Abba Zabba

As if the phrase "War on Terror" wasn't ridiculous enough, Rudy Giuliani has come up with a variant that's even worse. He likes to talk about "The Terrorists' War on Us". That's quite possibly the worst phrase in the history of the English language.

I know this isn't a new thing, but he's started using the phrase more often lately, and it really bugs me. War on Us? That implies a one-way conflict, in which they're attacking us and we're sitting here and taking it. That's hardly the image that Giuliani wants to present, since he's the big tough guy who knows how to fight back against terrorists. Even if you accept that there's a unified group called "the terrorists" and that it's possible to be in a war against that group (despite a lack of victory conditions, or any way of knowing whether we're winning or losing that war), that phrase is idiotic.

One time, I drove from Boston to New Jersey in 2 hours and 56 minutes. Usually it takes a little more than 3 hours; I plan for 3.5.

I was in the car for 3.5 hours today, but I didn't drive to New Jersey. I drove home. A lot of people have long commutes. I work with people who live more than 50 miles away. On a bad day, I guess it could take one of them over 3 hours to get home. You know how far away I live?

6 miles. 210 minutes for 6 miles. Admittedly, I didn't take a direct route. In an utterly ineffective attempt to avoid bad traffic and steep hills, my route was closer to 8 miles. But if you do the math, you'll find that 8 miles in 3.5 hours is absolutely fucking awful. That was literally the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone ever.

Last year around this time, I made a post called "Radio Free Santa". In it, I complained about a local radio station which plays nothing but Christmas music for 6 weeks.

Today is 6 weeks before Christmas. In the car on the way home from work, I clicked through the radio stations. There are now 2 stations playing nothing but Christmas music. For 6 weeks.

I do not enjoy the Christmas season.

I hate Ticketmaster.

Their website just doesn't work. At least, not when I really want it to. Friday night I bought tickets for a show that wasn't close to sold out, and I had no problems. The site is fine for situations like that. But just now, I tried to buy tickets for a show that I knew would sell out, and the site completely failed me.

First, the tickets were supposed to go on sale on Saturday morning. At some point that was moved to Monday morning. So instead of buying from home, I was forced to do it from work. At least our web-blocking software doesn't block Ticketmaster.com. But it's still possible that the firewall caused some of my problems. Or it could just be Ticketmaster's incompetence.

The way the site works, you choose what type of tickets you want, then enter a queue. When your wait is over, you're presented with tickets, and you can buy them or search again. In theory. The way it actually works, the first few times your wait is over, you get an "Invalid request. Sorry for the inconvenience." error, and have to start waiting again. Do that a few times, and you can instead get the "No tickets found" error. They never tell you the show is sold out; they tell you they can't find tickets that you requested, and suggest you broaden the request. At least if they said "Sold Out" I'd stop trying.

After 15 minutes of reloading with multiple browsers, I finally got the search to complete. I was offered the worst seats in the house, for the second night of the show, which I don't even want to go to. As far as I can tell, both shows sold out in under 20 minutes. And even though I started the ticket search process within a minute of tickets going on sale, I was only offered the worst seats possible. And that's why Ticketmaster sucks. Now, off to Ebay!

So last night I was in the liquor store, buying stuff to take on a camping trip this weekend. One of our group is a girl who doesn't drink beer, only girly drinks. So I was forced to look in the dreaded "malternative" cooler. And that's where I found the worst product ever.

Smirnoff Source. It's pure spring water, plus alcohol, and a small amount of flavoring. Yes, it's just watered-down vodka. And they expect people to pay for that. I can't imagine any environment in which this drink is necessary. Presumably it's aimed at people in clubs, but clubs have bars, and bars can give you a shot of vodka in a glass of water if you want. Of course, nobody has ever in the history of the universe ordered a shot of vodka in a glass of non-sparkling water, but that didn't stop the geniuses at Smirnoff from putting that in a bottle.

A couple years ago, I had a similar reaction to "Nice and Easy" vodka, which was only 60 proof. It was just regular vodka, watered down slightly. But in retrospect, that makes at least a little sense, if you want weak drinks but don't want to mess with the proportions. Flavored alcoholic spring water, on the other hand, is just moronic.

Now that everyone's got high-speed Internet, there's a trend towards putting more multimedia content on web sites. (Note: I can't say the word "multimedia" without feeling like it's 1995 and I'm reading a Time article about the Information Superhighway. But I still feel like more of a tool when I say "podcast", one of the dumbest words ever invented.) And I don't like it.

I like text. It's easy. It's convenient. Podcasts and videos are neither. With text, you can start reading, then switch away to something else, and come back to read more later. I guess you can pause a video or audio file, but it's harder to scroll back and remind yourself of what just happened. I read very quickly; I can definitely read faster than people can comprehensibly talk. I can skim text briefly to look for interesting parts, which is impossible with video files. Some streaming audio/video sites are blocked at work, so I can't access that content at all. And when I'm on the Internet at home, I have the TV or music on. I can listen to the TV and read something, but I can't watch two videos at once.

I know that some people prefer multimedia. They want to see or hear what happened. And that's fine. But that's no reason to take away my text! Big sites like the New Yorker (which inspired this rant) can certainly afford to pay an intern to transcribe their audio and video pieces. That way the cool kids can podcast and vlog and do whatever they want, while I sit here and read.

A few months ago, I complained about the band Stuck Mojo. Or, more specifically, about their new fans. They released an anti-Muslim song, and all the anti-Muslim bloggers declared them the greatest band in the history of the universe. At the time, I called it just a conservative phenomenon.

Turns out I was wrong. Rosie O'Donnell is getting fired from The View. Naturally, I don't care. And I'd assume that other intelligent Americans (ie, not fans of The View), also don't care. But I overlooked the fact that there are as many wackos on the left as on the right. See, Rosie likes to talk about politics on her show. She's said repeatedly that she thinks Bush should be impeached. And on at least one occasion, she said that the official 9/11 explanation is a conspiracy, because fire can't melt steel. As a result, she's widely praised among certain leftists. (Such as the ones on the site that inspired me to write this article.)

The people are making the same mistake as the Jihadwatch crowd did for Stuck Mojo. It's possible to admire what someone says without admiring the person for saying it. Rosie O'Donnell is annoying. She's always been annoying. She was a loud, mediocre stand-up comic, then one of the most obnoxious TV personalities of the 90s. And now she's on a crappy morning show for housewives and the chronically unemployed, yammering about celebrities and fashion. The fact that she occasionally throws in a standard Noam Chomsky point along with the discussion of Britney's new hairdo (or lack thereof) doesn't make her a hero. If anything, it makes her into even more of a caricature, and makes it easier for the mainstream media to ignore the left.