"Oh No You Didn't"

It grinds my gears when I hear someone say "Oh no you didn't!" What's up with that? The statement is usually a response to something that obviously did happen. It clearly happened, why deny it? It is mostly spoken with a cocky in-your-face attitude. Like, "I'm so cool, I can negate that action that you just performed." It's stupid and pointless and it grinds my gears.

Parading One's Sexual Orientation

Now here is a touchy subject that grinds my gears nonetheless, people parading their sexual orientation. I'm not promoting one sexual orientation over the other. What I'm doing here is expressing my complete dislike for those who parade their sexual orientation as if other people give a crap!

I really, and I mean really, do not care what the sexual orientation of the person in front of me in line at Wal-Mart is. I could care less whether my co-workers are heterosexual, homosexual or bi. As I go about my day minding my own business, I expect all others to do the same. I live my life as my own logic and common sense tells me. I want others to do the same.

However, when someone gets up in my face and tells me all kinds of junk about their private life, I have a problem. When I'm going about my day, respecting those around me with the maximum amount of respect that one can give, it really ticks me off when one demands extra respect because of how they choose to live. In fact, I'm more likely to, out of spite, respect someone less for childishly shoving their lifestyle up in my face.

Here is an example. If I was wearing a shirt that I really liked, which instance would I get the most negative attention?

1. I just go about my day as normal, feeling energetic and confident in this shirt that suits my personal interests, or
2. I walk around demanding everyone else to look at my shirt and to like and approve of my shirt.

In the first case I would be personally happy and everyone else would totally respect me, perhaps even noticing the spring in my step which would lead them to asking me why I have such spring. In the second case I'm being an idiot and forcing myself onto everyone, which would undoutedly show me as being obnoxious and stupid. In this second case, people who would otherwise be fine with my shirt would actually be turned against it due to my being pushy.

I also don't like it when people try to be cryptic in their harralding of such things. Something like, "You say your dog died? That's funny, I saw a dead dog the other day after buying this great shirt that I'm wearing now." If someone must bring it up in every conversation or walk in a parade to show it off, one must ask if this just isn't a desperate cry for attention.

So the moral of this story is this: If no one likes your shirt, it may be because you won't shut up about it! It grinds my gears when people insist that I approve of what they do behind closed doors when I really don't give a mouse's mule.

Peanuts and French Fries

You know what really grinds my gears? Peanuts and French fries. No, not both of them together. They each annoy me on their own but in a similar way.

Peanuts are possibly the worst appetizer at a restaurant (such as Logan's or Sagebrush). The peanut itself makes no sense. The tasty saltiness of the peanuty experience is on the outside of the peanut, on the shell. But no, you can't eat the shell. If you do, I'm sure it will hurt going down your throat and I don't think anyone wants to try that. And once you spend who knows how many seconds breaking into the Fort Knox shell, you're rewarded with a fairly bland food experience. I think the adage should be "Don't judge a peanut by it's shell."

French fries aren't much different, except they are slightly worse. I was at Sagebrush and ordered a medium well steak burger with fries, and when I got my $11 newborn bundle of joy, half of my plate was covered in these liquid lard sticks. When I saw this, I remembered the eternal hatred I have for these mockeries of food. You bite into a fry thinking, "Oh yes, this is a fry. This will be nice to eat," but you're wrong. It's a fried potato. It tastes like grease. You go some other restaurant, and it will still taste like grease. Perhaps the place you go will be daring and have fries that taste like grease and, brace yourself, salt! Mmm. How bold.

I wish that fries and peanuts could fight to the death and only one survive, but they both grind my gears.

Anarchists

People who claim to be Anarchists grind my gears. Anyone who genuinely believes that an anarchy is ideal is either wholeheartedly committed to a childish social movements (i.e. the skater punks) without giving it any thought for themselves or seriously has not used their ability to reason in their taking this political stance. I can understand a socialist's complete opposition to capitalism, maybe even the philosophical arguments for communism, as absurd as they are, but anarchy is against all logic.

It is hard to talk about this in a small amount of space, so I will only state a single and very important point. Many people seem to hate all types of law enforcement. They believe that law enforcement, or in some cases justice in general (*laughs*) is a bad thing. Just because they have recieved a speeding ticket when driving over the plainly posted limit, they believe that all cops are out to get well-behaved law-abiding citizens. Most of these people that I have encountered personally want an anarchy to replace the enforced law that we have.

What could be accomplished by an absence of civil law? Would the vast amount of murderers in prison suddenly realize that it is wrong to kill people now that the law does not tell them that it is so? Would all of the evil in the country suddenly become good? That would be impossible to argue. It is painfully obvious that, without law enforcement, the current curruption in our land would do nothing but multiply in curruption and lawlessness (pardon the pun).

What could be accomplished by absence of civil law is an apparent increase in morality. Without a law to compare their actions to, the bad things committed would seem less negative. Without a law that forbids murder, whether murdering is actually morally wrong or not would be in question. The anarchists would get what they want, people would no longer be doing bad things anymore. However, the deeds being done would be equally destructive to life and peace (as if peace would have a meaning) as they were before the abolishment of law enforcement.

A land without law and enforcement of law is a land without freedom. Free nations always have laws. Even in the hypothetical case of anarchy, there would undoubtedly be a force that rises within the non-government that in some way could win the respect of the rest of the non-citizens and eventually enforce some unspoken law. "You cannot eat the big guys grapes" would be the the first rule that eventually leads to the destruction of this lawless bliss.

Yes, if you have not encountered a hater of civil structure, they do exist and they grind my gears.

Toby Keith

You know who really grinds my gears? Toby Keith, the country singer. One of his most famous songs is Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.

This song was written and released shortly after the World Trade Center attacks. This seems almost patriotic, except for the fact that any song that is ever released and is not free is used to make money, obviously. The only patriotic thing to do would have been to release the song free of charge over the internet, in stores, whatever. Exploitation of war for personal profit, more specifically a current war, is a selfish and low thing to do.

But all that is assuming that Toby's song really is patriotic and fairly represents what Americans stand for and believe in. Let's run through the lyrics to see just how horrible of a message Toby is sending.

American Girls and American Guys
We’ll always stand up and salute
We’ll always recognize
When we see Old Glory Flying
There’s a lot of men dead
So we can sleep in peace at night
When we lay down our head

Toby believes that all americans will always, no matter what, obey their government just because we see our nations flag. This is blind obedience and anyone with a brain knows how wrong blind obedience is. As far as people dying so we can have peace at night... that's somewhat correct. The last war that the people could really support was WWII because it was obvious that a great injustice was being done to our European brothers and sisters. Since then, it's been a war of words to make ourselves seem like we're the good guys and whoever we fight is the bad guys. Something that wishy-washy shouldn't be celebrated.

My daddy served in the army
Where he lost his right eye
But he flew a flag out in our yard
Until the day that he died
He wanted my mother, my brother, my sister and me
To grow up and live happy
In the land of the free.

This I'll agree with. Every parent wants their loved ones to live happily and be free.

Now this nation that I love
Has fallen under attack
A mighty sucker punch came flyin’ in
From somewhere in the back
Soon as we could see clearly
Through our big black eye
Man, we lit up your world
Like the 4th of July

Toby acts like we're some innocent nation who "has fallen under attack." We've been at war with some nation or another for a very long time. However, this is the second time we have ever been openly attacked on our own soil. This generation has very few people alive who remember the Pearl Harbor bombing. We shouldn't pretend like war is something new, and when we're attacked, we shouldn't rejoice and light up their world like the 4th of July.

Hey Uncle Sam
Put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty
Started shakin’ her fist
And the eagle will fly
Man, it’s gonna be hell
When you hear Mother Freedom
Start ringin’ her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Brought to you Courtesy of the Red White and Blue

"It's gonna be hell when you hear Mother Freedom start ringin' her bell"? I'm sorry. I thought the middle east was already in a state of perverbial hell and that it was an area of constant turmoil. I'm glad that since the WTC towers fell we can really show them what suffering is, which is probably making them listen to this aweful song.

Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The U.S. of A.
`Cause we`ll put a boot in your ass
It`s the American way

This section is sung slowly and extra emphasis is added to "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." These lyrics make it seem like America is a nation of brutes who sodomize and rape people of other nations into submission. This isn't quite the image we want to give off, Mr. Keith.

Whatever you think about the situation in Iraq, that's not the issue here. What is the issue is the fact that some idiotic country singer made money from misrepresenting the feelings of an entire nation and made us look like brutes who foolishly fight without thinking, and it really grinds my gears.

Dr. Phil

You know what just grinds my gears? Dr. Phil. It's hard for me to express my dislike for for this show. I'll start by summing up his apparent "self help" philosophy in a nutshell. "I think I'm gonna help fellow human beings overcome their problems by making them suffer complete embarrasment on national television...because I care."

I'm sure that psychology was once a respectable profession before it became associated with talk show hosts. I can hardly imagine how the profession could have any dignity now however. When I think of a psychologist, I think of someone who you can pay to listen to your deepest, darkest secrets and not have to worry about them telling. Then I see Dr. Phil on TV, "What? You say you never cheated on your wife? Well I have it on tape right here in my hand and America is gonna see you cheating on your wife you filthy stinking liar! Get real!" Yeah! There is a man who cares about his patients.

Now a psychologist is supposed to have somewhat of a knowledge on how the human mind works. They try to find problems in an individuals life that may be causing the problems. For example, a traumatic event might have happened in a person's past where they were severely embarrassed, which consequently led to a social disorder. A psychologist is a person you would see to fix the problem. This is definately not the case with Dr. Phil. I would hate to see how many social disorders he's created by showing live footage of the most rediculously personal things I've every seen. I'm sure Mrs. X was fine and dandy after America found out that she hasn't cleaned her house in 5 years. You know Bob got right over having the nation see his obsession with collecting Barbie dolls.

Finally, how is this guy captivating everyone as if he is a saint? I've even seen some Christians fooled into believing that this joke of a psychologist has Christian values. Let me inform you, publically sharing the lowest, most personal aspects of people's lives with the world for ratings is not Christian values. Anyone can throw out some "moral" statement to captivate the naive. Here is a hint, network television is not the place to look for a saint.

For those of you who like Dr. Phil and think he is a good moral person, I respond with an emphatic, "Get real!" He and his show grind my gears.

Anime Music Videos

You know what grinds my gears? Anime Music Videos (AMVs for short). They are almost all the same, and from the looks of it, made by the same group of teenagers.

Recipe for making AMVs:

1 part emo song
1 part bad editing
2 parts of the same fight scenes you see in other AMVs
salt to taste

Go to YouTube.com and search "Naruto" or "Bleach" or any other anime. You'll find the same fight scenes in each video. The only thing that changes from video to video is the music, but it's almost certain to be a Linkin Park song, or an emo song in which a band cries because they're sad since life is just so darn difficult at the age of 16 with all of the homework they have to do.

Computers

You know what really, truly, grinds my gears? Computers. They aren't always annoying, only when I'm trying to use them. One computer annoys me in particular. My Dell laptop This amazing bundle of human engineering has had the following problems in the past 4 years:

2 harddrive crashes
a busted cooling fan
both hinges connecting the monitor and body are broken
dvd movies skip even though the dvd is perfectly fine
divx movies run slowly if there's any action scenes
the computer believes my usb 2.0 card is a usb 1.1 card
it cannot read blank cd-r disks
it cannot burn data cd's nor music cd's
it randomly restarts and suffers from system errors (at least once per day)*

On top of this, I play World of Warcraft. This game is not very demanding on a PC's hardware, but my laptop does not know this. The computer will quite often freeze as if it's thinking about something really hard, but then nothing happens. Everything resumes normally. This hardware lag has caused me to die far more than I would like to think about. This electronic sadist must know full well how infuriated I become when I'm trying to fight other players. It's the most futile of acts. While fighting, my computer is so slow, no matter what my own reaction time is to counter a player's attacks, my computer adds about two or three seconds of reaction time. This is devastating to what would otherwise be a decent challenge to my enemy. Earlier today, I fought a well-geared mage while I was on my rarely-played and relatively weak rogue. That alone is a tough challenge, but factor in my computer's special Olympic bronze medals, and it's easy to see why I stood no chance. I fully believe that I have the skill to at least seem competent while fighting other players. A few months ago, I played the game on a friend's nicely-equipped computer and was able to fight and kill two enemy players at the same time.

If my computer is the sadist, I'm the masochist.

Edit: I formatted my harddrive and my software problems are STILL there. Go figure.