Latin

Just because you know a few Latin terms doesn't mean you know Latin. Just because you know Latin doesn't make you smart. Hell, just because you're Hispanic, it doesn't make you Latino. I could do this for days.

The amount of people on the internet who use Latin terms to look intelligent far exceed the amount of people off the internet who are intelligent. Now, I won't argue that knowing Latin gives you an edge on understanding the meaning of words from another language, but so does knowing more than one language. What if I don't need to know more than one language? In my own job, I would probably be better served speaking Arabic. The majority of jobs where you live probably require you to speak the native tongue, and not some language that has been dead for over a thousand years. In the United States, most people only speak one language, despite the influx of Spanish-speaking people. They expect them to learn the language and there is nothing wrong with that. If they plan on living here, they should have to speak the native tongue (and most do, so stop crying.) Same goes for internet scholars.

The only thing protecting people who use Latin terms from getting hit in the face is the internet. If we were face to face and you started dropping Latin terms, I'd floor you. That shit's annoying enough when I don't have to listen to it. In short, stop using Latin.

Wine Racks

The only thing I hate more than wine racks are people who own wine racks. Now for once I'm not bashing rich people who own multiple houses and by default have to buy the most expensive drink they can afford to maintain their status among people who waste their money on stupid shit. Nothing like a drink I can't afford, so I can return it to the rightful owner by shitting it out an hour later in a toilet that also serves as a water fountain. I'm also not bashing the lesser people who drink wine, even though they tend to be college graduates who dress like they're from the Bahamas, and pretend to know Asian languages and culture. They wax poetic about merlots, cabernets, and other Dungeons & Dragons character classes I've never heard of, as if I care; I don't. I'm talking about those who have small wine racks, sitting on the counter, or above the fridge, or just somewhere you will see it to think they are well cultured. Well, I drink wine and have a vintage grape Mad Dog 20/20 that I regularly rotate in my cellar, but you don't see me talking about it, or displaying it. Stop this imitation of rich people, buy a bottle of cheap wine that tastes like fruit and not feet, and kill it over dinner, making sure to toss the bottle in the trash and not saving it for an art project you'll try and sell later on Etsy. You'll thank me alter.

Bacon

The only thing I hate more than everyone talking about zombies on a daily basis are the ones who act like bacon was invented in 2012. “Bacon is awesome!" No shit, dumbass, that's why we've been eating it all of our lives. I'm glad you could take five minutes away from sipping your non-dairy, organic latte to tell me everything tastes better with bacon. Where the hell you think we've been getting the lard we cook with? Not Starbucks. This "poverty" food has been a staple of southern kitchens since before there was a southern United States. Okay, that last part might not be true, but did you know bacon was creating equality before rabid, lesbian feminists marched on Washington, D.C.? Wiki tells no lies; history says it was a gender-neutral food as it pertained to preparing it. Men and women, back to the kitchen. Everyone else who recently discovered bacon and feel the need to declare it on a regular basis because you think, incorrectly, that it makes you look cool or funny, shut up and choke on an over-priced, Venezuelan, low-fat, cheese Danish.  

The Famous 5 That Survive the End With Me

Some friends and I were discussing the end of the world the other night, so for fun we made our own personal lists of five people we could take with us that would help us to survive the collapse of society.

Who: Insanislupus

What: Leader

Where: Kentucky

When: January 27^th, 1978

Why: Has a list of 1001 things he hates and cannot be killed.

The first person that came to my mind was myself (and I don't count as one of the five.) I rule, cannot be killed, but can kill wild animals with my bare hands, although I usually just talk them down, make them come to their senses, and then we go out marauding unsuspecting people who go on to tell tales of how they were chased out of the wilderness by me and a sleuth of grizzlies. But now they can also include…

Who: Mehmet Oz

What: Doctor

Where: Wherever

When: 1986

Why: Has been helping people to survive for 25 years.

I know, you’ve probably got the oddest picture of the greatest internetist, followed by grizzlies, and then a happy, smiling Dr. Oz wielding a crossbow in one hand a clipboard in the other. But you would not live long enough to laugh. Dr. Oz is obviously a brilliant doctor and has been saving lives for half of his own, but what makes him perfect for my team is that he’s a big proponent of integrative medicine, that pseudo-science that all the physicians from around the world (and since pharmacology started) have been practicing unless they are corporate shills bending over for the drug industry. For kicks, we will probably make his shelter out of emeralds and line the path to it with yellow bricks, which were carved from the mountains by…

Who: Aron Ralston

What: Engineer

Where: Mountains of Utah

When: April 26, 2003

Why: Climbed a mountain after self-amputation, stopped to play a hand of poker and get a beer, before finding his rescuers who were lost.

If you don't know who he is, try cutting your own arm off and come back to me later. Yeah, that guy. Just in case, he was trapped by a boulder and had to self-amputate his arm, climb out of the crack he was in, repel one-handed down a 65' wall, and hike 8 miles back to his car in the mid-day sun. According to his Wikipedia article, he found a Dutch family along the way, so it's safe to say he marched all the way to the Netherlands before finding the rescuers that were looking for him (they were lost and he probably had trouble flagging them down with one arm). He also has a degree in mechanical engineering and speaks French. Sure, the French language will be as useless as the French military has been since World War II, but imagine all the wind, water, and solar power we will have once we let him loose. He can probably even make us a deep freeze just in time for the return of...

Who: Dew Claw the Lioness!!!!

What: Hunter/Scavenger

Where: South Africa’s Kruger National Park

When: Unsure

Why: Survived brain hemorrhage, damaged right eye, and a puncture wound under her neck into her mouth from a Hippo and walked it off.

You might not know who she is, but you might not want to. While hunting with her in-experienced pride, she had her head crushed in a hippo’s mouth, causing her brain to hemorrhage under the 2000 pounds of pressure, a tusk piercing past her jugular and through the bottom of her mouth. The other lionesses mourned her passing, but she decided, rather than dying, to walk it off and go back to hunting 2 weeks later in order to make my team. She’s made of all things women should be made of, tested and true, making feminist and PETA proud, so logically should have baby liontaurs with…

Who: Paul Templer

What: Warrior

Where: Zambezi River, Zimbabwe

When: On the Zambezi, where time stands still

Why: Survived punctured lungs, a punctured major artery, and a crushed foot after a hippo attack.

Ironically, my next person not only had his arm amputated, but did so after facing a hippo.  After serving in the British Army (I assume in an elite squad dedicated to the elimination of hippos and self-amputation,) he settled in Zimbabwe to lead rich, white people on river safaris. Templer jumped in head and shoulders first to a hippo's mouth after it knocked passengers out of his boat and tried to devour them. Born bad ass, he fought the hippo off with his bare hands, but only so he could make it back to the surface long enough to get cell phone service and finish his game of Words With Friends. The hippo would have none of that and grabbed Templer's foot, dragging him back in, but a second round of well-placed blows freed him back to the surface again. The hippo decided a third attack, a bite into his chest, followed by shaking him back and forth like he only weighed 200 pounds, would do the trick, but finally realized Templer was just luring him in and swam away. After raising the chances of escaping a hippo attack to .00001%, he patched himself up as best as someone with puncture wounds in their lungs and body can do and doggie-paddled to the local hospital, 270 miles away (where it is rumored he scoffed at what the cafeteria was serving and swam to a European hospital for something more palatable,) before admitting himself. He continues to offer tours on the same river, minus an arm, and riding the hippo he has since enslaved, waiting for the arrival of me and...

Who: Salma Hayek

What: Santánico Pandemonium

Where: The set of From Dusk Till Dawn.

When: January 19^th, 1996

Why: Who better to repopulate the world with?

Salma Hayek. I’m a humble man and must make huge sacrifices when it comes to picking who I will repopulate the world with. I decided it should be none other than this unattractive and impoverished actress, with small breasts. I’ve obviously chosen her strictly on her kind heart and personality and nothing else. She was also really hot in From Dusk Till Dawn (and Desperado and Bandidas and…) and I’m hopeful she knows how to cook, because I forgot to take that into consideration. I’m sure she does other stuff, too.

So there is team Insanislupus. Where is yours?

Honorable mentions:

Barrack Obama. The guy won the Nobel Prize for just existing. That rules.

Anne Hathaway. She is playing Catwoman and did not laugh once during the scenes where she had to listen to Christian Bale’s Batman voice.

Houston. Not sure her last name, but I read on Wikipedia that she took on “620 men without interruption.”

Forrest Gump. Not only can he run like the wind, but this Medal of Honor recipient can take a bullet in the buttocks while saving lives, and operate a boat better than George Clooney. He has been temporarily disqualified until I can confirm alleged reports that he is a fictional person.

Ryan Gosling. Baby Goose has been saving a life every week in a different city each time (although rumors suggest it might actually be Zach Shields). I imagine he could beat up more paparazzi than Matthew McConaughey, and I’m not alone in sharing the love: http://tonictherapy.blogspot.com/2012/04/to-extreme.html 

Double-Sided Magazines

 It is no big secret that I am a huge fan of a well-planned magazine. I subscribe to a few, usually by signing up under various names and never paying for them, or taking them from other establishments. You may think this is shady, but I attribute my love for magazines as the sole reason for their rise in popularity over the past several years; you wouldn’t even be able to buy them if it wasn’t for me.

 But something brought about by even the most prestigious of periodicals pisses me off. In fact, I received an issue of Rolling Stone just today that did that very thing. I looked at the cover, wondered how they delivered it without having my address on it, flipped it over to not only find the missing address label, but a parallel cover. It always makes me think I’m on LSD. Regardless, that shit pisses me off.

 But what pisses me off even more is the fact that sometimes the sides are not even. The first side, or at least the side I’m on that I will assume is the first side, because I have no way of actually knowing, will be drastically shorter than the other. It’s like dating a girl who has one double D breast and one B cup; if you all have twins they’ll be Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. One is 20 pages, the other is 49, and you have no clue which one is going to be more entertaining, because whatever is on the cover is only there to entice you to buy the damn magazine, but obviously this magazine needed two covers to do that.

 This also gives some jackass the idea that they should put in twice as many insert cards. Instead of getting one every six pages, you get one every three. Brilliant strategy. Instead of relying on the content and word of mouth, combined with advertising, you now have twice as many inserts that will fall on the ground when I thumb through the mag. Your plan of people walking down the street and finding your subscription inserts, filling them out, and then doubling your reader base has succeeded. Take a bow, preferably on a sword.

 I’ve got nothing else. 

Mentioning the Foreign Language Title of a Work in an English Article

Look, I don't have a problem with foreign languages and think everyone should at least be able to ask directions in the native tongue of whatever foreign country they're travelling in. That being said, I'm not going to learn Russian so I can view Night Watch (2004) without sub-titles, or take archaic English lessons so I can read the Bible. I've picked up the basics of a handful because the people I associated with spoke them, or they were culturally relevant to myself. I even get that speaking Latin can be advantageous to understanding words you don't know the meaning to.

But this shit with being bombarded by German in mid-English-sentence needs to stop. I was recently doing work on chronotypes for the United States government's Department of Chronotype Affairs when I decided it would be a good idea to Wiki what a chronotype was. I stumbled upon this offensive line:

O. Öquist's 1970 thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Göteborg, Sweden, marks the beginning of modern research into chronotypes, and is entitled Kartläggning av individuella dygnsrytmer, or "Charting Individual Circadian Rhythms."

You could simply say:

O. Öquist's 1970 thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Göteborg, Sweden, marks the beginning of modern research into chronotypes, and is entitled Charting Individual Circadian Rhythms.

It's bad enough I have to trip over where the damn thing was written, but then busting my knees across a language I don't read and probably never will makes me want to stop reading immediately. In fact I did. You're also not a genius for pointing out the above was not in German. Get a life, virgin. The only thing more offensive than writing it out and forcing people to read it is when someone says it instead. Luckily I stopped watching Jeopardy years ago, so Alex Trebeck no longer offends my ears (and you can read about that in my other entry entitled, Mentioning the Foreign Language Title of a Work in an English Conversation, or "Indicación de la denominación lengua extranjera de una obra en una conversación de Inglés."

My readers know they can just click the translator to read my blog (unless they use Internet Explorer and must instead pay a professional one offered by Microsoft.) I would never intentionally put anything in another tongue to confuse the shit out of them or their translator. When I go to another country, I don't offend the native speakers with my poor understanding of their language. I force them to speak mine instead, because I'm American and it's just not right to make us speak theirs (especially since we took in everybody they were trying to get rid of.) They owe us this.

Apps That Are Really Just Links

Apps, also known as application software, are supposed to be designed for a specific task, and naturally are perfect for things like mobile devices, hence mobile apps, because no one wants to walk around with a desktop computer strapped to their back just to use MS calculator or MS Paint. Since everyone has scrapped their land-lines for mobile phones that also serve as mini-computers, it only makes sense that everything now has an app. Or do they?

Nothing pisses me off more than firing up an app on my Android tablet, or maybe even my Chrome browser, and then being whisked away to the “apps” website where I can use their service. I have a better idea. Why not instead of an app give me a link to your website and we can call them bookmarks? What idiot initially named those bookmarks anyway? They’re not in a book, they’re in a browser. Regardless, calling a link to your website is fraudulent. It’s the same as me selling you a copy of my latest album, and when you put it on it tells you where you can buy my latest album. Okay, so that’s worse, but this whole links pretending to be apps shit is pissing me off.

I have readers in a dozen countries and on six continents, so I think it’s time we declare war.  When you see an applink, rank them one star and leave a negative comment, preferably linking them to this post. They’re not apps, they’re bookmarks, and no one deserves credit for telling someone where they can play Angry Birds. I hate that shit.  

People Who Interrupt You While Reading

Nothing is more annoying than trying to read and having it interrupted. I believe there are several reasons people do this, so let’s briefly explore a few.

Some people see you reading and assume you are doing so because you’re alone. They would be correct. It is just me and my copy of The Catcher in the Rye and, sitting quietly amongst ourselves and waiting for the next famous person that catches our eye. They’re not the one, luckily. Others think you read out of boredom, because there is no possible way you can get enjoyment out of a lump of paper with ink on it. A typical conversation starts something like:

“What book you reading?”

“The Antarctic Cookbook.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

They wait for you to reply, but you keep reading.

“Did you catch that basketball game last night?”

You only have two options. Kill them, or kill yourself. Sure, there are others to consider, but they should understand why if they have ever read a book and will pat you on the back afterward.  Even if you do get sentenced for murder, at least you have done society a favor and will now enjoy plenty of reading time.

Then we have the ones who think you care to be on a superior intelligence level (and they obviously are, too!) If great minds think alike, and you’re one of them, you should know I want nothing more than for you to get lost. I read books because they sound interesting, not because my college professors read them. Book sobs love to interrupt you to inform you they read far superior authors than you and would never sink so low as reading a popular writer, ones that actually make money in their lifetime. They read maybe five authors and think they know everything. These people deserve to be smashed in the face with whatever antiquarian tome they are holding (Never use your own book.) I don’t really know what antiquarian means, but I assume it implies these people don’t like you putting fish in a tank and worse, members of PETA. Smash them again. 

Vevo

Who the hell invented Vevo? Ever notice how if you want to hear a song and you wind up going to Youtube to hear it (see entry on how I hate people who go to Youtube to listen to music instead of watch it), only to be tricked into clicking on a Vevo sponsored one? Yeah, everyone has. They take a five minute song and turn it into six. This is shocking, being as the Wikipedia article says Vevo was formed with "the goal being to attract more high-end advertisers." You'd think their goal would be to attract people who wanted to watch videos, until you actually listen to one.

A real time analysis of Smashing Pumpkin's Bullet with Butterfly Wings (or Despite All My Rage, or Rat in a Cage):

The page loads, complete with an ad to the top right, above the "similar" videos. Indeed, while thinking about this song, I want nothing more than to drive the all new Chevy Sonic, like all other Smashing Pumpkins fans, or people who just like this one song of theirs.

Do you:

a. Click the advertisement and see a video ad.

b. Continue watching the video, as brought to you by Vevo, proudly displayed beneath.

c. Google how to block Vevo videos from ever turning up on your Youtube searches.

I decide to stick with my original purpose and watch the video. But wait, there is another advertisement, this one placed at the beginning of the video. What do the Smashing Pumpkins have to do with 4G on my mobile phone? I'm watching this on a wired connection at a desktop. Now that I think about it, what does a washed up stage magician have to do with 4G? Probably about as much as Vevo has to do with bringing you a quality service. At least the ad is loud and clear.

The video starts and I still can’t believe Billy Corgan isn’t female, as he proclaims, “The world is a vampire.” At least that’s how I remember it. Sadly my speakers do not have a volume knob capable of bringing the video up to an audible level. After one minute of the actual video, approximately the same amount of time it took them to tell me about 4G, I decide to click off on another video that catches my eye. Sadly, it too is brought to me by, you guessed it, Vevo. But first this unrelated, thirty-second commercial that is guaranteed to piss you off. 

People Who Say Their Kids Are Their Heroes

Why?

Every time a profile asks, "Who is your hero?" someone has to say their kids. That takes about as much thought as listing Metallica as your favorite heavy metal band. Is your favorite heavy metal song One? Shut up. The problem with this answer, besides the obvious and blatant laziness in it, is that these people have obviously never read the definition of the word hero to begin with.

Hero, a noun, is defined as:

1. A person, typically a man, who is admired for courage or noble qualities. 
2. The chief male character in a book, play, or movie, who is typically identified with good qualities. 
3. Not your kids.

Did your kids do something courageous or noble when they were playing with their Lego Star Wars set? Maybe they put out a fire and saved the family from impending doom? But even if they did, does anyone actually admire them? They did it because they were scared, not noble and courageous, and that's not admirable at all. 

Stop being a coward and man up. Your kids should never be your hero, unless they fought off burglars, or battled cancer, or were born with no arms and legs and keep on trucking, or you're not a man at all.