things kevin hates

Not too long ago, facebook came up with the idea of fan pages. People can follow their favorite bands or sports teams or movie stars. Good idea, right? Well, people decided to create fan pages for lots of other things. Most of which are completely and utterly pointless. People think up some observational humor, find a semi-related picture, and then hope it goes viral. But even if it does, what the hell do these people get out of it?

In most cases, there’s no apparent profit motive. People aren’t linking to a website or trying to sell merchandise. They’re just coming up with something clever and crossing their fingers. Many times, the jokes are actually quite good, and I get a chuckle out of them, or they make some astute observation. (Examples, with spelling/punctuation as in the originals: “Looking at the clock in school even though you just looked at it.” “I hate people who walk really slow infront of you and can’t get past them.” “Pushing those little buttons on the lids of fast food drinks.” “It blew my mind, when I noticed the arrow in FedEx.”*) But it’s almost the Generation Y equivalent of stupid joke e-mails that insist that you send them to all your friends. Fortunately these aren’t quite as bad as the group invitations I sometimes get bombarded with, but when these things come across my news feed, even if I’m amused I’m not going to join a pointless fan page.

And speaking of groups, I don’t see why they fell out of favor for this sort of thing. You could make clever titles for officers and if your group went viral people would see your name on the front page of the group and wonder how Joe Blow from Middle-of-Nowhere High School started a group that gained 1,214,840 members. But fan pages don’t even list the name of their creators, so you don’t even get that trifling iota of fame.

However, let’s just assume that I wanted to start a bunch of fan pages. My clever ideas would be:

I learned my sevens times tables playing Tecmo Super Bowl.
(No, really. When it came time to memorize times tables, I had sevens down pat, all the way up to 84, my high score in a game. I used to torch the shit out of the CPU with 80-yard bombs from Dan Marino to Mark Clayton.)

It’s humiliating that my sister is better at Tetris than I am.
(Really, it is. Apparently women are better at the sort of spatial intelligence involved in Tetris. Or at least I’ve convinced myself of this to make myself feel better.)

I giggle every time I hear the word “heinous” in the opening of SVU.
(Every time.)

When I make lists of italicized things, I make sure not to italicize the commas.
(Yes, I’m that anal-retentive.)

If I open an html tag inside of another html tag, I always close the second one before the first.
(Chiasmus FTW.)

You don’t have to be a friend of Dorothy’s to be a fan of Judy’s (a Judy Garland fan club for straight men).
(I thought up this joke a few days ago and have been waiting for a chance to use it.)

Hopefully those are as funny as I think they are. But am I going to make facebook fan pages out of them? Hell no, I’ve got a blog for that. I promise not to annoy y’all with any other self-promotion (well, aside from my shows.)**

* This one I especially like because ever since I read about the FedEx arrow on Wikipedia I cannot look at a FedEx logo without focusing on the arrow. I barely notice the letters of the word, I’m too busy looking at the arrow. And now that I’ve told you about it, you will too.

** Come see Footloose! Opens January 29th!