IN WHICH I VENT MY ANNOYANCE AT TRIVIAL THINGS.
Which means that maybe I won't notice the larger things that I should be annoyed at.
The world is only going downhill from here.
It's a nice day, right? So I have every right to have every window and door in my house wide open, to enjoy the fresh smell of spring, and the cool breeze, and, most importantly, the glorious sound of the wind blowing through the empty trees that haven't yet budded, yeah? It was so nice for a while. Just sitting in the chair by the window, reading Crime and Punishment (which is truly an extraordinary book, I just love it) and enjoying the weekend when the neighbor's DOG has to go off and start barking. I swear, the sound of a dog barking is the most irritating thing on the planet. There simply cannot be anything worse. Every time it went off, it sounded like it was in pain or dying or something, but it was just...barking. Like, that's the sound that dogs usually make! I cannot wrap my head around the concept of actually owning such an ugly animal that can only make loud, sudden, coarse rasping noises--you know what, I don't even know how to find words to describe the sound of a dog's bark. Everyone knows what it sounds like. WHICH FURTHERS MY POINT; how on EARTH can people stand it?!? I could hear it clearly--CLEARLY from where I sat, one house and one street down from where the dog was, so how in the world can the people who actually live in that house tolerate it? If I had had a dog whistle, or something that it could have actually heard from my backyard, something that would have really bothered the thing, I would have gone and tried to bother the hell out of the blasted creature. And then, to make matters worse, my next-door NEIGHBOR lets her two dogs out, and they start barking their damn heads off...why do people own these things? I want an honest answer. People say that their dogs are well-behaved, that their dogs don't bark very much, blah blah blah...but they do. It's just that they've become neutral to the noise and only drive the people around them nuts. Is that what people really want? To have an animal in their house that they must become neutral to? What, do they consider it a trade-off? "Sure, my eardrums are left ringing for hourse on end whenever it sees a squirrel...but ain't it just the cutest little thing?" It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know if I'm missing something; I hope I'm missing something because the way I see things now, a majority of the world have ideas of what makes a pleasant pet that I cannot for the life of me wrap my mind around. Dogs never should have been domesticated. Society would be so much...nicer. People are freaking insane.
Speaking of freaking insane, has anyone seen that new game show, "Minute to Win It"? Before I delve into that delightful subject, I have a few things to say about game shows in general. I love "Jeopardy". It's down-to-earth, it's competitive, it's serious, it's smart. People who deserve to win money are winning money. Except of course whenever they have the games with celebrities, who, of course, just don't know very much, and it's just embarassing to watch them show how stupid they really are. But "Jeopardy" is, overally, a decent show. Then...there's "Wheel of Fortune". Quite a few notches down on the 'worthiness' meter. Three contestants with no unique personalities of their own, who clap constantly for the duration of the show, and scream letters at a man who stands about three feet from them. It's a glorified hangman game, where everything is loud and shiny and--yes, I'll mention it again, people SCREAM for no reason and clap for no reason, because they feel awkward and out-of-place just standing and looking intelligent, I'll assume. Still...I can see how it can be a good show. It's interactive, like Jeopardy; the audience at home can play along and it takes a little more than a complete loser to solve the puzzles. Now then, let's get into the really mindless trash on TV, shall we? (When I say "mindless trash", I'm only staying within the 'game show' genre. I won't even begin to touch on the subject of reality shows, because if there was ever a synonym for mindless trash, it's reality TV.) Just out of curiosity, is "Deal or No Deal" on anymore? It isn't played incessantly anymore, thank God. Here we have a handful of hyper, ignorant, overenthusiastic contenstants acting like children who stand around and win outrageous amounts of money. Like "Wheel of Fortune", they jump around and clap and shout things, but unlike "Wheel of Fortune", they shout random numbers instead of letters that may actually require some thought as to whether they are critical to the game or not. Nope. Here, the bar has been lowered even more, so that absolutely no intelligence is needed to win millions of dollars (note: As the difficulty of the game show decreases, the amount of money available to win increases. Interesting. Not entirely logical). Of course, having a sob story that fits nicely into a sappy montage and, as mentioned earlier, a mindless and overenthusiastic personality both help. Now, the intriguing part of this show is that, when the contestant shouts numbers, the numbers coorespond to suitcases of cash that they win. So the general idea of the show is that, if one is good enough at jumping around and shouting numbers, one can win a lot of money! You know what this sounds like? Yeah. This is the real-life equivalent of "Numberwang". This is what our society has degraded into. No--wait, no, this is not quite as involved. In "Deal or No Deal", only natural numbers from one to thirty are needed, as opposed to all rational and irrational numbers in "Numberwang". But I digress. Meet "Minute to Win It", the sexy new game show that anyone can play, and I mean anyone! Yes folks, that means no more shouting out letters or numbers, or, oh, of course nothing to do with knowledge, but now you can have a million dollars by embarassing yourself in front of the whole, wide world, who is happy to make fun of you [but, certainly won't evaluate the fact that they are the ones watching such garbage]. Here, we have a game show that has the same basic concept as reality shows--aka, performing pointless, sometimes impossible tasks to prove how shameless one is and the lengths to which one will go to try to get some money. A game show for the ultimate dregs of society. Wonderful. And you could say, "well, just don't watch it, you whiny dumbass", but it still bothers me that it's there. Why are we giving piles and piles of money away to the people who are the least capable of having it? It's upsetting. People are just...so stupid. Words fail. I don't even want to reread this entry because I'm sure that it's completely fragmented and unreadable.
Oh, and this. Thank you, Charlie, thank you immensely, from saving me the trouble of ranting about how disgusting celebrity magazines are, and teen celebrities are in general. Ewwww.
I could mention even more aspects of the world in which we live that worry me, but the short attention span and lazy mind that I've gained from instant gratification entertainment on the internet and the ability to skip songs on my iPod are causing me to end this one prematurely. I could go on...about the idiocy of the Census campaigns, about DVD players in cars, about an article in the paper that I read about--nah, you won't even believe me if I told you. Or maybe you would.
That's what scares me.
The world is only going downhill from here.
It's a nice day, right? So I have every right to have every window and door in my house wide open, to enjoy the fresh smell of spring, and the cool breeze, and, most importantly, the glorious sound of the wind blowing through the empty trees that haven't yet budded, yeah? It was so nice for a while. Just sitting in the chair by the window, reading Crime and Punishment (which is truly an extraordinary book, I just love it) and enjoying the weekend when the neighbor's DOG has to go off and start barking. I swear, the sound of a dog barking is the most irritating thing on the planet. There simply cannot be anything worse. Every time it went off, it sounded like it was in pain or dying or something, but it was just...barking. Like, that's the sound that dogs usually make! I cannot wrap my head around the concept of actually owning such an ugly animal that can only make loud, sudden, coarse rasping noises--you know what, I don't even know how to find words to describe the sound of a dog's bark. Everyone knows what it sounds like. WHICH FURTHERS MY POINT; how on EARTH can people stand it?!? I could hear it clearly--CLEARLY from where I sat, one house and one street down from where the dog was, so how in the world can the people who actually live in that house tolerate it? If I had had a dog whistle, or something that it could have actually heard from my backyard, something that would have really bothered the thing, I would have gone and tried to bother the hell out of the blasted creature. And then, to make matters worse, my next-door NEIGHBOR lets her two dogs out, and they start barking their damn heads off...why do people own these things? I want an honest answer. People say that their dogs are well-behaved, that their dogs don't bark very much, blah blah blah...but they do. It's just that they've become neutral to the noise and only drive the people around them nuts. Is that what people really want? To have an animal in their house that they must become neutral to? What, do they consider it a trade-off? "Sure, my eardrums are left ringing for hourse on end whenever it sees a squirrel...but ain't it just the cutest little thing?" It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know if I'm missing something; I hope I'm missing something because the way I see things now, a majority of the world have ideas of what makes a pleasant pet that I cannot for the life of me wrap my mind around. Dogs never should have been domesticated. Society would be so much...nicer. People are freaking insane.
Speaking of freaking insane, has anyone seen that new game show, "Minute to Win It"? Before I delve into that delightful subject, I have a few things to say about game shows in general. I love "Jeopardy". It's down-to-earth, it's competitive, it's serious, it's smart. People who deserve to win money are winning money. Except of course whenever they have the games with celebrities, who, of course, just don't know very much, and it's just embarassing to watch them show how stupid they really are. But "Jeopardy" is, overally, a decent show. Then...there's "Wheel of Fortune". Quite a few notches down on the 'worthiness' meter. Three contestants with no unique personalities of their own, who clap constantly for the duration of the show, and scream letters at a man who stands about three feet from them. It's a glorified hangman game, where everything is loud and shiny and--yes, I'll mention it again, people SCREAM for no reason and clap for no reason, because they feel awkward and out-of-place just standing and looking intelligent, I'll assume. Still...I can see how it can be a good show. It's interactive, like Jeopardy; the audience at home can play along and it takes a little more than a complete loser to solve the puzzles. Now then, let's get into the really mindless trash on TV, shall we? (When I say "mindless trash", I'm only staying within the 'game show' genre. I won't even begin to touch on the subject of reality shows, because if there was ever a synonym for mindless trash, it's reality TV.) Just out of curiosity, is "Deal or No Deal" on anymore? It isn't played incessantly anymore, thank God. Here we have a handful of hyper, ignorant, overenthusiastic contenstants acting like children who stand around and win outrageous amounts of money. Like "Wheel of Fortune", they jump around and clap and shout things, but unlike "Wheel of Fortune", they shout random numbers instead of letters that may actually require some thought as to whether they are critical to the game or not. Nope. Here, the bar has been lowered even more, so that absolutely no intelligence is needed to win millions of dollars (note: As the difficulty of the game show decreases, the amount of money available to win increases. Interesting. Not entirely logical). Of course, having a sob story that fits nicely into a sappy montage and, as mentioned earlier, a mindless and overenthusiastic personality both help. Now, the intriguing part of this show is that, when the contestant shouts numbers, the numbers coorespond to suitcases of cash that they win. So the general idea of the show is that, if one is good enough at jumping around and shouting numbers, one can win a lot of money! You know what this sounds like? Yeah. This is the real-life equivalent of "Numberwang". This is what our society has degraded into. No--wait, no, this is not quite as involved. In "Deal or No Deal", only natural numbers from one to thirty are needed, as opposed to all rational and irrational numbers in "Numberwang". But I digress. Meet "Minute to Win It", the sexy new game show that anyone can play, and I mean anyone! Yes folks, that means no more shouting out letters or numbers, or, oh, of course nothing to do with knowledge, but now you can have a million dollars by embarassing yourself in front of the whole, wide world, who is happy to make fun of you [but, certainly won't evaluate the fact that they are the ones watching such garbage]. Here, we have a game show that has the same basic concept as reality shows--aka, performing pointless, sometimes impossible tasks to prove how shameless one is and the lengths to which one will go to try to get some money. A game show for the ultimate dregs of society. Wonderful. And you could say, "well, just don't watch it, you whiny dumbass", but it still bothers me that it's there. Why are we giving piles and piles of money away to the people who are the least capable of having it? It's upsetting. People are just...so stupid. Words fail. I don't even want to reread this entry because I'm sure that it's completely fragmented and unreadable.
Oh, and this. Thank you, Charlie, thank you immensely, from saving me the trouble of ranting about how disgusting celebrity magazines are, and teen celebrities are in general. Ewwww.
I could mention even more aspects of the world in which we live that worry me, but the short attention span and lazy mind that I've gained from instant gratification entertainment on the internet and the ability to skip songs on my iPod are causing me to end this one prematurely. I could go on...about the idiocy of the Census campaigns, about DVD players in cars, about an article in the paper that I read about--nah, you won't even believe me if I told you. Or maybe you would.
That's what scares me.