First, a couple more bumper stickers:
—That’s MISTER Loser, to you!
–My Dead Grandmother Drives Faster than You!
Things I hate: (not an all-inclusive list)
–Gratuitous vomiting on TV or in movies. Just because people do blow chunks, do we really have to see it (or worse, hear it)? I’ve never seen that it adds to the story.
–People going to the bathroom on TV or in movies. (See gratuitous vomiting above) Except for maybe “The Green Mile,” where Tom Hanks’ peeing issue was cured by Michael Clarke Duncan, it’s almost never central to the story. And, even then, the depiction of MCD inhaling all the bad pee infection molecules was pointlessly gross.
–All staged “reality” TV. Except for the dialogue on Parental Control, where the girl’s dad says to the (no-doubt) future son-in-law as they watch video of her date with a guy handpicked by the parents, “She never laughs like that with you,” and the punk answers “She can’t; her face is always buried in the pillow when she’s with me,” and the dad replies “I’m gonna put my foot in your ass,” I’ve never heard anything mildly interesting coming from one of those shows. Don’t we all run into enough whiny, boring, stupid, and self-centered people in real life?
–Pointless remakes of old songs. Not all of them, mind you; there are a few winners, like the UB40 remake of Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine”. But there’s a zillion more that shouldn’t have been touched. A big case in point: the utterly talentless girlfriend-beater and Kid Rock hanger-on “Uncle Cracker” doing Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away.” The chorus of the remake should have been: “This is a totally pointless remake, of a song that wasn’t that great in the first place, called Drift Away.”
–Homely Asians. There’s enough of us Northern Europeans and whatnot that aren’t all that great-looking here already. If you’re going to emigrate to the U.S. these days, bring the cure for cancer, or else bring beauty. Thanks.
(Actually, I think that last one wasn’t so much dull-witted prejudice or attempted humor, so much as, at a previous job I saw a real sour-faced Chinese visitor one day, and it suddenly flashed into my head that we will all probably be in Chinese labor camps one day in the future. Their weapons are as good as ours, or soon will be, they have more people and more money, and they are way bigger pricks than us. It’s a wacky theory, I know, but I think the only thing that might keep them from taking us over at some point is the fact that they love selling stuff to us.) Scary-looking Asians truly scare me; what can I say?
