Things That Bug Me

I have resisted the stereotypical list of things that bug me on this blog up until now, but the time has come and here it is:

(1) White golf gloves. Every freakin’ golf glove in every freakin’ golf shop is white. Why is this? Golf definitely needs to present itself as the type of sport that can only be played when you’re dressed like a butler. Every time that I go to try to buy a new golf glove, I feel like I am shopping for handwear for a cotillion to be held between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Jeez, give us some options, golf people.

(2) The World Cup. This is a little bit of a misnomer. The World Cup per se doesn’t bother me. I think that it is interesting and exciting that the whole world except the U.S. – and even more and more of the U.S. – gets all worked up over a sport every four years. What gets me is that, every four years, I start to get a little worked up about this and then – I actually try to watch some of one of the games. Oh my God, soccer is boring. I like to watch soccer the way my dad used to say that he liked to watch all sports – in the highlights at the end of the day. I just can’t, can’t, can’t watch guys going back and forth across this big field for hours on end in the faint hope that one, maybe two – if the planets align just right – goals will get scored. This may make me an ugly American and I guess that I just have to live with that. Damn.

(3) The Pacific Ocean at the California coast. Don’t get me wrong, it is beautiful and occupies a large place in my soul, right in there with baseball, brilliantly stupid comedic movies and sports cars. But, God, why is it so cold??? The Atlantic Ocean isn’t so freakin’ cold right at the coast. The Pacific Ocean is warm and wonderful in Hawaii. Why is the closest ocean to my place of residence something that induces hypothermia with very little exposure.

(4) Traffic. Now I share this annoyance with everyone else in the U.S., but my commute involves one particularly mystifying stretch of traffic. Every work day, I drive across a causeway that spans what may be the world’s largest intentionally created flood passage area. Basically, when it rains in buckets, they open weirs on the relevant rivers and large portions of said rivers pour out into this leveed plain to rush less harmfully to the sea. Due to this area’s unique function, the causeway across it has no on-ramps or off-ramps. Basically, once you are on the causeway, no cars are entering or leaving the road. It has always seemed to me that traffic thus should flow smoothly and rapidly from one side to the other. “But,” in the immortal words of John Belushi, “nooooooo!” Somehow this thing still backs up. Even on days when the be-exited-and-onramped highway on either side of the causeway is flowing smoothly, the causeway itself will back up. Why, why, why?

(5) TV coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court. Whatever you think of the Court’s decisions, it is undoubtedly true that you are working with nine very (usually) smart people who are dealing with very complicated and usually important issues. Moreover, sometimes when you read the decisions, it is little like reading a synopsis of a soap opera about the Justices’ personal interactions. (Go read the Court’s recent decision about the Clean Water Act in the Rapanos case.) TV coverage of the Court, however, seems to be focused mainly on: (1) distilling its decisions down into five-word summaries that can run on news crawls; and (2) discussing whether those decisions’ political implications. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, in doing this TV news is hurting the country. The part of such coverage that really bugs me is the coverage of cases that the Court doesn’t take (i.e., cases in which it “denies cert” by denying petitions for writs of certiorari). TV coverage always makes a big deal out of the fact that the Court “refused to hear” – that’s about how they always say it – some case that involves a hot-button political issue. Well, the Court denies cert in at least 95% of the cases presented to it. The fact that the Court denied cert in some abortion case or some freedom of religion case doesn’t mean that the Justices have decided that some state’s law on those subjects is OK. It just means that they didn’t think that the case’s facts were sufficiently general to make a good statement of law or that the lower courts have all decided pretty consistently (minimizing the need for the Supreme Court to step in) or just that the Court already has too many cases on its calendar for that year.

(6) Chris O’Donnell. Duh. I saw some picture of him recently where he had grown his hair out and was wearing a weak beard. Unfortunately, those things do not equal talent. Have I mentioned how much it irritates me that this no-talent guy gets to play in the AT&T golf tournament at Pebble Beach?