 Michael and Rebecca Wong |
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Michael and Rebecca Wong |
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There are certain things that piss me off in this world, as I'm sure there are for all guys. Of course, some of those things are fairly universal, so they're not even worth mentioning. Things like taxes, lawyers, loud cell phone conversations in restaurants, politicians, bad drivers, and high gas prices are on everybody's list, so I don't think I need to bother putting them on mine.
Therefore, I'll just list some of the oddball, off-beat things that piss me off. Maybe you'll agree with them, and maybe you won't. Or maybe you'll appear in them, which would mean we have a problem. Oh well ... I was never big on diplomacy anyway.
Aw, come on, admit it. You've seen 'em. You've snickered at 'em. Teenaged boys wearing baseball caps, wraparound shades, and maybe even racing gloves, proudly gunning the silly little 90 horsepower 4-cylinder lawnmower engines of their Honda Civics or 3-cylinder Suzukis. Typically, they'll take off from the stop light with a cacophony of noise, but they'll barely outrace the minivan in the next lane.
They have some of Daddy's money and they want to look cool but they can't afford a real sports car, so what do they do? They grab a little economy car, and they dress it up! Does it have gimpy wheels? No problem- run out and buy shiny alloy wheels, complete with such incredibly low profile tires that you almost can't see any rubber at all!
Does the body look plain? No problem- run out and buy ground-effects kits, and warp all of that useless shit around the bottom of your quarter panels and doors! Then, buy a spoiler for the trunk lid, and bolt it on as if you really need the extra downforce at 80 km/h (on the rear wheels of a front wheel drive car). You might even want to cut channels in your hood, for that authentic Ram Air look.
But for the coup de grace, they must commit the final atrocity. Yes, we all know what it is. It's the big fat exhaust pipe! They replace the exhaust system with a "high flow" system, so their little 90 horsepower engine will sound just like the throaty roar of a Dodge Viper's V-10! Of course, that's what they think. In reality, it just sounds like a lawnmower with a bad muffler, which is precisely what it is. In fact, it actually robs the engine of horsepower, because the engine's cylinder heads, intake manifold, valve timing, and fuel injection system were all designed for a certain amount of exhaust system back pressure (not that these dipshits would understand this).
If you drive one of these ridiculous little rally-car wannabes, take it from me: the ersatz rally-car look doesn't fool anyone. You don't look like Mario Andretti; you just look like a dork with a serious psychological inadequacy problem.
Will somebody please tell this asshole that he is not a world leader? He's just an aging rock star with funny looking shades and the most enormously overinflated ego the world has ever seen. That's just one of two reasons he pisses me off. The other reason, of course, is the fact that he goes by just one name, like Prince, Slash, Madonna, and every other egotistical moron who thinks he's too big to have a normal name (never mind the one his parents gave him).
Hey Bono, stop running around preaching to world leaders about your global solutions! Buy a clue ... they don't invite you because they care what you think of the way they run their countries. They don't invite you because they think you're an expert on world affairs. They only invite you because you're a rock star and they want to meet you. Get it? They're humouring you, because they're celebrity whores and they can never say no to a good photo-op! If they agree with you on some issue, it's because of domestic political pressure and not because of the mind-altering power of your presence. Now drop the charade and go back to making your annoyingly self-important music.
It amazes me that the big television network news anchors get so much money for what they do. Not only are they paid millions of dollars, but they are routinely interviewed on all manner of social and political issues, as if their opinions are any more valuable than those of Ralph the bus driver.
However, in case you haven't been paying attention, television news anchors are not reporters. They don't go out in the field, they don't get stories, and they don't investigate anything. Moreover, they don't have to be particularly intelligent, or knowledgeable. A typical television news anchor is nothing but nice hair. Any trained monkey with an expensive toupee and the ability to read a teleprompter could do the job with aplomb.
When it comes to TV quiz shows, I don't discriminate. Whether it's Jeopardy, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or Weakest Link, my opinion is the same. I hate them all. And Trivial Pursuit? I hate that too. It didn't have to be that way; as a meaningless game to waste time on a Sunday afternoon, one could make an argument in favour of trivia games. But it seems that everyone correlates success in those games with intelligence, which is simply ridiculous.
Get something straight, people: the ability to memorize trivia does not denote intelligence! Doesn't anyone remember why they call it "trivia"? Look up "trivia" in a dictionary, ladies and gentlemen. According to Websters, it refers to "unimportant matters". Get that? Unimportant, as in not worth memorizing, as in useless shit.
I am really tired of televised sound bites from that idiot bitch on Weakest Link, insulting her contestants' intelligence because they didn't know who wrote some goddamned play that opened on Broadway the same month JFK was assassinated. Could someone please explain to this haggard witch that Intelligence is learning ability?
Intelligence is the speed at which you can grasp new concepts, and it is measured by your ability to quickly figure out how to apply those concepts. It is not your ability to memorize useless shit! Albert Einstein would have done very poorly on those kinds of games, because he thought about far more grandiose things than the middle name of the offensive coach of the 1982 San Francisco 49ers, or the year in which the Thirty Years' war ended.
Someone, somewhere along the line got the idea that sports is not about running a quicker mile, or throwing a javelin farther than the next guy, or even team competition. Today, according to the "extreme sports" crowd, sports is about risking your life in incredibly stupid ways, and then bragging about all the places in your body where you need steel pins to hold your bones together.
They say that one only feels truly alive after having a close brush with death, either by nearly plummeting to your death during freestyle mountain climbing or by nearly pancaking in any of a number of other bizarre activities (such as the jack-asses who try to skateboard off their parents' houses roof). All I can say is: if you think you need to risk death in order to appreciate your life, then your life must really suck.
If U R reeding this and U like the way i speld this sentense, U R prolly a mentul reetard.
Don't you hate receiving E-mails like that? I am really tired of the current trend (popular among high schoolers with short attention spans) to abbreviate words into letters so that sentences collapse into what looks like alphabet soup.
I am also tired of people who misspell words in such a grossly bizarre fashion (eg. the common use of "prolly" instead of "probably") that one must question whether they know how to pronounce it.
Sloppy prose is a sign of sloppy thinking, broken prose is a sign of an irrational person, and the prose I describe above is a sign of brain death.
Do you ever get directions which sound like this?
"OK, you come up towards us, and then you make a left at the Dairy Queen just before county road five. After that, go through four stop lights, and then make a right turn at the street with the red brick house on the corner. Now, go two stop signs, jog left, and it will be the fourth house on your right, with the white garage door."
For all you country bumpkins who love to give directions like that, that was not a set of directions! That was a prescription for migraines, lost time, and marital strife!
It is incredibly easy to mess up directions like that (was it three lights, or four?), and it is also easy to make a mistake when trying to follow them. Moreover, once you get lost, it's hard as hell to correct.
If you want somebody to get to your house, here's a few suggestions:
Make a map and fax or E-mail it to them.
Use compass directions: north, west, east, south instead of right and left. This allows the driver to perform some basic orienteering, and it makes it easier for him to get back on track if something goes wrong.
Always give street names and numbers instead of (or in addition to) counting the goddamned intersections. It's too easy to mess that up, and it's a disaster waiting to happen. If you forgot the street names, the least you can do is get in your car, drive through the streets in question, and memorize their names. If you're giving someone directions to your house, this would mean that they are guests, and it would only be a common courtesy.
Make sure that if you give a street name, that name is the same as the one on the signs! Country bumpkins are bad for this: they'll often give a local, informal name for a street rather than the one on the signs, they'll give the name that the street used to have when they were growing up, or they'll give the street name rather than the county road number even though the intersection in question has a sign for the county road number rather than the street name.
If it's at night, turn on all of your damned exterior lights! It's not always easy to see the house numbers at night, and it doesn't help when your host doesn't bother making the house any more visible than its neighbours.
Why does Internet-based advertising have to be the most annoying fucking form of marketing on the planet? Think of the innovations that have come from this band of fuckheads:
Website pop-ups
E-mail spam
Flashing banner ads
Animated banner ads
Flashing animated banner ads
Website pop-unders
Adware that silently installs itself onto your PC and alters your browser's behaviour
And the worst thing is that it takes almost no effort for the fuckers to do it! At least old-fashioned snail-mail spam had to be carried to your doorstep, and they had to pay money to get him to do it. Now, any asshole with one of those motherfucking "3 million E-mail addresses!" CDs and an Internet connection can become a spam king for a day.
Here's my proposed solution to Internet-based advertising: find all of the people who buy things from these assholes and beat the crap out of them. Because the really sad thing is that you could exterminate every spammer and more would pop up. The real problem is demand: nobody would be doing this if they did not get a real, albeit tiny percentage of responses. This means that somewhere out there, there's somebody sitting in his Dorito-encrusted basement who actually clicked on one of those links and bought something, thus encouraging this behaviour.
He must be found, and punished.
I mostly use Linux to surf the Web. Do you know what happens when I come to one of these websites that was written by a knuckle-dragging troglodyte using Frontpage, and it tells me that it doesn't work unless I'm using IE? I go elsewhere.
On at least one occasion, I have actually made on-line purchases from the second website I found rather than the first, because the first website told me that I couldn't come in unless I was using IE. Let's get something straight, people. I'm the goddamned customer! I can use whatever fucking web browser I want, and I refuse to be bludgeoned into goose-stepping Microsoft conformity by an online retailer!
If you're an online retailer and your website is designed only to work with IE, you can just suck my cock, because that's as close as you're ever going to get to my wallet.
Did you ever notice that TV shows tend to either have no black people in them at all (eg- "Friends", "Cheers") or they are composed entirely of black people (eg- "The Cosby Show", everything on UPN)? And did you notice that you almost never see black/white mixed couples on TV?
What racist asshole decided that TV shows should be actively promoting segregation? This seems to be the new version of racial equality: "separate but equal". Black people are upset because they're under-represented on shows like "Seinfeld"? No problem- just create a black version of Seinfeld! Let's get something straight, people. In case you didn't figure it out 30 years ago, "separate but equal" is not equal.
She used her wealth and fame to jump the queue and adopt a child ahead of more deserving couples who have been waiting for years. Welcome to America, where money can get you anything. Even babies.
She wants a baby, but she has never demonstrated the ability to maintain a committed relationship, either with a man or a woman (she has now revealed that she is gay, which is not that surprising). What makes her think she can be a good parent if she can't even hold up her end of a relationship?
Ever the staunch education advocate, she vented on mathematics, by saying: "I think there's no way they should have to teach it now. We have computers. We no longer need to know why 3X equals 2Y over 4." Gee, thanks Rosie. You're a fucking moron. Way to go ... using your public visibility to promote the destruction of public education standards. Perhaps we should also stop teaching history because you can look it up on the Internet, science because you can watch science shows on PBS, English because computers have grammar and spell checks, and phys ed because kids can always play sports on their own time, eh?
She has people who do all her chores and take care of her kid whenever she's working, travelling, or attending celebrity shindigs. She complains that single parents get a bad rap. She ignores the fact that few single parents have her resources, and she helps sustain the belief (increasingly common among teenage girls) that a baby is not really that much of a disruption to your life.
She makes me sick. 'Nuff said.
If you're like me and you actually care about parking, you probably try to line up your car as well as possible when you slide into a parking spot. And if you're observant, you've probably noticed that the spots are much smaller than they were fifteen years ago.
It's always such an enjoyable experience trying to park in skinny parking spots, especially when you're driving a big luxury car, the guy on the right is a big honking SUV, and the asshole on the left is apparently drunk, because he lurched his fucking car into the spot at a 30 degree angle. But I guess the mall owners can pack in more sardines that way, so we should all be happy for them. Yippee!
I can almost tolerate the constant ringing of cell-phones that I hear whenever I go into a shopping mall. I can almost tolerate the morons who talk on their cell-phones at restaurants, as long as they keep their voices down. I don't need to complain about the motherfuckers who drive like drunkards while talking on their cell-phones, because everyone else complains about that already. I have a cell-phone myself (which I keep switched off most of the time), so it's not as if I'm intolerant of cell-phones in general. But I cannot tolerate the idiots whose cell-phones play a little musical song every time somebody calls them.
It's bad enough that a meal or worse yet, a movie is disrupted by some goddamned cell-phone chirping in the pocket of the fashionable little ass-wipe at the next table. But when that fucking piece of shit phone has to sing some imbecilic little song instead of simply ringing, that's the last straw. Time to buy an air horn and start using it.
Do I really need to explain this one? When is someone going to institute the death penalty for telemarketing? Call your local government representative, and ask them to get on it.
Look, I don't want large womens' advocacy groups sending me hate mail, but will somebody please explain to fat chicks that they shouldn't try to wear the latest fashionable tight clothes? I don't want to get into a war over body image and "fat acceptance", but these women have got to learn that you should dress a certain way when you're carrying those extra pounds, and that way is not Britney Spears' way!
Midriff-baring shirts, stretch pants, short shorts, and low-riding tight jeans look great on women who have the body to match. But they are downright scary when they're stretched over a woman with a wide ass and a drooping belly. Please, somebody stop the suffering. Britney Spears' clothes on a fat chick is a sight that no man should ever be forced to see.
I have one thing to say to men everywhere: you are men, so act like men, goddamn it! When eight American soldiers got killed in Afghanistan, I saw President Bush bawling his eyes out on TV that night. What the fuck was that? Crying like a baby on national television, knowing that Bin Laden and his fellow ass-wipes are pointing and laughing at you? And don't tell me that this is a "spontaneous outpouring of emotion"; he had plenty of time for spontaneous emotional outbursts before the cameras started rolling. He chose to have an emotional outburst on TV. This "men can cry too" bullshit has gone too far when it's politically useful to bawl like a baby on TV, and he is hardly the first person to have done it.
When Winston Churchill defiantly declared that his people would fight in the streets, fight on the beaches, fight in the air and at sea, was he crying? No, goddammit! When FDR declared war on Japan, was he crying? No! I've had it with this "sensitive man" bullshit!
It's not just the crying game. It's also a wholesale surrender to bullshit feminist suppressions of manhood. I saw Ben Affleck on TV the other night and a (hot) reporter asked him what he found to be the biggest turn-on in a woman. Ben, having been fully programmed, responded predictably by saying that he was most aroused by "a woman who can assert herself". Can you say "bullshit?" When he sees a woman asserting herself, he finds that a huge turn-on? That's a bigger turn-on than a woman with long legs, a round, firm ass, smooth skin, a pretty face, long hair, or a nice rack? Assertiveness? I know it takes more than physical beauty to build a long-term relationship, but let's face it; we're men, and everyone knows what really turns us on. Enough politically correct bullshit already.
We are men. We burp, we fart, we watch sports. We get in arguments over stupid things, we rough house, and we're not too good at cleaning up after ourselves. We're perpetually horny, we never really grow up or stop buying toys, and if a man can go an hour without thinking about sex, he's probably dead. Let's be proud of what we are, and not hide it.
What is it about celebrities and national anthems? At major sporting events, they always get a celebrity to sing the national anthem. And every celebrity has to "customize" it, with unnecessary vocal flourishes and extra notes. Every note in the original anthem turns into a fucking arpeggio in the customized version.
Hey celebrity singers, listen up: The anthem is not about YOU, asshole.
What the fuck is that shit on the radio that they call "R&B music" nowadays?
HELLO!!!! McFLY!!! *knock knock knock* You want R&B music? Try B.B. King. That fucking bullshit on the radio with its ridiculous "look what I can do with my voice!" singing style is not R&B; it's a fucking abomination against music. Yes, I know, it's very impressive that these singers can squeeze 42 different tones into a single word. SO WHAT? If I wanted to hear people doing voice warmup exercises, I'd go to choir practice.
Have you ever had someone call you an "elitist?" Let's say you mutter something about how people who flunked out of high school are obviously too stupid to vote (which they are), and someone retorts: "that's the most elitist thing I've ever heard". Are you supposed to feel ashamed? Fuck no, you should say "thank you"! Roger Ebert reported that he received an overwhelming deluge of hate mail accusing him of "elitism" after he criticized George W. Bush's public speaking skills. He should have been proud; expecting a public speaker to know how to publicly speak is not unreasonable, folks.
What the fuck is wrong with elitism? Should I be ashamed that I would value the opinion of an educated historian on historical matters over that of, say, the bus driver? Should I be ashamed that I value the conclusions of the scientific community on matters of Big Bang cosmology or evolutionary biology over that of the fucking Bible-thumping minister at the local Baptist church? Should I be ashamed that I value the information in my university physics textbook over the ignorant drivel being spewed by GreenPeace in its idiotic campaign against nuclear power?
Let's look at what the word "elitism" means: in ancient times, "elite" meant "noblemen", ie- useless aristocrats who inherited their money. But today, "elite" means "the best". When people say "elite Delta Force operatives" or "elite athletes", they aren't talking about noblemen, you know.
Wake the fuck up, people. This isn't the 18th century, and there's nothing wrong with thinking more highly of the skilled than the unskilled. The world already has enough problems without demonizing the perfectly reasonable tendency to respect people who know more than the average monkey.
Christmas should be a time of celebration and joy. Why is it, then, that every fucking year at Christmas, whiners crawl out of the woodwork? First, we have the Christian fundies such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who complain that it's actually a Pagan holiday which was co-opted by the Catholic Church (hence the name "Christmas", or "Christ-mass"; strictly speaking, Protestants should not celebrate anything called Christmas). And guess what; if you crack open a history book, you'll discover that they're right! But there's one small problem with their argument: nobody gives a fuck. Does anyone really give a shit that Christmas trees, yule logs, and mistletoe are all holdovers from ancient Pagan winter festivals? Nope. Lighten the fuck up, people.
Second, we have the "old school" Christians who whine every single fucking year about how Christmas has become "commercialized", and has left its Christian "roots" in favour of "gift giving". Maybe we should force these clowns to get together with group #1 so they can get their stories straight. Do they really think Santa Claus was invented in the last 10 years? Bzzzzt! Sorry, wrong! Santa's been around since at least the early 19th century, boys and girls. And there's a gift-giving tradition in the last week of December that dates all the way back to Ancient Rome, for fuck's sake (they called it Saturnalia). So shut the fuck up with your "waaah waaah Christmas is becoming too commercialized" bullshit. It was always commercialized, dumb-ass.
After the smoke clears and the bullshit settles, all of the whining about Christmas boils down to one thing: people who are trying to change the way other people celebrate Christmas. That's why some people get pissed off at Hallmark cards that say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". No one's stopping them from calling it "Christmas", but it actually offends them that some people choose to call it something else. And look at the way they get upset when they can't put Nativity scenes on government property, so they run screaming to the media every fucking year. Hey listen, if you're a Christian and you like nativity scenes, good for you. Put one in your living room. Put one in your church. Hell, put one on your front lawn for all I care. But noooooo, that's not enough, is it? Oh no, you're being "oppressed" if you can't put it on somebody else's property too! Well, cry me a fucking river. I guess "religious freedom" means "I get to run around putting my religious stuff on other peoples' property" now, eh?
Let's make a deal: you celebrate your way, and I'll celebrate my way. OK? And if you don't like that arrangement, you can blow me.
From time immemorial, mankind has debated the great questions. Where do we come from? Why are we here? And why the fuck can't people figure out how to behave in a goddamned lineup? Today I was waiting in line behind some idiot and her daughter at a ticket redemption counter in Playdium. Simple, right? No. The woman was patiently asking her daughter: "OK, we have a hundred and ninety tickets left. Do you want the furry bunny, or do you want the earrings?" And her daughter was jibber-jabbering with her as the two puttered about the counter looking at all the options ... with a half-dozen people lined up behind them!
Meanwhile, I was waiting with my son and we already knew exactly what we wanted. Hell, we had known what we wanted for so long that we were already talking about where we were going to eat once we finally got out of this fucking lineup! So I eventually got fed up, elbowed my way to the counter, and redeemed my tickets. Naturally, the idiot thought I was being rude. Well fuck you, I wouldn't have done that if you weren't taking longer than a fucking Catholic Mass to pick your stupid dinky little trinkets.
Yes, I have a little lapdog. And yes, Mr. Wannabe Tough Guy has a big tough scary guard dog. Does he think this makes him more of a man? Does he think that those moronic little put-downs like "that's not a real dog" or "my dog could eat that little rat dog for breakfast" will somehow assert his manliness?
Guess again. There's this psychological phenomenon known as "compensation", and people who brag about their dogs' manliness are compensating for their own lack thereof. If you're one of these idiots, I'm going to let you in on a secret: no matter what you may have heard, you will not impress girls by owning a dog whose schlong is bigger than yours.
Last changed: 2005/05/01
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