I'm off to change my ringtone again! (Sweetie's Hunk of the Week, 60)

It's time for the 60th Hunk of the Week...

Joe Penny!

You Don't Know Joe Penny Without You Have... Okay. I've got nothing.

Seriously. I've been screwing around for just over an hour trying to think of something, anything, to say about Joe Penny. As you may have guessed from the intro, and from the "Okay, I've got nothing" part here, I've got nothing.

In the better-part-of-an-hour, I've read Wonderella. I checked my Twitter page. I did blog posts on two other blogs (This one, and this one). I even changed the ringtone on my phone. (I went with Barber of Seville for almost everything, but I changed it to hand claps for alerts.)

I also actually tried to research Joe Penny. I looked up some images of him, these, to be exact:



And that second one, I thought okay, I can do something with that. He's all 70'd-out, with that towel and that hair, like he'd be playing the main government guy in Manimal. But then, nothing.

So I looked at what he's done, and saw a lengthy career with all kinds of shows that I could be making fun of -- from Riptide to TJ Hooker, to Cold Case (a/k/a The one that's not Law & Order, not CSI, and not even the one that everyone confuses with CSI but which has Mark Harmon, what's-it-called, NCIS, that's right, but not that one, either.)

Still... nothing. I checked my email and went and gave Mr F and Mr Bunches some cookies and started a movie for them. I took the new (used) desk chair that I'd bought today and put it out in the garage because it turns out the new desk chair, as comfortable as it looked, is also rickety and sitting in a rickety chair makes me feel like I'm having a series of mini-heart-attacks, which actually is not that unlikely when you consider that I rushed downstairs to eat Pancakes-On-A-Stick for breakfast this morning.

And even that didn't give me any ideas for what to say about Joe Penny.

His name, too, should be good for something, shouldn't it? I worked on that for a few minutes. Joe Penny. Joe Penny. Joe Penny. It sounds like... it seems like... well, it seems like the kind of name that it should be easy to make a sounds like joke about, but, again, nothing.

I went for the old standbys: Look at the names of characters he's played. Think of something to say about those. But aside from playing Speed in something called "Mother Juggs & Speed," a show I assume is either a porn flick or a made-up movie someone slipped in there to test IMDB's screening process, there's nothing there, either.

By the time I finally sat down and said Okay, let's just write this thing, then, it was really starting to concern me. Not only do I never get writer's block -- never -- but I never have a shortage of things to say about the movies and shows and hunks Sweetie likes.

But even with this:


I just had nothing. It's not even like he was boring. I could work with boring. It's like everytime I tried to think about Joe Penny or writing up the 60th Hunk of the Week, my attention was shifted away like he's surrounded by a Somebody Else's Problem field or something.

And that's when it hit me.

No, not the

Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm About Him: There's plenty of stuff that makes you go hmmm about him -- ranging from the fact that he allowed his repaired hairline to be featured on something called the Balding Blog ("Your hair loss questions, answered daily.") to...

... wait a minute, let me back up.

Your hair loss questions, answered daily?

What questions about hair loss can be answered daily? Aren't there only a limited number of hair loss questions? As a guy who himself is losing hair, I can think of exactly three hair loss questions:

1. Am I losing my hair?
2. Is there anything that can be done to stop that?
3. How does this toupee/transplant/other 'miracle cure' make me look?

And the answers to those questions are all obvious and well-known:

1. Yes.
2. No.
3. Oh my freaking God! Is your hair under attack by some sort of alien.... uh, that is, I mean, maybe try a hat, instead.

So what questions need to be answered daily?

I think, from here on out, I'm going to redouble my efforts to make money off people being stupid. Previously, I was going to focus on selling dumb stuff to rich people, making sure the rich people bought it through a series of simple steps like ""initially refusing to sell it to them" and then charging them lots of money for it. But now I'm going to also get rich by selling stuff to guys to stop hair loss. It might slow your hair loss and make it look fuller, I'll tell them, and then have them shovel the money into my minivan. (I'll buy a minivan for that purpose.) In a world where we sell hair-in-a-can, I can't help but get rich.

But it's not Joe Penny's fake hair and the Balding Blog that are the thing that makes me go hmmm about him. Nor is it the fact that I can get Joe Penny's exclusive lasagna recipe online. [SPOILER ALERT!: THERE'S LASAGNA NOODLES IN IT.]

No, those are not the things that make me go hmmm about Joe Penny.


No, wait, they are. But they're not the thing that I figured out. What I figured out is this:

The Reason I Assumed Sweetie Liked Him: I figured that out. Sweetie liked him because of the Somebody Else's Problem field.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about [SPOILER ALERT! THAT'S EVERYBODY!] a Somebody Else's Problem field is an idea created by the late, great Douglas Adams, who came up with the idea of spaceships being powered, and protected by, the Somebody Else's Problem field. How it works is this: You make your spaceship as ridiculously out-of-place and eye-catching as possible; in the books one spaceship was an Italian Bistro. Then, when people see it, they will realize that whatever they're looking at is so wildly out-of-place that they can't comprehend it and their minds will instantly decide it's somebody else's problem, and stop thinking about it.

You know, the way The Boy's mind works about every single chore around the house, including feeding himself.

So Sweetie, I assumed, had picked out Joe Penny because as a Hunk, he is protected by a Somebody Else's Problem field -- I can't make fun of him. I can't even think about him. I can't write about him, talk about him, post pictures of him. I sit down to do it, and he fades away and before I know it I'm back on Twitter thinking about picking a Twitterfight with that one guy who keeps ranting about illegal immigration.

Sweetie had to do this, I figure, because she's tired of me making a big deal out of her Hunks and tired of me realizing just how much time Sweetie devotes to the Hunks, or how much time I assume she devotes to the Hunks, which is pretty much accurate I assume. (I assume that Sweetie's time breaks down on a daily basis like this: 8 hours of sleep. 4 hours of caring for Mr F and Mr Bunches. 1 hour of preparing dinner and household chores. 1 hour of figuring out what that stain is. 10 hours of "looking up Hunks online.")

I may be a little off on the exact figures, but I'm pretty close. How else could Sweetie have an encyclopedic knowledge of every single Hunk? How else could Sweetie pick out obscure hunks that nobody's ever heard of who then go on to be major movie stars?

When it comes to Hunks, Sweetie is what Stephen Hawking would be if instead of stealing Dane Cook jokes, Stephen Hawking thought about Hunks.

But Sweetie's probably embarrassed that she spends upwards of 70 hours per week on her Unified Theory of Hunkiness, or she doesn't want me to feel insecure, especially this week, when I'm already a little insecure because when we went to The Boy's rugby game one of The Boy's friends was giving Sweetie the eye (even though I was right there) and then Oldest's boyfriend said to Oldest "Your mom is really hot," and Oldest said "She's my MOM."

Not "She's married."

"She's my Mom." That was Oldest's reason her boyfriend shouldn't think Sweetie is hot. Because I, apparently, am not a hurdle for her boyfriend to overcome in thinking Sweetie is hot.

So this week, I assumed, Sweetie was trying to protect herself, or my ego, and so she used her SuperKnowledge of Hunks to pick out a Hunk who couldn't be noticed, really, or talked about.



But I caught on. You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to fool me -- especially because I get up pretty early to get those Pancakes On A Stick.

With all that, let's check into

Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: "He’s got a nice smile… he’s got nice hair. He’s gorgeous… he’s got a hairy chest."

Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: Come on, Sweetie, you know he's... he's... um.. hairy chest?

Okay, that's just weird.