Preserve the 80s

There are a lot of words/phrases/pronunciations that annoy the hell out of me and should never be said while I am within hearing range. Just what consequences will you suffer if you violate this request? Probably none, but if you’re not careful I might end up trying to come up with a blog post about it that I abandon after I can’t get past the third or fourth sentence, so you’d best watch out.

I was going to use the Ashton Kutcher scale of annoyingness for each word/experession, but once again I’m having trouble uploading my images due to wordpress sucking ass, so you’ll just to imagine pictures of 1-5 Ashton Kutchers  with a shit eating grin next to each phrase to indicate its level of deplorability

1. “Vaca” for vaction – Three Ashton Kutchers

Nobody ever said this until about a year ago, but now everyone does. It’s only subtracting one syllable, so it’s not like it’s really saving any amount of time, it’s just adding a whole fuckload of annoyance to the listener. I don’t really know why, but for some reason it reminds me of the song “Vacation” by the GoGos which is a song that I hate more than life itself. I suppose it doesn’t make any sense since they actually say vacation correctly in the song, but I’m sure had the expression “vaca” been around back then they would’ve used it. I also despise their song “Our Lips Are Sealed”. I wish their lips were permanently sealed in cement. Once again I’m getting off on a tangent but I have NLD, and that’s what I do.

2. “Ant” for Aunt – 2 Ashton Kutchers

I realize this one is somewhat of a regional dialect so I guess I sort of have to let it go but I still hate it. U is a letter and must be recognized.

3. “Cue-pon” for Coupon – 2 Asthon Kutchers                                                        You don’t call your car a “kewp”, you don’t put “cryoo-tons” on your salad, you don’t clip “cue-pons” from the newspaper. Enough said.

4. Shotgun, when used as a term of reservation – 4 Asthon Kutchers

I haven’t heard anyone say this in about 8 years, but used to hear it all the time in high school. People would say “I’ve got shotgun on those fries”, “I’ve got shotgun on that chair”, “Shotgun no blitz on that vibrator”, etc etc when they saw something they wanted and wished to lay claim to it. I’m not sure who or what was responsible for starting that trend, but if I ever find out who the originator was, they’re getting my foot up their ass.

5. “insert word: FAIL” 3 Ashton Kutchers

This one comes from Failblog, one of the most annoying internet memes in recent memory. I don’t really know why I hate Failblog as much as I do. Being the fuck-up that I am, I should enjoy seeing others out there whose life efforts are as fruitless as mine, but instead it just pisses me off.  Maybe it’s the wording, maybe it’s the popularity of the site, or maybe it’s just some other intangible quality I can’t quite put my finger on, but as Tourettes Guy would say, I hate the shit out of it.

6. “Kleenex” being used for non Kleenex facial tissue – 1 Ashton Kutcher

Kleenex isn’t the only kind of tissue out there. Give Puffs and all of the other brands the respect they deserve and call them by name. If you ever ask me for a Kleenex, be prepared to be denied unless that’s the actual brand I have within my possession.

7. Using “google” as a verb – 5 Ashton Kutchers

Google is the most overrated search engine of all time and should not become a part of our lexicon for in any form other than a noun. In my mind, to google something means to mindlessly devote yourself to it no matter how much ass it sucks. The only thing people are googling these days is google itself.

8. Saying “I itched it/myself” rather than “I scracthed it” 3 Ashton Kutchers

This one doesn’t need much explanation. You never hear anyone who’s just painted their house say they “housed it” instead of painted it and you never hear anyone say “I girlfriended her” after they’ve banged their girlfriend. Why? Because if you use the subject of a sentence where the verb should be it makes you sound like a dumbass. Why doing that with the word itch gets a free pass I will never understand.

9.  “It matters on” instead of “It depends on” – 2 Ashton Kutchers

In all my life I’ve only known one person who has said this and I haven’t seen her in well over ten years, but that annoying phrase of hers still rings in my ears on a daily basis. She was also a huge fan of Smash Mouth, so that doesn’t help her case any.

10. “Booya”- 5 Ashton Kutchers

Anyone who says this should be shot on site.

11. People blowing on baby’s stomachs- 500 Ashton Kutchers

Yes, I understand that this one isn’t a figure of speech and I also understand that I limited my scale to only 5 Ashton Kutchers. However, this is the most annoying action known to mankind so I couldn’t leave it off the list. The penalty for doing this should be similar to the one for saying booya, only the shooting should be carried out in a less humane fashion.

12. “Christening” instead of Baptism – 2 Ashton Kutchers

My mom says this one all the time and I hate it.

13. Calling those small hamburgers “sliders” 1- Ashton Kutcher

I’m pretty sure that’s actually the correct terminology, but I hate it anyway. We need to come up with a new term for those. I suggest “miniature burgers”.

14. “Make Love” instead of “Have Sex”, “Bang”, “Engage in Sexual Intercourse”, or “Hot Depression Injection” (the proper term for sex with me)  – 4 Ashton Kutchers

You would think in a society that is as open about and obsessed with sex as ours is, we’d be able to actually talk about sexual relations without having to resort to hackneyed and nonsensical euphamisms. There’s no such thing as “making love”, the phrase is meaningless.

15. “Sleep Together” – 5 Ashton Kutchers

Same as “make love” only even more annoying. Never say you slept with somebody unless you literally mean that you slumbered alongside them.

There are probably upwards of 1000 more items I could have added to this list, but this is pissing me off too much and I need to go to Wendy’s now to get this off of my mind. Farewell.

It seems the Apple tablet, or “iPad” is sucking just as much as I’d hoped, if not more. The youtube videos of it getting slammed by consumers in their reviews are better than porn.

In looking at the analytics for my site, it seems that a good amount of the hits I get come from people who search for “depressing facts”, “depressing facts about life”, “depressing things”, or “depressing life”. With this knowledge in mind, I’ve decided to give my readers what they want and serve up another list of reasons why we envy the comatose.

1. I couldn’t come up with a better topic for this post

2. Gas prices are once again on the rise

3. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show barely contains any visible lingerie anymore

4. One can’t go to a grocery store without seeing those John and Kate assholes on the cover of every magazine.

5. “Balloon Dad” wasn’t castrated.

6. Taco Del Mar may not be coming to Connecticut after all.

7. Whoever writes “Eat This, Not That” is still employed

8. Charter Oak Health Insurance is increasing its monthly premiums by more than 20%

9. McDonald’s said they will not bring back the McDLT, ever.

10. 33% of people aged 18-34 are now living with their parents. That means 1 in 3 people are now as pathetic as me (at least in one aspect) and that’s just disturbing.

11. Barack Obama doesn’t like bowling.

12. Depressing fact #10 was grammatically incorrect. I should have said “as pathetic as I am” rather than “as pathetic as me”. Despite the fact that I went through the effort to point that out, I’m still too lazy to change it.

13. Restaurants never sell half sour pickles anymore. It’s always the kosher dill bullshit now.

14. Home Improvement is now on TV Land. Home Improvement is NOT a classic television show. I’d rather watch 5 hours of senior citizens getting catheterized than 5 minutes of Home Improvement.

15. You can’t get a gmail account without giving google your mobile phone number. Fuck you google. Fuck you hard.

16. Without google I wouldn’t have made this post since I’m dependent on those assholes for my website analytics.

17. There aren’t any Rax locations near any airport accessible to me.

18. People are still donating to Quinnipiac University.

19. I can’t find the commercial for Jello when it was first put into single serving cups on youtube.

20. Cool-whip isn’t really completely dairy-free. It contains a small amount of a protein derived from milk.

21. I haven’t done shit to get the preservethe80s store going yet.

I hope it will suck more ass than the Titanic, the Edsel, Waterworld, New
Coke, and Milli Vanilli all put together.

Lately it’s occurred to me that my taste in tv differs wildly from the taste of the average person. The shows I seem to enjoy most either get canceled within a few weeks or ended their original run 20+ years ago. Fortunately some of these shows are available on TV Land, such as the great Sanford and Son, and others, such as The Mullets, have faded forever into obscurity. My goal in writing this post wasn’t to wax nostalgic for my favorite lost tv shows, but rather to bitch about the popular ones that I hate, so I’ll get started.

1. The Office – For a couple of years now I’ve heard people incessantly quote and talk about this show but I never watched it. That recently changed a few weeks ago when I actually watched a couple of episodes on TBS. The hour or so that I spent watching them was about as enjoyable as the time when I was a kid playing basketball when my friend threw a bounce pass that hit me square in the balls. Usually when people constantly imitate a line from a tv show, it’s much more annoying and much less comical than when the actual character on the show says it. However, when it comes to the “that’s what she said” line from The Office, it’s infinitely more annoying when the character himself says it than it is through any imitator I’ve ever encountered. Most of the characters on the show remind me of the assholes I went to college with who I’d get stuck working with for group projects who would have me do all the work then they’d take all the credit…. but that’s material for another post.

2. The Office (UK version)- I don’t know how popular this show is, at least in America, but I’m assuming it must be very popular in the UK as it was the inspiration for the American version. I’ve never even watched 1 second of this show aside from commercials, and I already hate it more than anything else on tv. I especially hate that blond haired guy on the show who looks like an adult version of that kid from Home Alone. Every time I see him on tv I seriously consider smashing the cable box so I won’t be subjected to his maddening visage again.

3. American Dad – When Family Guy first came out, it was one of my favorite shows on tv. When it finally came back from cancellation, it wasn’t the same show anymore. It became pretty much nothing but meta-humor and a sounding board for Seth MacFarlane’s political views. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to let his views and messages be heard, but making them the basis of the show took away from any of the enjoyment I once got out of it. You watch a show like Family Guy to escape from the stresses and problems of life, not to be reminded of them.

I’m getting off the subject a little bit here, but my point is that American Dad is just a clone of Family Guy – not of the Family Guy I once loved but rather of the current Family Guy which is unwatchable. Not one character on the show is even remotely likable. If you took the characters on Family Guy and removed all of the humorous/likable aspects of them, you’d have the cast of American Dad. I despise all of them, but I think I hate the alien most, though the daughter gets a high hate ranking too as she looks like a cartoon version of my pepsi loving ex girlfriend who was once alluded to in a previous post.

4. Friends- Unfortunately Maddox beat me to the punch on this one, but it’s just too shitty of a show not to be mentioned in this article. Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox were hot back when Friends was in production, but that still wasn’t enough to save the show from being a pile of steaming, mucous-laden geriatric shit. I hate the high pitched tinny voices of all the women on the show and I hate the way the men talk even more. I especially despise that Guido type guy with the spiked hair who eventually got his own spin-off. The only episode of Friends that I ever watched all the way through (and it was at a friend’s house so I had no choice) was one where one of the guys on the show gets depressed and two of the women take him to a really pathetic strip club and he won’t stop wearing sweat pants. What the fuck kind of a plot is that for a show? The answer, a shitty one. Friends also has the most annoying theme song of any show aside from The Nanny.

5. The Nanny- Do I really need to explain this one?

6. Ren and Stimpy- I never even saw this show, but an asshole I went to elementary school loved it and that’s reason enough for me to hate it.

7. Fraggle Rock – This is an older one, but I’ve hated this show ever since I was in nursery school. I seemed to be the only kid in the 2-8 year old age bracket who didn’t like it. I hated the songs, I hated the characters, I hated the props, I hated the puppeteers, and I hated the channel that put it on the air. Already a budding misanthrope during the time when Fraggle Rock was being made, I’d fantasize about the hippie-ish fraggle having some kind of accident whilst painting and succumbing to blood poisoning or the hyperactive one with the red hair getting too excited and running off a cliff any time I got stuck having to watch an episode.

I don’t have the time to write too much more tonight so I’ll just list off some other beloved shows I despise. The (dis)honorable mention list is as follows: Home Improvement, Phenom, Barney Miller, WKRP in Cincinatti, I Love Lucy, A Different World, Punk’d, Jackass, Undeclared, The Dating Game, How I Met Your Mother, Family Ties, Anime in general, Perfect Strangers, Step by Step, Sliders, Star Trek Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, and many others, but I’ll stop here because if there’s not enough space on the entire Internet to fit the rest of this list.

I was in Adams little while ago and when I walked by the deli, I saw something I’d never seen before. It was horrific, revolting, and disturbing. It was turkey pastrami. I looked at it for a while, not able to believe what I had just read. Turkey. Pastrami. No matter how many times I ran the two words through my mind, they just didn’t go together. Clearly, this was the doing of the health nazis. Why the hell would anyone buy turkey pastrami? It’s as counter-productive as a lunch meat can be. While you’re at it, why don’t you take a buy a ticket to Houston on a flightless airplane, install a sink with no faucet/drain, and purchase an issue of Forbes Magazine for masturbation purposes.

Turkey pastrami is yet another example of modern day food vendors giving in to pressure from the health nazis. I’ve seen similar things happen with chicken sausage and turkey burgers being sold in stores as well as with salads being sold as parts of value meals at fast food restaurants. Disguising health food as something palatable isn’t going to make your dining experience more enjoyable. It’s just going to make you slowly forget the good memories you have of your favorite fattening foods until they’re reduced to just a former shell of their once great stature, much like watching any post-1999 episode of the Simpsons will do for a die hard fan of the show.

Somtimes people give me shit for eating pastrami on Italian bread instead of rye bread. Don’t eat your sandwiches on rye bread just because it’s the cool deli thing to do. If you like rye bread, go ahead and use it, but if you don’t just stick with the bread you’re comfortable with. Never be ashamed of who you are, unless you’re that asshole in Hamden who once threw a jolly rancher at me. That’s not really germane to the topic at hand, but I figured I’d throw it in.

Getting back to my point, turkey pastrami is something that just plain should not exist. I actually bought an 1/8lb of it to see if it was as bad as I thought it would be and it was worse. I’m actually glad I didn’t enjoy it though, because if I did that might have been grounds for suicide. The next time you’re at a grocery store, give the health nazis a big Fuck You by buying a pound of mortadella and a slab of bacon and mixing the 2 together, topping it off with a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best. Milwaukee’s Best may be cheap, but it gets the job done.

On another irrelevant yet worth mentioning note, the girl in front of me in line at the deli counter in Adams had a pretty nice ass.

with Wendy’s.

My favorite picture on the Internet that isn't of Vida Guerra

Take a look at the above picture. Have you ever seen such a beautiful sight before? Unless you’ve gone to Wendy’s and ordered one of these in person, you have not. This picture is of a new burger at Wendy’s known to us mere mortals as the Triple Baconator. It features 3/4 lbs of meat with 9, count ‘em, 9 strips of bacon. The fact that this burger exists is sufficient proof that there is life beyond the grave, because there is no way I will ever believe that this burger was not the work of the genius of Dave Thomas. However, one does need to do just a little bit of tweaking in order to get this cavalcade of deliciousness just right. First off, you need to ask for it without ketchup. Ketchup should never be included on anything. Secondly, you should request that it be made without cheese as a substance as lowly and gutteral as cheese is but an insult to the Triple Baconator. The third, and might I add the most important modification that you should make is to put a packetful of Wendy’s Buttery Best Spread on to the Triple Baconator. (Butter makes everything infinitely more delicious) All you have to do is ask the person at the counter for 4 butter packets and they’ll kindly hand them over to you. Why 4 you ask? You need 4 because you’re obviously getting 2 Triple Baconators since nobody can eat just one, and you’ll want a large order of fries to go with each of them. If you use 1 packet of butter per each burger and order of fries, you should be okay, but if you want more you can always ask. Here’s a free tip: If you want your butter to melt on contact, put the butter packets into the cartons of french fries for about two minutes before opening them. This way the butter will be semi-solid upon being opened and will melt on contact with your burgers.

In these modern days of health food stores, kid’s meals that contain milk and yogurt, new diets popping up everywhere, and some health nazi getting in your face about dieting everywhere you go, it’s nice to know there’s a company out there still looking out for the fat guy (or the fat at heart, as the case may be and no, I don’t mean clogged arteries) Thank you Wendy’s for giving me a reason to get up each morning and make it through the long work days. I may be dead in 5 years from a heart attack, but if I can convince the ambulance driver to stop at Wendy’s on the way to the hospital, you’d best believe I’ll die with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

Do you remember the days when you’d log into your inbox and you’d see a long and complicated letter about how you’re the only surviving yet long-lost relative of some Nigerian king who has nobody to leave his millions to except for you? Do you recall reading e-mails telling you you’d won the Estonian lottery or that if you don’t read and pass along an e-mail that you’ll get ass cancer and die in 39 days?

As impractical and unrealistic as these kind of spam e-mails were, a certain amount of creativity and (albeit it very weak) mental effort was put forth to come up with these thirty second escapes from all things relevant which sadly in some cases actually worked on a select and gullible few. (At least some effort was required when the template for the form letter was made) The spammers of today are of a lazier breed than those in the golden age of spam. Now it seems as though they don’t even care if they take anybody in or not. They no longer pay any attention to demographics or the websites you’ve visited. I’ve done a good amount of traveling in my life and I’ve watched my fair share of porn, but I can guarantee you that I’ve never once been to Vietnam or had an interest in porn featuring goats banging Vietnamese stable maids. Despite this, on a fairly regular basis I receive spam promising access to just that and for only pennies a day. I also get e-mails on a daily basis from the URI alumni association (I never attended URI), petitions from pro choice groups telling me now is the time to protect my body and insure my right to an abortion (I don’t possess a vagina), senior discounts for various online stores, notifications of $500 shopping sprees to Victoria’s Secret that I’ve supposedly won, and offers for merchandise about various sports teams that I don’t give a rat’s ass about. (I’ve never watched a Cleveland Browns game, never cared about the Kansas City Royals, and never even knew about the Ft. Wayne Mad Ants).

As sad and puzzling as these demographically misguided spams are, there are others that are far more pathetic and project a true lack of effort and heart on the part of the spammers of today. These include the ones where the subject line is something like “Hey suga wanna huk up?” or “Local girls want you to fuck their brains out tonight!”. As much as I’d like to believe it, I’m pretty sure the latter isn’t true and even if it were, an e-mail that has a subject line but is otherwise blank isn’t exactly going to help me get to this supposed fantasy fuck fest. Then you have the ones that will just say something like “Miley Cyrus nude Paris Hilton shoves telephone booth ass New Jersey english muffin dildo NASA predicts lunar changes cellophane tape football jersey applesauce horny schoolgirl Uganda Family Guy wood glue!” These ones are computer generated and the lack of human touch shows. I don’t want to live in a cold lonely world where I can only receive unwanted e-mails that are of no use to me through machines rather than straight from the greasy fingers of some poor fat, bespectacled, hygiene lacking, socially unskilled (even compared to me) real live pathetic Internet user unsuccessfully attempting to con me out of money I don’t have. Where’s the love in that? Get off your asses, or more correctly, on them, and start sending us real live spam again or just give it up.

PS: I already realize the irony of the fact that I wrote this article about being pissed off by spammers yet most of my comments are from spambots, so don’t bother pointing it out.

Here’s an e-mail I received today that is about a pretty important topic. I encourage you all to read and reply by clicking the link provided further down in the article.

From: Fred O’Regan, International Fund for Animal Welfare <fred@ifaw1.org>

I’ve just received an urgent report that another city in China is planning a mass cull to slaughter any unregistered dogs, strays, and even registered family dogs that are over 14 inches (35cm) tall.

Dog owners in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, are even being told to kill their own dogs, or else their dogs will be beaten to death by the police and the owners will be charged a fine. Can you imagine being forced to kill your own dog to save it from a more brutal slaughter?

Unless we can stop this now, the Dog Death squads could be roaming the streets tomorrow – beating, stoning, and killing dogs – some right in front of their owners.

You might remember the attached e-mail I sent you recently about a similar cull. We found out too late for many of those dogs, but this time we have a chance to stop it before it starts.

I need you to do two things right now:
1. Send an e-mail to the Chinese Ambassador in your country. So you can act quickly, I’ve written an e-mail for you – click here to review and send it.

2. Make a donation to help IFAW end dog culls in China and to protect animals around the world from similar cruelty.

It’s crucial that you act quickly –according to the government notice, the police will begin combing the streets tomorrow to kill dogs. Please send your message now, and then forward this e-mail to as many of your friends as possible urging them to help us stop this slaughter.

In addition to working to stop this cull, IFAW is helping draft China’s first national animal welfare legislation that will prohibit culls like this. And we’re developing a rabies vaccination and sterilization program that we can offer to rural communities to humanely prevent rabies and control dog populations.

We’ve stopped culls like this in other Chinese cities, and we can stop this one too! Please send your message of protest today.

And then please make a donation to help us continue our efforts to help save animals around the world from cruelty and exploitation.

Please act now to save these dogs – make it the very next thing you do.

Thank you,

Fred

This past Wednesday I was flying home from Baltimore on Southwest Airlines. Nobody should ever fly on Southwest. They’re considered to be a discount airline, but with the exception of their clearance sales, they’re often no less expensive than a typical airline. Sometimes they’ll have special tickets at a low cost, but it’s almost impossible to get them and you usually can’t get them to fly anywhere that you’d want to go to. Also, everything is a fucking joke to the crew members. Every problem is confronted with a brief, but not brief enough, song by the flight attendants and crew. They also don’t pre assign seating so once you get onto the plane it’s a very disorganized endeavor and everyone is scattered every which way trying to find an empty seat and cramming their shit into the overhead compartments. You are randomly assigned a group and passenger number at check-in and if you’re assigned to a high number in a late group, it sucks for you because it means you’ll probably be sitting next to the bathroom and between a baby and a guy who hasn’t showered in 19 years.

I hate flying on Southwest, but that isn’t what I intended to write this article about. What I want to propose is a new rule for airlines that will make air travel significantly less annoying and miserable.

My idea is this: parents traveling with children under six years of age need to sit in a separate designated section of the plane, away from other travelers. They should be assigned to the rear seats with a curtain, at the very least separating them from the other passengers. Ideally there’d be some kind of soundproofing system as well, but money wise that may not be feasible. On second thought, screw feasibility, I want the sound barriers.

Several of my otherwise mildly unpleasant flights have been made into 3 hour trips to hell by little kids and their parents who won’t discipline them. On my last flight, I was seated next to a 2 year old who spent the whole flight kicking and scratching me. He only stopped doing this for two brief periods. One was to sneeze then wipe his snot on my arm, and the other was to start climbing the back of the seat in front of him as the plane was landing. The other passengers were all gawking and going on and on about how adorable the little shit was, but I’m sure if they were seated next to him they’d be singing a different tune. The kid’s mother did nothing to stop this and was not admonished even once by the cabin crew. On another flight, I was directly in front of one kid who kept spitting on me while making machine gun sound effects and next to another who shit his pants not once, not twice, but thrice during the flight. As annoying as all of these experiences were, there was one flight that was even more annoying than all of these put together. This one I don’t even blame on the kid but rather on his dumbass mother. I was flying from Minneapolis to San Diego about 3 years ago and was next to a hot but annoying woman who had a toddler with her who I would guess was about a year old. For a kid that age, he was pretty well behaved and wasn’t doing anything annoying. Surprisingly, he kept quiet through the boarding and takeoff and wasn’t making a nuisance of himself. About five minutes after we got up into the air, the trouble began. The hot but retarded mother of the kid started needling him, actually trying to make him cry. She kept saying shit like, “Oh honey it’s okay if you cry, it’s only natural and I won’t be upset. Come on Connor, don’t be afraid to cry. It won’t upset anyone else, they’re all expecting it and they won’t be bothered. Cry, it’s okay, start crying.”

This went on for about an hour, and the entire time I was pretty much in shock. It’s one thing to be near an annoying, loud mouthed kid on a plane and for the parent to not do anything about it, but actually encouraging your kid to be disruptive and annoying brings rudeness up to a whole new level. After about an hour of her prodding, the kid eventually did start crying as loud as he could and didn’t stop for the duration of the flight, which close to three hours. Once the kid started crying, his mother congratulated him, then she turned to the other passengers and started beaming with self satisfaction and going on and on about how she worries that her son doesn’t express his emotions enough and how you can’t stifle the beautiful natural actions of a child. Anybody who commits a violation like this should be automatically sterilized on the spot. Everyone around her was pretty fucking pissed off, but I think it bothered me more than anyone else. I was hoping for the plane to crash because even though it would mean that I’d meet a gruesome and painful death, it would stop this bitch before she could reach an orgasm from self congratulation and that would be well worth it.

In closing, I urge you all to write your congressman or whoever the hell else you think you can write to about this matter and hopefully within our lifetimes, experiences like these can come to an end. (Except for people who have little kids, but I guess they can sit back there and have fun with the beautifully naturally hellish behavior of their offspring.)