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Emoticons. (For the uninitiated, an "emoticon" is :-) or ;-) or
any such emulation of the human face using letters and punctuation.)
People who use emoticons have to resort to these crutches because
they can't express themselves sufficiently well in words to make their intent clear.
Urban sprawl. If not the root of all evil in this country, this is close. Dwight David Eisenhower is personally responsible for most of it because he pushed the interstate highway system on us. Eisenhower was assigned the task of getting an Army unit from one coast to the other in the 1920's, when he was a junior officer. It took him months. Then he saw how the German autobahns helped Hitler shift his troops around. The result? Eisenhower wanted a highway system. The unintended side effect was that anyone with the money fled the city for the suburbs. (I live there, too, for reasons I won't defend here.) Now we have rotting inner cities, separation and misunderstanding between social classes and races, pollution, longer commutes (and, paradoxically, greater traffic congestion in spite of the highways), road rage, and habitat loss. Welcome to America. Bounty hunters. In a recent case in my home town, bounty hunters looking for a bail jumper broke into a house where the fugitive had lived. Although the man living there was not the man they sought (and was of completely different ethnicity, and foreign to boot), they chased him into the basement and shot him. Fortunately, he survived. An even more recent victim, in Arizona, was not so lucky. Just as in the other case, the bounty hunters had the wrong man. They killed him as he tried to defend his girlfriend. If I remember correctly, they killed the girlfriend as well. The last I read of this case, they were being tried for their crime. But throwing them in jail won't bring back the wasted lives. Let's get rid of bounty hunters altogether - simply outlaw the practice. No e-mail from the idiots who do this for a living, please: I don't want to hear that tired old saw that the many should not be punished for the sins of the few. It doesn't apply this time. Law enforcement is not a private enterprise. Pointless profanity in movies. Hey, I'm a hard-core swearer, but the use of profanity in movies has gone further than a Compton homeboy would take it. "Fuckin'" this and "fuckin'" that has lost its shock value. It's just a distraction. Hollywood is full of incompetents who can't write good dialogue, so they're reduced to this. Profanity should be saved for the occasions when it's needed and useful; new motto: "respect your language, even when foul". Wise up, cretins. A tool constantly used grows dull. Tongue swallowing. And while I'm on the subject of movies, why the piranha act every time a man and woman kiss on screen? What are they trying to do, trade tonsils? It's no more sexy than watching a pair of fighting wolves lock jaws. Big Hollywood movies. (I'm on a Hollywood roll here. When I get hold of a good obsession, I hate to let go.) You know the kind of movie I'm talking about: big budget, big explosions, big stars, and a script that was cranked out by a machine. "Independence Day" is a prime example of why the people who foist this crap on us should be sent to a re-education camp. The theocrats who run Iran. They just renewed the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Islam is the only religion with special words for religiously sanctioned death and war: fatwa, jihad. That, and Mohammed's being the only founder of a major religion who killed anyone, sums up Islam. But these Iranian clerics have cranked up the hatred yet another notch. Rushdie would be perfectly justified in hiring an assassination team of his own to off some of these guys in self-defense. The kind of crap companies put out in their press releases: "ABC International is proud to be associated with its new partner XYZ Limited, and we look forward to a long and productive working relationship. We will continue to provide the cutting-edge products consumers demand, and we think that this new partnership will be synergistic to that effort." If you don't have anything to say, don't say it, guys. You only sound like idiots. Kenneth Starr Okay, how many years, and how many tens of millions of dollars has Kenneth Starr spent trying to bring down Bill Clinton? And have any other special prosecutors used illegally obtained recordings of personal conversations of a subject they weren't even investigating to expand the scope of their investigation? And why on earth would this heartless bastard subject a young woman's mother to a third degree interrogation that reduced her to a quivering mess? Not to mention the cost, which she's worried could bankrupt her. I could go on, but you either get the picture, or you don't. Starr's job is not to determine whether Bill Clinton cheated on his wife; and the multi-volume Pillsbury report, issued by a Republican law firm, has pretty much the definitive say on the Whitewater affair: that the Clintons were Jim McDougal's patsies, and were left holding the bag, and had to clean up McDougal's mess. May he rest in peace, and may Kenneth Starr soon join him. You've heard the phrase, "He's a waste of oxygen". Kenneth Starr is a waste of money, time, resources, and our collective trust. Make my day, Ken: subpoena me for this hotheaded outburst. It's just your style. The Oscars. Why do people watch this circus? Are there so few of us who see through the pretense? Oscar night is nothing but a stream of pretentious, smarmy phonies patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves. Now, isn't that special. They think they're dream-makers. Pardon me. This deserves a Technicolor yawn. Sport utility vehicles. My co-worker Carlos drove an SUV. He claimed it was nice to have the traction when there was ice on his street. Now this is a guy who lives in Wichita, which may be the flattest city in the country outside the Gulf states. They get almost no snow, and ice days are nonexistent, for all practical purposes. So he spends an extra $5,000 or whatever to get an SUV. Why am I skeptical? It seems to me that nearly everyone who drives these vehicles is pretending, just as Carlos did. There are exceptions - Kim has to haul around musical instruments and 2 very large dogs, for instance - but mostly they're a bunch of trendoids, city people trying to do the rugged outdoor thing. Meantime, they're wasting resources, especially gas, and making driving more hazardous for responsible people like me who bought their cars with an eye toward fuel economy and long life. I've half a mind to get a HumVee and run over them. Bank mergers. E-mail sent to NationsBank on 4/14, after announcement of their merger with Bank of America: In the last 4 years, I've banked at Bank IV, which was acquired by Boatmen's, which was acquired by Nations Bank. After both mergers, service deteriorated and fees worsened. This was particularly true after the Nations Bank merger. Not one person I've spoken to who was banking there before the merger has been happy with the result. Now there's another merger. I plan to vote with my feet and pull my accounts within a month, and use a smaller local bank. Their reply, in the faceless, innocuous, bland business-speak (the nauseating tapioca!) you would expect: Thank you for sharing your concerns with us. NationsBank has made a commitment to lower the costs of banking for as many customers as possible -- and has already acted to lower prices for 4 million of its customers. We expect to implement best practices of both BankAmerica and NationsBank to create a company that provides unmatchable coast-to-coast convenience and service for our customers. It would be refreshing if these cretins had the balls to admit the truth - that big banks charge higher fees, as studies have shown - and even more refreshing if they'd just tell me to go fuck myself, they're so big they don't need my business anyway. After putting the above flame on this page, I found this by Molly Ivins, which will give you a lot more information than my hotheaded rant did. Misleading nutrition information. Usually, the packages you get from a machine (animal crackers, pretzels, and so on) give you the information for fat and calories based on the package having a serving size of 2. What, am I supposed to give half the package to someone else? Then why sell that size of package- why not reduce it by half? The most startling thing is that for a long time, even Coke cans claimed they held two servings. [A tip of the hat to my bud Brett Limer for this tidbit when I was ranting about the packages.] Coke made a 12-oz. can because that's what people like to drink, then they claimed a 6-oz. serving of nutrients to make it seem healthier than it is. Coke has finally stopped doing this, but the solid foods from vending machines still follow the practice. Biblical literalists. Wake up and smell the coffee, guys. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. If evolution is an unproved theory, then so is the heliocentric model of the solar system. It makes more sense to believe the evidence. Even the Catholic Church, never known for quick acceptance of new scientific theories, supports evolution. The people who don't accept it are simply so insecure that they can't tolerate anything at all that's the slightest bit contrary to the mumbo-jumbo in their holy book. Messing with my work. Came to work this morning and the production Unix server my code runs on, and I maintain the database on, would not accept the login I've used for six months. Some asshole took away my sign-in and never bothered to tell me. If I catch the guy, well, I'll whine. Our new currency. The new hundreds, fifties, and twenties are ugly, pure and simple. I've been around the world and seen and used dozens of currencies, and our bills were the best, hands-down: the most attractive, and probably the most functional in size and design. Aesthetics seemingly count for nothing with the Treasury Department, though, and they've scrapped the traditional design for hideous asymmetrical bills with glaring empty spaces. I'll grant that we need anti-counterfeiting measures. But the new bills could have been designed with more thought for attractiveness. We all handle currency every day, and the twenties in particular (because we use them more) mean a loss of beauty for all of us, day after day. These little victories for thoughtless functionality add up to a huge victory for ugliness. Lawns. The number-one crop in this country is lawn grass. We use fertilizers and chemicals, poisoning the water table, and we mow with internal combustion engines, wasting resources and creating air pollution. Turf grasses are a holdover from our European ancestry; they don't do well in most of North America. In places like Denver, they have to bring West Slope water through enormous tunnels drilled through the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains so the idiots who live there can fritter it on their lawns. What a fucking waste. I'm not about to put any more than the minimum work into my lawn. I don't like lawns anyway. Anyone who doesn't agree is free to come over and work on mine. Just don't use any chemicals. And while you're at it, throw some seed on that dead spot in the back yard where I left the pile of leaves during the winter. People who park you in. It happened to me just the other day. A red car with California plates was parked over the line dividing our parking spaces, and I couldn't open the door of my car to get in. I had to go to the passenger side of my car and open the door and reach in and release the hand brake and push the car back. Then, when the car was completely out of the parking space, I had room to get in. People like this either don't care, are unaware, or don't want to share. I'm going to get some fliers printed up, with a peel-off backing, and glue them to the windows of people who do this to me in the future. They'll say, "Next time you park me in, I'll scratch your paint job with a key. The third time, I'll use my jack to break your stinking window so I can get in your car and roll it back out of the way. Try parking in your own space from now on." Misuse of the word literally. Why do people use the word literally when they mean the opposite? "He literally flew through the air." Unh-unh. Sit in the corner with your dunce cap on, and think about this for a while. Evil alien mutant children.. who come to visit and throw such loud screaming tantrums that the neighbors call the police. And children who leave the doors open in summer, making it simultaneously impossible and expensive to cool the house. |
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The above was written in late '97 and early '98.
I've decided to resuscitate this page. Here are my 1999 pet peeves: People who don't look. People who don't look where they're going. Like the guy who backed into my car when he was leaving his parking spot - and blamed me. Or the woman in the cafeteria who was walking backwards, and ran into my full tray - and blamed me. Does the word "idiot" ring a bell with you people? Audio-blitzkrieg. Anyone who uses the speakerphone when he's the only one in his cube, and everyone around him can hear it - especially if it's a long, loud conversation. Too damn lazy to hold the phone, and doesn't care that anyone else is trying to work. People who barge onto an elevator before anyone can get off. What's the logic behind this? Crowd the elevator? Create confusion? Bump into people as the door opens? What? It doesn't seem to occur to them that letting people off first makes more room for them when they get on, and prevents maneuvering inside the elevator. But they're in so much hurry they have to slow things down by creating crowding and confusion. Sneeze guards that are too low. Even short people have trouble with these; tall people like me have to become contortionists to get at the ingredients they want to use in their salads. People who barge through doors when they can't see who's on the other side. Someone hit me in the elbow this way the other day. Another guy, who was pushing on the door with his fist - or thought he was, except that he was looking back over his shoulder - buried his fist in my stomach. "Thank you" for "please". As in, "Thank you for putting your trash in the proper receptacle." I haven't done it yet, so how can you thank me? "Thank you for not smoking." How do you know? "Thank you for wiping your feet." No, thank you for imagining that my command of the English language is so minimal that I don't notice this patronizing usage. Laugh tracks. Annoying, distracting, unnecessary, and they imply that we're too stupid to decide for ourselves what's funny and what isn't. We for I. Pete Rose referred to himself in the plural several times the other day. Politicians have taken to doing this a lot lately. Traditionally, this is allowed only on the editorial page, and to a reigning monarch. Anyone else who does this is obviously trying to boost his own importance, but it's so egregious it would be laughable if it weren't so God-damned annoying. Starbucks Coffee. The beans are so over-roasted that all the acids are destroyed and the only taste that's left is charcoal. People who drink this crap don't know jack about coffee. Phony British spellings. I don't mind it when the English do it - after all, they were raised that way - but when an American writes "favourite" or "colour" or similarly misspells a word, he's showing himself as the same kind of phony who affects an English accent when he grew up in the Bronx. Gus is a particularly bad offender, even using "attourney"! He indulges himself in other astonishing blunders as well, such as the use of "it's" for "its" and the subjective in lieu of objective ("He gave it to her and I"). And this guy used to hang out at Oberlin? He's an ignoramus. |