Five Things I Hate, Plus Five More

There's a blog-tag kind of game going around the Internet, where you're supposed to name five things you hate that everyone else loves, and then pass it on to other people. I've avoided answering one of these in the past (I think it's a little blog-cliquey), but I answered over at AriGoesDown and then realized that, hey, I've got a lot of hate in me and I don't mind sharing it.

This is a narcisstic post and contains crude language (turning off my f-bomb censor), so unless you give a fig about what I hate and the vile language I'll stoop to in expressing that hated, move on the next post.

1. White Wine. I don't see the point of white wine. I don't know why people drink it. I don't care if you're supposed to have white wine with fish or light meat. To me, red wine goes with everything, and if it's too strong and overpowers the taste of the meal, so what?, you're still drinking red wine, and you ought to be pretty happy about that.

Let's be honest: white wine isn't even wine. It's a Bartles & James wine cooler but without that delicious "cooler" part, so I'm basically just drinking tainted water that tastes faintly of animal piss, unleavened by that sweetass pineapple/melon flavoring.

Red wine is real wine. It's the sort of wine you drink before fucking or fighting. White wine is what you have at Nice Dinner Parties where people discuss fine restaurants & the superior quality of BabyBjorn pappooses. I don't get invited to those parties, so I have no need to drink this vile swill, the white trash of the vinyard.

2. Talking About So-Called "Great Acting Performances." Although once in a while I will notice fine acting, I kind of hate having to discuss who did a good job of acting in a movie. If an actor does his job, I don't really notice him acting. He's just good.

I'm much more interested in talking about script or direction or cinematography or set design or hell, even costuming, if the costumes warrant it. As soon as people start to say "Jamie Foxx was amaaaaaazing," I begin counting down the time until the conversation dies out and we can talk about something more interesting.

To me, if you're talking about performances in a movie, you're talking about a bad, boring movie. If the movie was good and compelling, you ought to be talking about scenes and lines in it, or how it moved you or scared you. If you're intellectually dissecting the power of someone's performance, the movie probably failed its primary mission.

3. Edward Fucking Norton. I don't, on the other hand, mind talking about bad acting, and I don't get the Edward Norton "thing." I know a lot of chicks are going to say he's cute or whatever, but I hate him.

Some writers are "writerly" and you see their fingers clicking at the typewriter as you read them; too many cute fluorishes and too-clever lines. Well, Edward Norton is "actory." I can see his technique rather than his character.

Plus, no offense, he has that sort of distant and lost look in his eyes that I associate with serial killers and child molesters. He's an asshole, and I hope he gets caught with his dick in something nasty so they take his career away from him posthaste.

4. Spike Lee. So many people hate this guy I'm not really sure it's even fair to name him on the list. But I do grow weary of people insisting he's brilliant. Mainly guilty white liberals, usually women, are big on claiming he's great.

Why? Who knows. Just something you're supposed to say, like "we should pay teachers as much as doctors" or "I've been really meaning to read more Jonathan Franzen" or "well of course I'd love to go hiking."

Spike Lee is the most self-indulgent, cutesy-poo, archly "avant garde" director of glorified film-school student movies in history. He is such an insecure and egotistical prick he cannot for one moment let the viewer lose himself in the actual *story* without deliberately calling attention to himself through overdirection.

Not that focusing on his stories would help, because they suck too.

As someone once said, quite brilliantly I think (no, it wasn't me), Spike Lee is the first director in history to find a manner by which to star in a movie from behind the camera.

And what's the deal with him calling his movies not "A Spike Lee Film" but "A Spike Lee Joint"? Is that supposed to be cool? Just making up stupid words and using them to replace other words?

Okay, then you're not reading the Ace of Spades blog. You're reading the Ace of Spades kabob, boyyyyzzz! Now I'm cool too, right?

Asshole.

He's a douchebag and a dick and if I see him whooping it up at a Knicks game one more time I will hunt him down and skin him like an animal.

5. iPods. When these became necessary for thirty-plus-year-olds I'm not quite sure, but it seems to have happened over the course of the past year.

I used to like iPods... back when I was in fucking high school, and we called them "Walkmen." And yeah, I sure thought I was fuckin' cool, slippin' on my headphones, cranking that tasty Steely Dan Greatest Hits album up to nine, tuning everyone out... I did not think the girl could be so cruuellll...

But then, for the next, I don't know, twenty frigging years, I was quite capable of walking around and riding the subways without a Walkman. And so, as far as I can tell, was everyone else.

But now it seems that Walkmen-- which we were all getting along without quite fine until recently -- are absolutely needed if you are to function in everyday life.

Why? Who knows.

And yeah-- these carry a lot more songs than a Walkman, or even a "Discman," could. So what? Under what circumstances will you require listening to 1800 hours of music? Unless you're Richard Fucking Branson and you are, in fact, attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon while naked from the waist down, you don't need a Super-Duper Walkman. So fucking stop pretending you do, and for the love of God, stop talking about the stupid fucking things.

You're all driving me fucking bananas already.

Hey, guys-- you know what else you suddenly need after getting along without for fifteen years? Trappers and of course Trapper Keepers. How the hell you gonna carry around your important memos and Motions to Compel Production of Documents without a good Trapper Keeper under your arm?

6. Movies About Fucking Retards. Every year or two, we are forced to suffer through the sappy commercial campaign for Yet Another Move About a Fucking Retard. They all suck -- every single one of them, with the possible exception of Charlie, but that was only good because they smartened up his retarded ass for half the movie -- and yet Hollywood keeps cranking these manipulative and vile pieces of shit out like clockwork.

First things first: these movies are all transparently Oscar-bait. No one acts in these movies because they "fell in love with the script;" no, these douchebags take a role in a retard-movie because they are almost guaranteed to at least get an Oscar nomination out of it. (Unless they play the retard like a real retard, as Sean Penn did in I Am Sam, in which case the film becomes too real and too painful to watch and so no one wants to acknowlege its existence.)

Next: They're fucking lies. They all feature "Magical Retards From Whom People Learn All Sorts of Wisdom and Insight Into the Joy of Life." The truth is, mental retardation is a horrible fucking thing, and I know this personally. Yes, of course, someone with this disability can be loved and loving and an important person and all that. But in my experience, the mentally challenged simply do not fucking sit around waiting to solve my life's problems for me by demonstrating their love of the "simple pleasures of life," like feeding pidgeons or having a gift at origami. To be perfectly frank, they're a bit of a handful and, there's no getting around it, their condition is a deeply sad one.

But goddamnit, don't all of these Magical Retard movies almost make you wish that you too were retarded, so that you could share in the wonderful gift of being severely mentally handicapped and emotionally stunted?

Fuck you, Hollywood. Dishonest, transparently self-serving, and worst of all, boring and shamelessly manipulative. No thanks, I will not be seeing House of D, even if David Duchovny begs me to on his blog. (Yeahp, he has one, and he's begging you to see it.)

And I don't care to see Robin Williams as a retard; quite frankly, I've seen him as a retard numerous times before: on Mork & Mindy, in Good Morning Vietnam, in Patch Adams, in Comic Relief I through XIII, just giving interviews on Jay Leno, etc. The man should not get an Oscar nod for playing basically a low-energy version of himself.

And, while we're on the subject, Robin Williams is not funny and never was. Yes, he was good in Garp, and okay, there was that one special on HBO where he made me laugh by doing the "gay San Fransisco voice" that, quite frankly, an awful lot of people can do; we just know we'll catch hell if we try. But apart from one movie and fifty minutes of decent (though not great) comedy, what the fuck has this sasquatch-retard asshole done to earn this kind of career?

Fuck you, Robin Williams. You suck, almost as much as Whoopie Goldberg.

7. Movies About Wise and Mysterious Black People Who Seem To Exist Primarily To Solve White Boys' Personal Problems. I can also do without this film genre, a smaller one to be sure, but almost as fucking annoying as the last.

Who was it that first fucking thought this up? Who conceived the genre of "Magical Negroes Stepping Out of the Darkness To Help Troubled White Boys Understand and Conquer Their Own Fears and Flaws"?

For a progressive and liberal industry like Hollywood, this is a condescending kind of movie, isn't it? Do black folks really sit around dreaming of helping rich and handsome Matt Damon succeed in life? For God's sake, I can't even get an extra biscuit at KFC.

When Will Smith rings my door-buzzer to explain to me how I can finally make some crazy blog-money, I'll believe the conceit of this genre. Until then, fuck these stupid-ass movies too.

Radio, from two years back, was both a Magical Retard and a Magical Negro movie. Cuba Gooding Junior played a Magical Negro Retard who helped Ed Harris regain his love of life and of football... or something. I don't know. I didn't fucking see the stupid shit.

And neither did you. Kudos to you for that.

8. Slang/Catchphrases/"Hip Lingo" Past Its Expiration Date. Most people are like me. 80% of us are not hip and not trendy and not on the cutting edge of "The Scene," wherever that is (I'd go, but no one will tell me where).

So those of us in that 80% have to grasp something: By the time you hear some cool new slang or a funny catchphrase, it's almost certainly either played out or just about to become so.

So that means: Pick your spots, use your new pet-phrase quickly and effectively, and then stop using it. Forever.

The "ironic" use of hip slang, by the way, only extends the shelf life by a couple of months. In 1999, you could say "let's get jiggy with it." In early 2000, you could say "let's get jiggy with it" ironically, to show how unhip you were, and yet, by doing so knowingly, to show that you were actually still pretty hip.

By 2001, anyone saying "let's get jiggy with it," ironcially or not, was a fucking douchebag who needed to be put down like a cow with hoof-and-mouth.

And that leads to a bit of snark that I hate most among all others. Back when I was a lad, knee-high to a june-bug, we would say, after someone confided some embarassing or graphic detail about his or her life, "I did not need to know that" or, a little bit later, "A bit more than I needed to know."

Since that time, this obnoxious and unfunny "joke," if you can call it that, has evolved. People are just still determined to make this lame joke, now at least 15 years old. They know that previous ways of saying it are played out, so they resort to coming up with ostensibly new ways of saying the same put down. "A bit more than I needed to know" gave way to "Too much information," which briefly became "T.M.I.," and then, in its latest incarnation, became "oversharing," as in "That's... oversharing."

It doesn't matter if you come up with a new way of saying it: the joke itself is cliche. And it was never that funny to begin with. And a lot of cocksuckers were so eager to use this stupid joke that they would use it in inappropriate situations, situations where the person they're talking with is, say, explaining some embarassing medical condition. So you'd have some assholes, being trusted with the confidence of, say, their friend's chronic urinary tract infections, and rather than showing support, they compound the embarassment of revealing something like that just to get out their stupid fucking "Thanks for sharing...!" joke out.

Knock it off. The joke sucks. If you are really made uncomfortable by something someone just said, either say "I'm a little uncomfortable talking about that" or make a slight wince of the face, that face you make when you say "eeesh." That communicates your discomfort well enough without resorting to moronic cliched "jokes."

If you really feel you must make some small joke about it, if just to relieve the social embarassment of hearing something a bit too intimate, try something a little different and not as scripted, like "Don't let's get into that right now" or "Moving right along..."

Do not say "that's oversharing." Because if you say it to the wrong person -- like, for example, me -- you will find the next morning that a "homeless person" has coincidentally keyed the words "Stupid Fucking Jagoff" on to your car and defecated all over its interior.

Now that would be oversharing.

9. All Other Sports Except Football. It's a weird thing. I love football; I hate just about every other sport. Well, not hate. I don't mind their existence per se. I just don't like the fact that whenever I hang out with guys, or even girls, there's a 75% chance I'm going to have to hear about how Mariano Rivera really blew it in the last game.

Who cares? I don't. So why don't you ask me if I care before you drop this stupid shit on me?

A lot of women hate sports talk, and quite frankly, I'm right there with you ladies. I don't like boring conversations about something that, let's face it, doesn't even really offer much fodder for interesting analysis or opinion. Maybe I like football because it's the hardest sport to have a discussion about. All the football talk I have is pretty simple and brief: who looks good this season, who got traded where, and occasionally if the Giants should yank their current sucky quarterback for their second-string "quarterback of the future" who, everyone knows, will also suck. And suck hard.

On the other hand there's baseball, a game invented primarily to give uninteresting men something to talk about with other uninteresting men and thus perhaps avoid those awkward pauses during which homosexual coupling becomes a dangerously real possibility. Were it not for interminable discussions about slugging averages and on-base percentages, upwards of half the male population would be humping each other like rabbits in high rut.

Individual statistics come up in football, of course, but it's such a team sport that it's hard to say, for example, whether Kurt Warner was a better QB than Peyton Manning. Too much depends on the quality of their respective running backs, O-lines, and receiving corps. It's a futile question to try to answer, and so most people who aren't fucking insane don't bother trying, or only try for a minute or two.

Not baseball heads. Oh no. There are so many stats in baseball you actually can have a thoughtful discussion about whether Barry Bonds was a more valuable player than Ted Williams, and so baseball geeks insist on having them. Far too frequently and in way too much detail. And, alas, too often within my range of hearing.

And the other sports all suck too. Basketball is boring, hockey is both boring and hard to follow, soccer is just a bunch of jerkoffs running around in a field and occasionally kicking a stupid ball when it comes close to them.

And I'm tired of the expectation that, as a heterosexual male, I'm supposed to have an opinion about any of this nonsense.

Well, here's my opinion: it all sucks and is a big waste of time.

Except for football.

God, I hope Eli Manning really is the Quarterback of the Future we've been waiting for since Phil Simms.

10. The Shackling Myth of the So-Called "Female Orgasm." Look, angry feminist women basically invented this bullshit in 1971 to both achieve "equality" with men and also make us wigged-out all the fucking time about the one thing we actually enjoyed doing with them.

But there's no such thing. Never was. Doesn't exist.

I'm in my thirties, and if women were capable of achieving an "orgasm," don't you think I would have seen some shred of evidence of this by now?

But I haven't. Not once. Not a single woman.

I've seen no evidence of the "female orgasm." Nothing. Ab-so-lutely nothing.

But don't let's get into that right now.

posted by Ace at 01:16 AM

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