- People getting taxis from the shops or from the pub
- “Funny” replica warning signs, either the fake, e.g. “beware of the bullshit”, or real, e.g. “kangaroos crossing”
- Piano students constantly practicing the cascading arpeggios from Schubert’s Impromptu no.4
- Trailers and taglines that claim to be beyond my imagination or —-er than I could ever imagine
- People in the army thinking it is funny to say and signal “come on me”
- Stand-up comedy stories that are always narrated with the words “And I’m standing there thinking/going…”
- Boys at school doing tie-flicking, towel-flicking, or belt-flicking
- The way Hollywood script writers always make baddie hubris speeches, or launch-of-ill-fated-technology speeches, start with “Today we begin a new era: an era in which…”
- “Because I could not stop for Death”
- The way Starbucks can’t just say Small, Medium, and Large
- People being “super stoked” about anything
- People shaving their heads for charity http://www.newlondonfirefightersunion.org/St_baldricks.jpg
- Gadget writers constantly describing things, especially apple things, as “hewn from a single block of magnesium”, or the word “unibody” (etc)
- Things being slightly out of people’s grasps in films
-
Fashion writers referring to “THAT” dress or “THAT” bikini as if everyone is as stupidly interested as them to know wtf they are talking about.
- Companies sending out menacing bills and reminders when you are already paying by direct debit
- That ebay email for every Buy It Now purchase telling you to “please pay now” when of course you already paid…
- Office suites apart from oo and ms
- Sites which focus on regularly updated news and content, perhaps have facebook and twitter, but utterly lack any RSS feed
- People talking about their “gut feeling” as if I care
- “Ironic” versions of that evolution diagram showing monkeys getting more upright and ending with man.
- Having to have google API keys for some tools, and WordPress key for Akismet… why
- The way UPS in the UK demands cash on delivery in exact change in order to hand over an import-charged parcel
- Generally, how lazy and stupid couriers are about delivering something successfully, starting from the fact that they are incapable of simply phoning the (mandatory) delivery phone number to check if you are in
- The way there are still lots of people who have never bought something from overseas, so that they are surprised by import taxes and charges; the way office mailrooms have no clue how to handle those cases
- Those little nasal bogeys that are insanely adhesive and no amount of flicking will get them off your fingers
- The artwork of the Gorillaz
- BBC Alba
- Buttermilk
- Whale song, especially artifically added by Foley
- Red Leicester
- Top Gear referring to any car having gone round the Nurbergring
- Song lyrics referring to the moon or moonlight
- Anyone trying to tell anyone else that they have, or will, “let the side down”
- Eggnogg
- The made in China cassette for 3 AAA batteries
- Anything describing itself as “truly unforgettable”… I can’t remember any actual examples though.
- Youtube overlay ads and intro ads
- People claiming to be ambidextrous, people actually being ambidextrous, and the word “ambidextrous” itself
- Multi page TIFs
- When I was younger, being described by adults as “A keen—” (fisherman, sailor, cricketer, classicist) when usually I was actually below averagely interested in that
- The Royle Family
- The Grinch
- People calling noughts and crosses “tic tac toe”
- People going on and on about pasta having to be “al dente”
- Seamonkey
- Period piano music played pedantically on fortepiano
- Mildly ill people being described as “peaky”, “below par”, or “bunged up”
- Ebay sellers saying “good luck” in their descriptions
- The play Equus, without even having seen it
- Drinks that say add hot “but not boiling” water
- The Glastonbury festival
- When I was younger, people trying to teach me, evert time, about how to stop a nosebleed, always wrong, always conflicting, always unsolicited advice, and at that time I had at least one nosebleed a day so, yes, I did have my own methods
- People describing themselves as “foodies”
- People naming poodle cross breeds -poo
- Fire breathers or people juggling with things on fire
- Web pages with cgi-bin in the url
- The Chrysler PT Cruiser
- Having to remove500 of those y-front shaped bits of plastic from new cd wallets
- Celebrities visiting children in hospital, and the children have no idea who these people are
- News, journalists, newspapers, and mainstream media
- People talking proudly about being “caffeinated”
- ASK and Pizza Express
- Mr potato head variations
- Drying up, aka let’s put all the bacteria back on the dishes
- Grown up women with fringes
- Men proposing to their girlfriends in public
- People calling light shades of blue “navy blue”
- Crisps in sandwiches, or served as a side to sandwiches
- Things being expressed in dpi
- People laughing “hyah hyah hyah”
- The outrageously short “working” hours offered by embassies and consulates
- Men’s magazines like FHM and Maxim which pretend to be something more than porn but only elevate themselves above boring when they provide porn
- Anything claiming to be an “extravaganza” or “bonanza”
- The faint smell of beer-in-carpet on UK trains
- Realtek audio drivers and software/ wtfware
- Americans saying “he could care less” when they mean “couldn’t care less”… I could give an analogy to explain, but I give a shit.
- Lame people claiming “humorously” to be “plotting world domination”, especially in web profiles
- Ridiculously burdensome long customer experience surveys from companies online which they somehow expect people to give up half an hour of time for nothing
- People showing off how they are “double jointed” by bending their fingers backwards
- Marketing copy that talks about seasons, holidays, “back to school” etc
- People thinking they are ironic for noticing that children’s TV like Rainbow, Magic Roundabout, or Teletubbies are ironic or trippy
- That UK phony “smiling and friendly” public service cadence e.g. http://www.georgebaily.com/audio/annoying-uk-cadence.mp3
- The UK customer service arsey “customer is always wrong” response beginning with “Yes we do ask that customers….”
- Rio Carnival women
- Headline layouts where the headline is put ANNOYING! between two parts of the subtitle.
- Girls with vestigial tic-like head side-to-side twitching as if they are flicking hair out of their face, but it is just to the side of their face and just wobbles a bit each time
- UK People prefacing a dumb and probably insulting remark with “I’m not being funnaiyy bu’ ….”
- Door handles too close to the edge so you scrape your knuckles closing them; taps so close to the edge of the basin you can’t put your hands under them
- MLM and offline network marketing
- Books that start with acknowledgements where the author always thanks his typist
- Offline mode in firefox and windows printers
- Total lack of auto reconnect in linux wlan
- Ubuntu start menu and bizarre classification of programs into utilities, system, system settings, and settings
- The “came from nowhere” idea that every event has to have a “mascot”
- Applause between movements of music; people coughing during music performances
- Loo lids that don’t stay up
- UK local governments’ delusion that linking PDFs constitutes an OK way of publishing information on the web
- Parents “grounding” their children
- Cartoon maps in theme parks
- Public information maps that are not oriented north
- Students being all excited and champagne-y when finishing exams
- Literally any form of student protest
- The way people need a “festival” before they can do stuff; similarly how cyclists need a “ride” organized with numbers on their back
- Militant cyclists holding up traffic where they could cycle on the pavement
- Reading lists of pompous band and dj names in concert listings
- Shop chains that sell nothing in particular like WH Smith, Robert Dyas, and Woolworths (go figure)
- People pronouncing ‘project’ with a long o
- Anyone, especially middle class twenty somethings, making the metal hand gesture
- Young people made up with grey hair to look old
- When American TV has two or maybe three people on the screen at the same time to represent a conference call http://screencast.com/t/Zjd2tESqu
- Americans constantly pre-warning or pre-apologizing for use of “profanity” which is almost always totally tame
- Internet marketers referring in any way to the size of their launches
- Internet marketers in the marketing-to-the-internet-marketing niche constantly referring to other internet marketers in the same niche like we are supposed to know who they are or care
- People who do long loud breathing out through their nose in pauses in the middle of sentences, which sounds like a sigh of frustration whereas it is actually just their inability to control their breathing and syntactical concentration for long sentences
- Verbose training speakers who always introduce a definition by saying extensively what it is not
- Learning courses talking about “those ‘Aha’ moments” and furthermore the pressure on one to have had ‘aha’ moments
- People bringing their children or babies to grown up parties. Ever.
- Son illumiere
- The Rocky Horror picture show
- Rab C Nesbitt
- The Vicar of Dibley
- People who speak in really loud voices
- German key signatures being in Soll Moll or whatever
- Variety shows
- Stupid camera settings like solarize, sepia etc that you never use
- Cosmetic surgery
- Big negative warning labels on products
- Sylvia Plath
- Murray Perahia
- Monty Don
- The Chuckle Brothers
- American people in movies saying “get out of here” in a joking way
- Single gear bikes
- Police/Ambulance sirens that cycle through stupid versions like they can’t make up their mind which sounded cooler
- People flying England flags on their cars
- American people pronouncing “Arctic” as ‘artic’
- The horribly inaccurate crooning 1950s Sinatra singing style where they glissando their way either side of the notes like a sort of drunken slalom
- Men having their top shirt button done up without a tie on. Come on, wtf
- Face painting
- Modern artists attempting to claim that any of their pointless masturbatory activity is “subversive”
- Cars by the side of the road for sale
- The new trend of the rich lower classes driving huge Toyota and Nissan pick-up trucks just to go from their cul de sac to Asda
- Schoolchildren riding public transport to go to school
- Flavoured mineral waters; Vitamin water
- The concept of viva voce exams and the boring ‘legendary’ stories that come out like Oscar Wilde’s
