. Easily fits all three kids; it doesn’t hold a huge amount of extraneous cargo, but that’s not really a problem except on road trips, and we have a big roof cargo tub to put on for that. The stereo is spectacular, and has an auxiliary input to connect my iPhone and listen to podcasts and weird experimental pop music (just to annoy Sarah). The acceleration is fantastic, the handling is superb, and the braking is good although I think the rotors are a bit warped (more on that in a moment as well). I still think the road noise is a bit high, but I think that’s just the way cars are built at this price level; a BMW X5 probably is better insulated, but of course costs 50% more.

Issues? Well, the nav system is a little weird. It doesn’t let you make modifications to your route while you’re moving, to keep the driver looking at the road instead of the console, but doesn’t take into account that you might have a passenger who can do it safely. Also, it gives you 2-3 options when you enter a destination: “shortest,” “fastest,” and sometimes “alternate;” the car’s definition of “fastest” leaves something to be desired. For example, we went to Ocean View for a short beach vacay a few weeks back, and the car reported that the fastest way down was this:

View Larger Map
You may notice at the bottom where you drive down through Rehoboth, Dewey Beach, and Bethany, aka the home of 35mph speed limits and countless lights. That is not the fastest way, by a long shot.

I also can’t say that I’m a fan of the autostick, because unfortunately, it’s not just a manual transmission without the clutch; it likes to think for you. If you floor it, it downshifts. For me, half the point of the manual transmission is that I can open the throttle and accelerate WITHOUT downshifting. So when it does it on my behalf, I get angry. It also will downshift when you slow down a bunch, which is fairly handy because I’ll occasionally forget to do so. Also annoyingly, the torque converter doesn’t lock up, so even when you’re staying in a single gear, the tachometer moves around a bunch depending on load and fuel delivery, which isn’t really all that bad, just disconcerting if you’re a car nerd like me.

The other issue is the brake rotors, which I think just need to be replaced, and since the car brakes fine even with the shimmying it’s not really urgent, but it leads me to why I won’t buy from Carmax again: there’s not a local franchise. They give you a 30 day warranty, but in order to get it repaired you have to go to the Carmax shop, the nearest of which is, as I mentioned, White Marsh, MD. We wanted to get the brakes taken care of, but just couldn’t find time to get down there before the warranty expired. I really enjoyed the no-haggle Carmax experience, but if we’d needed more serious repairs, getting them fixed would have been a HUGE inconvenience. If you happen to live near a Carmax, I highly recommend it. I know they recently opened a new location in Lancaster, but that’s still a solid 75 minutes away; hopefully they eventually open one near Wilmington, since my van ain’t gonna last forever and I’m gonna want a new ghettomobile at some point.

To sum up: Mazda makes nice cars, Carmax needs to open a location in northern Delaware, and if your car has a built-in DVD system because Madyszin has to be able to watch her Wizards of Waverly Place DVDs or she whines all the way to school, you might be a terrorist.

Had us a nice little vacation last week. Went down to Ocean View with the folks, ate like pigs, swam in the indoor pool in the clubhouse, chased the kids around the yard, drank entirely too much. After 3 days of this my body simply rebelled. I felt like six asses all last week. (Punctuation is important: “I felt, like, six asses all last week” would be a different matter possibly resulting in divorce proceedings, criminal charges, and PETA protests.)

Last Saturday was spent mostly at Little League, because we had the opening ceremonies, picture-taking, and the opening game, all spaced out perfectly to maximize our inconvenience. Opening ceremonies were from 8:30-9:30am, and then pictures didn’t start until 12:30, and of course the game itself was at 3pm, meaning we basically had time to go home and then drive back. I managed to at least get a little yard work done after the game, which I had to frantically finish on Sunday before friends came over, at which point my diet went out the window and I drank beer and ate barbecued flesh like I was being placed in stasis for a trip to Mars.</NERD>

But I need your help with a little bit of dream analysis, because I’m worried that I’ve edged a little closer to the deep end and treading the dark waters of sanity is becoming somewhat harrowing. (Apparently I’ve turned into H.P. Lovecraft again.)

I dreamt the other night that I had gone to see organist Peter Richard Conte perform on some kind of theatre organ, but which turned out to be very oddly operated in that he spent most of his time running around banging on drums and actually blowing on pipes with his mouth to make the sounds. Suddenly, I found myself actually in the pipe chamber with him, as he conducted some kind of interview of me, broadcast to the audience outside, in which I did some of celebrity impressions and a host of funny voices.

Apparently the audience loved this, because as I left the interview the crowd outside went nuts. I then found myself at some kind of outdoor high school bonfire being congratulated by everyone I met, assured that I would soon find great success in television, and to escape the throng I ran off towards some large field with a massive climbing net or web, a football field wide and hundreds of feet high.

I’d like to say I then dreamt Mr. Conte appeared as a big spider in the web and ate my feet, but that would not be true as actually I simply woke up.

Important note: I had gone to bed stone sober. What, in the name of all that is holy, does all of this mean? Am I, in the words of noted psychologist Kanye West, “cray?”

I’ve been thinking lately about the old trope, “I don’t care what anybody thinks.” You see it usually when somebody’s making a series of poor decisions, like “I may be fat, but I like wearing skintight leopard prints, I don’t care what you think,” or “I don’t care what people say, I’m definitely getting a tattoo of a leprechaun on my face.” Sometimes you’ll hear it as a compliment. “Oh, you know Grandma’s a little racist, but she’s just being real, she doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”

My question is: isn’t “not caring what other people think” the primary description of a sociopath? I wikipedia’d up “sociopath” and found information on what the World Health Organization describes as “dissocial personality disorder“, the first indicator of which is:

Callous unconcern for the feelings of others

If six-year-old children acted this way, they’d be given a mental health evaluation. But in healthy adults, it’s something to be admired? Why?

I’ve also heard the saying, “What people say about me when I’m not there is none of my business.” It’s true you don’t have a whole lot of control over what others say. But you do have some control, by which I mean you can control the behavior that may lead to people talking about you positively or negatively. If you routinely lie to your friends, fail to meet expectations at work, and are just generally a douchenozzle, of course people are going to say bad things about you. And when the things that one person says about you affect the way you are treated by the listener, it has suddenly become your problem. If a prospective employer calls your former boss for a reference, their conversation about you is very much your business whether you’re there or not. If a former friend of yours pulls your new girlfriend aside and says, “Look, you should be aware that Roger’s a nice guy, but he’s cheated on every girl he’s ever dated,” that is your business as well. If your boss and your friend are telling the truth, it’s pretty stupid to blame them for talking about you.

Obviously you can’t please everybody. There are going to be people out there who poop on everybody and everything, and listening to them is silly. But it seems to me that when people say “I don’t care what people think,” they mean “If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.” If you say “I’m thinking about dropping out of medical school to become a professional rugby player,” and most of the people you know respond “That’s stupid, you’re only 5-foot-2 and have the athletic ability of a tree sloth,” it’s not because they’re all haters. It’s because you said something dumb.

How about we all agree to start listening to each other’s reasoned arguments, and stop saying “What you say doesn’t matter” just because it doesn’t conform to our narrow beliefs? Or not. I mean, I don’t really care what you think.

I promised this last week, but I’ve been working on it fairly constantly, whenever time allowed, for like 9 days and still I’m not terribly happy with it. I suspect this is because I’m not a particularly astute political observer, and certainly not an effective journalist/commenter. Read on with the fair warning that I really don’t know what I’m talking about, and can’t organize my thoughts into coherence.

I realized something interesting about the current state of the Republican Party. The current batch of Presidential candidates like to call themselves conservative, even though they’re really just Fascism Lite. Their supposed concern for the outrageous size of government is betrayed by their wish for a massive defense establishment (controlled, behind-the-scenes, by defense contractor lobbyists) and for careful monitoring of uteruses and bedrooms (which would obviously require more government employees to do). It’s hard to see how a true small-government, free-market conservative can get behind them. What I would describe as a “true conservative” is really just a libertarian, folks who don’t believe in government interference in much of anything, because usually (though obviously not always) they are relatively well-to-do and stand to lose a lot by being overtaxed and usually don’t much care what other people are up to. They often have religious objections to abortion, and usually have the facts wrong about the effects of drug use on the country as a whole, but otherwise if people keep to themselves they don’t see a reason to interfere.

The average Santorum or Gingrich supporter is a more complicated animal; usually not as well-versed in their Keynes and Adam Smith, they understand only a few basic “facts:” lower taxes means more money in their pockets, deficit spending will lead to national insolvency, and the truly needy just need to work harder. I’ve found that young white males, without regard to location of origin or economic background, hew closely to these beliefs. As they age, however, these men split into two groups: those who come to realize that a balanced budget is largely useless without a progressive tax system and some safety net to keep our poorest citizens fed and clothed, and those whose youthful beliefs go unchallenged for the remainder of their lives. This divergence is based largely on upbringing.

A young man who is working hard and achieving success will frequently assume that the only barrier to wealth is the ability to do that hard work. The Libertarian idea of “Every man for himself!” will be very enticing for him. Why should he be prevented from gathering as much money and toys as he can, just because others won’t work as hard? Why should he have to pay more in taxes just because poor people can’t be bothered to get a job? And so, he reads his WorldNetDaily emails, and nods his head knowingly when Presidential candidates talk about how they’ll cut entitlements and get rid of ObamaCare.

The problem is, eventually one of those politicians will argue against gay marriage, or call women “sluts” because they would like their healthcare to pay for contraception, and this is where the divergence starts. If that young man was raised in a household where homosexuality is not tolerated, or one where the only acceptable form of safe sex was complete abstinence, he will continue nodding. If he or several of his relatives are veterans, he will hear about defense cuts and become enraged. If his parents routinely complained about lazy Mexicans and freeloading blacks, he will hear an African American man described as a “food stamp President” and then he’s hooked: anything that MSNBC says is a lie, and anything Fox News says must be truth.

But if the young man raised to believe that what people in the bedroom is their own business, he will stop nodding and say, “Wait…what did you say? That’s crazy.” And he’s wondering what other things might’ve been lies. This is roughly the path I took; I am still a registered Libertarian, in fact, and retain certainly very non-Democratic Party beliefs about gun rights, among other things. But when GOP mouthpieces rail about President Obama’s deficit spending without mentioning the previous administration’s unfunded wars, tax cuts, and entitlement programs, how can one take them seriously? When a Republican candidate for President complains that allowing two women to marry one another is an infringement on his religious rights, how does one not conclude that he’s had a serious break with reality? How often can one hear so-called conservatives insist that the only route out of a bad economy is to give money back to rich people (so they can then give it to poor people, without any evidence that they actually do so), before wondering “Wait…wouldn’t it be more effective to cut out the middle man and just give the cash directly to the poor people?”

The best that we can hope for is, frankly, that the sort of child-rearing that leads to racism and homophobia is dying out, but I don’t believe it’ll happen in my lifetime. The fact that there exist intelligent and rational people, my age and younger, who believe that gay people should not be allowed to marry each other, is a little frightening. It’s also disheartening to realize that the GOP wouldn’t be sprinting to the right if they didn’t believe that enough of a fundamentalist base exists to be a significant voting bloc. What I hope is happening is that the average American is moving to the left as the extreme right-wing slowly but surely dies out, and the extreme right-wing is simply growing louder as they shrink. The moans of a dying demographic. Hopefully, eventually all that will remain are the Duggars and the Phelpses, screaming about biblical literalism, while the rest of us shake our heads and wonder “Remember when we had actual national debates about contraception and gay marriage? What the hell was wrong with us?”

A more distressing possibility is, since right-wing families tend to have far more children than left-wing, the demographic is actually growing, or, more likely, we’ve reached a balance wherein the number of extra children produced by Christian fundamentalists is roughly equal to the number of children who realize their parents are nuts and break the cycle (usually by moving to New York and becoming baristas and/or sculptors). Which means we could be having these kind of debates for centuries. And what a pleasant thought THAT is.

Hey all, no post today, ’cause I’ve been working on something Big and Political that I’ll post tomorrow or Wednesday. Spoiler: Republicans do not come off well. In the meantime, I figured you’d like to know the following important fact: I’m a Gryffindor, baby.

Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?

Surprising, right? You’d think a guy with the nickname “That Leviathan” would be in Slytherin. I guess the Sorting Hat really does take your choice into account.

Gryffind0r 4 LYFE.

This will have to be quick ’cause you know how time be all CRAY CRAY. So, two things: the first, a fitness update, and the second, the greatest music video produced since Journey’s “Separate Ways“.

I spent about 6 weeks eating very few carbs and a great many hunks of meat and cheese, a diet that has worked well for me in the past, and did so again, sort of; I lost about 20 pounds in those 6 weeks, but unfortunately, lifting weights without any carbs to help rebuild muscle suuuuuuucks. My strength dropped rather precipitously (after squatting 347.5 pounds for 5 solid reps in January, I’ve been having trouble with 315, and anything above 250 or so feels dangerously heavy). My bench press has dropped about 15 pounds as well, and after hitting 405 pounds on the deadlift for 5 reps a few weeks ago I was able to lift it exactly once during last Wednesday’s workout.

So, ’tis time for a change. After doing some googlin’, I decided to go with the LeanGains diet that Martin Berkhan came up with. It’s an “intermittent fasting” plan that involves 16 hours a day of not eating anything (o nooooes) and 8 hours of getting the nutrition you need. You then cycle your intake so you take in a bunch of carbs and protein on workout day to keep muscle mass, and eat at a significant deficit on rest days to keep fat loss rolling. If it works as advertised, I should be able to lose about a pound of fat a week and keep all my pretty musckles that I’ve worked so hard to develop. I started on Saturday, and I can report that the deficit days are somewhat difficult, particularly on a weekend when there’s Happenings happening that usually involve food and booze, but I managed to be fairly good and not blow out my intake. The whole “not eating until after noon” thing actually HELPS, once you get used to it, because then instead of 3 small meals, you get 2 larger ones. Supposedly after a week or so, your body just gets used to not having breakfast, and stops signaling you to eat in the morning. I’m interested to see how that works out, what with my love of donuts and pastries and eggs and…sob…bacon.

Workout day is great, of course. After not eating all morning, I worked out over lunch and got back to work and ate 2 pork chops, a big bag of broccoli, a turkey sammich, an apple, a bag of potato chips, and a huge cup of milk and protein. Total caloric intake: 1900 calories. 206g of protein. I was so full I thought I might asplode.

I’m also switching workout programs; the Madcow 5×5 routine is probably a great workout when you’re eating enough to gain weight, but it’s nearly unbearable when you’re trying to cut fat. Too much volume, and with the ramping sets, you get pretty worn out by the time you hit the max weight. The aforementioned Martin (read the LeanGains site, it’s super informative) recommends something called “RPT,” or Reverse Pyramid Training. The idea is that if you ramp your sets upwards, hitting your max only on the last set, you’ve already tired yourself out and won’t be able to lift the biggest weight as well (exactly what was happening with me on Madcow). Since the biggest weight is theoretically the most important set, Martin advises you lift it FIRST (after a few easy warmup sets, of course), and then back the weight off for 1 or 2 subsequent sets. You’re more likely to get all your reps that way, since you haven’t blown out all your energy on lesser weights. Since the muscles are pretty glycogen-depleted (as a result of not eating anything all morning), they don’t have enough energy, and getting the hardest work done first is the best way to achieve, if not muscle gain, at least minimal muscle loss.

I can report it works pretty well, although I have to admit that after squatting 315 for 5 reps earlier, the thought of taking off 30 pounds and then doing a set of 6, followed by taking off another 30 and doing a set of 7, did not please me. I survived, however, so I’ll add more weight for the next workout and see how things feel.

Okay, enough of that nonsense. This, right here, is the top video of 2012 as voted by a Team of Professionals, consisting of me and some of my friends and relatives.

I’m a day late (and, per usual, a dollar short) again, without the excuse of extreme illness, but this is a topic so important that it took an extra day. Pray forgive.

I was texting some of the folks in my fantasy league yesterday, making fun of some of the other folks in my fantasy league for bad draft strategies (Jesus Montero? Really?), when one of us dropped the strange phrase, “A was man said…if they wanna live in a donut, let ’em live in a donut!” I replied “Dammit, now I want a donut,” and was immediately asked, “What kind of donut would you live in?”

I was struck dumb. A more important question had never been posed to me, and I include “Matthew, do you take this woman to be your wife?” in that statement. What kind of donut would live in? I couldn’t answer right away, because it’s all complicated, and whatnot. I knew I had to blog a post about it. (I considered, in fact, starting an entirely new blog just to discuss the question and its attendant theories and research, but I simply haven’t the time.)

It’s not as simple as just “What is your favorite donut?” which of course is a question that could spawn thousands of graduate dissertations and a massive 3-day conference at a major university (either Harvard, or anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon that’s reasonably near a Krispy Kreme franchise). But that’s a good place to start. What is my favorite donut? A standard chocolate frosted from Dunkin Donuts has always been my go-to, but so much depends on mood. In the autumn months, the strong cinnamon notes of an are really the only way to go. I certainly won’t turn down a regular chocolate cake, nor what is invariably termed the “Manager’s Special,” which is essentially a Boston Creme (chocolate frosted, custard filled) except that the filling is standard white sugar frosting.

(We no longer have a Krispy Kreme nearby, so we shall not speak of their luscious hot glazed treats. We shall also ignore the bakery that makes the finest donuts in the world, the Fractured Prune, for two reasons: 1. they also have no franchise in northern Delaware, and 2. no human could survive living in one because the aroma and flavor of the walls would drive him mad.)

“Favorites” aside, there are many things to consider. Let’s be clear: we are intending to make this donut our home! Does this mean that we are better served with a standard donut, defined as “a donut with a big-A hole in the middle,” since otherwise, where would we stand, and put our fine antiques? Or are we better served with a filled donut, operating under the assumption that the contents would simply be consumed before, or even during, the move-in process? I lean towards the latter, for the simple reason that a filled donut, carefully emptied of its interior, would have a roof, and a regular donut has a big hole in the center and you’d get wet when it rained.

My choices for filled donuts are the “Manager’s Special,” the “Apple Crumb,” and I’ll even throw in a nice powdered chocolate-filled. I believe we are forced to eliminate the latter two out of hand, because both crumbs and powder would respond poorly to rain, whereas a well-sealed chocolate glaze should be able to keep moisture at bay for at least a few days.

My choice, in the end, is the “Manager’s Special.” I would simply eat the cream filling, slightly enlarge the hole so that my piano could fit through it, and move in. Of course, if you are averse to white cream and prefer custard, the Boston Creme is another viable option.

You might think a jelly-filled donut might be best. You might be an idiot.

Let me tell you a little secret about Norovirus (AKA Norwalk Virus, AKA “The Old Spew and Spray”): it SUUUUUU-UUUUUUCKS.

It’s Josephine’s fault, as you might expect, she being our youngest school-going child. Last Thursday, we’re all watching a spot of TV before bed, when suddenly she stands up and calmly tosses her cookies all over the living room. Luckily, vomiting for a 2-year-old is gentle; it didn’t affect her much at all, aside from the fact that she was somewhat concerned that she couldn’t actually stop. It just kept a-gushing for a few minutes until her stomach was drained of contents.

We got her cleaned up and prepared for a long night, putting a towel down in her crib. Sure enough, she was up about every 30 minutes from 10pm to 2am to blow chunks, although after a while there wasn’t anything to bring up other than foam. After each session, we’d clean her up as best we could, and she’d immediately fall asleep. I stayed home with her the next day, and she rallied pretty quickly, eating some animal crackers and juice and watching hour upon hour of educational programming. We assumed she had food poisoning, or some kind of stomach bug, and planned our usual weekend of cleaning and odd jobs, complicated somewhat by the fact that I had to work on Saturday.

I then spent much of the early hours of Saturday spraying various substances into the toilet. From both ends. Sarah started soon after, followed in the late morning by Charles. At some point in the middle of the night, Josephine produced a poop so substantial that it went all the way up her back, but didn’t wake her. She felt fine by morning (although, as we later discovered, was still quite contagious) and so Grandma and Grandpa were kind enough to come get her and William. Sarah and I went back to bed, occasionally rising to help Charles throw up, finally passing out for good around 8pm and sleeping straight through until roughly 6am Sunday.

I didn’t think I’d be throwing up again, but my throat was raw from all the stomach acid, so I called out of church, and we spent the morning resting some more. Around noon, Sarah retrieved the younger children, and they and Charles and I sat around the rest of the day while my wife, who is a lovely person but whose work ethic outsmarts her at times, worked on cleaning up the house and organizing all our bills and mail. Heaven forfend she actually rest, you see.

Sunday night, Sarah’s parents reported they were sick, and we suspected everyone might still be contagious, so she stayed home with the kids on Monday. William, meanwhile, hasn’t been throwing up, but his fever goes up and down. Luckily he’s eating like a pig, per his usual.

Norovirus sucks. On the other hand, it gave me the opportunity to watch some TV, since I certainly wasn’t getting off the couch, which is how I got to watch the last forty minutes of “Commando,” which I am proud to report is the gayest movie I have ever watched. I loved it.

John Matrix, played by Ahhhhnold, needs to rescue his daughter from the bad guys, who are played by Dan Hedaya (who you may recognize as Alicia Silverstone’s dad in “Clueless”) and, as near as I can tell, Fat Freddie Mercury:

Yes, that picture is signed “I won’t shoot you between the eyes, I’ll shoot you between the balls,” an actual line from the movie.

Arnie has Rae Dawn Chong (who I believe was cast in the mistaken belief that her name was Ray Don Chong by a casting director who never looked at her picture and thought he was getting a nice bear dude to play Arnie’s love interest) fly him to a location off the coast of LA, and he then, clad in nothing but a small pair of purple skivvies, rows to the island where his daughter is being kept. There is then a brief montage of him painting his body and putting on various weapons, and he sets out to slaughter all the bad guys, which he does, finally catching up to Fat Freddie in a basement and engaging him in a shirtless knife fight and eventually IMPALING HIM IN THE CHEST WITH AN 8-FOOT LENGTH OF 4″ STEEL PIPE, which can’t possibly have had any phallic symbolism at all, wink-wink nudge-nudge.

I’m told it’s Rick Santorum’s favorite movie.

It’s been a loooooooong-A time since I’ve made fun of the…unique, let’s say, searches that people put into their googlers that lead them to this site, so let’s make the MAGIC happen! (The numbers at the end of each line are the number of searches made with that string, that led people all up ins hurr.) Apparently Dwyane Wade is a popular fellow:

dwyane wade muscle 70
dwyane wade muscles 32
dwyane wade men’s health 14
dwyane wade shirtless 11

Those are just the top 4 of literally dozens of ways of saying “Hey Google, I wanna see naked D-Wade, get on it.” Well, heaven forfend I fail to please my “fans,” so here you go, America: Dwyane’s balls.

There were also a bunch of things related to fitness, which is hardly surprising since I’ve been rapping on that topic frequently:

how to gain 15 pounds of fat 15
running weight loss before and after pictures 8
south beach diet before and after 6
will love handles ever go away if enough weight is lose 3

The answer to the last one is, of course, “Yes, if you are Dwyane Wade.” Apparently people are fond of tennis, as well:

andrea petcovic 15

I only vaguely remember mentioning Andrea Petkovic in a post from 18 months ago, but apparently it’s enough to get over a dozen hits in the past 3 months from people looking for her. If only someone could have predicted that just dropping the names of attractive women is the way to a high hit-count? Megan Fox, Katharine McPhee, and Kate Upton know what I’m talking about.

I gave away my old Mazda almost 4 years ago, and yet old posts keep bringing the hits.

mazda protege 98 5
1998 mazda protege white 5
1996 mazda protege white 5
98 protege 4

That was a good little car that deserved a better driver than me, and we donated it to some kind of shady agency that I’m sure uses it to transport drugs up and down the eastern seaboard. ::pours out a small bottle of 10-40 oil for his homie::

matt hearn auburn 2

I’m really more of a dirty blonde, really. In that my hair is somewhat blond, and I am personally dirty, and I think you know what I’m talkin’ about. I’m talkin’ DOWNTOWN.

white guy 3

Now you’ve got my number.

running butt before after 2

I really hope this actually belongs up with the fitness-related searches, and isn’t the final google search of two completely separate poor souls whose butts are running.

guy eating guy who looks like a thumb 2

Uh…wh…what?

milrf 2

Mothers I’d Like to…Ridiculously F***? Religiously? Rastafarianly?

the fatness.com 2

That sounds like a decent name for a medium-sized jazz combo, amirite?

souped up tempo 2
hi hat with a souped up tempo 2

I’m on a roll. It’s time to go solo.

transgender elf 2

Somebody get Will Ferrell on the phone RIGHT THE HECK NOW.

fish oil and testicals size 2

I wish they’d specified if the problem was shrinkage or inflation.

vera zvonareva feet 2

Probably pretty stinky, right?

enormus testicles 2

Is this just narrowing down the fish-oil problem?

plumber’s cleavage 1

1) Why would you actually search for this? 2) What have I done wrong that it led you HERE?

how does a woman look if she weigh 150 1

Probably pretty hot, unless she’s only 4 feet tall.

“my father’s perm” 1

This might’ve been me. I need to get my hands on the pictures of my dad from the 70s, his hair was beyond description.

do lips stay small after weight loss? 1

Not to get too gross, but…which ones?

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It sounds like the fish-oil problem led to a serious explosion, and some poor fellow is just trying to reassure himself that everything’s gonna be okay.

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Check manhunt.com.

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He is notorious, isn’t he?

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I’m proud to admit that 1) I know the song in reference is “Prayin’ For Daylight,” originally by Rascal Flatts, 2) I arranged it, and 3) I sang lead on it when I was still in the group.

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I…I guess just kinda lube up an encyclopedia and do the best you can in the time you have?

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I feel like manhunt.com could probably help here too?

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Sounds like my sex life. ::rim shot::

Have a pleasant week, allsayalls!

I know that 1) it’s not Monday, so what the H am I doing updating on here, and 2) I’m one of maybe three Americans who care a whit about the English Premier League, but I’ve been hearing a lot of people poop all over Luis Suarez this week, and I wanted to get my tuppence in.

Since you (probably) don’t follow the EPL, here’s the lowdown. Uraguayan Luis Suarez, striker for the Liverpool Football (soccer, you dolt) Club, got into a bit of a heated argument with Patrice Evra of Manchester United a few months back wherein apparently Suarez addressed Evra as “Negrito” or “Negro,” depending on the account you read. He says he only did it once, and, oddly enough, meant it in a non-racial way, as in Uruguay apparently saying something like “Hey, negro” is roughly equivalent to you or me saying “C’mon, bro” or “Hey, man.” I read one account where “someone in the know” said it wouldn’t be particularly surprising to hear a Uruguayan say something like it to his own mother, with no disrespect intended. However, Evra took offense, the powers-that-be got involved, and Suarez was widely accused of being a racist, which Suarez and the Liverpool club protested loudly. Suarez later apologized for causing offense, but was handed an 8 game suspension by the Football Association, which he duly served over the last few months, returning to the lineup last week. Evra, to his credit, said that he was willing to shake Suarez’s hand and put the whole thing behind him.

Over the weekend, Liverpool played ManU again, and during the pre-match introductions, Suarez refused to shake Evra’s hand, and predictably the football (sorry, SOCCER) world lost its collective poop. Eventually Suarez and Liverpool had to issue apologies, and sports reporters the world over are saying that Suarez is an embarrassment and should never be allowed to play soccer for Liverpool ever again.

Okay. Let’s construct a straw man, and call him Don. Let’s say Don is a sportswriter for a major sports magazine. And he’s writing a nice little feature about, say, Matthew Jordin (also a straw person), who is notorious for not passing the basketball. And let’s say Don uses the following sentence in his article:

Jordin is notoriously niggardly with his distribution of the ball.

Now, you and I know that the word “niggardly” has nothing to do with “The N-word.” They are etymologically unrelated. But let’s say Jordin doesn’t know that. And he reads the article and accuses Don of being racist. Don knows he’s not racist, but the sports magazine wants to save face, so they tell him he has to apologize. Wanting to keep his job, he posts something to Jordin’s twitter account about how he’s sorry he used the term, it wasn’t intended to be racist, and he won’t use it in future. But Jordin’s not happy, and continues to rile up the rest of the media, who say that Don should have known better, and maybe he actually IS racist, and he should resign. Eventually Don is called into his editor’s office and told he’s suspended for 3 months. After the news is disseminated, Jordin posts something on Twitter about how justice was done, and he forgives Don, and wants to put the whole thing behind him.

3 months later, Don’s covering a local pro-am tournament because it was the only thing he could convince the editors to let him do after coming back to work. He comes across Matthew Jordin, who’s playing a round that day. Jordin sticks out his hand. Now, because Jordin misunderstood the true meaning of the word that Don used, Don has suffered professionally and his reputation is sullied. If you were Don, would you shake the man’s hand? Don’t you think he has a little bit of a right to be angry and unforgiving?

I’m not saying that Suarez shouldn’t have shaken Evra’s hand. In fact, I think he was being rather stupid not to do so, particularly since before the game he told the team manager Kenny Dalglish that he would. If he couldn’t predict the controversy that would result, he’s an idiot, and sometimes you just have to suck up your feelings for the benefit of your team and your career. What I am saying, however, is that perhaps the media and the fans could be a touch more understanding of a man who honestly feels he was wronged by a player and the Football Association, doesn’t believe he did anything racist, and was severely punished anyway. Let’s let this one go, Planet Earth.