Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

Absolutely with infinitely more swearing and panic breathing. It soared across the space right at my foot and I did a little tiptoe dance trying to get away while screaming, "Shit! Shit! Shit! Fuck! Shit!" and slapped the hell out of the carpet, which let me tell you it's almost impossible to kill a spider with an envelope against carpet. The whole thing is not nearly as dramatic as I'm making it out to be, but I'm not ashamed of myself. I do say sorry to them when I kill them.

 

There's a lady I went to school with ages ago when we were young and idealistic. She was a pretty girl of 19 then, and I was a, well, a boy of 19, and we both were in uniform.

And she looked me up a few years ago and we got friended up on facebook. She's still an attractive woman who has done a lot better job of keeping fit and healthy over the last thirty-some years than I have, but...

...but her smile. Somewhere in those decades it changed from a broad and toothy grin to this rictus, with her lips peeled back all the way past her gums and the corners of her mouth fish-hooked back towards her ears in a way that looks almost predatory. And it isn't natural, it's her "cheese!" smile; she's posted candid shots where she looks quite happy.

Apparently she thinks it looks good, she's quite the photo sharer.

Not for me to judge I guess.

 

I'll put the word out on the even wider web : Arachnids, stay the hell off Dogberry's patch.

 

It might come under the heading of those weird 'talents' that people learn when they're kids and keep on showing others. You know, they'll say "Look what I can do" and then contort their face into some bizarre configuration, or do weird tricks with their eyes that are disturbing to say the least. And because their parents told them it was cute and rewarded them for it they persist in believing it really is cute or somehow a 'talent'.

Enter social media, and these people feel the need to show the whole wide world.

Maybe when she was a kid it really was cute, and she refuses to see that it no longer is?

Hey, here's a thought. You should send her your avatar pic...

 

They should have listened to the grandmother, who said "Stop it or your face will freeze that way!"
As a child I didn't believe that, but I have seen quite a few adults whose childish grimaces did become a life-long habit. So that's what she meant!

 

... OR she was incredibly prescient and meant that it would be forever plastered all over images on people's social media feeds.

 

What part of the Midwest, I wonder?

I'm from smack in the middle of it, but I've never said uh for oo in my life.

Now, confront me about the eh-into-ih shift . . . "Han' me that pin, willya?" Non-Midwestern person passes me a tiny sharp object with a head on it. "No, a pin! Like you write with! A pin!" (Oddly enough, it doesn't go the other way.)

And swallowing the r sound? Yikes! Right in the back of the throat. I've spent most of my life training myself out of it.

 

Take it to the Debate Room warning?

 

"Deluxe" tax prep software that didn't give me enough lines for all the municipalities I paid local tax in on one W2. The only work-around they could give me meant I had to file by mail. And then it failed, twice, to print one of the schedules I needed for my state return. Only found out about it by accident.

The only reason this isn't in the "Not Happy" thread is because I got both returns to the P.O. this morning. No use wasting mental energy feeling pissed about it now.

 

This annoys me; when modern commercial television re-runs old shows, back from the days when a 30m program would have a single 3 minute ad break, and hacks them to pieces just so they can fit in their 5 minute ad breaks every 10 minutes. Often they cut out whole scenes, even when the next one references it in some way, leaving those unfamiliar with the show completely baffled.

And what annoys me equally if not more than the editing itself, is that you know the people responsible are working on the assumption it's 37 year old show and no one is even going to notice.

Well guess what, mister? That particular show you've butchered happens to be my all-time favourite show in the whole of all time, and I know every line of dialogue word for word, and every scene like I know my ugly face.

 

Working at the high school garden and someone on the edge of town a couple blocks to the west set off a LOUD explosive. I don't have a problem with fireworks, but that one scared the heck out of me.

 

Ah, but you see this is an American show on American television. America has always catered heavily for commercial breaks. It's only in the last 15 years or so that the UK has adopted the same mass advertising.

Sometimes the shows these mass commercial channels are re-running originally aired on the BBC and had no adverts at all! They get hacked to bits even more carelessly.

 

Ages ago the TV shows here ran really weird. First some TV channels noticed that there were commercials after their competitors's shows that no one was watching, so some genius got the idea of starting their own shows a few minutes early. Like, instead of starting at 9:00 pm, Knight Rider would start at 8:58 while the commercials were running elsewhere. This of course turned into an arms race that went to ludicrous extremes of shows starting at times like 8:47 pm, which is hell when you're trying to remember when your favorite shows are on.

Then there were the channels that ran shows commercial free. Kind of. They'd run the whole "hour-long" American TV show, all 44 minutes of it, in one block and then deluge you with sixteen minutes straight of commercials. Japan seems to like trying to annoy people into buying things; they'll run the same commercial for the same product twice in a row, the big electronics stores all have these "catchy jingles" that play on infinite repeat in-store at an annoying volume, and when there's an election coming up the political candidates all drive around in these tiny doof wagons waving out the window as the loudspeakers blast out window-shaking repetitions of the candidate's name and party affiliation. I can't vote but if I could I'd be taking down names and voting for the opposition on principal.

No affiliation with the creators of the clip below:

 

Holy shit!

 

I worked for several years at a pizza delivery place. Okay, answer this question OVER THE PHONE: "How big is your 10-inch pizza?"

You'd be surprised how often that got asked! What they really wanted to know is: "How many people will a 10-inch pizza feed?"

Try asking them how hungry the people are ...that usually gets them talking, at least.

Much more diplomatic response than asking them, "What's your shoe size?" Or, "Have you got a ruler handy?"

Holy mud. No wonder I'm considered to be a 'diplomatic' sod. Most of the time, anyway.

 

I have YouTbe TV, and their DVR feature always records the newest airing over the original for some unfathomable reason. Everyone knows reruns have more commercials, so if I don't get around to watching something immediately, I miss parts. It's infuriating.

When the channel Chiller was first on - I don't know if they still do this - they used to play the original 58 min Twilight Zone episodes uncut. That was pretty cool.

 

The episodes from the show I'm referring to had a run time of 51 min, with three-minute ad breaks (it was always three minutes back then - 6 adverts at 30 sec each) at 15 minute intervals (the 3rd act of the show probably ran for approx 22 minutes not 15). They were given a 60 min slot which equates to two commercial breaks per show, allowing 3 min at the end for a break before the next show.

Now consider this. I've just checked the slot time for the re-runs and it's still only 60 min, and yet the commercial breaks are closer to every 8 min, and run for much longer than they used to. Do the maths and it will give a good indication of just how much they're having to edit out in order to cram it into the 60 min slot.

 

I know. I get it, the first question is really 1) their amazement at actually finding a red vest on the floor, and b) their attempt to stave off disappointment if said red vest should say, "Sorry, this isn't my department."

 

What would be a better translation for "Yamauchi has risen to his feet?" Something like "Yamauchi is standing strong for you"?

As rendered, it sounds like "Yamauchi has finally gotten off his butt."

And the "I am Yamauchi's housewife." Wow. Is there a separate word in Japanese for a woman who stays home to manage household affairs? And would having a wife in that position be a plus for a man running for office?

 

Here in Germany, commercial breaks are regulated by law. For a normal one-hour show, they only allow two breaks per episode (with US shows, they mostly do not come at places where the US makers intended one to be.) Now, net running time of network shows has been going down throughout history, from which I observe watching old shows. As said, it was over 50 min around 1970, 47 min around 1980 (they cut out Magnum's Vietnam flashbacks here to fit the show in the hard 45 min time slot without any commercial breaks when it was first aired), 45 min around 1990, and so on. Nowadays they scratch the 40 min mark (but it feels like they have bottomed out).

Thing is, the two German commercial breaks with 10 mins each are freaking long (good for bathroom breaks, though ). My old folks frequently forget that the episode hasn't ended yet when the second break runs...

Stations have trouble filling these breaks with actual commercials, and some stations fill it with lots of station related trailers (which by law do not count to the commercial count, so they sometimes can get away with a third break with nothing but trailers.) Some station simply don't fill the full hour, especially on re-re-re-runs. It's not like we had hour-to-hour time slots hereabouts anyways... (German prime time begins at 2015, because there's the oldest and most important newscast coming on at 2000, running 15 mins. That's where the hard 45 mins for things like Magnum, PI in the 80s came from. Some commercial stations tried to break that and start their prime programming at 2000. Not a single station does it anymore, that's how strong that newscast tradition is.)

 

Which reminds me of the annoyance that all those US shows I grew up with were cut. Back then there only were the publicly financed TV stations which were not allowed much commercials, and most of the shows were shown when there weren't any commercials with the hard 45 min time slots. The classic Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, Magnum PI... all cut. (Hawaii 5-0 – the old one – was shown in the two-hour slot Mondays through Fridays where they were allowed commercials, with one commercial break in the middle, so it might have been uncut. But I'm not sure about that.)

 

Cutting out Thomas's Vietnam flashbacks? Nooooooo!!!