First, quote of the day, from an office-wide email:

“There is a bag of cheese curds in each of the 2 refridgerators in the 4th floor pantry….please feel free to help yourselves.”

(Should I make cheese one of the regular themes of this blog? It keeps coming up.)

And now, the Things I Love to Hate.

  1. Quips on Church Marquees. Recently spotted: SIGN BROKEN. COME INSIDE FOR MESSAGE. I’m an old-fashioned marquee girl. I like them to list the service times, the name of the pastors, any special events. When did pithy statements take over? And yet I keep my eye out for new ones, awaiting the frisson of recognition, the subsequent groan.
  2. Use of quote marks for emphasis. As in, “Fresh,” “Delicious” Sandwiches. In my mind, such quote marks indicate insincerety, as if the writer could not stand behind the words and thus attributed them to some unspecific Other. There are many things those sandwiches could be, and Fresh and Delicious are not among them. I relish the “possibilities.”
  3. Red Twizzlers. This product is not candy. It is a soft plastic upon which someone spilled their strawberry KoolAid. If there is an open package next to me, I keep pulling pieces out and biting them off. Is it still true? Is this substance still masquerading as a food? Why yes, this bite tastes exactly the same as the last! But the next one is bound to be different! I shall try again!Twizzlers
  4. The Female Leads in Cary Grant Romantic Comedies. These women have it all– brains, beauty, guts, fashion sense. Best of all, they see right through Cary Grant’s charm to his wrinkled, caddish heart, and they let him know it. He’s loose or drunk or selfish or bad with money or, most often, an unrepentant shyster. Yay girls! And Cary Grant doesn’t deny it, or change a whit. So why do they keep falling for him by the end of the film?
  5. Spin-Offs from Baltimore City’s Believe Campaign. So there are these black signs and bumper stickers all around Baltimore. They say BELIEVE in white letters. The proliferation of variations is just too cute! Let’s play spot-the-clever-substitution: We have BEHAVE, BEEHIVE, BE LOVE. Hey you bumper sticker people! It would BEHOOVE you to get a new idea. (Ooh, that one felt good. BEHOOVE, get it?)believe
  6. Burger King Commercials. They don’t seem designed to make you want to eat the food, so I love to hate them. The creepy mascot, the giant pile of female dancers forming a Whopper, and now the father and son duo (“Dad, if you’d just get your head out of your bun!”). How does one convince a comfort food corporation to go “edgy”?
  7. Baggy Basketball Uniforms. This year’s versions have truly entered The Culotte Zone. How can those boys even run? I love to watch floppy shorts impede progress down the court as they ripple around the boys’ shins. It seems you have to wear more servicable shorts under your uniform shorts. And how lucky are the players that the material is silky? Otherwise, they’d wad up in the crotch area more and more as you ran– nobody wants THAT. (Image from http://www.taylorcointl.com/basketball/) oversized_basketball_shorts.jpg