- Elaborate suspenders supposedly being sexy. Especially with high heels.
- The universal but completely false assumption by radio and tv advertisers in the UK that simply having an actor say some normal words in a regional accent will make the message catchy, funny, idiosyncratic, or ironic. In fact the effect is almost certainly simply to alienate and irritate 95% of the audience. Ditto for use of Welsh or Scottish call centres, Direct Line for example could surely make more sales if their customers didn’t have to fight through a thick treacle of Glaswegian to get to the message.
- Jongleurs (a stand up comedy bar chain in the UK)
- Street markets
- Office worker men wearing brown leather shoes together with dark or grey suits. In particular those too long type shoes which are supposed to look Italian, are pointy, and curl up at the toe.
- People holding their mobile phone with their right hand against their left year with head cocked.
- Those Halfords commercials with the yellow background and black silhouette of a strange dwarf.
- Social kissing
- The acting of Robert Strauss http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0833865/
- The way chemistry distinguishes between different things with just a stupid little vowel change like sulphate/sulphite, alkane/alkene/alkyne.
- Investment advice claiming to be “contrarian” and the underlying assumption that it must be automatically successful to be doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
- Shakespeare plays [oh yes, you heard me]
- Lame forwarded “warning” messages about the latest virus or scam, claiming to be “direct from Norton/Microsoft/the Police” etc
- People in daily life smelling of deep heat, athlete’s foot powder, or other strange sports talc things.
- Pull down hand drying towels in public loos
- Door to door sales, charity, religion, anything.
- People on their mobile phones wandering around supermarkets lamely asking for instructions from home what they should be buying. I also hate myself when I have to do that.
- Retired people expressing mock surprise and indignation that they are “busier than ever”
- Grapes or bright pink cherries in fruit salad
- Car rental companies saying some good car model then in tiny font “or similar”
- People calling scissors-paper-stone anything other than that. Anyone heard of cadence?
- People thinking because Moore’s Law is called a law that it is somehow an obligation or target or natural passive effect to keep up with it.
- The categorization of music, in particular stupid categories like “Alternative” and “World” and “Other”. As with anything, the music that can’t be categorized is usually the most interesting, and any attempt to categorize interesting things always misses the point.
- Cheerleading
- S’mores
- Americans exhorting each other to have “spirit”
- Olympic skiing (especially the cow bells, and now they have even more stupid stuff like lighting flares)
- Inventors, artists, authors etc saying “I’ve always been fascinated by…” or “I’ve always been interested in the way…”
- Crazy golf
- Neelix
- The Hollywood convention that insects make “chittering” noises
- Kodak’s attempts to make digital photography complicated and proprietary
- People labelling anything “urban” to try to make it sound more cool http://screencast.com/t/MTllOWNlZ (similar to “Guerilla” and “street”)
- The limitations of Google spreadsheets, that mean it’s, er, not a spreadsheet
- Excel suddenly deciding to jump to row 65,000
- Recipes and diets measuring food in cups or half cups.
- People being interested in child prodigy musical performers, but otherwise not, as if music is some kind of aptitude contest or poodle show.
- People going on an on about a house having “character” as if it is something objective and measurable, e.g. “tons of character”, “52% more character than the previous house we looked at”
- People calling me “Young Man”
- Logitech software and update manager bloat; plus the annoying “feature” of having obsolete extra buttons all over the mouse, which when you accidentally touch them, every single time pop up a dialog box asking if you want to assign a function to it. Adobe is even worse in terms of software/installer bloat.
- The greatcoats worn by air stewardesses especially British Airways
- People pronouncing “mischievous” as “miss-cheevy-us”
- Shiny clothes material, Nike being a particular offender
- Farty sounding brass bands in shopping centres
- Balloon sculpting
- Full justify text
- The Shorty Awards (whatever they are)
- The animated red bull commercials
- TV intros never just saying “new” but always saying “the brand new” (-series, episode, seaon) etc
- Magicians’ wands, especially when Sooty holds one
- Pro-gold writers constantly “ironically” referring to gold as “the barbarous relic”
- “Boasts” used to mean “has” e.g. “this house boasts 3 bidets” or “area woman boasts four breasts”
- “Funny” songs
- Scully being pregnant in the X Files
- People taking one RSS feed and making into “its very own iPhone app”
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