There are way too many rant pages on the Internet!
But of course, I wouldn't be able to rant about that unless I had my own. Consider it a sinkhole for my anger.
And since I can't be bitter all the time, I'll pepper these pages with a few odd things I notice in life, too.
Biased Observations and Obligatory Rants
A Presentation of The Big Waste of Space Wanna see more?
October 2000 Previous Rants:  
Tuesday
October 31
2000
When someone asks me for the time, I give them the time. If it's 8:48, I say, "It's 8:48." But, when I ask someone else for the time, I usually get a math problem. "It's twelve to nine." So, let's see...that's minus twelve...almost nine...

And there seem to be a dozen different ways people like to respond without actually giving the time. "Half past five." "Quarter to six." "Eighteen after four." Look, if I'm concerned about the hour, I don't have time to work equations. And then there's the allusive "fifteen till." Fifteen till? Fifteen till what? If I knew that, I wouldn't be asking for the time!

My absolute favorite response, though, is, "Time to get a watch." Sure, I'll do just that. And then you can fish it out from under your coccyx, smartass.

Monday
October 30
2000
I muted my TV the other day and discovered that it had the interesting feature of turning on the Closed Captioning when I did so. Closed Captioning, in case you don't know, is the subtitles at the bottom of the screen placed there for people with hearing disabilities.

Anyway, I glanced at the TV just in time to catch the opening of a commercial, which was helpfully subtitled with two little musical notes and the comment "bluesy guitar riff." Now, if I were deaf, how the hell would I know what "bluesy" sounded like?

Tuesday
October 24
2000
I've been in movie theaters across the country and one thing never changes. The concession stand is always busy and it is always slow. Why is this? It's not like they're cooking anything back there. Goobers, soda, money, change, done. Where's the speed bump?

They can have 6 people working two lines and it still takes me 20 minutes to get a box of Milk Duds. And it's not like any of them are just standing around. All of them are always rushing back and forth — doing what, I don't know. Are they lost? Can they not remember where the popcorn bin is each time?

I dunno, maybe they're all perpetually dumbfounded that they just charged a guy $38.00 for a soda and some Sweet Tarts.

Monday
October 23
2000
Can I take just a moment to thank God that Jenny McCarthy's 15 minutes are officially up?

Holy crap, she was annoying.

Sunday
October 22
2000
Just when I thought sales calls couldn't get any more annoying, now they've started calling me and instantly putting me on hold.

"Hello. All our associates are busy right now, but please stay on the line for an incredible offer!" [Muzak.]

They tear me away from my Internet porn search and they don't even have the decency to annoy me up front. Instead, they make me wait for it. Last time, I had to hold on the line a full 8 minutes before I could hang up on them...

Thursday
October 19
2000
Attention, all people walking around in public wearing a headset attached to your cell phones:

You look like complete morons.

That is all.

Wednesday
October 18
2000
So, there's a guy behind me at the bank today. A big, sweaty, raspy-breathed guy who is standing just a little too close to my heels. So, I move up. Then he moves up. So I move up again. And he moves up again. I'm only moving in half steps, but it's enough to get him out of my perimeter. But, he matches me inch for inch. I think he may have even been getting closer each time. Neither one of us is actually going anywhere, but this D&D asshead feels some gravitational need to breathe right down my shirt collar.

I'm at the front of the line, so there's really nowhere for me to go. I actually had to move forward as far as I could, shuffle surreptitiously to the left, then step to the right. We ended up standing next to each other.

Next time I'm just going to start grinding with whomever insists on standing that close to me. Either I'll teach him a lesson, or I'll make a good friend.

Sunday
October 15
2000
I can't tell you how many times I've pulled a pair of jeans fresh out of the dryer and one of the little copper rivets burned my arm like an abusive, cigarette-wielding father.

But, I guess that's what I get for never washing them. (Febreze is a bachelor's best friend.)

Tuesday
October 10
2000
Have you noticed that almost every company and product name today is just two common words slapped together and capitalized in the middle? Take, for instance, FireWire, SmartMedia, MemoryStick, ImageReady, BurnProof Technology and Microsoft FrontPage. My favorite? ReFlex. It's not even two words — it's just the word "reflex" with each of its syllables capitalized.

But, it's not only computer- and technology-related names, either. How about a line of hair-care products termed EnzymeTherapy? Or a brand of contacts called FreshLook ColorBlends?

And in the blind, monkey-see, monkey-do fashion so common to the populace, people have begun combining words that don't belong together and arbitrarily capitalizing others. Faxmodem. DualBand. The ridiculous ReWritable. I've even seen InterNet. Not to mention the Kroger commercial that instructs us to "HaulAway the Savings."

What's even more annoying is when companies insist on lowercasing what should be proper nouns. The aforementioned EnzymeTherapy actually appears in literature as enzymetherapy. It's not a real word and lack of capitalization indicates that it's not a name, so it just looks like a damned typo! Besides, what company in its right mind would want to denigrate its own name by making it appear as an improper noun? And at the same time, many of them turn around and capitalize what shouldn't be in order to make it appear more important! (e.g. "We are professionals in the Business-to-Business e-Commerce arena.") IBM has gone so far as to trademark the term "e-business" and their usage guidelines insist that it always be lowercased, even at the beginning of a sentence.

Apparently, the overwhelming influence of the contracted URL and the trend-saturated, unimaginative corporate beast has warped people's understanding of second-grade grammar. Just imagine if the Internet had been present in its current form years ago — we would all be checking the YellowPages for Carrepair while our children drink cocacola and play with their LincolnLogs.

Saturday
October 7
2000
In this wonderful age of convenience technology, we have motion-sensing toilets and motion-sensing faucets, but why have I never seen a motion-sensing towel dispenser? After I wash my hands in the bathroom, the last thing I want to do is touch that dripping, bacteria-infested lever to dry them off. Not to mention the fact that you have to pump the thing three dozen times to get a decent length of paper.

And half the time, they mount the thing so high that the water on my hand runs down into my shirt sleeve. I can buy a robot lawn mower, so why can't I wave my hand in front of a sensor and receive some paper towels?

And while I'm on the subject, the doors at the grocery store open automatically — let's work that technology into the john, why don't we? In fact, I don't want to touch a damn thing in a public bathroom ever. I'm willing to take this so far as to make the whole floor like an air-hockey table — float in, float out.

Friday
October 6
2000
Remember back in gradeschool, when you were punished by writing a sentence 500 times? What ever made us think that it went by faster if we wrote the first word 500 times, then the second word 500 times, through to the end of the sentence?

And what about skipping every 7th line between the first and last pages? Well, that actually worked... (Good advice for those of you still in school.)

Wednesday
October 4
2000
I don't know what the hell I was watching last night, but this is absolutely the biggest hair I have ever seen.
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