Thursday Thirteen: Thirteen Things That Annoy The Mess Out Of Me

With sundry notes as deemed fit.

1. Cables that tie themselves into knots.
How do they do that? I toss a pair of headphones and an audio cable and a couple of USB cables into my suitcase and by the time I get to my hotel they have knit themselves into a ball so tight only the sword of Alexander can untangle it.

2. Garrison Keillor.
I picture hoards of NPR listeners gathering round their radios to enjoy his homespun stories and high-pitched mellifluous voice and am transported to a warm world of muted tones and glowing windows and Saturday Evening Post covers and Thomas Kincaid prints and before you know it I want to barf.

3. Thomas Kincaid.

4. 158th and 185th Avenues being consecutive exits.
Once you get out of the airport and figure out how to get past Portland and finally find yourself westbound on U.S. Route 26, it should be enough to know that your exit is a numbered street with a 5 and an 8 in it. Why should any out-of-towner anywhere ever have to remember more than that? So you see 158th Ave -- that has to be it -- and move over to exit. But wait! The next exit is 185th Ave! Fuck! Which one do I want?!

5. George W. Bush's voice and everything he says with it.

6. The American date-style (mm/dd/yy).
The rest of the civilized world uses dd/mm/yy, as is only logical; and if you interact with the rest of the civilized world, you have already experienced no end of confusion over whether a given milestone was supposed to be the 5h of April or the 4th of May. I strike back by using the European style if the date isn't ambiguous, for example yesterday at Kaiser I dated some forms "28/02/07". Today I would have written "01 Mar 07". It is up to each of us to subvert the system!

7. Leaving a brilliantly hilarious and insightful comment at someone's blog somewhere and wanting to follow up on the undoubtedly riveting conversation that surely ensued and being totally unable to remember where the hell it was.

8. Television "news" media.
Yes, all of it. Every aspect.

9. The United States still not having gone metric.

10. Use of the present tense in television documentaries.
Worse yet, mixing past and present tense and evidently not being aware they are doing it.

11. Jokes about Mexicans, Nee-gros and queers.
I don't care if your name is Carlos Mencia, enough already.

12. People who drive the speed limit when they're in front of me.

13. Developing the best damn character-building and plot-moving dialog ever and not being able to recreate one sentence of it once I get out of the shower.