The Worst Stuff of 2004

So you think you could escape your readership here and avoid those cheesy lists like you find in Parade Magazine or in the little Reader's Digest? Speaking of Reader's Digest, that periodical should be re-christened "The Toilet Journal" because no one in their right mind would ever read it unless they were chained to a commode by boredom or a severe lack of gastrointestinal fortitude.

Starting us off, the worst software we've seen this year is, without a doubt, WeatherBug. It's intrusive, makes freaky noises, and adds so little value to the PC experience that one wonders why they even masquerade it as anything but spyware with blatant advertising. For all but the most socially-inept cube-geeks and other windowless impresarios, looking out the window or going to weather.com is more than satisfactory. But we who installed this shitty application are doomed to hear chirping noises every thirty seconds until we acknowledge that there might be some precipitation in Topeka, Kansas sometime in the next 15 minutes, whether or not we deactivate the "warning/advisory" settings. Faboo!

Do yourself a favor, and save your sanity -- run, don't walk. And uninstall if you've already made the mistake.

Another regrettable thing from this past year was the rising incidence of spam. Granted, it's become so ubiquitous (and a buzz-word of "bloggian" proportions) that no one needs the clarification of spam being junk e-mail as opposed to junk luncheon meat. In either case, spam is so universal that a variety of sites and applications designed to stop, slow or report spam have cropped up. Problem is some are good, most are bad. So the problem is out of control, despite (snicker) governmental involvement in trying to curb it (if they can't stop spam, can they really stop steroids in baseball? Please).

The music industry and the movie industry came to a joint decision this year: thanks to file-sharing, they've been getting robbed blind by "online pirates" looking to download their 'wares without paying for doing so. It's an ironic twist, considering the music industry has been trying to sell copies of Britney Spears albums for US currency and the movie industry has been trying to peddle crap on celluloid like "Space Camp" and "Daredevil" and calling it entertainment. Granted, mass downloading has taken a big bite out of profitability for these entities, but finally they're being treated like they've treated us for quite some time. Personally, I've adopted a sort-of shareware mentality to anything I download: if I find an album online that I like and listen to more than three times, I go out and buy it -- Amazon, Tower, whatever -- and if it's crap, I delete it and move on. What I find interesting, and what I expect more of in the future, is copy-protected media. To wit, the eponymous release from Velvet Revolver, the Guns N' Roses/Stone Temple Pilots amalgam, came with a special extra feature: when you pop it into a CD-Rom drive attached to a Windows-based computer, the disc is unrippable.

Ripping, for those unknowing folk, is when you digitally copy the musical information on a music CD onto a hard drive. The Velvet Revolver cd's copied media sounds garbled and is more akin to listening to the aforementioned Britney Spears. However, hitting the "shift" key prior to and whilst inserting the CD into the PC's drive defeats the copy protection scheme. This is useful for those of us who bought the damn CD and just want to enjoy it on an iPod or be able to listen to it without digging the CD out of a box somewhere on the other side of the house. So it's more of the same bullshit we encountered when we were teens copying software to try out. Honor among thieves, perhaps. But honor indeed.

Speaking of Britney Spears, do we really need to see her any more than we already have? Last year's Jennifer Lopez, the human wedding invite pranced around TV's and magazine covers and looked like an inflated porno star.

The deer-in-the-headlights look on her face, below, says "Why
am I wearing this little clothing? I'm only 14. Where's my mommy?"

I propose we stage a skank-fest -- collect all the great female media whores of the past decade in one lab and see who has the most disease flowing through them. I'd put my money on Madonna, but let's sign up a bunch for shits n' giggles: Jennifer Lopez, Britney, Christina Aguilera, Carmen Electra, Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords (yep, sticking by the Madonna pick). The line between "musician," "celebrity" and "porno star" is certainly blurring faster by the minute; at least it's not as bad as Italy, where they elected a former porno star (Ciccolina) to their parliament. It's not quite that bad in this country -- yet. Considering Jesse "The Body" Ventura was able to get elected on a platform of free wrestling tickets to every Minnesotan, what would it take for Jenna Jameson to be voted into office in California? I'll refrain from offering my opinion here, but it would certainly take a while and a lot of videotape...and she'd definitely capture 100% of the heterosexual male vote ;-)

Speaking of politics, another thing that we need to address is the election in November. I know lots of people who voted for John Kerry, but what disturbs me is the number of people -- sane, rational, seemingly semi-intelligent people -- who suggested the election was "fixed." The government can't come together to do anything, so to suggest that George Bush's administration was actually able to fix the election is sort of laughable, almost as much as hearing him pronounce the word "nuclear."

Infomercials played a very significant role in our irritation as a culture this year. The Great Wok of China (made in Newark), Oxy-Clean, the Magic Bullet and any products invented by Ron Popeil was responsible for 24.3% of the diarrhea we experienced as a culture in the last 12 months, and the problem seems to be growing.

There's no doubt that we as a culture watch far too much television. The fact that commercials have become a form of entertainment on their own is sad, however. It suggests we have willingly and happily assimilated advertising into our lives and are now TV cows absorbing it like grass in a field. So the next time you see a beer commercial, just remember: just because you drink lots and lots of beer, you don't have the right to play beach volleyball with supermodels and be cool. You do have the right to belch, urinate frequently, and emanate noises and odors that are generally not heard in beer commercials but are marginally more offensive than beer itself.

Finally, the newest item, chronologically, on this particular collection of irritants is the pop-up ad. Within the past hour of surfing, I've encountered a half-dozen or so ads that are so involved, complicated and garish, that I can't seem to locate the "X CLOSE AD X" buttons that are about the only universal characteristic of the pop-up ad. So I've decided to sign up for one of each of what they're selling. Now I've got a free $100 BestBuy gift card, a subscription to Ladies Home Journal, a free bouquet of fake, scented roses, a free consultation for hair loss, a Suzanne Somers Ab-Domizer and $25,000 for college after I complete my three-year military stint.

So I'm off to boot camp with flowers, some hair cream, $100 worth of BestBuy crap, a metal hula-hoop thing and my LHJ mags. Semper Fi. Wish me luck.