- Standing ovations
- Standing ovations in parliaments
- Repeated up and down standing ovations in parliaments
- Software that puts you through a whole load of shit to “download update” and it turns out that the file you downloaded is just an installer which itself downloads the real stuff,ultra slowly
- Trying to use a touchpad with a wet finger
- Bank stress tests
- Sites that iframe you without permission like digg and alibaba
- Evangelicals holding their hands in the air
- Puffed up crisp packets which you open to find only about 5 crisps inside
- Air miles
- Pizza Express
- The price of first class air tickets
- Docx and xlsx
- Windoze “unused icons” cleanup wizard
- Unneccessary sidebar menus in Excel, Frontpage, and Adobe Reader
- Landlords’ attitude towards deductions from your deposit, and their general misconception that tenants are supposed to maintain the property
- Atonal arythmical builder whistling
- People in offices playing music out loud instead of on headphones; Generally, the assumption by annoying people that their taste in music (a) is a taste; (b) is music; (c) must automatically be shared by everyone in the space around them at that particular moment
- People introducing their opinions with “let me ask you a question” or “lemme ask you one thing”
- The Domain Registry of America (you evil, evil bastards)
- Godaddy
- Netfirms
- UKL (meaning GBP)
- Companies adding up all their people and saying “we have a combined experience of over 400 years in ecommerce” etc
- Hotel surcharge for internet (w… t… f..)
- Executive summaries
- DJs, especially “huge” or “celebrity” DJs
- Brian Blessed
- Small bins
- Hannah Montana
- When comedy shows like Mock the Week or Have I Got News for You have celebrity guests who are not funny at all
- J Cloths
- “1st post” “sofa” type blog comments
- Those little trailing bits of plastic at the rear of a car that are supposed to prevent static electricity buildup
- The Vagina Monologues
- Those puppetry of the penis guys
- The Archers
- Radio 4
- The Huffington Post
- People wearing sunglasses on the back of their head
- People cycling mountain bikes in ultra low gear unnecessarily
- Having to unpack my bags in airports
- Croatia Airlines (see above)
- Airport security generally
- Grey no-brand hotel toothpaste
- Tourist tat that is the same wherever you go, as if being a tourist makes you want to buy strange hats or magnets.
- People taking suitcases as carry-on luggage
- The Shanghai attitude
- Americans pronouncing Ob-Gyn as if it is an acronym
- Journalists appending “-gate” to anything to imply that we are supposed to have heard of it and it is amusingly scandalous (even more annoyingly Chinese news blogs now append -men (I suppose 1989 was tiananmenmen)
- Scavenger hunts
- Singing psalms where no one knows the setting and no one has the music
- Sit com series DVD covers where all the actors are clustered together grinning blandly, totally ignoring all their in-show personalities.
- Windows – things that install themselves by default to start at startup
- Urchins and poor people in hollywood olde movies denoted by always walking around with dirt on their faces but otherwise looking plump and healthy and not thin or warty
- The way printing a document modifies it in MS Word so you are prompted to save, but only sometimes
- Stick on bow ties
- Mountain bikes with no rear mudguard
- People riding mountain bikes with no rear mudguard and a line of mud up their back
- Cycling helmets
- All cycling clothes
- Birkenstock
- Having to have both juice and coffee at hotel breakfasts
- Stickers
- People asking you to guess anything in a conversation
- Slavic keyboards with the Y and Z the wrong way round (god it is annozing to tzpe on those kezboards)
- People or marketing copy describing food as “prepared by” instead of “cooked” or “made”
- Interpolation and upscaling
- People noisily breathing through their mouth or noisily sighing during a conversation
- Scientists, academics, and journalists assuming that “emotions”, “memories”, and “morality” are just areas of the brain that you can peer into and mess with.
- People with a broken nose
- Nasal office secretary women with stroppy attitude
- People who speak like they’ve got a permanently bunged up nose
- Chairs modelled on racing car seats (stupid anyway but they all look nothing like car seats anyway)
- People saying they’d give their eye teeth for things, usually for something totally lame like being able to go to university or be able to eat spinach every day
- Stupidly high art prices at auction
- Modern pseud artists constantly calling their daubings “triptych”
- Men who only talk in the back of their throats because they have come to think it is the way to sound cool, chilled, or deep-voiced
- People being afraid of swearing, oh my gosh
- People proudly narrating how they were lashed, smashed, caned, baked, messed up, well out of it, etc
- Flexible displays
- People writing MSFT instead of Microsoft
- Articles talking in the future tense about how America might lose its power, prestige, influence etc… helooo
- Couples saying “We are pregnant”
- How cryptic Russian nicknames are and how when you read russian books you are supposed to know that Vasha is the same person as Anatoly etc
- Cream Teas
- Cleaners blithely stacking all your desk papers together to be more neat
- Latin American people signing/identifying themselves using all 5/6/7 of their names
- People not accepting money for good causes because it is “tainted” or from bad sources
- Obscene pricing of water filter cartridges, ink cartridges, photo paper, and razors.
- MS Word in “draft” view mode
- Google Reader not remembering per-feed view preferences
- Windows not remembering per-folder view preferences
- Pub lock-ins
- Shower gel claiming to be “2 in 1″ as in, you can use it as a shampoo, as in, no shit.
- Saved web pages
- All TV gameshows and knockout competitions
- Athletics
- The sound of cars on wet roads in England
- Any assumption or social arrangement that requires “everyone just to get along with each other”
- The way people thought Nigel Kennedy was interesting and memorable just because of a “rebellious” haircut
- American job applicants who think a cover letter or resume begins with “Personal Objective: to blablahblah whinywhingy memememe”
- In-jokey web 2.0 comics
- Fred Bassett, Love Is, Peanuts, hell, any and all cartoons in newspapers
- Girls draped on motorbikes or cars
- Paul Daniels
- Stage hypnotists
- The concept of unemployment benefit
- Americans trying to be medieval
- The way it always isn’t happy hour now or any other time you could possibly go there
- American men being called Bugsy or Bubba
- People supporting sports saying “Coomon”
- People supporting sports
- Never mind the buzzcocks
- Beer and shots
- Home fries
- Satire that “pokes gentle fun at”
- Satin
- Louis Armstrong singing “what a wonderful world” used in commercials ad nauseam
- The Bugatti Veyron
- Smoothies with banana
- Everything about What not to wear
- Ashby de la Zouche
- Americans referring to the main course as the Entree
- El condor pasa
- Burpees
- Products that declare they are “Suitable for all the family”
- Vauxhall cars and the people who drive them (usually to be found cutting in front of me or right behind me with full beam headlights)
- Muffins, danishes, buns, brioches, shortbread
- Being told to calm down, hurry up, chill out, cheer up, smile, get a move on, slow down, or take it easy. In each case can you think of anything less likely to work?
- Rowing as a sport
- Water ski jumps in lakes
Ashby de la ZoucheEl condor pasa
