This is my problem exactly! There are clothes for sixteen year olds, there are clothes for sixty year olds. Unfortunately, I’m 35.
kayT, I’ll definitely check out Travelsmith. Thanks.
Time for gloating is now! My cars both have little arrows on the gas gauge on the dash that indicate the side of the car the gas cap is on!
Thanks, I’ll check them out.
Back to the rants.
Coworkers who are clueless. That’s a marker cap, not an unwrapped broken crayon. I can see how you might mistake one for the other from a distance, if you squint, but once you handle it, you can tell it’s a marker cap.
Stop putting marker caps in the crayon baskets. When I called you on it, you said, “Oh, I thought it was a piece of broken crayon! It doesn’t really matter, though, does it?” And you dropped it back in the crayon basket. WTF? Stop doing that, moron. The kids can’t color with a marker cap. Find the marker it goes on or throw it away.
Clueless parents. It was your kid’s birthday today. And what did you bring in for a treat? A half sheet cake, uncut. I’m trying to wipe down three tables, get 20 kids to wash their hands, set the tables for snack, and you show up and think I’M going to cut that cake into 20 little pieces? Not a freaking chance, Mom. You shoulda brought cupcakes or donuts or brownies, like I suggested. Not a whole frigging cake that needs to be cut.
People who don’t understand who has the Right-Of-Way at a four-way stop. The person who got there first, jerk. Doing a rolling stop through the intersection does not mean you get the right-of-way. Having a more tricked-out car does not mean you get the right-of-way. Having a Hummer does not mean you get the right-of-way.
I thought of more while I was at work, but I’ve forgotten them now.
When I lived on 6th St by the UA this was horrendous. The worst thing about living in that area, though, are the [fellow] students who figure that our lawn is a trash can made specially for cigarette packs and beer bottles.
“Straw man” is English. It has an American English definition. In fact, so does “ad hominem” and so do those other “cool sounding latin terms”. What you’re referring to are fallacies, and their names are all accepted into the American English parlance and all taught in first-semester English, and Logic and Philosophy general-ed classes, and sometimes even science classes. It’s nobody’s fault but your own that you weren’t paying attention. Didn’t go to college? My high school junior-year English class taught all of 'em, and my junior-year History class touched on it too. My high school is a little different from many others, but a quick Google or Wikipedia or Dictionary or Merriam-Webster search should tell you what these terms mean. Adult debate requires adult words.
Now, I’ll agree that there are some people who toss them around to sound smart–but they have real, legitimate meanings. Why you object to the use of two English words, “straw man”, as opposed to a long English sentence, “You’re fighting against an argument that you made up that nobody else really believes in but which you’ve attributed to other people”, I don’t quite understand.
Brilliant post; you’ll be a great Doper.
I think that a lot of these people–who, by the way, aren’t at all shy ordering food at a restaurant or talking on the phone in any other context–are also looking for an excuse to make someone else pay for the pizza.
Exactly. It takes about 2.5 seconds to type “fallacies” in Google and get the whole list. I’m impressed they taught you that in highschool.
No one’s impressed you can use grown-up words instead of stating your argument.
Those are the SPECIAL people. Rules and laws don’t apply to them, and if they do get caught, then they’re victims of injustice. Seriously, where does this current heightened state of entitlement come from? Who raised these people to act like this?
Talk to your gyno about the birth control pill Ortho Tri-Cyclene. I’ve seen it work miracles with acne.
Well, I guess I agree with that scaled-down Rant v2.0. So if your rant is about people who try to substitute pretty words for substantive arguments, then at the risk of seeming even remotely like Snowboarder Bo, I’ll agree with that rant. But it sounded like you were ranting against the use of the agreed-upon terms for fallacies, which sounded silly to me.
I think it’s always been here, honestly. To answer the second question, I’d guess they were raised by people who felt entitled. 
I just figure if you’re going to argue, go ahead and argue. We all appreciate a well-reasoned arguement.
If you want to show your mastery of identifying logical fallacies as a debate technique, keep it in Great Debates. They wank off on it there.
Hey it was a minor rant, and this is a minor rant thread.
Sorta like the “Ad-hominem”, “straw man” thing…
It bugs the crap out of me when people say something like this in a thread:
“It’s a MacGuffin”
WTF is a MacGuffin? Not everyone is as up on their obscure pop-culture references as you. Try and define something like that, or at least put it in a post where its meaning can be reasoned out from context. When your whole post is one sentence, its really hard to determine what things like that mean. There are others like this, but this ones on my mind.
My mini-rant (which made me more than a mini-pissed-off) - some asshole in my neighbourhood is making a habit of driving into my parking pad (which I dug out of my sloped back yard with a freakin’ spade, thank you very much - it took me all of last summer) and making gouges in it with their vehicle. That is very much “WTF???” If someone drives into my pad and turns around while I’m a work, I couldn’t care less. It’s the leaving of the deep gouges that I’m not getting (right through the gravel layer and deeply into the underlying dirt). Someone is making an effort to mess up my hard-earned parking pad for no apparent reason, and it’s pissing me off.
Oh, the reason for the parking pad in the back yard? We bought a (nearly) new car, and we have had one car hit-and-run on the street already. I’m not very impressed with people today.
You really think this high level of entitled people has always been there, fetus, and we’re just noticing it more now? Maybe it’s a function of the world population and more people living in more crowded areas - the percentage of entitled assholes hasn’t gone up, just the concentration.
I disagree - I suspect it’s more a matter of the various perceived entitlements are becoming noticeble on a lower social level than they had been in the past, and there’s more communication through more geographic areas, to make them appear more noticeble, and common.
As an example, we’ve all got stories of arsehole idjits who must be illiterate to be parking in handicapped reserved spots. But my experience is that the incidents that I can actually claim to have observed in the past decade are vanishingly rare. But we all know it’s a common problem because we hear people griping about it. (legitimately, I admit.) One of the better stories I’d seen recently was one from Austrailia. Without the kind of cheap, global communication that we have now, such a story would never have gotten into my mind (nor that of most of the people who’d read it.) to affect my emotional perception that this is still a problem.
I HATE HATE HATE being accused of things that it makes no sense to acuse me of.
I mean, if your pearl earrings that I admired are missing and you ask me about it, that’s fine. Chances are very low that I took your earrings and I’ll be annoyed if you keep presing and accuse me of taking them, but I’ll sort of understand.
But if the cookies are missing? I don’t eat dairy or sugar and those cookies have too many calories for me and you KNOW it. There’s nothing at all to point to me taknig the cookies, and yet I get in truoble for it.
If your size ten high heels are missing? I wear size FIVE. It makes absolutely zero sense to think that I stole your giant damn shoes. Same goes for your giant bra (wtf would I do with it? plant flowers in it?)
Well, featherlou, I hope it’s just the concentration and not the percentage. Could be the percentage, though; now that I think about it, a lack of respect for others’ needs can be a viable evolutionary trait. I guess I haven’t been around long enough to say, honestly.
Also, we all fall victim to the phenomenon psychologists refer to as “autistic perception”, whereby our personal desires, needs and opinions color our perception of the world around us.
Or maybe I’m just too optimistic.
Surrender Dorothy, sounds like you’re getting served raw deals on a regular basis. You’re a bright woman and I think it’ll all make you that much stronger.
I just got this image of a huge bra hanging from the ceiling by the window with flowers growing in it.
Never one to shy away from a good rant…
I wish people who have yet to master the art of dribbling would shut the hell up when I call a carry on you. By the way, hopping after taking 4 steps does not turn a walk into a hop-step. Idiots, do not argue with the guy who has the whistle if you do not know what you are talking about.
I hate these stupid real estate descriptions that I get every week and have to post on the Internet. Every room does not need to be “exquisite”, open a damn thesaurus.
Parents who get upset when we send little Susie home because she is wearing a headband for shorts. If she cannot bend over to pick up a Frisbee without showing everyone her progress on the path to womanhood, then she is dressed inappropriately for camp.
To the people who drive around my cul-de-sac at 40 mph, is it really necessary to drive that fast when there is only one way in and out?
…at least the sun came out today.
I think my evil twin (the one with size ten feet and d-cups) must have posted this.
I can spell “pressing” “taking” “trouble” “accuse” and so on, and my grammar isn’t normally this hideous.
fetus, if I recall correctly, you’re around 20, and I’m pushing 40; I was thinking about what you said about things always being this way, and I don’t think they have. I have also thought about what you said, Otaku, and I think that may be part of the problem, but not all of it. I think people are truly acting very badly quite frequently, and I don’t really understand why they think it is okay, or what I can do to co-exist with them more peacefully (that is, without them pissing me off because they act so entitled when I don’t believe they are).
It’s like we have two sets of rules in our society; one set is for people who don’t seem to know any better, and another, more restraining set for people who were raised to think about the consequences of their actions on other people. I can see the freewheelers doing whatever they please, whenever they please, but I can’t join them, because I was raised differently and I wouldn’t be doing it out of ignorance but out of a conscious decision to be an asshole. Maybe I should pity them, instead of getting angry with them - they’re showing their bad manners as openly as someone blowing their nose on a tablecloth.
I’d have to agree with this. I’m just slightly older than featherlou, and I’ve been saying for years, “Do the rules not apply to you, asshole?”
Okay, I’ve been muttering it under my breath when I see people openly mocking the rules.
There are too many examples to list - I’d be here all day.
I think most people are oblivious to the world around them. You see it everywhere: People cut in front of you in traffic, no signal, jabbering away on their cell phones. I don’t think they’re actually trying to be assholes (not most of them, anyway), but they truly are NOT thinking about others, and that, IMO, is what’s missing in society today–just a basic consideration for others, in everything we do. Rude customer service operators who just want to hand you off to someone else; Target employees who avoid you when they can see you have a question; people who talk in movie theaters; parents who let their children act like spider monkeys in public places; etc.–they’re everywhere. And thinking only of themselves.
I don’t know why people do this, but it annoys me too, featherlou.
Great thread, as this rant is utterly lame:
Fie on you, person who stole the lid from my recycling bin. I don’t want my neighbors looking at all my bills and counting how many beers I’ve had this week. Give it back, you… naughty person.