I’ve moved!

My blog is now at http://thingskevinhates.com. If you’ve been kind enough to link to me, please update it to the new site, where I’ll have plenty more of the same hatred you’ve come to know and love.

misused apostrophes

It seems like half of the apostrophes I see are used incorrectly. People get confused, I think, because they aren’t able to understand the difference between a plural and a possessive, and they get caught up in a tangle of s‘s and apostrophes. A plural means there’s more than one of something. In that case, you almost never use an apostrophe. The only exceptions, basically, are when you’re dealing with something that’s italicized (such as a book title, magazine title, non-English word, etc.), when you’re dealing with abbreviations that have periods in them, or in a few words or phrases where it’s become standard (“do’s and don’ts,” for example).

bad clock management #2

I watched the Saints’ win over the Falcons. After the Falcons turned the ball over on downs with 1:49 left, I thought, “I realize they can’t quite run the clock out, but with an 11-point lead the Saints should kneel on the ball and then punt on 4th down. I realize this is one of those things where people are going to say, “Kevin, you’re only saying this because of what happened.” Well, that’s true; had the Saints run for a first down, had there not been an injury, had there not been a fumble, no, I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now. (I’d still be right, though.) But I definitely thought the Saints should have taken a knee. And my dad said the same thing when I talked to him after the game, and I checked a few message boards and saw at least one more person agreed with us.

halloween

Now, I don’t mean this as a personal attack against those of you who enjoy Halloween. But it’s not my cup of tea, not at all. It combines a couple of big things I don’t like with a very small number of things I do like. And besides, it’s on a Saturday this year, and it’s very hard to drag me away from my house on a Saturday during the college football season.

Things I don’t like about Halloween:

The costumes. Now, lots of people have amazing, hilarious, clever costumes. But if you’re going to do Halloween right, you have to have a costume. You look like a tool if you don’t, and if you just half-ass it you still look like a tool. So partaking in Halloween requires three things: creativity (to come up with a great costume idea), hard work (to actually pull said idea off), and a certain degree of exhibitionism (because any costume is ultimately a plea of “Hey, look at me!”). I’m pretty lacking in all three of those areas. I’m always amazed at the costume ideas people come up with—all sorts of things I’d never think of. And the amount of time, money, and work involved in pulling off a good costume is way too high. And, despite the fact that I have a blog, and despite the fact that I do like to think of myself as a very, very, very minor celebrity, and despite the fact that I do enjoy performing (an exhibitionist hobby if there ever were one), I don’t need the attention that comes from the perfect, outrageous, intelligent costume. And the problem with Halloween that you need to have some sort of costume. At least with Mardi Gras you can just put on one of those striped purple green and gold rugby shirts and leave it at that. But with Halloween people are gonna judge you if your costume isn’t good. So why bother?

hipsters

I feel kind of conflicted writing this. Because I don’t hate all hipsters. And the term is a horrendously nebulous one, anyway. And it’s difficult to mock hipsters without becoming one—their movement is so obsessed with irony and putative non-conformity and feelings of superiority that just pointing out their faults makes one a sort of hipster. And because we’re all hipsters to some extent. You’re reading a blog entry about hipsters, for fuck’s sake. And even worse—I’m writing one! While researching for this I went to urbandictionary.com and the 2nd result for hipster is: “You, for reading ironic, pseudo-intellectual dictionary entries on the word ‘hipster.'” Touché, my friend, touché. And so much of the hipster mocking that goes on (LATFH being the prime example with stuff white people like operating in a similar vein) attacks a ridiculous straw-man version of hipsters. I feel like the examples I see every day are easy enough to mock, so why bother with an exaggerated paragon of the stereotype?

the lack of baritone roles these days

When I drag myself to an audition for a musical, chances are I’m singing something that’s fifty or more years old. And the director or someone else on the casting panel will be surprised that someone my age would pick something that old. It’s because I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE! There have hardly been any good roles or songs for baritones and basses in the past thirty years. In the golden age of the musical, back in the days of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Bernstein and Jule Styne and Frank Loesser and so forth, shows usually had a good mix of roles. You’d have a leading man role for a baritone—a John Raitt or Alfred Drake or someone like that—a juvenile second lead for a young tenor. And there’d usually be a mix for women as well, maybe a nice soprano role for the romantic lead and some good character roles for altos, or maybe a nice belty Ethel Merman role. Sometimes the altos complain, but even then, they’ve got a whole nice song for it. And these days, I think it’s the sopranos who have more to complain about than the altos as far as female parts are concerned. But everything for men now is tenor, tenor, tenor, with maybe a few character parts for basses and baritones.

the nfl overtime rule

There are about a thousand different ways to deal with a tied football game. You can leave it tied, as was the rule in college for many years. You can let the teams alternate possessions starting at the 25 or the 10, as is the case now in college and high school. Neither of these solutions is ideal. The current college and high school system eliminates the importance of field position, punting, and the vertical passing game, while placing a heavy premium on turnovers, field goal kicking, and two point conversions. And obviously, ties must be avoided in the NFL playoffs. But either of those proposals is a huge improvement over the NFL’s joke of a playoff system. In fact, just about any system would be an improvement. It is far too easy for the team that wins the coin toss to march down the field, kick a field goal, and win the game without a single possession for the other team. Of six NFL overtime games this year, three have been decided by a field goal on the opening possession.

lousy things in NYC

I just had an awesome vacation in New York City, and while it’s my second favorite place to be (after my hometown, of course), like any other place, it has its problems. And traveling, no matter where, always causes its own problems. So, without further adieu, a grab-bag of NYC complaints:

1) The fact that you can’t walk around drinking. Growing up in New Orleans, I think it wasn’t until I was 15 or 16 when I learned that people in other parts of the country can’t walk down the street with an alcoholic beverage. I was pretty shocked when I found out. What’s the harm? And New York would be the absolute perfect city to allow public drinking. No one ever drives; you can take the subway (the public transit there is the practically the 8th wonder of the world) or a taxi everywhere you want to go, so you never have to worry about drunk driving. Wouldn’t it be great to walk around Times Square as if you were walking down Bourbon Street? NYC needs to get on this, stat. And while they’re at it, how about a casino? NYC and the state lose tons and tons of money to Atlantic City and Connecticut, and the underground games there are perhaps the busiest in the country, what with people like Alex Rodriguez frequenting them. NYC would be able to print money in tax revenue.

softball

Softball. I hate it. I’ve always been a baseball fan, I played baseball growing up, but I’ve always disliked all the bat-and-ball sports that try to be baseball without actually being baseball.* Cabbageball, wiffleball, and the like are all just shadows of the game they imitate. They can be fun, sure, but they’re nothing like actual baseball. The distance between bases is all out of whack, much of the strategy of bunting and stealing bases and so forth is lost, and they only exist because having kids throw fastballs at each other during P.E. class would require way too much extra equipment and jack up the insurance premiums quite a bit.

Softball has these downfalls, and more. At least the others don’t require gloves or helmets or other equipment beyond the bat, ball, and bases. But softball? All of the equipment of baseball, none of the advantages.

the intelligent design movement

You’ve probably heard about the so-called theory of intelligent design. Its advocates suggest that the world (or life, or intelligent life, or whatever) must be the work. Now, as far as the origin of the universe is concerned, it’s pretty hard to prove or disprove this; I actually agree with them, but that’s beside the point here. It’s a philosophical question, and in philosophy, most of the questions which were raised by Plato or Aristotle or any of those other dead Greeks still haven’t been answered with any greater confidence than they were more than two thousand years ago. If the intelligent design advocates limited themselves to philosophy, I really wouldn’t have any problem with them. What I have a problem with is what they have to say about the origin of living things, and of intelligent life. They dismiss all of the evidence in favor of evolution, put forth a few nonsensical theories, and then stir up all the controversy they can in an attempt to discredit evolution. What they are doing is taking a philosophical/religious concept and insisting that it is a scientific concept, when, in reality, it is about as far from science as possible, regardless of any validity it has in a philosophical context.