Stupid Things That Piss Me Off
Until we move into our new house, my evening commute involves the godawful Bay Bridge. To drive the 14 miles door-to-door, it can take anywhere from 35 minutes to 1 1/2 HOURS, as it did last night.
But that's not what I'm going to complain about, because complaining about traffic is even beneath me. (OK, no it isn't, but let's move on.)
Like many high traffic freeways, as you enter the city after getting off the bridge, you're inundated with billboards. I'm okay with this - let's keep the massive advertising there, and commerce is commerce. Good to go. But more than a few of these just kill me.
First, there's one for the Gap -- this rotates every few months, and for awhile now has featured several "famous" people wearing Gap clothes. I know that Maria Bello was on there, and my memory fails me for others - but generally speaking, they are either nameless models or genuinely famous people. Today, one of the pictures is of Angie Harmon and her husband, ex-NFL'er Jason Sehorn. Sehorn has been out of football for four years, and really should legally change his name to Mr. Angie Harmon. Let's be clear - despite being way too bony for my taste, Angie is a gorgeous woman and her accent only helps things. But Sehorn is not a celebrity. He's better looking than most NFL players, I'll grant you, but really? He gets to be in ads still? This angers me - and it probably shouldn't. And that angers me a little bit more.
Then, driving just about twenty feet further (which took about five minutes, I'd point out if I was going to complain about the traffic, which I'm not), I see the following tagline for a Toyota Prius: America's Most Fuel Efficient Vehicle.
Can you figure out what's wrong with that sentence? TOYOTA'S ARE A JAPANESE CAR. Now, I know what they're doing here - mindless robots will go buy a car, or at least pay more attention to the advertising, if the name of our glorious country is involved - but this is not an American car! It's a great car, and one that many douchebags like myself should consider buying instead of our SUV's, but it's NOT AMERICAN.
The next one - yes, right across the freeway from these other two - is for Nokia, and it says something along the lines of "WHERE MY PEEPS AT?" Apparently, there's some product by Nokia called 'peeps' and I can't talk about this any longer or my head will explode.
You know what else I'm upset about? Nowhere on the world wide web can I find pictures of existing billboards. That's moronic. Especially because there WAS one I particularly liked, for a Motorola RAZR featuring some young Asian woman with her hair flying all over the place. I wanted to show this as "good" advertising - but I can't. This also pisses me off.
Some non-billboard related notes:
This season of Heroes ate ass. It was boring, perhaps the worst thing you could say about a show that's about people with supernatural powers. The fact that the show's creators have acknowledged the missteps is good; let's see if they can correct it whenever the show restarts. But here's another thing that gets on my nerves -- Hayden Panettiere IS NOT THAT HOT. She's blonde, has a cute body, and has a nice smile. Don't get me wrong - she's definitely pretty...but I can't figure out for the life of me what all the fuss is about. And let's be clear - part of the reason the show sucked was that it asked her to ACT...and it's altogether unclear whether that's in her wheelhouse or not.
San Francisco sports teams suck. That hurts in places I don't want to talk about.
I'm thinking about changing from DirecTV to Comcast but I'm actually so uninterested in diving in to figure what is a better option that I'll probably just stick with DirecTV. That sucks.
Lists like this piss me off.
I haven't started buying anyone a gift for the holidays except for my wife, and time is, shall we say, ticking. Good times. Also, I seem to spend roughly eight days per week running between my apartment, our new house and my job. Doesn't leave a lot of time in for finding that perfect gift for Mom, you know?
Wow...this list has gotten really long already. Let's break it in half, and I'll come back another time with more stupid things that piss me off.