So many things already here so I’ll try not to repeat:
Old Navy tech vests - these commercials started recently - is it the new fashion to look like you work at K-mart?
Performance art - I don’t disput your right to call it art, but, does anyone actually enjoy this?
Sportscasters - I’m not a sports fan, but I might enjoy watching more if it weren’t for them.
Steven King, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz and all those other “2 New Best-Sellers A Week” horror writers.
ICQ and IM - I have enough ways for people to bother me already without adding more
Fanatically watching cooking shows when you never cook or Gardening shows set in Georgia when you live in Michigan and couldn’t grow those things in a greenhouse.
Free PCs that have 1.2gig hard drives and 16megs of RAM and require a 3 year subscription to an ISP at over $20/mth. But they’re in all the news these days.
By the way, I’d never want to drive a manual transmission during the stop-go-go faster-wait-stop!-ok, go… joys of Chicago rush hour.
“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”
E A Poe
Things I Just Don’t Get:
Blood-spattering video games
Celine Dion
Giant pants
People trying to ram religion down my throat
How Borders went from being a really good bookstore to the most pretentious place in the universe (I’m from Ann Arbor–I remember the original)
long CASUAL dresses, with sneakers
Short dressses at proms
Teletubbies
Pokemon
…and most of the stuff listed in the other posts.
Porn magazines. Why would I BUY such an item when I can get it for free on the Internet?
Big blockbuster action-adventure special effects extravaganzas.
Boy groups, girl groups, “divas,” most any top 40 pop, hip hop, R&B, it all sounds bland and lifeless to me.
History revisionism. I hate it when I learn something on the History Channel that they misrepresented or completely left out of history class. I mean, I want to learn the truth, but it frustrates me that they think we can’t handle it in school. (insert Jack Nicholson impression here) (And then I get paranoid and wonder if even the History Channel isn’t telling the whole story…)
The F-word seventy-nine jillion times in a movie. I really believe most people just don’t talk that way. I even worked at a gas station and was surrounded all day by truckers, loggers, hunters, and rednecks (some of which were all of the above), and most of them still didn’t talk like that. Except maybe on the CB.
Revamping classic characters or logos to “appeal” (they find this appealing?) to younger, “hipper” (I question that if they find this appealing) audiences, like the new animated Colonel Sanders. Before you know it, he’s going to be using the F-word, too.
Professional athletes and super models. Excuse me? We pay people to play games or look pretty? People do this for a living?? No, I don’t get it.
People who hate small dogs. What’s to hate? They’re real dogs, they bark and wag their tail and roll over, they’re just the compact version. Y’know, so that if they decide to turn on you, you can take them. I like that in a dog.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
OK, I borrowed that last remark about being able to take the dog from Norm MacDonald, but there’s truth there. I really wouldn’t want a dog that could make a meal out of me if he so chose. I guess I don’t get those, either.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
To bantmof (sp?) Perhaps this merits its own spot in MPSIMS; but stick-shift cars seem beyond my ken, and perhaps beyond many others’ as well. (A girl I went to high school with had been driving the automatic-transmission family Oldsmobile; she bought a VW bug for her own use. She told me, the Christmas after graduation, that “driving a stick-shift is like learning to drive all over again!”)
You are right about gas mileage, but at my age (50) the ‘relearning’ the girl spoke of (she was 18 then) would be prohibitive in terms of time, stress, and expense.
Ditto on “wrestling”.
Here are my additions:
Mariah Carey - hunh?
People who move to Arizona (from up north/east) and then want a green lawn - it’s the desert!
Calling in to those TV shopping channels and talk to the presenters like they’re your friends and you have some kind of personal relationship.
Beanie Babies
Designer Anything
People who pay full price and don’t think twice
All the trendy coffee shops
Day time tv
Soap operas
Talk shows
Today’s music
People who pay $15,000 or more for an 8-10 hour party.
Living together (why buy the cow when the milks for free)
Nordstroms
Clarification.
I meant to write “People who pay $15,000 for their weddings…etc”
More things I don’t get:
Demi Moore
The Moral Majority
Politics
People who rip on whatever else someone is reading (I read romance novels…yeah, I know, it 'splains everything) As long as they are reading and exercizing their brain, leave 'em be.
People who follow any thing (religion/politics/celebrity) blindly and with fervor.
Required classes to get a degree. Why not just shell out a couple of grand to bypass this waste of time to get to the core glasses. Isn’t that what the universities are after anyways?
Loud gang-bang music (my neighbor does this with his friends outside and then they talk… how they can hear each other over this POUNDING BASS is beyond me. I did retailiate after one drunken bash that ended at about 4am. I waited until 6am and played the 1812 overature at full blast!)
people who don’t water/mow their lawns until critical mass. (same neighbor)
people who shouldn’t even have a dog who have a passel of kids that they seem to hate.
hitting. Hitting anyone or any animal. It’s the most childish reaction to anger on the planet.
rock videos where the star(s) are totally obsessed with themselves (Kid Rock comes to mind)
supposed friends who come to dinner and then WON’T leave!
oops getting off track on things I just don’t like… things I don’t get:
women who obsess about their apperance and can only talk about diets, nail polish, hair goop and the like. Who cares?
men who obsess about sports especally when they look like a flight of stairs would knock them cold for hours.
RAW or WAR or whatever that parade of steriodal freaks is.
actor obsession. One person I know gets ‘into’ a new actor, buys all the films they were ever in and then becomes disillusioned when she finds out they are married. I just find this whole thing beyond understanding.
american obsession with cars. It’s just transportation, isn’t it?
religions who send people to my door. If I want what you have I’ll look you up.
You can count the number of apples in one tree but never the number of trees in one apple.
H. L. Mencken
Scorn for people who wear glasses
Riotous public outrage about trial verdicts
Why Pete Rose was barred from the Hall of Fame while George Steinbrenner owns a racetrack
People’s tendency to gather in doorways and walkways, when others want to get through
Ok, Pete Rose was banned from baseball and the Hall of Fame, because he bet on the game of Baseball.
This is surely a great debate, but Pete Rose bet on baseball, even though the rule that you get banned from the game if you bet on the sport. The rule wasn’t new, it had been around for a long time. He bet on the game and he payed the price.
Now, he cries about how he should be allowed in the game, and that he was treated unfairly. Baseball can’t answer these charges, because the agrement that was signed, says Pete Rose is out of the game, and Baseball can’t talk about any of the evidence it had. So, he can cry all he want about how unfair it was, but baseball can’t answer any of these charges. If it was so unfair, why would he sign that?
I do think he should be allowed in the Hall of Fame, and so should Shoeless Joe Jackson.
hmm things I don’t get:
Blair Witch Project (see the other thread for more of my opinion)
SUVs
Starbucks
coffee in general
gourmet pizza
high car payments. (Hey, student loans are enough for me)
pat
“Baseball can’t” this, “baseball can’t that…” really convenient rules, huh? Add “Baseball can’t touch George Steinbrenner”! I read that, after banishing the so-called “Black Sox,” Landis played the stock market with funds from the commissioner’s office; he tried to do the thou-shalt-not bit on Rogers Hornsby, who made no bones about playing the horses. He knew Landis was playing the stock market with someone else’s money (Unaccetptable conduct for a federal judge!!) and threatened to expose Landis if he lowered the boom on Hornsby.
I noteod also that Ferguson Jenkins and Orlando Cepeda, both convicted on drug charges, were admitted. These days the Commissioner’s office is as draconian as the Taliban.
Baseball’s rules don’t state that you are kicked out of Baseball for getting charged with drug charges.
Baseball can and has touched George Steinbrenner. He was banned from day to day operations for two years after paying some two bit thug to give him information on Dave Winfield.
Landis was an awful judge, and awful racist, and an awful man. I don’t stick up for the commissioner of baseball, I just say that banning Pete Rose was a part of the rules that were already clearly established. Rose signed an agreement that stated he would leave baseball, and that baseball would no longer talk about the evidence it had.
ok, if you want to discuss this more we should probably start a brand new thread.
pat
Diet Soda - its CRAP. whats wrong with water instead? it doesnt even taste good. like the other post, iced tea is MUCH better!!
the music industry… too many crappy bands and too many stupid people buying that crap
and many of the other things that were previously posted…
Chief’s Domain - http://www.seas.ucla.edu/~ravi
To me, there are two questions here. There are a lot of things that I understand the appeal of, but am not drawn to at all. (I can understand what a 13-year-old girl sees in the Backstreet Boys, but I am personally not interested.)
Then there are those things that I just don’t understand. Rosie O’Donnell and Adam Sandler are fine examples of this category.
Anti-Semitism, particularly in our day and time, is another. I have never thought much about my ethnic background (since it is so varied) and I can’t understand hating someone so severely for it. Aren’t we all Americans by now?
Gambling was mentioned by a lot of people. The appeal of gambling is very polarized–either you enjoy it, or you can’t see the point of it. My gambling buddies and I finally decided that the gamblers are people who 1.)love games, and are obsessed with getting their minds around them, and 2.)enjoy winning money more than they hate losing it. For example, if I win $10 at the blackjack table, I’m really happy about it, but if I lose $10, I’m not really going to miss it.
(I should point out that playing the slot machines for long peroids of time is not gambling–it is putting money into a machine and losing it at a very predictable rate. The real gambler would want to put it all in the machine at once and give it a pull. We know that if you put quarters in that machine for four hours, you approach statistical significance.)
Also on my short list–collections of figurines, body piercings, and selling insurance.
Dr. J
It might not be as bad as you fear - in fact, I’d almost lay odds you’d pick it up faster than an 18 y.o would! It does feel odd at first, but most people become adept at it in short order, and before long you don’t even think about it any more. But I guess it’s a good thing there are choices - yours seems to be much more popular than mine! 
Anyway, I guess it’s all a matter of what you’re used to. I can get in an automatic and drive it around, but it feels awkward and requires some extra mental attention. It also feels sort of disconcerting to me since the fluid coupling in the auto tranny gives me a “disconnected” feeling. It’s hard to describe - remember those huge 60/70’s land yachts where the steering was “mushy” and you could turn the wheel a bit in each direction before the car would start to turn? It feels like that to me, except for the engine. But the newer ones are definately better on that front than they used to be.
–
peas on earth
Here’s something I don’t get, and never did get:
How the Blues Brothers were on a “mission from God” when they rammed their car through a shopping mall, killing innocent people and wrecking property.
Maybe they were God’s murderers, like the Crusaders? 
[sarcasm]
If Aykroyd and Belushi, or their characters, were on a “mission from God” by doing this, I am Mikhail Gorbachev’s niece!!