Monday 7 December 2009

Irritation of the Non-Biological Type



Welcome to Jerksville, population YOU, or, yet another list of words that tend to annoy me.


"delish" (it does not magically translate into "delicious" to intelligent people. Only to imbeciles obsessed with "saving time," whatever that might be. Do they save time for later? Do they save it for the winter, when -as we all know- the Time Banks are shut for months? I wonder.)

"schedge" (only a class D ignoramus would use this word, as if it was actually that much shorter than the original, "schedule." At least, I assume the original is "schedule." I hope it is.)

"celeb" (trust me, if you are in that much of a hurry, simply avoid using the word altogether, or even avoid talking about celebrities, for that matter, rather than dropping last bit and turning the idiotic "celebrity" into the even more imbecilic "celeb.")

"it girl" (only to be used when referring to the girl from the Information Technology Department. In which case, the "it" should be capitalised and, thus, "IT." If referring to a model, super model, and/or glamour model, please use the old-fashioned "whore.")

"star quality" (which solely applies to vast, luminescent balls of plasma. And, no. Not even the brilliant John Goodman fits that description accurately enough. Are we clear?)

"push the envelope" (what?!?! That's just plain weird. Why not "shove the stationery"? "Nudge the wrapper"? Or, "thrust the package"? Well, that last one actually works better than the original. At least it makes some sense.

"think outside the box" (if, for whatever reason, you find yourself inside a box in the first place, forget about the entire concept of thought. It is clearly beyond your intellectual grasp. Give it up. You've lost. You're lost. You are obviously not philosopher material, which is the main reason why it doesn't seem obvious to you. Fool.



Why am I such an angry person?

Saturday 5 December 2009

Easy Ways To Ruin Good Literature



Bad Choices... Bad, bad, choices. You've been a bad choice.

This Week: Audiobook Accidents

When looking for someone to read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy -consisting of All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain- for its audiobook version, some halfwitted executive at Random House who could not have possibly read McCarthy's works threw -for reasons both unexplained and unexplainable- Brad Pitt's name into the mix. Unfortunately, it stuck, and -thus- we can now safely assume that Brad Pitt has read at least -and quite possibly only- three books in his life. Needless to say, all three audiobooks are abridged versions of the original novels. One must wonder whether the width of Mr. Pitt's vocabulary -one hundred and two words, by my calculations, counting the word "yeah" no less than three times, to bump up the numbers- had anything to do with the aforementioned abridgement. (Pst, Brad... Hey, sorry, I should probably explain what both "aforementioned" and "abridgement" mean, right? "I said it before" and "shorty-shorty short-short," respectively. And "respectively" means "each one, in the aforementioned order.")

Communicating with morons is harder than it might seem from afar. Audiolibrarians all over the land shall despair at the sound of these, as much as cinephiles despaired upon hearing that Matt Damon had been cast as John Grady Cole in the film adaptation of All The Pretty Horses.