Mattcast 060331: I definitely love Huc-a-Poo’s
March 31, 2006
It appears that my lifelong dream of having my phone number written on a bathroom wall has finally come true!
Mattcast 060331: I definitely love Huc-a-Poo’s
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Mattcast 060330: The Writing on the Wall
March 30, 2006
It would be creepy if it weren’t so cute. Welcome to Huc-a-Poo’s.
Black Men On Television
March 17, 2006
While it is a fact, as some of those close to me know, that my grandfather usually refers to black people as “coloreds,” it’s not a term of derision and he genuinely is a good man. That said, saying the word “coloreds” does make it hard not to paint someone as a racist.
Lest anyone dwell on that possibility too long, the other day my grandfather reminded my mom of just what a sweet, if not sometimes confused, man he is. When she arrived yesterday for her usual visit to check on them and dole out medication, granddad was agitated because of the lack of adequate African-American representation on daytime television. My mom tells it:
He was sitting there, just going on and on about how somebody had taken all of the black men off the television, because he hadn’t seen one all afternoon. Grandmama [my equally entertaining grandmother] was yelling over him that she’d seen “plenty of black men” on television all day. Daddy handed me the remote, and told me to “go on and see if you can find one.” So I turned it to the channel that Montel comes on. I said “see, daddy, here’s a black man who has his own show!” Then I went a few channels down and there was an ad for the Johnnie Cochran Law Firm, and I said “see, there’s one, a lawyer.” And daddy said, “well, I don’t know how you got ‘em to show up but that’s good.” Grandmama just said “I told you so,” and I changed the subject.
I love them.
Today, my grandmother called my mom at work because she was “looking for some Martins.” Mom explained that they were Martins, and grandmama replied “your daddy wanted to get some gas in the car, but I didn’t feel like driving so I wanted to see if Jim would drive us.” Jim’s my uncle who lives in Orlando. Mom told her to go ahead and call Jim and see what he said.
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I don’t know why I was listening to the police scanner, but this is what I heard:
March 16, 2006
433: 414, be on the lookout for a black Chrysler Pacifica in the area, with Chris Meyers dealer plates or no plates.
414: 10-4
(beat)
414: What the hell is a Pacifica?
433: It’s like
(beat)
433: Like a cross between a minivan and a Jeep Cherokee
414: ...
433: Like a bigass van-slash-SUV
414: 10-4
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Please take off all hoods
March 12, 2006
Hampden has the most beautiful white trash signage.
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How to be a Gumshoe
March 8, 2006
Wow, you are one fat dude. Figures we can see an empty place in the distance. You even have fat on your fingers!!! Go on diet fat boy.
Such was the comment left for me, like a flaming bag of poo, in the comments of my article Thanks a Lot, AppleCare. Now it’s not like I’m sensitive about being a fat guy, but some things just aren’t polite. So I decided to sleuth around.
The comment was left by a user calling themselves “The Real Matt Thomas” with the email address mtt251@hotmail.com.
Well, a Hotmail address. That makes it difficult to discern the real culprit. Let’s check Mint to see what their IP address was.
plksgate.mssny.org
167.206.249.151
Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Mint also lets us know that this alleged “real Matt Thomas” found iammattthomas.com by searching on Yahoo! for the phrase Matt T. I could have told him that a search like that wasn’t going to get him very far but, alas, he never asked for my advice.
The Medical Society of the State of New York owns the address mssny.org. Let’s go to their web site and see if we can find any clues. The Contact Us page is a good place to start.
Hmm, no Matt Thomases work there, but there is a person there named Matt Talty. Doing a simple search at Switchboard.com for everyone with his name in the state of New York brings up a lone result. And as it turns out, that result is for a person who lives just outside Lake Success, NY, the headquarters of MSSNY.
And it also leads us to another clue. Remember the email address they left—mtt251@hotmail.com. It just so happens that 251 is also the first three digits of the home address of that person.
So, are “The Real Matt Thomas” and Matt Talty one in the same? It’s hard to say—or it was, until I tried searching for “Matthew T. Talty” (remember, the email address is mtt251@hotmail.com. MTT looks an awful lot like initials).
That led me to a page that I won’t reference out of a respect I have for the person’s privacy that I am certain he would not extend to me. Because while being a gumshoe is fun, I’m not entirely heartless.
It looks like I found my culprit. What am I going to do? Well, there’s not a whole lot to do. Our friend Matt just thinks I’m a big fat ass, for whatever reason, and I guess that makes him upset. For me, it was just fun to figure everything out.
I’m not encouraging anyone to use the easily-findable personal identification about Matt to get in touch with him at all. But he should know—as should we all—that the internet’s a wide-open place, and if finding random people to criticize for being fat is the best use he can find for it, he can’t complain about the consequences.
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Hell out of Dodge
March 7, 2006
It’s not exactly an announcement, since almost everyone who knows me already knows it’s happening, but for the sake of posterity, I wanted to get the news out to any interested parties who, for whatever reason (probably because I don’t like you), haven’t heard yet.
I’m gay.
Wait, I already did that one.
I’m leaving Baltimore.
I have to say it really was a tough call. While living in Baltimore isn’t exactly everything I ever thought it would be, I’ve enjoyed making this my home for the past year and there are some things I’ll miss. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long since I packed up the Jet, picked up Camp and started the long journey that led me to where I am today.
I’m certainly better off for it. Meeting and getting to be friends with this guy, this guy, and this guy has been great. And I’ve made friends who don’t have web sites but are awesome people all the same. I’ve worked with a crazy-talented group of people at Silverpoint, and I’m glad to report I’ll be continuing to do so. I’ve seen things I wasn’t sure if I ever would. I’ve met some really, really weird people. I’ve had a few hot dates (wink wink, Mike). I rode public transportation. I went to my first Pride. And while it’s been difficult to live so far away from my friends and family back home in Alabama and Georgia, all in all it’s been for the best.
I’ll be in town until mid-March. After that I’ll be taking a much-needed week off and getting settled in my temporary digs back in Alabama. While I won’t miss all of you, I’ll definitely miss some, and for those of you—you know who you are—who made this experiment worthwhile; thanks.
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More Good News
March 6, 2006
My brother, John, 
found the iPod nano I thought I’d lost during my trip to Alabama in January. The left-for-dead nano was found in the remotest of possible places—the glove box of my mother’s car. I have no idea how we managed to not look there, but congratulations to John, who just won himself a slightly-used iPod nano since I’ve already bought an iPod video to replace it. Nice sleuthing, bro!
Lamentation Vacation
March 2, 2006
Confident that my self-imposed period of wailing and gnashing of teeth has successfully brought down the moods of myself and those around me, lately I’ve been making a concerted effort to put on a happy face, as my grandmother would tell me to do. Then she’d ask me who I was and where her house went.
It’s not always easy, because my initial reaction to things not going my way is to get frustrated. Right after I came back to Baltimore from my unscheduled “vacation” to Alabama, I was screaming like a banshee as I drove around Baltimore, pissed as hell that I couldn’t find a Western Union location that actually knew how to transfer money with Western Union. A traffic light turns red on me, I can’t find a parking spot at work, these are the sorts of things that become personal tragedies when one is already on the edge.
I’m doing better, lately. Apple breaks my PowerBook worse than it was before when I send it off for service—water off a duck’s back. I get a nail in my tire and then can’t figure out how to change the damn thing so I have to stand around while a tiny little girl from VW Roadside Assitance does it—calm and collected. Little things are little things again, and that’s a good feeling.
And good things are happening. I’ve started working with a really cool trainer, Demian from Lifetime eFXects (he gets a plug for putting up with my endless rescheduling). I met a new pal who’s a great conversationalist, Mike (I told you I’d “blog you!”) I finally got my PowerBook back and it seems to work now.
And despite my “Check Engine” light coming on today and getting violently ill from my Subway lunch, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m officially out of my slump. After all, grey skies are going to clear up. Or so I’ve been told.
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