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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
It's been a while since I enumerated some of my pet peeves in detail. It seemed unnecessary after I put out the Fear Not Guide to Life, which is essentially an encyclopedic compendium of my pet peeves disguised as a self-published Hints From Heloise. But here's a short bunch of interrelated things that tweak my beak.
PEEVE: People who state their incorrect personal beliefs as fact. I have two examples of this one. The first I encountered while taking a quiz on the MythBusters website -- I love me some MythBusters. Here's the text that grabbed me: In September 2004, Derek Kieper, a senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote an editorial for the Daily Nebraskan entitled Individual Rights Buckle Under Seat Belt Laws in which he asserted that "as laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws. There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group."So. First of all, though it's not polite to speak ill of the dead, the guy who wrote the editorial is a freaking spasmodic dipshit moron. It's the worst kind of "editorial," where somebody who knows nothing barfs out a prescribed number of column inches of utter caca. Read the full editorial at your own risk. The sentence from the quote that really bugged me was: "as laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws." What? Huh? What are you talking about? Shouldn't that be prefaced by something like " I predict that..." or "If all other Americans feel the same way I do..."? This guy's argument basically tells me that he's a Virgo. Or to put it less astrologically, he bucks at authority just because it's authority. Which is another peeve of mine. PEEVE: People who buck at any perceived authority. not to mention: PEEVE: People who say offensive things in public way too loud. I'm talking about this guy, an actual friend of yours, who in a crowded restaurant does this: GUY: That girl over there is super fat and ugly. YOU: Um, wow. Could you keep your voice down a little bit? GUY: WHAT? HUH? DID YOU SAY I SHOULD QUIET DOWN? HUH? YOU: You are an asshole. 'Nuff said. Okay, but backing up a bit, a corollary to the first peeve above is: PEEVE: People with extremist views who really think that their opinion is shared by a majority of the world. Example two is John Bolton, super asshole supreme, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who looks like Bruce Dern with shingles. Speaking in 1994 at an event called the "Global Structures Convocation" he says: "If you think that there is any possibility in this country that a 51,000-person bureaucracy is going to be supported by most Americans, you better think again." [source] He's referring to the United Nations (great nominee, President Fucktard). This is such bizarre wishful thinking. How can you hold extremist views and not know they're extremist? Maybe it's a kind of invocation, like "if I say it out loud it will become true." Or maybe it's an attempt at mass suggestion: "If I say it out loud to the people, they will start to think as I say they think." Granted, his is not the most extreme viewpoint ever, and it's certainly boring. But it's just a matter of degree that separates his statement from the following: "If you think there's any chance in this country that a pot-legalization bill would fail to pass both houses, you're crazy; Americans just won't tolerate the demonization of hemp or marijuana any longer." No matter how you may feel about the issue, you recognize that a pro-legalization stance is extreme. And finally, for now: PEEVE: Message boards; idiots Forums and message boards are the devil because they give regular old boring stupid idiot people the impression that their opinion, anecdote, or viewpoint is valued, wanted, or valid, when of course it is none of the above. Can you imagine how many discussion forums there must be on the web? Can you imagine the sheer volume of disk space taken up by posts to the same? If you took all the ones and zeros that represented those posts, they would stretch to the horsehead nebula and back, and then you could make a really long rope out of those ones and zeros and then make a lasso with which you could corral all those fucksucking omnitards and hurl them into a FUCKING BLACK HOLE. Here's an example of what I'm talking about, from a forum on (again) the MythBusters site, the nominal topic being the myth of poppy seed bagels causing positive results on drug tests (and every error [sic], naturally): AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!!! I just want to put out my eyes when I see shit like that. There are soooo many things wrong with that, if I were making up a fake example of a bad message board, I would reject this as utterly unbelievable. Gabble. I should really have a seven-second delay (like the Howard Stern Show, or Saturday Night Live when somebody like Andrew Dice Clay was on (Ha! Remember the Diceman?)) to protect myself. If I saw something that would haunt me forever with its badness, the NBC censors in my head would hit a button, I'd jump back seven seconds to the moment before I was exposed to the badness, and I'd avoid it somehow. This next bit doesn't fit, exactly, not being a peeve, but: I love my aunt because she and I share many of the same peeves. We were talking about idiots and she expressed almost word for word a concept I wrote in the FNGL, which I know she hasn't read. I can't remember how she said it but my statement, listed under "Argument," went: "There are certain things that you believe are matters of opinion which are actually matters of fact." After she said her version of this and I howled in agreement, she mentioned what she calls "First Amendment Opinions," that is, completely uninformed opinions that people love to share because it's a free country. This weekend we were talking to a family friend who said he hated musicals, but he loved Rent and Le Miz. She said something like "your opinion is not particularly valuable in this context, K____, because you have already said that you don't like musicals. Why would we listen to, or care about, the musicals you do like? This is like: if you said you didn't like beer and then tried to tell us which beer you do like. it's like: who cares? 'I hate beer but I love Budweiser,' well, obviously your opinion is crap." Woo! I love my aunt. Okay. I know this was a stupid post with more formatting than content, I know it's been too long since my last post for this to be the case. I'm sorry. You deserve better. But seriously, it could be worse. At least I spellcheck, he said pathetically. 2 comments |
OTHER REVIEWS: Scrabble NEW! LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" - misuse of reflexive pronouns, as when someone says "Please talk to Bob or myself." Come on people now. "Myself" is not just a fancy version of "me"! LEARN IT. - tattoos in the Courier font - any use of Comic Sans |
