Things I Hate

I decided to throw something up today in honor of Ramit Sethi (who was apparently a member of my graduating class this summer), who writes the "Things I Hate" blog. Those of you who know me know that the list of things I hate could stretch to the Sun and back, because it could be summed up by saying "the entirety of human behavior," but here's a start.

- When a site has a ridiculously overblown Flash intro that takes too long, and then the site itself is incredibly poorly designed and not at all user-friendly. It's like the Web designers got so caught up in masturbating over their Flash capabilities that it didn't enter their minds that someone might actually be trying to get information from the site in an efficient manner. Guess what: Every single person is going to click "SKIP INTRO" as soon as they can locate it.

- People who try to make casual conversation with you when you are wearing IPod headphones, which are the universal symbol for "don't talk to me."

- People who ask straightforward questions like "Who was president after Teddy Roosevelt?" or something VIA THE INTERNET. THAT IS WHY GOOGLE EXISTS.

- People whose voicemail messages are like 30 seconds long. I know how to leave a message; you don't need to tell me to "leave your name and number at the beep, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible."

- Commercials whose premise involves people behaving in a completely illogical or unbelievable manner, like when an adorable four-year-old child grows concerned over whether his father has life insurance.

- ESPN.com for taking away the "Race" feature on the MLB standings page. The "Race" feature pulls up a graph that tracks the number of games a team is above/below .500 as the year goes on, and is an easily readable summary of a team's winning and losing streaks. I brought this up while talking to my friend Glenn the other night at a bar, who immediately knew exactly what I was talking about and was equally enraged about it, and my girlfriend looked at us like we were crazy. Also, Glenn pointed out that it would be incredibly easy to color-coordinate the graph lines with the teams they represent (say, A's=green and Giants=orange), but ESPN still didn't do it.

- When someone is late and then complains about the traffic/weather/etc. like it's a valid excuse. I know we all run into unexpected situations every once in a while, but if you're going to be late, CALL AND INFORM ME OF IT ONCE YOU KNOW YOU ARE RUNNING BEHIND, not when you're already 20 minutes late and calling to tell me that you're "almost there." That is what cell phones are for.

- People who misuse common phrases, like when they say "It's us against them, mano y mano." It's "mano a mano;" instead of "hand-to-hand" you're actually saying "hand and hand." I'm looking at you, Joe Horn.

- Skip Bayless, for being a contrarian dick and never giving credit to an athlete for any accomplishment, ever; for trying desperately to make every trivial issue into a moralistic debate; and for co-hosting a show with Woody Paige. What makes me the angriest is when he picks an outlandishly moronic position like "Lance Armstrong is the greatest athlete in the history of sports," builds it up like thousands of people are clamoring in support of it, and then argues against it like he's somehow standing against the tide of ignorance.

- Lastly, Paris fucking Hilton. I could literally write a 100-page treatise on why, and how much, I hate her. In a nutshell, she is a blight on the face of humanity and deserves to be crushed into a fine paste and then fed to orphaned puppies. The only thing that makes me angrier than she does is the men who are attracted to her. I know the primary line of reasoning is "Who cares how dumb she is, she's hot!" No. SHE IS NOT THAT ATTRACTIVE. Her face looks like Howard Cosell fucked a cracked-out prostitute, and her chest looks like a ten-year-old boy's. And dude, if the only thing that makes you attracted to her is her omnipresence, then do I have an invention for you: the Internet. I can name 100 hotter actresses, models and pornstars off the top of my head, all of whom have the added benefit of actually getting naked for our viewing pleasure and who probably don't give head like they were shaving down a Popsicle with their teeth.

- Just for good measure: obnoxiously fat people, Us Weekly/People/Cosmo/all those other magazines that make women dumber by the word, MTV, pretty much every celebrity, PETA, McDonald's, bumper stickers, people who hesitate in front of your car in the crosswalk and then cross anyway, guys who wear jeans to the gym, unattractive porn actresses, and smokers.