Soap-Box: ACTIVATE!

I fucking hate...

The casual and derogatory use of the words "gay" and "fag"- In our culture, ideas are shaped through words and terminology. In order to understand something, we first have to be able to label it. The label we apply to a person, place, or thing shapes how we see it, framing it with all the connotations that word carries with it. Think of the example that has been brought up in recent years that a person waging war against an oppressive government can either be a "freedom fighter" or a "terrorist" depending on which side of their gun you're on. It is in this same manner that we come to label and understand homosexuals in our society. The word "faggot" carries with it oodles of negative connotation, and by applying it to gay culture we automatically frame it as something worthy of our derision. The word "gay" doesn't necessarily carry the same negative tone (it originally meant "happy," and that's nice and all) but dammit if we're not doing everything we can to give it one. Every time some angsty twelve-year-old calls a friend/parent/homework assignment/tv show/whatthefuckever "gay" in order to express displeasure with it the word "gay" is given a gentle little push away from being a relatively neutral word to one loaded with as much negative connotations as "fag." Now, seeing as gay culture is already barely tolerated in our society as is (hint: saying "I'm okay with gay people as long as they keep it to themselves" does not actually mean that you're okay with gay people), I really don't think it needs the added stress of having its existing labels turned into slurs. This is why every person, be they fat twelve year old or ignorant 20-30-something, that uses the word "gay" as a slur, or the word "fag" to refer to anything other than a British cigarette, makes me want to show them what a real hate-crime is.

Related only through talk of homosexuality, I fucking love...

Mondo Guerra- Say what you will about his bowties and short-shorts, this man has the biggest balls in the world for finding the courage to come out as HIV-positive on national television. There are special places in heaven reserved for people who refuse to hide who they are, people who refuse to let something negative define them, and people who are able to harness tragic events and refine them into works of art. As he has proven himself able to do all three, Mr. Guerra probably has a golden chair with his name on it right next to Jesus so that the two of them can sit in the early evening sunlight (it's always dusk in heaven) and talk about suspenders and Jerry curls.

America the Booty-full

Today, close personal friend and part-time lover M. Timecat and I explore the many facets of our patriotic sides.

I, for one, fucking hate...

American Currency- Old American currency was boring. While the collective monies of every other country on Earth were getting dolled up in their finest blues and pinks and purples, American money was dressing itself in the same drab greens, burying its fun side so deep in the closet that it took us until recent years to see even a splash of color. But I'm not here to harp half-assedly on paper currency. No friends, I'm here to harp spectacularly on the 1971-1978 Eisenhower dollar coin, pictured left. I have no problem with Eisenhower himself. Buttons from the time of his term as president (1492-1500AD) proclaim "I LIKE IKE!" and if people liked the man enough to make buttons about him then certainly he has every right to be on the front of a coin. But what's that on the back of the coin you ask? It's a bald eagle, flying with a sprig of some sort of plant, on the moon. This is significant because EAGLES CANNOT FLY ON THE FUCKING MOON. There is no atmosphere on the moon for them to flap their wings against. Furthermore, without the previously mentioned atmosphere, eagles (like their distant cousin, man) cannot fucking breathe. Without atmosphere, the eagle's eyes would explode out of its very head like a bloody space-firecracker. Also, without any Atmosphere CDs, the eagle has no hope of throwing a decent party. According to internet witchdoctor and general know-it-all, Wikipedia, the design is the insignia of the Apollo 11 mission and was designed by some dude named Frank Gasparro. I don't know Mr. Gasparro personally, but his name does sound like a digestive disorder and I'm going to put my foot down and say that he has absolutely no business getting anywhere near our money again.

Timecat, on the other hand, fucking loves...

American Psycho- "Movie = good. Book= best book ever? Back when I was a young warthog, I was wonderfully traumatized by the gratuitous sex and violence that occurs in the fictional life of seemingly normal guy, Pat Bateman. You know you never saw a movie where a guy bites off a chick’s snatch then drops a chainsaw down a stairwell on a hooker before this one, and you probably never will again. Then my eyes were opened to dangerously unsafe levels when I realized that this cinematic masterpiece was actually a novel, written by supercreep Bret Easton Ellis. I must compliment Mr. Ellis because to this day I do not think I have read a better written book, but I hope I never run into him in an alley late at night, because any guy who can think up a chapter where the main character sports the decapitated head of a woman on his cock while killing is not invited to tea time with me and Grand Ma-Ma. However, kudos are in order because with the incredible attention to detail and the ability to bring to life what I imagine is a spot-on rendition of the mind of a psychopath from the inside out, it is obvious that Ellis is a very talented writer. So with that being said, shine on Bret Easton Ellis, you blood-and-gore-covered diamond!"

Droppin' Plot Points Like Galileo Dropped the Orange

I fucking love...

Completely ridiculous movies- Today's installment being District B-13. The French action film that everyone only knows as "that stupid parkour movie" just recently got a sequel made about it. Or rather, I just recently found out someone made a sequel to this movie, so that's as good to me as it just being made. It's hard to imagine what was left to cover in a sequel, as this movie seemingly has it all. A "low-life" character with a heart of gold? Check. A large, evil gang? Check. A tough-as-nails cop who only works alone but suddenly finds himself with a partner? Check. A nuclear warhead? Check. Running and jumping on stuff that should neither be run nor jumped upon? That's a big check. A fucking huge dude who must be defeated by using brains rather than brawn? Check. A "sexy" girl who must be rescued? Check. A government conspiracy? You'll just have to watch and find out! Oh who the hell are we kidding, check, of course. There's no point in hiding the ending, I just summed up the entire rest of the plot for you. This futuristic masterpiece is set in a place and time wildly far from now (Paris, 2010) where crime is so bad that blah blah blah the government tries to blow up all the poor people. Somewhere along the line someone makes a reference to the Holocaust (while choking someone else out over the side of a building) and we all go "ooooooh shit!" and narrowly avoid a massive nuclear blast which, for some reason, would only kill the poor people and not, you know, the entire city of Paris itself. Also, while that's going on, one guy's sister is kidnapped for six months, fed heroin like babies are fed formula, and then manages to be perky and alert a few days after her rescue rather than vomiting and sweating profusely from all the MASSIVE HEROIN WITHDRAWAL she should be going through. And yet, in the midst of all this, the hardest thing to believe in this entire movie is the fact that there should be such a ready supply of nicely kept, high-end sports cars available in a walled-off barrio where every building, inhabited or not, is literally missing at least one wall. I forget where I was even going with this post because my mind is numbed by the sheer absurdity of the entire scenario. And yet, at the same time, I own this film and fucking love watching it. And you should too. Watch it that is; I wouldn't really encourage anyone to buy this thing per say. Just make sure you have a glass of water handy so that you can do spit-takes every five seconds when you find yourself saying, "Surely this cannot get any dumber!" and the movie yells back at you, "YES IT FUCKING CAN!"

But I still fucking hate...

Completely terrible movies- Today's installment being 500 Days of Summer. I actually can't say that this movie is completely terrible, I do think it was shot and edited and acted out very well, but someone brought it up this weekend and it made all the bile rise in my throat like I had forgotten a film could. For everything this movie does right, I still found myself constantly amazed by how much I hated both of the main characters. "Sexist!" I hear a couple people already shouting. The most common defense of this film is to call anyone who doesn't like it a chauvinist and claim that they're just uncomfortable with a strong, assertive female character, but that's really not it at all. My counter-point to this argument is that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character is a whiny bitch and Zoey Deschanel's character is a manipulative twat and anyone who can't see this has behaved too much like one or both of them at some point in their lives to stop being butthurt and admit it. Beyond hating both main characters I don't have any logical reason why I despise this movie so much, but who says I have to be logical? Despite fully loving Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoey Deschanel in other roles they've played over the years I still wish their characters (whose names I never bothered to learn out of spite) from this movie were real people so that I could tell both of them to shut up to their faces right before I lit them on fire with my mind.

Home is Where the Couch Is

I fucking hate...

Themed homes- While I understand that different people have different aesthetics, there is a certain amount of class in realizing where in the world you live and owning it. For example, throwing doilies on your coffee tables does not turn your NYC studio loft into a New England bed and breakfast. Or, more specifically to my locale, throwing hay down in your front yard and getting a mailbox shaped like a barn with a cow on the front of it does not turn your suburban box into a country ranch. It actually looks pretty fucking dirty. Similarly, I will never understand why people feel the need to pretty up their bathroom in the styles of lame, white-people getaway spots, like the beach or a mountain cottage. Decorative spheres of twine and seashells do not make your poop smell better. Although I guess to be fair, my bathroom is full of dinosaurs and unicorns and pictures of a dog on a bicycle, so I guess I did go for a theme with my bathroom and that theme turned out to be "things that are awesome." So really, I guess what I really hate are boring, white-people themed homes. Do not model your home after either a bed and breakfast, a country cottage, or a shore house (unless it actually is one of those things, and even then only do so reluctantly) and I won't want to take a shit in your living room.

But I do still fucking kind of like...

Awesomely inappropriately themed homes- Is your living room decked out like a graveyard? Do you have an office done up to look like the bridge of a spaceship? Did you transform your bathroom from an "ocean shore-house" to a "rat-infested pirate brig?" I doubt you have as I have yet to meet anyone who has, but seriously, these ideas are all gold. Let's get the fuck on this, people.

Vroom Vroom

I fucking love...

Top Gear- I wouldn't necessarily call myself an Anglophile, but I do love me some grumpy, sarcastic British people. So much do I love them, in fact, that I will watch a show about anything so long as it is hosted by said grumpy, sarcastic Brits. Which, I think, explains my love of Top Gear. Normally, I couldn't give a shit less about cars. I think they're fun to drive, but I don't know dick-all about them, and I certainly don't want to learn. Hence my love of this show would initially seem quite a mystery. What it all boils down to though, are the presenters. Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have such a fantastic dynamic between the three of them that I am fairly convinced I could watch them discuss literally anything. If they can get me to watch a show about cars then they can probably get me to watch a show about animals taking shits for all I care. Actually, I would probably watch that show even if they weren't on it, so bad example I guess. And it probably doesn't hurt that Top Gear is a show about cars much in the same way that Wheel of Fortune is a show about grammar. When you start reviewing tiny cars by, say, driving them through office buildings or cramming enormous dogs into them to rate how happy the dog stays, then is the show really still about the cars at that point? I guess sure, why not.

But at the same time, I still fucking hate...

Every other program about cars on television, ever- This includes, but is not limited to informational shows (Car and Driver Television), other "entertainment" based shows (Pimp My Ride, Monster Garage), and plain ol' racing. They're all boring, and they're all a horrible waste of gas. If NASCAR would just throw a dog in the back of every car then maybe we would have a deal. But it would have to be a comically large dog though. And so help me god, if any of those dogs got hurt. You know what, let's just skip the dogs and ban NASCAR. Then everyone will be happy.

Friday Quickie

Today's article is short, but it's one that I feel strongly about. I fucking hate...

Invisible bugs- I think the only people who will truly understand what I mean by this are people with hairy legs and drug addicts. Every time I take a pair of socks off after wearing them for hours on end, the hair on my legs starts standing back up, making it feel like there are dozens of tiny, bastard insects crawling all over me. It would be enough to make me shave my legs just to get rid of it, but

A) I'm not 100% convinced it would solve the problem, and

B) I fucking hate stubble. Shit itches.

It is also entirely possible, as far as I'm concerned, that there really is a species of small, invisible insects that like to feed off of some hormone that your body secretes when you're really, really irritated. Just in case, I propose we task someone with developing a pesticide for them. The writers of Lost were good at killing off imaginary things, so I nominate them.

On This Special Episode...

Please welcome special guest hate-monger, M. Timecat. Today, Mr. Timecat fucking hates...

"How flimsy Playstation controllers are- Are you fucking kidding me Sony? You know how hard and infuriating video games are, you make them. You damn well know I am going to slam my controller on the ground as hard as I can when Madden fucks me over and makes the Browns beat me 49-0. Not only that, but it’s fucking bogus when you 'Ask Madden' and that fat bastard tells you to 'bang it up the middle with the fullback' even though its 4th and 12 on my own 10. Thanks for making me look like an asshole, John. I remember back in the day when videogames could be beaten by the average person and not just fucking losers who do nothing but play them 24/7 in their Grammy’s basement who would go into anaphylactic shock if their cocks came within 6 nautical miles of bottom-shelf pussy. When I was a kid, video games were way easier. How easy was Japan’s side-scrolling insult to all Italian people, which later became known as Super Mario Bros? Seriously Japan, in 1980 were you still that mad that Italy bailed on the Axis? Did leaving you as the only ones to face 'prompt and utter destruction' mean you had to make a game where every Italian character is a plumber and where the bad guys are 'Goombas?' Yeah well, I guess you can stay as mad as you want to about that one. Maybe that massive blow to Japanese culture and infrastructure is why you can’t design a controller that can survive your average angry white guy who sucks at video games.

But seriously what has happened to videogames? Back in the day the only thing you needed to do to win at videogame football was pop Techmo Bowl into your NES and then zigzag your way across the screen to gridiron glory. Now I have to be able to read a fucking Cover -2 defense or else Madden starts talking shit about how I need to get the ball out of the QB’s hand so you don’t get sacked. Fuck you, Madden, what do you know anyway? What’s that? Super Bowl Ring you say? Ok, well then maybe it’s my fault that I can’t convert 4th and 12s when John is calling the plays for me. I guess the only way to really be good at videogames anymore is to really be dedicated to playing all day and night and buying every expensive new consoles and the latest games. I wonder if that’s why poor people are so good at real sports…"

On the other hand, I fucking love...

How much easier non-sports games have gotten- Did we play the same games as kids? I have nothing but hateful memories from my childhood as I tried to express myself as an eco-conscious nature lover by guiding that stupid fucking hedgehog towards all those gold rings so that he could buy his hedgehog girlfriend a house and a car and earn a slim chance of mating with someone besides a fox suffering from birth deformities. Maybe other people found this shit easy. Maybe I just hadn’t developed fine motor functions yet, even by late elementary school. Nowadays though, videogames at least have save points so that you can quit playing them the 600th time a demonic dog-mannequin hybrid bites you in the ass right after you used your last health kit repairing the damage from an onslaught of shadow-infants just back from the Improvised Knife Festival. You can also save your game when you realize that Jesus fucking hell, you’ve been playing this game for six hours and have to be at work in another two. To me, this makes modern day gaming easier than classic videogames, and I fucking love it.

I do agree with the necessity for sturdier hardware, though. Back in the old days I could hurl a Sega Genesis controller at my parents’ Radiate-Mo-Tron tube television and the only thing that broke was my mother’s temper. Try doing that with these tiny joystick-laden bundles of nonsense and your new plasma-screen bullshit and see how far it gets you. If you ask me, two objects that can’t handle you smashing them together as hard as you can have no business letting you play Mortal Kombat on them. Fucking Goro.

Disclaimer: M. Timecat’s opinions do not reflect in any way my own, nor do mine represent his. Timecat has never given me any reason to believe that he spends his days imagining the married lives of hedgehogs. Similarly, I don’t even know what “banging up the middle with the fullback” is, but I snicker every time I read it.

The Ol' Ballin' Chain

I fucking hate...

Listening to people bitch about their marriages- Never mind the fact that it's disrespectful to your spouse to sit around whining about them when they're not there. Never mind how rude it is to tell someone, upon hearing that they're engaged, to "run while they still can" weeks before they make one of the biggest commitments of their life. Never mind the fact that all across the country there are same-sex couples fighting tirelessly to publicly proclaim their love in the same fashion that you're shitting all over with your ceaseless torrent of petty criticism. The real reason it irks me so much when people go off on stereotypical tirades about their husbands/wives is that it's pure, played-out comic horseshit. There is nothing funny, entertaining, or remotely of value for me to listen to you talk about how your spouse is messier/cleaner than you are, like you've hogged the stage at a shitty open-mic night. If you want some cheap laughs about how boys are from Planet of the Apes and girls are from Pretty Woman, get a spot on Comedy Central. If you want some legitimate advice on what to do when your partner drives you nuts, get a therapist. But whatever you fucking do, don't think for one second that I want to hear about it. Comments like, "Whenever I clean the garage Bob goes right back out there and messes it all up again! Men!" and, "It doesn't matter how much money I put in my savings account, my wife'll just redeposit it at the mall! Am I right?" do not endear you to me. Although they do make me want to give you a high-five. Directly in the face. With a brick.

But I fucking love...

Mutual sass in relationships- For every sorry sod I have to listen to who prays for the sweet release of death to take either themselves or their "loved" ones out of the shackles of marriage but doesn't have the balls or brains to do something about it (divorce and murder ain't hard folks, they both just take good lawyers), I do get some relief from watching couples who clearly know how to make each others' lives a living hell, and love every second of it. It seems like all relationships involve a healthy amount of irritating the shit out of each other, but the couples I can respect are the ones who do it right in the other one's face and don't try to sneak around whining behind their back. There's got to be a reason that some of the longest and seemingly most happily married couples I witness on a daily basis are openly hostile to each other in entertaining ways, and I can't imagine it's all for my viewing benefit. So go ahead ladies, tell him that shirt makes him look like a horse's ass. Or gentlemen, feel free to let her know that you don't give a shit about going shopping. Just make sure you're talking to each other about it, and not to me. Never, ever, ever to me. Or, you know, just don't get fucking married in the first place.

*Please note, Google Image searches of "marriage" turned up nothing but boring white people, so I decided instead to search for "animals doin' it" and put up results from that. I hope it helped.

This Town Ain't Big Enough For All Six or Seven Of Us

I fucking hate...

Having split identities- I'm a lazy man. A lazy, lazy, etc. It's not so much that I hate physically doing things as it is that I hate devoting mental exertion to thinking about how to do things. As such, one of the more irksome points in my life as a post-college resource-hog has been the need to create a "professional" image for myself in the workplace. Immediately after graduation, I think I took a lot of appropriate steps: I bought some ties, I cut the dried semen and whiskey out of my hair, I started bathing regularly. I even took down the Myspace where I pretended to be a girl in order to disappoint local perverts and, hopefully, confuse them on a profoundly personal level. As soon as a company hired me, I put my facade into practice. I began showing up for work on time, in neat dress, and with a kind, unassuming smile. By all accounts, I seemed a perfectly pleasant, well-adjusted young man. The illusion was complete.

Unfortunately, my work persona falls in direct conflict with the way I prefer to live my life on my own time. I hate waking up before 10am. I hate wearing sensible colors and clothes that don't cling tight enough to show the outline of my balls. Showering, and washing my hair in particular, makes me want to shake with such titanic fits of rage that I was briefly employed as an eco-friendly paint mixer. I also hate being nice to people who are mean, listening to boring stories, and making coffee for strangers. This creates a disconnect, then, between my personal and professional selves. Which was fine for a time. I went to work as one person, got through 9 hours of that, metamorphosed back into my real self through a baptism of rage on the drive home, and was ready to be fun and sassy for the evening.

Except cracks have started to show. Sometimes at work I slip up and imply that I might still be drunk, or make lewd, aggressively homosexual innuendos around people I think it might bother, or suggest how much I would like to light someone's house on fire. Worse yet, sometimes my Labor Face slips out in my personal life. I find myself organizing my money to make sure the bills are all facing the same way, or accidentally putting on the television and being boring and white all night.

Which might not even be so disastrous if I then didn't have to factor in online personae as well. How do I maintain a mental division when I also have to take the effort to sign onto message boards and be a condescending know-it-all? Or log into a Steam gamer tag and be so purposefully obtuse yet such a good shot that I give the impression of being some sort of mute, idiot-savant? This double-triple-quadruple life is tearing me apart.

And yet at the same time, I kind of love...

Getting away with it- There's some sort of sick, double-agent appeal to knowing that I can be such a bastard at certain times of the day, and such a goody-goody at others, and pass successfully as both. And every time a slip between the two goes unnoticed, whether it's forgetting to shower here or singing off-color songs under my breath there, it feels great. Like I shoulda been an actor, or low-level, local politician. I suppose this could all be a normal part of the "adult" life I'm still adapting to. Either way, I think I'll be okay as long as I manage to avoid any major screw-ups. Like going into work with a flamethrower looking to play capture the flag. Or coming home and issuing loans to my neighbors. Or logging into Team Fortress and failing to be taken seriously as a writer.

I'm Tired of Sitting Here Pretending I'm Not Fucking Dangerous

I flipping hate...

Second-hand smoke bashing- I know this is by no means a new topic, but everyone in the entire fucking country seems to have such a permanent stiffie for whining about second-hand smoke. Let's all take a second to think about this. I agree that certain areas should be kept smoke-free: hospitals, airplanes... I don't know, day care centers? I would like to argue, though, that state-wide indoor-smoking bans are entirely unnecessary. Don't want to smell smoke while you eat at a restaurant? Don't sit in the fucking smoking section. That seemed to work out well. Don't want to smell like smoke when you come back from going out to a bar? Grow a fucking pair. Who goes out to get drunk in the neatest, cleanest way possible? I'll tell you who: people who don't understand the fucking point of drinking. I understand that you may not want to return to the office smelling like cigarettes after your liquid business luncheon (you posh twat), but what kind of shithead goes to some local dive and expects to come out squeaky-clean at the end of it? I live in a town full of shitty bars, and if I can go off-topic for a minute, if you want to bitch about smelling cigarettes then I want to bitch about having to smell your fucking pheromone-infused body spray and whore wash.

So indoor smoking bans are dumb. But you know what's even dumber? Outdoor smoking bans. A few years ago, Pennsylvania state colleges instituted some ass-hatted rule where you were no longer allowed to smoke on campus. This immediately lead to one of two results: smokers being late to return to class from smoking breaks, or everyone collectively deciding not to give a shit. When the whole argument against second-hand smoke comes up, I've noticed that people like to go about saying that second-hand smoke personally gave them cancer and was the direct cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. "It's unhealthy!" six bazillion moms in turtlenecks and high-waisted jeans have cried for years. You know what else is fucking unhealthy? Car accidents. And heart-attacks. And being allergic to bee stings. And fucking life in general. I know we've already started working on the bee stings part by mysteriously killing off an entire species of animal that we probably need to live, but that doesn't change the fact that EVERY FUCKING THING INVOLVED IN YOUR LIFE IS KILLING YOU SLOWLY AS WE SPEAK. So let's all just calm the fuck down and live a little. Or let's at least stop bitching about the health hazards of smoke while we eat a 6,000,000,000 calorie quadruple-bacon-fatburger at our local TGI McAppleBarrel.

Which, as you can probably guess, means I fucking love...

Smoking just to piss people off- It probably would have been worth mentioning earlier in this article that I don't consider myself a smoker. I mean I go through a pack maybe every 2 months or something, but basically I smoke so little that if I ever identify myself as a "smoker" REAL smokers come out of the woodwork to collectively bitchslap me. The reason I have my panties in such a bunch over anti-smoking campaigns is that even without nicotine pulsing through my veins I can still spot a social injustice when I see it. That's why it gives me such great pleasure to light up a cigarette, even if I'm just going to let it burn and not smoke it, in front of doctors and moms and elementary schools everywhere. Or at least right off school property. It's kind of like an indirect middle-finger to groups of people I don't give a shit about. It also makes me look cool as hell.

You Know I'm A Liar

I fucking hate...

Angst over music covers- Music nerds and pretentious twats seem to love getting a rise over covers of songs. Should you ever find yourself in the company of these people, make sure to tell them that you love that Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon song written by Urge Overkill for the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Just make sure you have a tarp or rain coat for when their blood inevitably starts bursting from their temples as they think of all the derogatory names they want to call you while they correct you. I understand the logic behind some people's hatred of covers- it can be incredibly frustrating when a song by a band you like gets attention because someone else is singing it. You liked the original band, and you want them to get credit. That's fine. But that doesn't mean the cover itself is garbage. The case in point for tonight is the song Fire, originally written by Bruce Springsteen. It's a great song, but here's my problem: fuck Bruce Springsteen. He's boring, and aside from Spirit in the Night and Dancing in the Dark his only purpose is to be played softly by masturbating middle-aged women who want to remember their rock-n-roll glory days. A few years after Springsteen recorded and released Fire, it was notably covered by The Pointer Sisters, and you know what? It was fucking awesome. Just like with Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2. I don't hate this particular song, but I do hate U2. But give that song to Saul Williams and Trent Reznor to cover? Fucking magic. My point is, I understand wanting an artist to get credit for writing their own music, but hating a performance of a song just because it's a cover, even if it far out-stripes the original? Fuck that.

And yet I fucking love...

Getting angry over samples and covers- As both a nerd and a pretentious twat, I can't help but feel that I have no right to bitch about people hating covers when I get angry over new rap music using samples of songs I love. Remember that Kanye West song where he sampled Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk? I don't, because my memory blanked out in a fit of rage around the time someone first told me they loved that Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger song by Kanye West, not so much for his rapping, but for the awesome techno chorus. The same goes for whoever that bitch who sampled Tainted Love was. Growing up in the Napster-fed piracy-friendly generation I don't find anything inherently wrong with sampling, but I still love shitting all over someone's favorite song or artist by pointing out how little of the music they actually created. Here's where I get off justifying this to myself though, given what I just spent a very fat paragraph bitching about above: Tainted Love and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger were awesome songs to begin with. Their original versions were good enough. Kanye and Mystery Bitch's new versions of the songs are not covers and are therefore not homages to the originals. They also weren't creative enough samplings and reworkings to create new, personal versions of the song. Instead, they fell somewhere in the middle where you're not paying your respects and you're not creating something new, you're just being a lazy shit who capitalizes on other people's music. And that makes you an asshole.

Eats Shits and Leaves

I fucking hate...

Crappy punctuation- Being a nerd makes me a stickler for rules. Being a misanthrope makes me a stickler for rules that no one else gives a shit about and which are almost impossible to accurately enforce. Hence my love of picking on grammar. I do not claim to have spotless grammar, nor do I wish to teach what I do know to others. Because of this, I try to be lenient with sloppy syntax and misspellings. There are, however, two things I believe wholeheartedly:

1. There is a difference between writing an email to a friend and publishing an advertisement for your company. Official shit deserves to be proofread by someone half-way literate.

2. Punctuation, with the exception of the family bastard, the semicolon, is not that hard.

With these two factors considered, no grammar errors piss me off more than the inappropriate use of periods, question marks, and exclamation points in advertisements and corporate documents. "Hamburgers- 2 for $3?" is not okay to hang outside your restaurant. They are your hamburgers, don't ask me how much you're charging for them unless you're willing to bargain. By the same token, "List the steps involved?" is not okay to put on a test for new employees, unless you're willing to give full credit to the first wonderful asshole who answers with a solid "no." Going overboard in the other direction is bad, too. Question marks are necessary for questions. Without them, "Why not go to the mall!" has turned from an inquiry to a shouting match. Just pay a little attention to how you're ending your sentences, you assholes?!

But I do fucking love...

Correcting other people's crappy punctuation- In case it hasn't already become apparent, nothing makes me happier than when I can point out the punctuation mistakes of others, particularly if I don't like them. The others that is, not the punctuation. Is it necessary to fully flush out the meaning of a sentence? Not always. Is it smug and condescending? Of course. Does it make me feel like a big man anyway? You'd better believe it.

Because this section turned out to be so short, allow me to plug something I love: Zero Punctuation. Related to this article in name only.

Unpause

Hey Diddy!

I fucking love...

Legit country music in the summer- My experiences with popular country these days is pretty much limited to Taylor Swift and Big & Rich, and I'm not talking about either of those assholes. I mean classic country music like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr. Hell, even newer bands done in a similar fashion, like The Builders and the Butchers or Old Crow Medicine Show. This kind of music isn't always my cup of tea (except the Builders and the Butchers, who always make fantastic tea), but there's something about a hot, summer day that just makes me want to kick my feet up, listen to some twangy guitars/banjos and sweat my living face/off. Since I managed to remain aggressively ignorant during the seven years I spent in my middle school/high school string orchestra, I don't really know shit all about music theory. None the less, there's something about the lazy, almost swing-style tempo of this music that fits so perfectly with warm weather that it almost seems criminal to listen to anything else. As tomorrow is Labor Day and the weather will instantaneously drop down to -500 degrees, we might not have many more chances to experience this, but I challenge anyone to go driving with all the windows down and "New Virginia Creeper" by Old Crow Medicine Show cranked up and tell me it doesn't send shivers down your spine. For those violently opposed to country, I also recommend trying it to "Jimmy Jazz" by The Clash, but take five points away from yourself for being such a sissy.

But I'm not crazy about...

Seasonal Music Withdrawal Syndrome- For lack of a better term, I made that one up. I've talked to several people with this and most of them seem to agree: we all have certain music we listen to in the warmer months and certain music that fits better with the cold. Living in a part of the country that has four distinct seasons, there is a fairly definite cut-off time when I stop listening to country and psychedelic rock, put on a sweatshirt, and dig out my Arcade Fire and Radiohead CDs. Sure, I could try to stretch summer music into the winter, desperately screaming along to Jefferson Airplane as the first snowflakes begin to fall, but it just doesn't feel right. Part of me suspects this is a good thing. Taking a break from certain styles of music keeps me from getting burnt out on them, making them all the more special when that first day in the mid-60s hits and I can bust them out again. But another part of me just really fucking misses all my summer music when seasonal depression hits in the winter. Still, it's inevitable that in a few weeks I'll be forgetting about Mr. Cash and Mr. Williams. There's already a small chill starting in the air when the sun's not out in full force. I guess, at the very least, there's also a new Arcade Fire album that I haven't given a serious listen to yet.

Like This, Like That

I fucking hate...

Gender stereotyping in advertising- Men, as we all know, are different from women, and I'm not just talking about the difference between an outie and an innie. Advertisers have known this for years and have skillfully and subtly used it to stimulate our intellects as consumers. No one knows exactly how agencies ever accumulated such a wealth of knowledge about the unique behavioral patterns of the dueling sexes. Many state that the use of detailed focus groups has been key to understanding gender dynamics. Fewer, but more interesting, sources have suggested that most top advertising executives have inherited copies of the mythical Hackronomicon, an ancient and powerful book full of dark magics and hilarious insights known only to media moguls and 1980's stand-up comedians. Though the book's secrets have remained carefully guarded for generations, a few items have recently begun to leak to the general public. Through the use of detailed Latin scripture and occult diagrams, the text apparently teaches the power to touch the hearts and minds of the masses through such axioms as:

• Men hate shopping, while women love it.
• Women are good at cleaning homes, while men are bumbling morons.
• Men love beer; women love chocolate.
• The most horrible thing either sex could possibly endure would be to have to listen earnestly to, and have a frank discussion with the other.

The problem I have with basing advertising campaigns on these sexist notions goes beyond the fact that they are not, and have never been, funny. If you'll give me a minute to fetch my footstool, I would like to get on my high-horse and point out that they're actually quite offensive. Personally, I know how to run a washer and dryer. I also know ladies who don't necessarily cream their panties over the idea of going to the mall. Clearly, according to the marketing gods of yore, there is something desperately wrong with this. There is something desperately wrong with anyone who doesn't fit into the predetermined black-and-white gender category laid out for them by advertising culture.

"But wait," you're spitting cookie crumbs on your keyboard to point out, "these are just commercials. No one takes them that seriously." Which is a fair point. They are just ads. Most people in our society actually do a fairly fantastic job of completely tuning them out.

The problem is that if you shout something into a public vacuum long enough, no matter how ironically or sincerely you mean it, it becomes a part of the lens through which that culture views itself. Maybe, as a man, I really should hate going places with my girlfriend. Maybe I do need that pocket television so that I can watch sports and reaffirm the existence of my testicles. Maybe engaging in an actual conversation with her makes me an emasculated human skid-mark. Maybe we should all just fucking kill ourselves now rather than ever peacefully coexist again.

I think I've bitten off a little bit more than I can chew with this article, and will most likely go into more specifics later, but the point I want to drive home is this: gender-stereotyping in advertising conditions us to believe that each sex acts in a predetermined dynamic that not only makes them incompatible with one another for long periods of time, but also makes them seem like dysfunctional human garbage. While it isn't the responsibility of the media to reform us into better people, I do think we could do without the pounding repetition of this nonsense in order to hawk dish soap and pickup trucks. And to those wondering about the usual format of these articles, there is nothing I don't hate about this. Case fucking closed.

Must Be the Money

I fucking hate...

Uppity, rich people- I'm not sure exactly what income bracket you have to reach before you get your license to shit all over other people, but it must be relatively high. There's something about having money in our society that seems to automatically make you a total prat. The first time someone asks you, "Do you know how much my time is worth?" it almost seems like a joke. Before I began working in the soul-crushing money-factory that is a job in the "real wold," a phrase like this conjured up images of oil barons and rail tycoons blowing thick cigar smoke from behind bushy mustaches as their distended bellies hang out the front of their pinstriped suits. The sheer cartoonish surrealism of the fact that someone would ever say something like this outside of doing some shitty J. Jonah Jameson impression, makes it laughable. However, it becomes much less comic when shouted at you by some red-faced asshole who hopped out of his leased BMW so fast that it's impressive his hairpiece didn't fly off in the parking lot. The sense of entitlement that seems to seep out of every pore of your standard wealthy bastard never ceases to amaze me, as well as the sense of obliviousness. Believe it or not, shouting at someone whose yearly salary is less than 1/100th of your own does not make them sympathetic to your needs. It makes them sympathetic towards people like Brad Pitt in Fight Club and the entire French Revolution.

Though I must admit, I actually don't hate...

Rich people who look like crazy, poor people- When some neatly groomed tit in a polo shirt that costs more than my life drops a check for $160,000.00 on a desk in front of you, not only does it not seem like a big deal, it just seems sickeningly obvious. When some greasy dude with a bushy beard who looks like a Hell's Angel, or possibly someone's creepy uncle, does it, it's actually kind of awesome. While there's certainly nothing wrong with looking nice, there is more to life than appearances. So when some super-rich asshole decides to say "fuck it" and start dressing like a Salvation Army threw up on him because, you know, he can clearly afford to, I actually kind of have to admire them. Using your wealth to try to bully and impress the rest of the world into creaming over you is for chumps and twats. Using it to give the rest of society the finger and hope they think it's as funny as you do is for rock stars and true champions.