THINGS THAT NEED TO GO AWAY RIGHT NOW:

• "Can you hear me now? Good!"
  
• People who walk right toward you in twos or threes on the sidewalk, sometimes walking a dog, and they obviously see you, but they refuse to move aside. What's wrong with you people? Or did you purchase the entire sidewalk while I wasn't looking?
  
• People who affix Confederate flags to their extended-cab pickup trucks and yell stale insults at people, (that is, me), who are just out for a pleasant run. I can understand wanting to ridicule a skinny man prancing about in a halter top and hot pants, but can you please come up with something clever and original? "Nice legs!" and "Run, Forrest, run!" just aren't going to cut it anymore.
  
• Those Jaguar commercials where the guy with the snotty British accent pronounces it "Jag-u-ahhhhh". Why are Americans such suckers for British accents? Having a British accent doesn't make you smart. It just means that you grew up in England. And why did Captain Jean-Luc Picard on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" have a British accent? Wasn't he supposed to be French?
  
• Speaking of Jaguars: any commercial in which a man gets ridiculed for not buying his wife a ridiculously expensive gift. These commercials tend to run during the Christmas season, which means they should be starting up next week or so. I remember one commercial from last year in which a man and his wife are driving around their upper-middle-class neighborhood, looking at all the men who bought their wives Jaguars for Christmas, as denoted by huge bows on the Jaguars' roofs. The wife shoots a smoldering dirty look at her husband, who sheepishly turns aside and stares at the floor. Now: I have never hit a woman in my life, but any woman who gives me a dirty look for failing to buy her a Jaguar is going to get a fist in the face. No jury would convict me.
  
• Here's another one: a Jared jewelry store commercial in which a woman looks at her husband as though he was covered in donkey semen and jeers at him in front of other people for not buying her jewelry from Jared. (The context of the commercial makes it clear that the man had bought her jewelry, just not from the right particular goddam store.) BAM!!!!
  
• People who form plural's with apostrophe's.
  
• This itching, burning rash and nasty yellow discharge.
  
• My poker buddy Saul of Tarsus, who bought speakers from one of those guys who drive around in vans. Sorry, Saul, but you encouraged them, and now they'll never go away.
  
• Matrix rip-offs featuring actors on wires leaping 22 feet in the air while fighting thirty guys at once, accompanied by a thumping techno soundtrack. I am done with this.
  
• I am also done with bullets traveling in slow motion and cameras that whirl around while the action freezes. Next idea, please.
  

+posted by Lawrence @ 10/06/2003 12:05:00 PM