What Joe Absolutely Cannot Stand

Okay, I'm exaggerating. I actually don't hate any of these things. In fact, my emotions range from "generally-like-but-am-sometimes-annoyed-by" to "want-to-hate-but-am-morbidly-fascinated-by". See? I copped to it.

Microsoft

I know that this will probably get me killed, especially because of the William H. Gates wing of the new MIT Stata center, but I HATE MICROSOFT. And NOT because they're taking over the world. That's actually kind of nice; it keeps everything uniform, as opposed to the forty thousand faces of UNIX.

No no, what I HATE is that they try to take over my computer with software written by monkeys. Monkeys. I'm serious. You know those million monkeys at a million keyboards, that, given a million years, would end up typing out the complete works of Shakespeare?

Yeah, well, same monkeys.

Anyway, these monkeys wrote it all. The whole Office suite, Internet Explorer, everything. How else could you explain The Office Assistant, the little jerk who keeps popping up asking if I'm too stupid to know how to send a fax. "Would you like me to send a fax for you?" No! I typed the WORD 'fax' in my document! I KNOW how to send a FAX!! GO AWAY!!

And even worse, the monkeys who wrote Word aren't the same ones who wrote PowerPoint for instance. I think Word was written by gibbons, and PowerPoint by howler monkeys. So I draw something with Word Art and maybe, oh, include an equation... then I try to drop it into PowerPoint. ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE! MONKEYS HOWLING EVERYWHERE! GIBBONS HURLING FECES! SCREEEEEE! SCREEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Hence my feelings toward Microsoft.

Beagles

I don't know why, but I just hate beagles. They're supposed to be dogs, right? But they're not! They can't even bark. They just waddle around looking stupid and shouting things that sound like "Roo!" My next door neighbor's beagle said "Roo" for days on end. Kept me up nights as a kid. I obviously have some deep-seated childhood trauma about beagles.

SPECIAL UPDATE!
I was informed by Ms. Barbara Roll, from the University of Calgary, that I am, in fact, wrong about beagles. Well, at first I didn't believe her, so I performed painstaking research for several minutes, and uncovered the following startling facts:

• Beagles are dogs. (Webster, Noah. Any Old Dictionary, 1998.)
• Dogs can bark. (Americana, Standard. Dick and Jane Hear Spot Bark, 1947.)
• Beagles are not stupid looking and they don't say "Roo". (Jablomi, Heywood. All Things Beagles Say and Look Like, 2001.)
• Beagles very rarely become possessed by restless alien spirits and begin radiating sinister green light from their eyes. (King, Steven. The Tommyknockers, 1988.)
• Beagles have been known to play the jew's harp with some proficiency and talent. (Schulz, Charles. A Boy Named Charlie Brown, 1969.)
• Additionally, a beagle, in the right circumstances, can apparently be used as a floatation device. (Darwin, Charles. The Voyage of the Beagle, 1860.)

In light of this compelling evidence, I have thereby ruled in favor of Ms. Roll and other beagle-lovers. Beagles are definitely worthy of my admiration and affection, and I have no business condemning an entire breed of domesticated canine based on one unfortunate beagle-related experience. Thank you for your time and understanding, and I regret any inconvenience my earlier statements may have caused.

DragonBall-Z

This is like the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers of the modern era, kind of. First of all, I LIKE ANIME. I've seen some pretty good anime. Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Slayers... I can watch them for hours. Excellent shows. Nicey nicey. But I digress. Dragon Ball Z deserves my scorn because of the following reasons:

Firstly, the characters look like bloated babies. Every single one looks like some kind of toddler suffering from gigantism. It's hard to even look at the screen. I keep thinking that one of them is going to just fall over and his huge baby head will burst open, spilling out candy or something. Creeepy! Actually, only the male characters look like bloated babies. The female characters have a different problem: their eyes are the shape of blue USPS mailboxes. I keep expecting foreign models to lean out of them hollering "Egoiste!"

Next, most of the episodes involve two characters engaged in a huge battle. Inevitably, one of the characters ends up summoning "more power than anyone in the universe had ever possessed before, in fact, more power than had previously been humanly imaginable"... and launching a beam of kapow at the other one. The beam either totally kills the other character, or somehow it doesn't, in which case the other character ends up summoning more power than anyone blah blah et cetera. But by this time, the episode is over, which brings me to my biggest complaint about this show:

NOTHING EVER HAPPENS. When you watch a half hour of Dragon Ball Z from start to finish you get to see three, maybe four actions take place. What happens in the intervening time? Well, sometimes you get to listen to each member of the whole gang give their opinion of the most recent action: "Wow, Trunks, could you believe what Goku just did?" "No, Piccolo, can you believe it, Krillin?" "I don't know, what about you Gohan?" "Yes, I can believe it, but let's ask Vegeta." "Didn't we already ask Vegeta?" Or sometimes you get to watch the same action over and over and over and over again, making some scenes consist of the same pair of punches one hundred times in ten seconds... which is a fairly decent home epilepsy test. Mostly though, you get to watch two characters simply stare at each other in anger, confusion, disbelief, love, constipation, what have you. That has to be my favorite part. Watching a SINGLE FRAME of two characters and flipping back and forth between them. It's just like watching inconceivably powerful bloated baby paint dry.