Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

oh god I love that oatmeal cartoon

Yeah, what I want to see: the opening hours, the menu, the phone number and maybe a link to Google maps.

All they ever have:
- a massive Flash gallery of pictures of attractive young people (90%) interspersed with arty shots of a fork (10%) where you can't even see what's on the attractive young peoples' plates
- horrible tinny piano music which can't be turned off
- what looks like a sidebar of links which reads "Gallery - About - Menu - Contact", except the "menu" and "contact" links don't work, and the "about" page is some typo-riddled rubbish about the fragrance of the sea near the chef's grandmother's house when he was 6 and a picture of Tuscany
- but hey, why not look at our massive Flash gallery?

and you have to download a giant PDF of the stupid menu because why not

my favorite is sites that have some sort of menu that is obviously the "export to html" or (god forbid) "export to flash" from an out-of-date version of a desktop publishing or design tool creating a 5MB web page that is slow as hell

pdfs on web sites always annoy me

it also doesn't help that all of the browser integrated pfd viewers are terrible

Exclaiming "Ah, ya cunt" at a cold tap I've just myself turned on way too hard.

normally over the back of a spoon for preference of course, but in this particular case washing a salad.

I don't know when but at some point Robot Chicken-style comedy just really started annoying me. Basically when the joke is that something strange is taken out of context and placed into 'normal'/'everyday'. Like "what if Darth Vader suddenly remembered he had to do his laundry?" It's not funny, it's not clever, it's just lazy and easy and cheap. And more often than not, it involves an awkward pause joke, and at that point I just have to turn away.

Agh! I had some time to kill before magnetic fields show. Went to Trader joes and stocked up on a few bags of trail mix. And they wouldn't let me in with my goddamn trail mix, and im too cheap to just throw away pristine bags of food I just bought so I got on the subway to dump my food at work and lo and behold the train switches to express and I don't hear it because try only announce it once and quietly.

stephin merritt is so bitchy!

They didn't have coat check?? I would never take the train to save bags of trail mix - my time is worth money - but it's nuts that they wouldn't let you check it.

lol "nuts" geddit

I don't seem to be able to get myspace player to play through the several tracks of the artist I'm looking up without jumping to another artist first. Guess that's not irrational.
Is it just me or did they change the settings recently?
JUst trying to check out one thing I'm unfamiliar with while I'm doing something else and find out I've been listening to a totally different band for a couple of tracks its not very helpful in me building a picture of whether I like/dislike the band I'm trying to check out.

The course yet again. hours of repetitive nothingness. Well at least I'm learning to type,roughly but Mavis Beacon keeps graduating personas I've set up to allow me to practise typing without looking at the screen to a level I'm not ready for.
& now I've got to find a work placement for 2 weeks in June when it's unlikely that everybody in the course will find one and there's almost no hope from the course itself. Think it's a vital part of the marks too.

& we could be spending what time we do have on the course going over examples of the programs we're using in a more in depth way instead of being on typing tutors so much. I'm going over e.gs from other sources and half wishing I'd taken the course online as had been offered as an option. wah.

Yeah they wouldn't let me check it. I was so mad! But in retrospect, I'm more annoyed at my own irrationality. I probably could have walked around the block, stuck them at the bottom of my bag, and come back in like 20 min.

rayuela: in Toronto a few friends similarly bought groceries before the show (why do the MF keep playing near grocery stores? Hmmm.) and the security guard gave them a plastic bag to stash it in a bush near the door! It was unscathed post-show.

that security guard was much more accomodating than mine!

too bad they don't travel with their own security guards!

I don't know when but at some point Robot Chicken-style comedy just really started annoying me. Basically when the joke is that something strange is taken out of context and placed into 'normal'/'everyday'. Like "what if Darth Vader suddenly remembered he had to do his laundry?" It's not funny, it's not clever, it's just lazy and easy and cheap. And more often than not, it involves an awkward pause joke, and at that point I just have to turn away.

absolutely, but this type of comedy is A) incredibly easy to write and B) strangely popular with whoever "gets" the reference, so it's probably not going away, unless Seth MacFarlane dies in a plane crash or something

you mean seth green? seth identification can be tricky i know.

Well, Family Guy did this too, but it feels more like a watered down version of early Adult Swim style.

Either/Or. They both do work on both shows and have the same humor.

Keep tempting fate with that "Seth MacFarlane dies in a plane crash" comments. Dude was probably scheduled to sleep in a boxcar outside Dallas yesterday, but missed his cab.

wow, you could just, y'know, not pay attention to him

I feel like you may have missed the point of the internet.

you mean seth green? seth identification can be tricky i know.

so long as MacFarlane keeps getting TV shows and movie deals people will always think this kind of humor is acceptable

Yeah my anger isn't really directed at any one person here, just this very lame type of comedy.

wow, you could just, y'know, not pay attention to him

Too late. Saw the Ted trailer already.

Guy has to be a furrie irl? We're all on the same page with that one, right?

online trade mag I subscribe to through work: mostly garbage, once in a blue moon they have actual industry news, which is why I keep my subscription up (free thank god).

however they send out these stupid daily emails almost always with the headline BREAKING NEWS. a dvd release that EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT ALREADY does not count as breaking news.

there needs to be some kind of legal decree that bans them from using the words BREAKING and NEWS in the same sentenence for the next, idk, 25 years.

the other day I read a breaking news report about how a mom in Chicago is 60 but looks 25 and that dermatologists hate her, pretty cool imo

That's been my complaint since 9/11. Now that was breaking news.

But turning to CNN and seeing Anderson Cooper go "BREAKING NEWS, Mitt Romney says President Obama's health care plan is no good." THAT'S NOT BREAKING NEWS, I DON'T CARE IF HE JUST SAID IT.

Memories of BREAKING NEWS: Survivors being pulled out of the Murrah Building. Kid waving arm out of broken window at Columbine High. 9/11. George W. Bush says he'll run for re-election in 2004…. wait WHAT?

Mitt Romney's whole disavowal of Obama's health care is a little notme.gif

That said, I don't think anyone needs to stop the presses on that one.

What was the last news event in which the old networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) all interrupted programming?

I remember as a kid watching "Manimal" or something when the screen would fade out for a second and THIS IS AN NBC SPECIAL REPORT would come on. Would scare the shit out of me.

(Not counting The State of the Union or some scheduled event.)

yeah local news is really bad for this too

Ha, the last time the local news interrupted programming was when the Razorbacks hired a new basketball coach.

remember as a kid watching "Manimal" or something when the screen would fade out for a second and THIS IS AN NBC SPECIAL REPORT would come on. Would scare the shit out of me.

Me too! I was always convinced it was going to be about Russian nuclear missiles sighted over DC airspace. Ugh.

In my gradeschool years the special reports were always local stations giving us a heads-up re tornadoes headed straight for us, which was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL GODDAMN. Stupid Minnesota.

We lived in a trailer for some years so our tornado plan was to GTFO on the highway to the north or south, depending on the trajectory of the tornado (tornadoes usually came in from the west or southwest). Only had to do that once, during the 1984 summer Olympics. We drove south as the tornado headed east. My dad threw a shoe running to the car.

God, fuck living in a trailer. Any sort of rain sounded like pebbles hitting the roof. A fucking boxcar would have been more secure.

Never had any tornadoes though. A Titan II missile did explode from its silo just down the road from us, but fortunately the nuclear warhead was thrown into a ditch.

Shook that trailer like a motherfucker when that happened.

A tornado hit my house a few years after we moved out of the trailer (built on the same spot). It was hilarious.

They moved our trailer after we moved out. Word was it got bit by a tornado too.

I feel bad for whatever family was living there, but nothing makes my heart sweller than picturing that trailer torn the fuck up to pieces.

"Oh, your little goldenrod plastic shower windows? Yeah, those are in the next congressional district now."

Out of my close friends and acquaintances, a sizable majority of the married couples have different last names. Out of all the peers that I interact with regularly (excluding parents and such) there are only maybe five or ten couples where the wife has taken the husband's name. Of course I'm into this (my wife kept her name) in a fuck-the-patriarchy equality sort of way, not accepting society's defaults or at least putting some conscious thought into these things, etc.

But now that everyone's having kids, all of them (save one couple who hyphenated) has given their child, male or female, the father's last name. Which I guess doesn't really make me angry, just kind of befuddled and vaguely disappointed.

i dunno, it seems like a much bigger deal for a bride to *change* her name than to give a kid one or the other (and hyphenated names are terribly un-american amirite)

Yeah, but I think joygoat's point is that it's always the father's last name that the kid gets, never the mother's.

balls to hyphenated names

were I to have kids I'd probably let them take Mr Veg's last name, sheerly out of practical reasons that might sound preposterous but w/e. I didn't change my name but Mr Veg's last name gets randomly bestowed on me at every turn anyway, so it just seems easier for the kids to go through life with their Dad's name, save confusion bc wider society tend to like assuming yr last name for you

I had a friend whose parents kept their last names and gave the kids a portmanteau surname that combined elements from both parents.

the mayor of los angeles has a portmanteau name. he was villar, his wife was raigosa, and they both changed it to "villaraigosa." (they're divorced now, but he still uses that name.)

lol am picutring the possibilities

Pennyhill
Cahenny