matthearn.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a problem. Namely, I have a TRULY GIGUNDOUS HEAD. Being a totally hep (hip) guy, I like to make sure that my hairstyle is up-to-date and super-duper stylish. This is hard when one’s cranium affects tides, for a variety of reasons. Number 1, any short haircut, which was the style from about 1995 to 2003, looks ridiculous on me because you can see my scalp, which leads most folks to comment “Holy crap, look how much skull that guy has!” It’s depressing and said. And number 2, long haircuts make me look like a goddamn hippie, because clothes aren’t made to fit my frame, and I hate to iron, so I end up dressed like a 1992 fat chick, all hiding my frame with baggy sweaters and loose jeans and with a mop of unkempt hair.

This is just NOT cutting the mustard, people.

So, I’ve made a study (I ran “fat head” through Google Image Search) to get a sense of what other nogginly-blessed folks are doing with their hair. The following is the result of that study.

Here we have Alan, who is getting in some early combover practice in case he starts to bald, which is pretty smart planning, when you think about it. It’s not something I’d wear out of my bathroom, but then I wouldn’t do a combover outside my bathroom. In fact, if I ever go bald, I’m going to spend the rest of my days lying in the tub, having HW bring me bon-bons and cognac.

I like to think Ray here went to his hairdresser and said, “Listen, I’m starting to develop a little lazy eye problem here, is there anything you can do to cover that up?” And the hairdresser replied, “Oh honey, if I can hide the fact that Mrs. Nelson lost an ear to a rabid Great Dane, this’ll be easier than finding love at Club Fist.”

And Ray slowly sat down in the chair, and Ray prayed.

This is Jimmy. He may or may not be French. Either way, he walked into the stylist hoping for “Gordon Gekko” and walked out with “Joe Dirt“. On the other hand, he’s wearing an argyle sock as a tie, so his style is clearly rather avant garde.

Remember when I mentioned I can’t wear my hair short? Yeah, this is why. Also, Paul here appears to be 80% jawbone. I can’t imagine how he talks, let alone chews.

Or perhaps he got jaw implants? Now THAT’s a solution to a self-esteem problem! Here I’ve been considering tasteful liposuction to eliminate the ENORMOUS MASS OF FLESH HANGING OFF MY RIBS and I could just be getting collagen injected into the sides of my face!

When in doubt: take it back to the 80s. I don’t know what kind of band this guy is in, but I GUARANTEE it could have opened for A Flock of Seagulls, or maybe Devo. I also guarantee that it never, ever, EVER ever ever, would have opened for Styx.

This guy is clearly at a Styx concert, meaning he’s wearing a band’s shirt to go see that band, which makes him That Guy, which we can all agree is a bad thing to be.

Yeah, I dunno. I guess it’s your dad, or something? Search me.

If you can pull it off, add a gold chain to the mix. A necklace can make all the difference between “mildly overweight guy” to “guy named Tony who could probably make you disappear with a minimum of fuss.”

Alvin here is totally rocking the “Boring Literature Professor” cut. I say rocking because, as it turns out, Alvin is the largest collector of antique nursemaid rocking chairs in all of Devonshire. He even has a stuffed one that he sleeps with!

Shaving cool designs into a close-cropped cut is a hip way to show your support for the local football or cricket club, or even give a shout out to a recently imprisoned/murdered homey. Or, as seen here, your favorite walrus down at the inner-city zoo!

I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and HOLY COW AM I WHITE! I think a tanning bed would do more for Pat here than a haircut, so let’s just move on.

Oh, I’m sure that’s exactly what you want these people to believe. You know something, Bender? You ought to spend a little more time trying to do something with yourself and a little less time trying to impress people. You might be better off. All right, that’s it! I’m going to be right outside those doors. The next time I hafta come in here…I’m cracking skulls!

Did you think I’d leave out my African-American brothers? Of course not! That would be racist. This is Steve; he sports a classic black man’s cut, cropped tight around the ears, but without the careful trimming of the edges that indicates true sophistication. This haircut says: I’m not paying more than $15 for a haircut, and that $15 is COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS, BOY.

I know! It’s honestly just 8 hairs! I grew them all out, carefully curled them, and applied them around my face using approximately 3 pounds of spirit gum and enough hairspray to glue my entire head to the ceiling!

As far as I can tell, no, this is not Lou Diamond Phillips preparing to play Jaime Escalante in a prequel to Stand and Deliver. But I’ve been wrong in the past. Of particular interest here is the old “concealing the weak chin with a beard” trick, which has failed, as it always does. The joke’s on YOU, Lou!

If you really want to find a good hairstyle, look to professional athletes, right? Um…not so much. But you have to give this guy some serious props for trying to bring about some kind of dreadlocked Jheri curl.

Speaking of athletes, this fine fellow is Kevin Mench, a professional baseball player. He has what is widely regarded as the largest head in professional baseball, a size 8 (the same as mine!) noggin. He has the enviable sense to just cover it with hats and batting helmets as much as possible, and hope no one notices the fact that he doesn’t technically have a neck. Kevin also hails from Delaware, which basically means there’s something really nasty in our water.

I feel like I probably shouldn’t really burn this guy, since he’s, you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury and all, but come on, people, what better way to distract from the bald spot on the top of your head than by developing the most AWESOMELY OUTSTANDISHLY RIGHTEOUS pair of eyebrows EVER? If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think he was planning to grow them out so that he could comb them back over his head, totally putting the Combover Style Establishment out of business. I mean, who could compete with that?

Finally, we have what is probably the ideal big-head style; simply shave that crap off completely, and make sure there’s a pretty girl in all your pictures.

The graphic atop this here page sure is grim, ain’t it? It’s been up since winter, and I intend to put something more spring/summery up ons, but sadly my time at home with the computer has been SEVERELY curtailed by the fact that my wife is working on some kind of paper, and hasn’t let the laptop out of her grasp for 3 weeks. (I suppose it’s also possible that she’s developed a life-altering addiction to Teh Pr0n, but I don’t think so.)

It’s kinda sad, really, ’cause I have like 8 tons of totally hott photos I took with my camera over the last few months, featuring flowers and trees and geese and whatnot, that would be hella rad up there, but sadly I have not been able to edit and upload and make the necessary template modifications. Which is sad, really. Totally sad.

What is also sad is that, despite not having posted in roughly 9 days, I don’t have much interesting to say. I thought I did; I had in fact written four or five paragraphs of something that I thought was totally AWESOME when it was rattling around in my head, which of course turned into absolute pap when neatly typed into El Computador. So, I beg your forgiveness. I’ll give you a hint: it described my boy Kyle as “the fastest human being I personally know.” So, you know, HILARIOUS stuff there.

The weekend was pretty busy; I helped my dad move a piano to my sister’s house AND some of my grandmother’s stuff OUT of hers before she moves to Florida, and managed to do it without exploding my spine. We saw “Chicago” at the New Candlelight Dinner Theatre (it’s New!), which was outstanding. We went to a birthday party for our friend John, who is Old (not New!). Sarah went to the beach for a fun overnight with friends, and Charles and I joined her on Sunday morning because I was singing an evensong in Lewes that afternoon; it was windy and cold and I about froze my nads off. BOO TO THAT. We did get Nicobolis, though. Can’t beat ’em!

I’ve been keeping up with my jogging, although I haven’t been SUPER good about it; I try and get out three times a week, but sometimes it’s just one or two. I’ve basically been eating everything in sight, justifying this by saying “Hey, I’m jogging like ALL THE TIME!” As a result, I’m getting fatter and fatter, so now I’m back to my “eating nothing but vegetables and small amounts of meat with no sugar” diet, along with drinking buttloads of water. Great times! Not really.

Wow, I’m sure typing up the hilarity today. I’ll try and do better later in the week, really I will.

In which I hate technology, and technology hates me right back.(All up in my grill, yo.)

It’s heck of warm out today (low 60s), so, being a forward-thinking individual, I thought to myself yesterday “I should TOTALLY go running at work and try to eliminate the enormous amount of fat located between my crotch and my boobs,” and brought in running clothes and a towel to store in my locker downstairs in the poop room that has showers. And lo, I took an early lunch, went out, and ran 2.75 miles before the agonizing chest pain and developing foot blister made me stop.

Have I reached my point yet? Not even remotely.

So I came back in, showered, and grabbed lunch, which consisted of a Salisbury “Steak” made of, as far as I can tell, pressed gerbil cremains, along with green beans and cheesy potatoes au gratin (a quality side, to be sure). A few hours later, I realized I was still pretty hungry, so I said to myself, oh man, the SNACK machine will hook me up with FLAVOR.

So I wandered into the snack room, bought a bottle of Diet Coke, and then studied the snack machine for delectables. Sure enough, they had some kind of Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish, all over which I desired to jump. I attempted to stick my dollar into the machine, but was foiled! It would accept no bills. And I had just used the bulk of my change on my drink. Bemused, I pressed a few buttons on the front of the machine, which showed no sign of even being powered on. Argh!

I wandered aimlessly around the halls, looking for another snack machine, and finally found one. Sadly, it had no Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish. It did, however, have a three pack of chocolate cupcakes of the type I subsisted on in high school, so I inserted my dollar and pressed the proper buttons. The machine whirred for a moment, then beeped, and a small light appeared next to some words reading “Please make another selection.”

“What?” I replied. “But the other selections are not what I desire. Don’t mess with me, machine, I COLD RAN 2.75 MILES EARLIER AND AM NOT ONE WITH WHICH YOU SHOULD TRIFLE.” And I pressed the buttons again.

“Please make another selection.”

I tried to outwit the machine by requesting my dollar back, which came back in quarters, and inserting exact change, but I came to the conclusion that whoever inserted the latest supply of foodstuffs had improperly loaded the chocolate cupcakes. In the end I realized that the machines were involved in some kind of conspiracy not to sell me anything that might increase the amount of lipids bonded semi-permanently to my stern. I relented, bought a small package of peanut butter crackers, and went back to my desk to weep silently.

Just a few short notes for today:

• They still haven’t plowed my neighborhood, and so now the ice has sublimated and refrozen and is perfectly slick. I basically sledded out to the main highway today. Note that the 1998 Mazda Protege is NOT equipped with runners. I’d make some calls, but you know me, I don’t like to create a fuss. Plus I have a sneaking suspicion the guy in our neighborhood who is in charge of such things has probably taken 37 calls on the subject and might strangle me through the phone if I call him up and employ Sarcasm. So I’m gonna let it slide. For now. Unless I’m driving home with my son and I slide into a parked car at 5mph.
• My homeskillets Ped and Andy have started themselves a blog in which they intend to ridicule all things artsy. I fully support this, and not just because I’ve known the two of them for like 8,000 years.

  In fact, it’s an odd story, woven through the millenia: I knew Ped when I was like 8 or something, in public school. I think we ran across each other in Math League every year all through middle school and high school. Andrew I knew because we were in band in high school, but he also may have done dorky science and math stuff with me before then. And then we were all in the Ychromes together in college. Delaware is a small place.

  Anyway, check out their site, it’s highly amusing.

• I’m setting myself up for a serious amount of abuse here, but on the advice of my attorney Josh, I have invested in a neti pot. The idea, and this is really gross, is that you make a saline solution, and then you pour it into one nostril while it drains out of the other one. Then you switch nostrils. It’s very new age. It cleans out your sinuses, and then you get to spend a few minutes spraying water out of your snozz and spitting out nasty wet loogies.

  It’s almost as fun as it sounds, but I can report that my sinuses are so clear it’s disturbing. I’ve used it twice a day for about 3 days (although not this morning, ’cause I was in a hurry, yo) and have achieved major awesome results. There are downsides, however:

  1. The sensation of water pouring into your sinuses and back out the other nostril is pretty disturbing. It goes against all my principles of “avoiding sinus burn in the pool.” Doesn’t burn a bit, though, unless you’re an idiot and double the amount of salt in the solution.
  2. Sometimes the saline gets sort of trapped in your sinuses, and you can’t really feel it in there, then later on, you bend over for some reason, such as to kiss your wife, and salt water pours out of your nose all over, say, your wife’s face. Her response to this may be unpleasant.

  Still, it’s given me a reasonably clear schnozz for the last few days, and I’m looking forward to finding out if it improves my singing noticeably.

Okay, so uh, what’s in the news? Apparently that girl Anna Nicole Smith died, but I joked about that yesterday. (Was it too soon? The response I got from the interwebs was cold, to say the least.) There’s some banshee crazy astronaut ho that drove from Texas to Florida in DIAPERS to kidnap and likely kill her romantic rival. Apparently she wore diapers so she wouldn’t have to make unnecessary stops, but here’s the thing:

Distance she drove: about 950 miles.

Distance most cars can go before they need to stop for refueling: 350 miles.

So she had to stop AT least twice to get gas; would it be that out of the question to maybe take 5 minutes to whiz while the gas is pumping? Here’s the lesson I have learned: women are crazy.

What else? The weather has been making up for lost time; it hasn’t been above freezing, as far as I can tell, in like 6 days. I can’t say I’m sad about it, since I enjoy me some cold weather, but I’d like to have a good dose of 8″ of snow to go along with it and make it impossible for me to drive to work. They say we’re supposed to get snow on Tuesday, we’ll see how it goes.

I’m low-carbing it again, but it doesn’t appear to be working as well this time, probably because I’m screwing it up. It’s not my fault! People keep making me pies! I need to get on my bike some more and see if that helps force the old belly into “ketosis,” which apparently is what they call it when your body starts burning your fat for energy. I fully support the burning of fat; I am, at last check, roughly 85% fat myself. Maybe self-immolation is the answer…I’ll look into it.

Speaking of death-wishes, Charles has been crawling for a few weeks now, and has developed quite an interest in flinging himself down the steps into the foyer. So far I’ve caught him before he does so, but we need gates; a friend of ours is going to lend us some, but I’ve yet to go pick them up, so I guess I’d better do that. You know, before my son lands nose-first on cold, unforgiving ceramic tile.

As you can probably tell, I really don’t have anything of any interest to share with you, so I’ll just point you to Vinegar Man-Douche and let you have your own fun.

Hi y’all…I was going to post something more substantive today, but I just don’t have it in me. My world is shattered.

Link day, y’all! HECK YES!

• I got a new haircut yesterday, and trust me, I definitely considered this. It was simply fear of my violent wife’s wrath that kept me looking my usual self.
• It’s new! It’s fast! It…is it frowning at me? That’s an interesting marketing ploy.
• I admit: in an effort to understand this comic, I looked up the Ackermann Function as well as whatever g₆₄ is. I think the brain overload gave me cancer.
• This reminded me of my Recording professor at Peabody, Alan Kefauver, who had a reputation for making dumb freshmen believe that if you held a piece of recording tape to your ear and ran your thumbnail on it at just the right speed, you would hear the recording stored thereupon. He didn’t try to pull it on me, which nice ’cause I’m an idiot and would probably have tried it, but now I can pretend I wouldn’t have fallen for it.
• The beauty of socialised medicine! (Spelt all Britishly ’cause the story’s all Britishy.)
• Speaking as a Fat American, this is hilarious.

That’s all I got! So…bye!

Oh snap son it is TOTALLY 3:21am and I am working, doing work things at a work place. Technically my work is pretty much done, we’re just waiting for word that everything worked. Meanwhile, I’m putting up with my laptop keyboard, which is not so grood. The control key is not great, and also the O, U, and L keys have an annoying tendency to to type extra letters in strange ways, such that sentences often look like this:

I’m goiong to opoen the lletter, sir, lelt’s make sure to hide the childrens.

The backspace key is getting a heck of workout.

Anyway, I wanted to report two important things:

1. My friend Rachel now has a blog, although she feels remorse and guilt about the whole thing. Nevertheless, you should read it, as it’s far more entertaining than anything you might read here. I post horrific camera-phone pictures of my hair, for Jebus’s Own Sake. What the hell is wrong with me.
2. I have decided to start a new internet meme. It is entitled:

My Favorite Canadian

My favorite Canadian is Alex Trebek. Born to gay furtrappers in Jonquiere in 1765, he grew up learning the art of Indian negotiations. When one of his fathers was captured by the Algonquin tribe, he travelled by himself over the Mighty Mississipp’ to retrieve him, but found only the sweet ethnic love of a Cherokee medicine woman. She bore him 17 children before dying in a tragic balloon animal accident.

Alex found his true calling 180 years later on a Dutch variety show, hosting a segment entitled “Het Gevaar,” and occasionally smoking vast amounts of herbal seaweed and performing free appendectomies for Amsterdam’s large prostitute population. Eventually, he was invited to perform for the czarina in Prague during her tour of the Western Continent, and she saw fit to have him sentenced to death for referring to her as “That Wild Moscovite Skank.”

After the czarina was revealed to, indeed, be a pretty skanky ho, Alex’s sentence was commuted to 6 days cleaning the royal garderobe and occasionally shaving Royal Auntie Esmerelda’s neck.

By 1976, Alex Trebek was the most famous game-show host in the galaxy, and spent his evenings being serenaded by Pavarotti and fellated by Maria Callas. It was all downhill from there.

Who is YOUR Favorite Canadian?

I got pulled over on Saturday, but received no ticket. Wooooooooo, says I.

It was rather late (I had actually just turned the clock in my car back, as it was 2am EDT and 1am EST) and was heading home from the Carmen cast-party (Carmen opened TEH BOMBZORZ, as expected) and traffic was heavy (I don’t know why; this is the third parenthetical aside this sentence, a new record even for me). Over on the right hand side of I-95, the cops were sitting with their flashers going, which usually indicates they’ve already pulled over somebody, so slowing down is dumb. Everybody, of course, slowed down, including one idiot that swerved in front of me and then hit the brakes.

So I flashed my highbeams, swerved around him, and accelerated back to a healthy seventy miles per hour. Apparently the policefolks disapproved of this move, so they chased me down.

“What’s going on?” he asked. He appeared to be one bright policeman. What does one say to that? I went with

“Um…nothing, officer.”

“Where you goin’ in such a hurry? I saw you whip in and out of traffic back there.”

“Well, sir, the fellow in front of me swerved into my lane and hit the brakes when he saw you folks, so I had to swerve around him to keep from hitting him.”

The officer grunted at this. “You have anything to drink tonight?”

“Yes sir. I had two beers about 2 hours ago.” This was true; I’d stopped drinking at the party around midnight.

“Just two beers?”

“Yes sir.”

“Got your license, registration and insurance?” I handed them over, and he went back to his car, while I sat and waited. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they intended to charge me with; he couldn’t possibly have clocked my speed from where he was. I assumed they might charge me with an unsafe lane change, which I figured I could probably fight successfully in court, since technically a guy did change lanes in front of me and hit his brakes. I assumed I would probably get a warning for having one headlight out (the Mazda seems to go through them like Rush Limbaugh goes through oatmeal cream pies). After a few minutes, the cop returned.

“Slow down.”

“Yes sir.” I drove off. A surreal experience, all in all.