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?

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.

Sighing in the Rain

"I love the smell of Naipaul in the morning. It smells of... victory." New Literary Remakes of Old Illiterate Films.


The Big Bukowski - After having been successfully sued for copyright infringement by "the other" Lebowski, "the Dude" Lebowski changes his family name to Bukowski... with hilarious consequences. Most of the action in the film takes place in a badly-lit dive inhabited by barflies who -time and time again- refuse to go home at closing time. A cautionary tale, rilly.

The Grapes of Roth - The tale of a deprived family being forced to face a drought in rural Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Of course, John Steinbeck's creation - the Joad family- is slightly altered so as to include the lasciviously Rothian Nathan Zuckerman. Expect explicit scenes of masturbation and ejaculation every five minutes, or so. But done tastefully, surely.

Dial M for Murdoch - A Hitchcockian thriller starring Iris Murdoch as either the protagonist, the antagonist, or some other character. A terrifying whodunnit. Was it the butler? Or was it the Judith Butler? Or the big bad wolf? Or the big bad Virginia Woolf? We all know -after all- that someone is afraid of Virginia Woolf. We simply don't know who.

Rimbaud: First Blood - Arthur Rambo -or, for that matter, Joe Rimbaud- is back from either Vietnam or Abyssinia and encounters a certain amount of trouble when he meets the local sheriff. Guns, guns, guns. And a tiny bit of French symbolist poetry here and there, perchance?

Wilde At Heart (or should it be The Wilde One?) - A rather Lynchian take on the life and works of Oscar Wilde. Or a Brandoesque biker gang, with homoerotic undertones and allegorical poems. I don't know. So... either cars or bikes. But a lot of Wilde. Ooooh, yeah.

Re-writes, Corrections, and More!

The Rapes Of Garth: Re-writing of The Grapes Of Wrath and other Classics, the Hollywood way.



Tolstoyry, or, Tol Stoyry - The story of Count Lev Nikolayevich (Leo, to his friends) Tolstoy's favourite childhood trinkets and playthings, and their feats as they come to life and embark in countless adventures. An epic tale of tormented souls and the never-ending quest towards honesty.

American Were-Woolf in Paris - Few literary critics are aware of Virginia Woolf's trip to Paris, France, during the winter of 1927. Even fewer know that during the aforementioned trip she was bitten by -and subsequently turned into- a werewolf. This film chronicles her tale of lupine redemption. With lotsa gore, by the by.

D.H. Lawrence of Arabia - "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." With said epigraph begins this epic fantasy, set in an alternative reality in which D.H. Lawrence and T.E. Lawrence are -for some reason unknown to the general public- one and the same person. Set during World War I and having Modernity as its general backdrop, this is a tale of poetry, betrayal, the Arab Revolt, and sons and -of course- lovers. Eff, you, enn, spells FUN.

Bend It Like Beckett - 126 minutes of two adolescent girls who just happen to be obsessed with football sitting on a typical Adidas truncated icosahedron ball, pondering over the meaning of life, the absurdity of going on, the nature of artistic creation, and making out with boys. All in a bare, very minimal theatre stage.

I'll just go wait for the Coen brothers to phone me. We really should make these films.

C'mon, I'm waiting.

This is a Warning.

People That I Don't Really Like often employ these words and / or phrases in conversation.

"Wow factor"

"X factor" (and the X Factor ©, for that matter.)

Most other factors, unless we are referring to algebraic expressions by which others are exactly divisible, genes that determine hereditary characteristics, and / or any of a number of substances in the blood which are involved in coagulation.

"My / Your / His / Her / Our / Their Comfort zone"

"The next level"

"Blog" (used as a regular verb. Silly, rilly.)

"Tweet" (used as an irregular verb, conjugated tweet / twit / twat.)

Post

The Humour of The New Yorker, also known as unfunny jokes and other non-sequiturs.

Animal Humour, like The Far Side, but not humourous.

An ant wearing a surgical gown is lying down on an operating table. A duck wearing a stethoscope, surgical mask and operating theatre scrubs bends over him with a worried look in his eyes. The caption reads:

-What did you say your specialty was, Monsieur Fourmi?
-Ant-hropology, Duck-tor Canard.

New York Humour, whatever that maybe.

A Catholic priest, a Rabbi and an Ayatollah walk into a cafe. The latter is murdered pre-emptively by the other two, who go on to eat bagels with cream cheese.

Self-Referential Humour. (The New Yorker? Yes! The New Yorker.)

An uneducated workman boorishly walks up to a Manhattan newsstand not wearing a tie and asks for a copy of The New Yorker. End of joke.

Ouch

Silly Words and Stupid Phrases that only Olympic-size morons and Brobdingnagian dickheads use. Particularly on television.
"The thing is is that..." (the thing simply is, you commoner!)

"110%" (and any other silly percentages, including 101%, 99.99% and seventy-fuck percent.)

"The best of the best" (if you are the best, then you are the best of the best, the worst and everyone in between, including those treading water in their puddle of mediocrity.)

"Yum-o-metre"

"The next... / The new..." (as in: "Rufus Wainwright is the next Elton John, in that they are both really annoying," or "Nickelback really do wish they were the new Nirvana, but they are just -well- utter shite.")

"The myspace Generation" (which normally sends shivers down my spine, as I consider the prospect of future age groups being sponsored by multinational corporations, as in the following nightmares: "the Nestlé generation," "the Age of Coca-Cola," "the Year of the Cadbury," or "Life, sponsored by Marlboro.") See also: "The facebook Faction" / "The iPod iDiots"

"-ista" (suffix, normally added to words that are on their own already asinine, such as fashion, to produce a surplus of asininity, as in "fashionista," meaning "silly person wearing even sillier clothes.")