Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

"I'd like to teach the world to sing" (based on an actual song from the hippie era)
"I'm Loving It"
"Let it be Lowenbrau"
Yeah, Folgers. Can't remember it right now but I know I used to like it.

 

What the fuck is with changing the names of everything!! I'm talking in particular about a few things—just today researching how to spell Cro-Magnon I discovered the term is no longer in use, has been replaced by Early European Modern Humans. Oh yeah, that's really memorable!! Sounds fucking great! Any time I try to say it I keep forgetting one word or another and have to stop to think about it. Cro-Magnon has some charisma to it—it's memorable, it's romantic, in the sense of sounding adventurous and compelling. It's a fucking NAME. Early Hominid Bipedal Flibbetygibbets or whatever the hell it is is NOTHING. It's not a fucking name. It's a scientific designation. Nobody but specialists would want to use it or be able to remember it.

I guess they've now gone the way of the Brontosaurus and Pluto. I mean, they're all still there (well in a sense)—they still exist (as ideas we can talk about, or historical facts or whatever), but they don't have actual real names that you can chew on anymore. Apatosaurus isn't too bad, but Bronto had a certain something that Apatosaurus lacks. What do you shorten it to? Apato? Whatever. And Pluto is no longer a planet but an orbiting testicle or whatever. The new naming conventions all feel reductive and scientific and like they were made up by science nerds with no friends and no social awareness who wear pocket protectors and use $10.00 words for everything.

</RANT> And I just realized this should probably be in the Not Happy Thread, but screw it. I'm too pissed off to move it.

 

Brontosaurus was a made up long-necked dinosaur anyways. There never was one. Apatosaurus didn't just replace it, it's an actual dinosaur in the long neck family, with ones like Camarasauros, Diplodocus, Argentinosaurus and the like. Has the possibility of being resurrected as a name as one of the Apatosaurus fossils was misidentified and may be something new.

Pluto is a planetesimal, as it is mostly if not entirely ice. There are many planetesimals in just our solar system, most hanging out in the Oort Cloud.

 

I have no idea what that means. Everybody knew it as a brontosaurus. It must have been real, I saw one in a Harryhausen flick once.

That's what I said, a planetesticle.

I vote we change the name of that to the Scrote cloud.

Ok, I'm done. Sorry.

 

I suppose that "Modern" in this context is a relative term.

 

They are really just like us in every important regard, compared to say Neanderthals and anything that came before. Put a Cro-Mag in a business suit, stand him on a corner, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference (so I understand anyway). Yeah, the term modern does have different meanings in different fields though.

 

Here's a reconstruction of Altamura Man, a neanderthal skeleton found in a cave:


Put him in a kutte next to a Harley and no one would bat an eye.

 

The move of vitamins and other over-the-counter medications to gummies. An adult should be able to swallow a pill.

 

And not be tempted to down a week's supply.

 

Weed's not my thing, but I've always wondered about the wisdom of edibles with something that gives you the munchies.

 

kind of looks like an unkempt Chuck Norris

 

A thing that annoys me but shouldn't would be like today.

I was sitting in my car just having pulled up to the store and witnessed a full grown adult who seemingly has the skill and intelligence to drive and manoeuvre a car through streets, roundabouts, junctions and traffic lights. Avoiding people, animals, potholes and other various hazards before finally selecting a parking space and reversing into said space on the first time of asking. Yet the second they park up and grab a shopping cart,. all coordination and control just shuts down. He just about killed 3 people including himself and wrecked the shop just trying to move the cart from A to B.

Spoiler: Pretty much me

 

Speaking of shopping carts...

At the Aldi stores in the US (not sure if they do this at the UK stores) you have to lend a quarter (25 cents) to use a shopping cart. Bring the cart back, and you get your quarter back. I have seen people walk a city block to return their cart, so they can retrieve a quarter.

At other stores- Kroger, Target, Meijer, Walmart -people won’t walk three parking spaces to put a cart in the corral, so they shove it into handicapped parking areas.

 

Particularly the homemade kind. Ready-made ones are not cheap, so it's not like you're gonna' have a cookie jar full of them, but if you make baked edibles at home, yeah... I'm sure it's happened.

 

It used to be a pound in the UK but I think all our supermarkets have ditched the idea now. You just grab your trolley and go.

 

It's Machete!

 

Here in Germany, that's standard (with a 1-€-coin, or a 50-cent, or a plastic token that one could buy or got as a advertisement give-away). Every store does that. Keeps damage and trolley-losses down, it seems, but not to zero, and it goes up recently, again, despite the coin thing. I see a lot more broken/vandalized locks and chains the last two years, for instance. Also, Aldi always shares a parking lot with a non-discount supermarket. The non-discount has three or four bays for trolleys, Aldi only one at the main entrance. Many people bring the Aldi trolleys back to the other bays, even though the locks and chains are incompatible (there's always one person who won't get their coin back, or it's a broken lock, but this one trolley acts as seed for a new chain of trolleys.) Compared to the USA, our parking lots are tiny, so I'm at a loss why the people cannot walk the extra few meters...

 

When people message me on fb messenger and I'm not feeling chatty.

 

I know, right!?

 

Very limited audience for this one, but the Marine Corps' motto is "Semper Fidelis," which is Latin for "Always Faithful." This is commonly abbreviated to "Semper Fi" as it fits better on a tattoo and doesn't challenge Marines' spelling ability so much.

But these days with 133t and text-speech it keeps getting chopped down further to "S/F" or even SF, the latter is the bloody Special Forces! All respect due to them, I've got a buddy who did four in the corps and jumped over to the Green Berets, but is it that hard to maintain some sort of distinction?

Spoiler

Their motto is "De Oppresso Liber," or "Liberate the Oppressed." No idea if they just write DOL or not.

Spoiler

 

Always Faithful? Give it 5 years, Iain, that will be cropped down to AF.

"Bro, I'm in the corp, we're as tight AF."

 

I have good news for you. Brontosaurus does exist. Although the first specimen (discovered by Othneil Marsh) was later considered to simply be an Apatosaurus, in 2015, that changed. In fact, it's been proposed that there are three species on Brontosaurus.

Pluto is not a planetesimal. It's a dwarf planet, because it's in orbit round the Sun* and it's massive enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. a sphere). Planetesimals are much smaller, usually a little bigger than 1km. Once they start getting bigger, they become protoplanets, the cores of planets. Some, like Ceres, fail to get past that stage.

*As opposed to being a satellite of another body. However, because Pluto's moon Charon is so massive relative to Pluto, they actually orbit around a common centre of gravity, which is outside Pluto's radius.

You know what really annoys me? Pedants.

 

Many large supermarkets here have stopped doing that now. They're bloody annoying when you don't have the right coin on you. The UK also change their £1 coin about 3 years ago, and some supermarkets just didn't bother reconfiguring all their trolleys.