Your greatest and most august mini-rants

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m just about fed up…No. I am completely fed up with certain of my fellow expatriates. In case you haven’t noticed it yet, we are not living in 1924. It’s 2017. The women in China are not waiting for you to “come rescue them from being Chinese women”. And, even if they were, I’d be willing to bet their standards are a bit higher than a wheezing, chronic alcoholic, chain-smoking imbecile. Again, it’s 2017. If you can’t be bothered to find an up-to-date calendar, at least see what you can find out on the Internet.

Next. Many people’s impression notwithstanding, I actually don’t dislike fundamentalists. I dislike the ignorant ones who spew nonsense, especially the ones spewing stuff that even the denomination the ignoramus say they belong to have long disavowed. The latest iteration of this nonsense for me is getting stuck with not one, but two people (different occasions, thankfully) who tried their damnedest to convince me that Roman Catholics aren’t Christians. Of course their point, let’s call it, is that the Catholic aren’t Christians because “Catholics worship saints”. When I explained to the ignoramuses that Catholics,d in fact, don’t worship saints, said ignoramuses then responded with, “Well, they’re still making graven images; that’s a violation of the commandments”. Okay, fine. How about you idiots forking over all the money you have on you then? You don’t want to run afoul of that there commandment, now, do you? After all, the money–both paper and coin–have “graven images”. Oh, you don’t have a problem with the money? Then it’s not the issue of breaking the commandments! You’re just a bigot parroting another bigot’s nonsense.

While I’m on the subject of bigots: If you repeat something a bigot says without stating that you disagree with it or you don’t explain why you disagree with it, then the reasonable conclusion is that you’re fine with that bigot’s nonsense. Guess what. That makes you a bigot too; at least it makes you look like one.

2

Drives me fucking insane it does, how on an Android phone the leyboard differs between search functions and all the others.

When searching, the space bar shifts and becomes smaller, making.people.type.with.periods.instead.of.spaces.

Why? Why do this? Why not make the keyboard standard across all functions? Do we really need the “.com” button to appear when conducting a search? C’mon, Google, fix this shit.

3

I’m glad this thread came along today, as i had a rant that needed expressing. It’s not a *great *rant, more of a mini…

We don’t have a lot of traffic circles/rotaries/roundabouts (whatever they’re called where you live), so maybe that’s the reason that people don’t have a fucking clue how they function! I happen to live near two of them, use them often, and want to attach a loudspeaker to my car so I can shout: “The car in the circle has the right of way, you doofus!” It makes me nuts when I see a car in the circle slow way down or even come to a dead STOP to allow a car waiting in one of the side lanes to enter the circle. You have the right of way, you freaking idiot. That car has to wait for you-- not the other way around! AARRGGHH!

There is another mini-rant I’ve been saving up: amateur YouTube reviews of products, or instructions, or how-tos of one sort or another (including makeup and cooking demonstrations). These people spend the first five minutes of a seven-minute video telling you what they’re going to tell you and may *eventually *get around to the point. Sometimes. I watched a video this morning that was a review of an expensive camera bag. The guy was explaining why he was returning it. He spent the first three minutes repeating several times that it was a great bag but not for him and that he was going to tell us why. Eventually he did. (He filled it with too much stuff and it was heavy and hurt his shoulder. The end.)

A cooking demonstration, for example, how to make a pie crust, will start out with three minutes of why I like pie why my family likes pie, how good my mother’s pies were, how my husband proposed after he tasted the pie crust I learned to make at my mother’s knee, blahblahblah. Make the freakin’ crust already!

I know these are amateurs. I know they have no sense of how long they are blathering on. They haven’t rehearsed, probably don’t have written notes, don’t watch the video afterwards, yeah, whatever.

Which is why I’d rather read a news story than watch a video, because professionals sometimes beat around the bush, too. I can read an entire story in the time it takes the anchor to clear his/her throat.

P.S. I get video BILLS from AT&T. What’s up with that? I’ve never watched one. I’ll get an email with my AT&T bill, and then a separate email with a video version of the bill. Strange.

4

Yes! Yes, yes, yes.

Yes to the other two points in your post, too. But a big, fat “yes” to that last bit, especially.

My mini-rant for this morning: Why is almost nothing in this city set up for bicycles? Why is New Amsterdam so much worse than Old Amsterdam in this respect? Gah!

5

I cannot wait to get this cast off my foot. It’s a walking boot but it’s 1) heavy as hell; 2) it’s nearing 90F with humidity today, and 3) I’m sick to death of killing myself with crutches.

And knee scooters really aren’t made for street use, just so you know.

Pffffffffffffft.

6

The Spanish traffic police* has released a video explaining how to use roundabouts and how not to use roundabouts. One of the bits they repeat multiple times boils down to “the default lane is the outside one, not the inside one.” I figure, given how many times I see someone take the inside lane for a quarter-circle (often cutting someone else either on the way in, on the way out, or both), they’ve got to be quite up to here of seeing it.

  • actually it’s from a research center dedicated to automobile science, but reporters are saying it’s from the cops. I wonder if reporters have problems with the concept of “automobile science” or they believe other people will.
7

No kidding! Here’s a nifty hint for someone who wishes to make such a video: if you cannot speak without smacking your lips every time you begin a sentence (actually, a sentence fragment since almost all of the incompetents making such videos don’t know what a damn sentence is) without saying “um” or “er” or “you know” about a million times, DON’T MAKE THE DAMN VIDEO! Basically, the wannabe Youtube Heloise should follow the advice I proffered in the OP of this thread.

8

Monty, you’re right, it’s not 1924. So why the hell did adidas shut down a female ref? Misogynist pigs

9

Ok, have to add another one. It’s about the question & answer section on amazon that comes before the reader/user reviews. People will ask practical, factual questions about the product, i.e., how tall is it, how much does it weigh, is it durable. Some people (more than you’d think) will post an answer like, “I don’t know because I haven’t bought the product.”

I’m reading about a set of neutral density camera filters, and someone asked about the performance of the filters in question. An actual reply, " Sorry, I can’t answer your question. I haven’t been in a situation in which I needed to use a ND [neutral density] filter." One asks oneself: why did you post at all, hmmm?? Do you go around to every product on amazon and post answers like that to the millions of products you’ve never used??

And while [del]we’re[/del] I’M on the subject of amazon reviews: people who post one or two word reviews about books or products. “Crap.” “Don’t buy.” “Hated it.”

Or post about the vendor on the product page, not the product: “Arrived promptly and undamaged.” “Sent as a gift and it got there on time.”

10

One of the other engineers at work had to use a knee scooter for a while a couple years back. Turns out they’re also not made for getting around chemical plants.

So I got her these. So when she wasn’t getting around, at least she was stylin’. alas, she was too clever and I was unable to sneak them onto her scooter. even so…

11

I blame amazon for this one. Amazon has sent me “xxx has a question for you” type emails on certain products. I figured out that they pester people who bought the product and sometimes people who just looked at the product. Somebody probably got one of these bot driven requests and answered it under the assumption that the question really WAS directed at them by the asker by mistake.

12

OOH! I don’t think there’d be a way to attach those to my scooter. As it is, I only have it for another week – when my sutures come out in a couple of days, I’ve been told that I can start hobbling short distances. Maybe I’ll have to renew my scooter rental?

They are, however, perfect for zipping around Home Depot or Lowe’s with their big shiny concrete floors :slight_smile:

13

Interesting. I didn’t know this. I probably get two to four deliveries a week from amazon, and I’ve never gotten one of these emails. Now I’m going to take that personally. Why don’t the bots like me?

14

Road work delays! Ugh! I sat in my driveway waiting more than ten minutes just to get onto the road, traffic going absolutely nowhere for the whole ten minutes. All so some road crews could trim some tree branches!

Okay, so maybe the trees need to be trimmed, but this is a major highway in Maine, and it has two travel lanes and two break-down lanes. The crew was only taking up one of the break down lanes. Is there a particular reason they couldn’t just put up some cones and shift traffic over so that we could have two way traffic? I don’t understand the need to let only one direction move at a time when the road has that much space.:mad:

15

Ugh. Were they doing the work during rush hour? If they were, then, double ugh.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

16

It’s supposed to be 97 degrees on Thursday. This is Seattle, you know, home of gray days and rain?? I didn’t sign up for this shit!

17

Yeah, I had a job interview in Seattle, and the Creative Director said “And another nice thing, here you can just wear your fall wardrobe all year round!”

But not Thursday…

18

Excuse me, do you work in a library? No?
How about a museum? Uh-uh.
Film archive? Historical Society? No?

Then you are not a curator and you didn’t curate jack shit! You’re just a pretentious twit that made a list. Leave the title to people who deserve it.

19

Last Tuesday I woke up at three in the morning in such pain that I could only lie on my side, sweat and vomit. Turned out to be a 7 by 9 mm kidney stone.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday night at the hospital, my urologist was not able to break the stone up using the laser. My ureter was apparently too narrow to accept the tools. So he put in a stent and sent me home.

I never thought I would say that a good day was one when I didn’t have blood in my urine.

Thursday morning I have a consultation appointment. I hope they can do something about this because it does hurt.

(Anyone who follows me on Facebook now knows that morphine makes me read Lewis Carroll and make political posts.)

20

Note to self: No morphine… (It’d be Saki and sophomoric anti-Trump satire in my case)

So sorry you’re getting stoned! Do let us know when you pass.