things kevin hates

I’m under the weather with a bit of a cold and too lazy to form a lengthy, sustained argument on one topic, so here’s a smattering of tidbits on things I hate but couldn’t make a full post out of.

1) The ice cream truck is traipsing through the neighborhood, blaring out its perverse, Doppler-shifted version of “The Entertainer.” Now, I love ice cream as much as anyone, and I have for a long time, but it’s 51 degrees right now. Hardly good weather to run outside and buy some retarded confection of ice cream on a stick. I can’t imagine even the five-year-old version of me being seduced by the call of the ice cream truck on such a day.

2) The word “donnybrook.” If you had to pick its synonym on the SAT, you’d probably get choices like:

A) escritoire
B) valley
C) stream
D) brawl
E) antidisestablishmentarianism

Now, doing the extensive research that goes into writing this blog,* I learned that the word “donnybrook” comes from a place name in Ireland. Donnybrook is now an affluent suburb of Dublin, but centuries ago it hosted an annual fair, and as usually occurs when large numbers of Irishmen get together, the fair descended into drunken, violent mayhem, and it was banned in the 19th century.** (So, if you chose D, you are correct.) My objection to this word is that it sounds nothing like a brawl. “Donny” makes one think of Donny Osmond. And a “brook” is a little stream. I suppose if you held Donny Osmond down in a brook that would be pretty violent, but really, those two words are quite bland and inoffensive. (Wikipedia’s article on Osmond includes a section on his “image struggle.” And not image struggle in the sense of a sports star who snorts coke and rapes strippers, but in the sense of being too clean cut. Pretty much the last guy you’d associate with a violent brawl.) And “brook” conjures up an image of a river that’s too small to drown anybody, so that’s not terribly violent. And yet, thanks to a place name in Ireland, the word “fracas” has a synonym that sounds like it shouldn’t have a damn thing to do with violence.

3) People who translate small phrases of foreign languages into English just to show how smart they are. There’s a theatre in New Orleans called Le Petit Theatre, and I’ll hear people (mostly older ones) call it “The Little Theatre.” CONGRATULATIONS, MORON! YOU KNOW THREE WORDS OF FRENCH! I’m so impressed by that. One time I was at a play and heard a woman call Le Chat Noir “The Black Cat.” Who the fuck do you think you’re impressing? Even my miniscule amount of grade school French taught me those words. I realize this may sound somewhat hollow if you look at my “about me” section, but at least the difficulty is slightly higher going from English to another language. And at least I’m trying (perhaps failing, but at least trying) to be humorous.

4) Restaurants that serve fried shrimp with the tails on. That really pisses me off. I just want to shovel massive quantities of fried food into my mouth, I don’t want to have to take the time to pick out the inedible tails. I remember one restaurant that served its po-boy fried shrimp with tails off, but the shrimp platter fried shrimp with tails on. Also, while I’m here, I’m not a fan of jumbo shrimp. They’re almost always way too tough, grimy, and mealy, regardless of how they’re prepared. Now that I’ve written this, someone will tell me how such-and-such restaurant that does this-and-that with their jumbo shrimp and it’s simply irresistible, and that may well be true. But for fried shrimp, I’ll stand by this: a normal-sized shrimp is always better than a jumbo.

5) Oh, and clearly Sean Payton isn’t reading my blog, or else the Saints wouldn’t have called timeout with nine seconds left to set up Garret Hartley’s infamously missed field goal, which led to this infamous celebration/realization from Tom Benson:

The Saints had only one timeout, couldn’t hope to run another play, and were well within makeable field goal range. The next play HAS to be the field goal, so they should let the clock run down to two or three seconds before calling timeout. But in situations like this, everyone panics, and players call timeout right away in the fear that it’ll take eons to alert an official. With less than five seconds on the clock, it’s a valid concern, perhaps, but nine seconds is an eternity when you have eleven players and one coach, only one of whom needs to get the attention of just one of seven officials. It was unlikely to make a difference, but why, when you spend tons of time poring over minute details, would you make a mistake like this? In a similar situation against the Redskins, the Saints tried to pick up a few yards before attempting a 58-yard-field goal at the end of regulation; that extra play had the benefit of running a few more seconds of the clock and forcing the Redskins to pin their hopes on an improbable missed field goal return instead of a hail mary from midfield, which, though also unlikely to result in points, could have resulted in a TD or at least a penalty to get them into field goal range. And a made field goal would have forced a kickoff to the same Bucs team that had just torched us for a punt return TD.

* Google and Wikipedia. Ok, sometimes I actually do a lot more research than that, but those two things usually suffice. It’s amazing how much you can learn from the Internet, but I’ll get to that in a forthcoming post about how I hate when people ask stupid questions when they could find an answer on google just as easily.

** Yay for cheapshot ethnic stereotypes! But it’s okay, I can make fun of white people all I want. Maybe I’ll throw in some Pollack jokes next time.