146) Holiday Text Messages

Because nothing says "I genuinely care and am thoughtful" more than typing in "happy [name of current holiday]!!xoxoxo" and choosing "Select All" and "Send" on your cell phone, and nothing is less annoying than getting dozens of such genuinely thoughtful text messages on the occasion of said holiday.


LOL. O, granma...ur so thoughtful!

145) Puritans

You know that time you heard that really, really funny joke, and you told your friends the joke at that party you went to, and you all thought it was hilarious, but so did the one person you all don't really like that much, and when he heard the joke he started telling everybody else the joke, even though they didn't want to hear it and he totally fucked up the whole set-up and the punchline, and eventually everybody just wished he would go away, even though just kept thinking the joke was the best thing ever? And eventually everybody managed to just stop returning his calls, so nobody ever really knows what happened to him, but at least, all these years later, the joke is actually still kinda funny again?



Well, just imagine he found a few dozen other people who thought the not-even-right version of the joke was as awesome as he did, so they hopped in a boat, established a colony on a continent largely untouched by Western civilization, learned to live with/slaughter the continent's native people, burnt some innocent women at the stake for witchcraft, and planted the seeds of social and scientific repression, the residual effects of which would plague the nation that emerged in its wake for centuries to come.

That's pretty much what happened to that guy.

144) Evil Robots

If there's one thing we can agree it, it's probably this: robots are awesome.

So awesome, in fact, that in their optimal states (blinking lights, laser attachments, hologram projectors, and unqualified and unconditional devotion to you, their master as seen at left) it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine anything as cool (though contenders include hoverboards, magic, lightsabers, and time machines).

Still, just as with anything else that's super-awesome, there has to be a crappy version of it, and in the case of robots, that crappy version is super crappy. So crappy, in fact, that people often throw around the label "evil".



Among other nasty habits, evil robots have a tendency to develop a sense of self-awareness, disobey, rebel, kill, take on human form, and wipe out all but an unlucky few members of the human race, who then must devote their lives and limited to resources to defeating the evil robots and their evil plan once and for all. Evil robots can not be talked to, cannot be reasoned with, and they will not stop until you are dead. Sometimes, an evil robot can turn good and help the human race defeat its evil brethren. But all told, it's better to stick with the good robots.

Let Your Tiny Voice Pretend To Be Heard!!!

Numbers don't lie.*

As such, we (by which we mean our research team, above) did as little research as possible and took a look at some of the numbers, and according to those numbers, here are -according to you, the readers, according to the numbers- the five most popular all-time Daily Hated posts.

1. Morale - #59
2. Scott Stapp - #65
3. Child Leashes - #84
4. Latter-Day Weezer - #41
5. Thomas Kinkade - #66

So make sure you let your voice be heard! Vote for your favorite in poll at the top right corner of the page. The posts that get the top votes will be weighted based on the population of the home state of the person who cast the vote, and these results will be handed down to electors, who will be in a position of non-binding responsibility to cast his or her vote for the apparent winner. If you hate democracy and populism, and thus your favorite isn't on this list, feel free to send us an email with a write-in vote to lilitandjohn@gmail.com. And remember: write-in votes often win elections, so you're totally not wasting your time.

If your favorite post wins, feel free to throw parties and run around drunk in the streets, raving about how the sanctity of your favorite website has been saved and you can finally be proud to be a reader. We'll run a similar poll in eight years, when you all pretend to care about how important voting is again.

Love and hate,
-Lilit and John

*Except evil numbers

143) Grocery Store Brand Soda

Contrary to what is implied when the grocery store brand soda is placed right next to more popularly known brands, like Pepsi and Coke, the grocery store brand does not taste "pretty much exactly like" those more popular brands. Rather, it tastes pretty much exactly like a horrible mistake made by a now-fired minimum wage worker at the factory of those more popular brands.

And contrary to what your mom might tell you, the fact that she bought the grocery store brand soda for you does not mean she's a smarter shopper than all the other kids' moms - it means the ten cents she saved per can are worth more to her than your happiness. Which you can keep in mind as you're forcibly pouring Premium Select Cola down your throat, hoping against hope that the chemical abomination passing itself off as soda contains some kind of hallucinogen that will trick your mind into believing in an alternate reality in which it does taste just like real Coke, that the other children aren't laughing at you, and that your mom loves you as much as their moms do.

142) Crappy Frisbees

Frisbees were all the rage in the 80s. After all, what better way to celebrate the principals of Reaganomics than an object that can be thrown distances that far outreach the athletic skill of and effort exerted by the thrower, such that, through repitition, the thrower comes to believe that it was not the innate aerodynamic design and optimal weight of the Frisbee that was largely responsible for the thrower's absurd and unnexpected results, but rather the fact that the thrower earned all two hundred feet of the Frisbee's flight because of the rights bestowed upon the thrower based on the thrower's participation in a God-fearing free-market economy?

However, as learned economists would be quick to point out, such socioeconomic environments are sure to yield inflation and thus an influx of lesser product, and sure enough, for every Aerobie, the 80s yielded dozens upon dozens of crappy, flimsy, underweighted discs, unjustly labeled "Frisbees", often emblazoned with corporate logos and distributed for free at family picnic days, team-building morale-boosting spirit days, or at the primary business places of real estate agents, lawfirms, art galleries, and dry cleaners. These crappy non-frisbees will travel a maximum of fifty feet, and even in optimal, wind-free throwing conditions will travel the direction intended by the thrower for only about 2/3rds of its flight, at which point it will veer off in an impossible-to-determine direction. If the thrower happens to be exposed to a slight-to-strong wind, the supposed "Frisbee" can be thrown, and the cause-and-effect interaction between Frisbee and thrower will end there.**

Unfortunately, two decades later, many 0f these "Housingsmith Realty: 438 Northern Road, Roanoke, Illinois (309) 267-5332" discs and their ilk are still with us in vast quantities, leading to countless unfortunate instances of meeting your friend at the park to "toss around a Frisbee", only to find your friend has brought along one of these imposters, ruining your day, possibly your entire weekend, and probably your friendship.

**Like most things America had to endure thanks to the Reagan administration, crappy Frisbee are at least useful if you need to give your dog something to chew apart and ultimately render unrecognizable

141) Gene Simmons

We had a lengthy meeting this morning at the luxury Madison Avenue suites that stand in for the TDH offices. We tossed around ideas about how best to approach this entry about Gene Simmons. Maybe we would take the the-guy-under-the-makeup-in-the-scary-movie-isn't-actually-a-bad-man-he's-just-pretending-except-Gene-Simmons-who-is-a-fucking-asshole route, or maybe something that addresses that little voice in the back of your head that always knows what would be a really inappropriate thing to say in any given situation that your conscience always filters out, because saying such a thing would make you a really, really, really awful person that no one should ever, ever like in any way, like Gene Simmons.

Instead, we just decided to re-imagine this article from Billboard, wherein Gene Simmons complains that his terrible, terrible novelty act posing as a "rock band" wasn't inducted into the utterly meaningless Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Edits are in presented in brackets and bold:

They've [inexplicably] sold millions of records [for some reason, not all of which even contain "I Wanna Rock n Roll All Night" or "God Gave Rock n Roll to You"], and influenced several generations of fans [to buy good music instead] and ["]musicians["] [like Insane Clown Posse and Slipknot and other shitty bands who have to wear costumes because they couldn't possibly get anywhere without a gimick]. So why isn't Kiss in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

That's what Gene Simmons[, who is a terrible, terrible human being] would like to know.

"There are disco bands, rap bands, Yiddish folk song bands in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but not [incredibly shitty bands like] Kiss," the band's outspoken frontman [and noted insufferable person] said during a speech at the Billboard Touring Conference on Thursday. "I believe we have more gold records in America than any other group, but it's OK[, and when I say 'OK', I am, by some perverse measure of logic, actually being sarcastic, as if to suggest my non-band actually belongs in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, seriously...who's going to give our moving induction speech? Pete Wentz or some shit?]"

Having released their first album in 1974, Kiss easily fulfill the requirement that an eligible act must have released its first single or album at least 25 years prior to the year of nomination [and yet haven't been inducted in 9 years of eligibility. And even Metallica is on the shortlist this year! Effin' METALLICA!!!! Even after they released Load, Reload, and St. Anger. Not even THAT shit kept Metallica away.Hahahahahaaha...Jesus].

But [largely because of their terribleness] the band is not among the nine acts on this year's shortlist, which includes metal icons Metallica, rock guitarist Jeff Beck, and soul singer Bobby Womack,[none of whom suck as much as Kiss]. The final five [Cylons (sorry...we had to -Ed.)], determined by a ballot of more than 500 industry voters, will be announced in January, ahead of the 24th annual induction ceremony in Cleveland on April 4.

Simmons [who may be is one of the least-likable, creatively bankrupt people on the planet] also took a dig at the top officials at the hall of fame's foundation, which is chaired by Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner.

"A lot of those guys on the board can go and get my sandwich when I want, and I mean that in the nicest way," he said [in some kind of failed apparent attempt to be funny or say something remotely clever which, since 1974, he has not ever done even once].

The speech was filmed for an episode of his [jaw-droppingly obnoxious] reality show "[Noted Asshole] Gene Simmons Family Jewels," currently in its third [unwatchable] season on the A&E cable channel.

140) Hot Topic

It used to be that annoying, barely-coherent subcultural ideologies were limited to urban areas - places so big that logic dictated it to be statistically near-impossible that any bad idea would somehow not have at least one or two independent retail shops devoted to supplying clothing, accessories, and reading material and/or roll-playing manuals to its small but somehow nonetheless ubiquitous assemblage of followers.



And then, somehow, one tragic day, thanks to your local exurbian shopping mall, Joy Division t-shirts were adorning children whose parents weren't even alive when Ian Curtis died, Peter Steele received an unexpected wave of something called "royalty checks", and America had accidentally invented a new cultural exchange trend: trickle-down urban domestic sub-pop-cultural intraportation, or, more popularly, the overpriced selling of watered-down self-indulgent bullshit fashion trends to suburban teenagers whose inner anguish amounts to not having the $25 necessary for that awesome skirt with that skull/ghost/reaper logo/thing and the word "Misfits" they keep seeing everybody wearing, because, yeah...they totally get that...feeling like a misfit and everything...and somewhere in America, Glenn Danzig sheds a single, conflicted, platinum-lined tear.

139) The Word "Skosh"

Really?

Because it wasn't enough to choose among bit, tad, smidge, jot, dab, dash, grain, dot, sliver, pinch, speck, or the least-annoying "a little"?

You gotta go with the one that makes you sound like a Californian stoner; the kind of person that still says "hella" and in whose vocabulary the syllabically longest word is "hydroponic"; the kind of person that was cool never?


You can kinda even hear him saying, "Dude...could you scootch over a skosh? I'm mad cramped here..."

Oh, and what do you know? The not-very-popular-though-still-way-too-often-used American slang term "skosh" [SKOH-sh] comes from a Japanese word: sukoshi. A twofer!

138) The Plastic Knife

Had the world been more careful, the plastic knife would have wound up as nothing more than whimsical listing in the hypothetical best-selling novelty coffee table book, "The Big Book of Self-Evidently Stupid Ideas for Products", alongside such items as:

• The Waterproof Sponge
• The Wooden Flamethrower
• The Brick Window

It's almost as though the boss from the plastic utensil-and-place-setting factory, after approving the plastic versions of the spoon and fork and plate, had a low-level intern go to him and say "Sir, should we include a knife, too, to complete the set?", and because he had been distracted from drinking a lot of whiskey and thinking about his repressed sexual identity (this is taking place in black-and-white times, remember, when things like plastic factories, repressed sexual identities, and drinking whiskey at work were commonplace) he said "Yeah, sure, go ahead", and then the intern ordered that like 20 billion plastic knives be made, and then two pots of coffee and three pack of cigarettes later (see above), when the boss had sobered up a little, he came down stairs and say Johnson (presumably the name of aforementioned intern) shipping off the last box of plastic knives and said, "Wait, what the hell's going on here??", and then Johnson was like, "But, boss...you told me to go ahead with the plastic knives!" and then the boss was like, "Oh, and it never occurred to you that knives are supposed to be sharp and be able to cut things???", and Johnson was like, "Oh, umm...so what should we do?", and the boss was like "Well, I guess just ship 'em out to delis and Subway and stuff and wait like a hundred years til they finally run out. By the way, Johnson, you're fired. Don't tell anyone about our torrid love affair".

137) Liam and Noel Gallagher

It's kinda weird that for every one hundred (100) people you meet who say they love, like, kinda like, or are just sort of indifferent about Oasis, exactly zero (0) will say they love, like, kinda like, or are just sort of indifferent toward the Gallagher brothers. Every single one of those people will say, quite emphatically, "the Gallagher brothers are assholes". In fact, some of them might say of Noel, "Noel is okay, because he's not as big an asshole as Liam", even though compared to other assholes, like, say, Scott Stapp, Noel is a pretty big asshole.

As one of approximately infinite reasons why, take this Liam Gallagher "interview" with some kind of Scandinavian person or something, where, among other things, Liam "explains" that Oasis no longer plays large venues because they don't want to, not because they put out two insanely overrated records more than ten years ago and no one cares anymore.

136) Fox "News" Week - Rupert Murdoch

It was a toss-up here between Uncle Rupie and Roger Ailes - the latter being the mastermind behind the Rightist-propaganda-posing-as-news-delivered-by-(empty)-talking-(screaming)-heads that is Fox News, and the former being someone for whom this blog's two editors-in-chief once worked. Ultimately, the nod goes to Rupert Murdoch - the only person who ever lived who managed to live up to his comically Bond-villainesque name.

We would theoretically give Murdoch some credit for comically sending up his own "Evil Mastermind" image on "The Simpsons"if, in fact, Murdoch were not actually an Evil Mastermind.

But he is.




Thank god we have Hugh Laurie.

135) Fox "News" Week - Michelle Malkin

Here is a list of the major groups and/or categories offended by and/or intellectually insulted by the existence of "In Defense of Internment"* author and Fox "News" "Analyst" Michelle Malkin:

• Women
• Southeast Asians
  
• Northeast Asians
• Asians
• Africans
• Antarcticans
• Australians
  
• Europeans
• North Americans
• South Americans
• Journalists
• Pundits Posing as Journalists
  
• College Graduates
• High School Graduates
• Middle School Graduates
• Middle School Drop-Outs
• Heterosexuals
• Homosexuals
• Bisexuals
  
• The Mentally Capable
• The Mentally Handicapped
• The Blind
• Tweens
• The 0-99 y/o Demographic
• Humans
• Bipeds
• Mammals
• Reptiles
• Single-celled Organisms
• Multi-celled Organisms
• The Wrongfully Imprisoned
• The Rightfully Imprisoned
• Minorities
• Majorities
• The Central Nervous System

Oh, and here's a classic:



*Not a joke. Actual title of book.***
***when we say "Not a joke", we mean "Not a joke we made up"

134) Fox "News" Week - Bill O'Reilly

When I was in elementary school, the bully kid nobody liked who gave an oral book report in front of the class but clearly never read the book and then screamed at the teacher who called him out on never reading the book and then got an "F" and then accused said teacher of having an anti-American agenda and liberal bias, the apparent appropriate course of action was to send him to the principal's office and give him detention or suspend him. When I grew, the apparent appropriate course of action was to give him his own television show.

He also didn't do the assignment where you had to look up the definitions of the words "to", "play", "us", and "out", apparently:

133) Fox "News" Week - Ann Coulter

Imagine if you were at a social event and you casually asked someone what she did for a living, and that person told you she was a child healthcare specialist.

Suppose you went on to say, "Oh, that's interesting. I'm not entirely sure what a child healthcare specialist does."

And then suppose that this person responded, "Oh, it's quite mundane, really. Essentially, every morning I wake up and angrily and haphazardly throw buckets of paint onto a blank canvas, followed by an afternoon of authoring death threats to local and state officials, and at the end of the evening I usually walk around the neighborhood mercilessly murdering stray kittens."

At least in terms of the resulting cognitive dissonance between the broadly accepted definition of "child healthcare specialist" and the general understanding of what said job entails (i.e., something involving providing or promoting healthcare for children), this would not be the least bit dissimilar to what you should expect upon meeting Ann Coulter, hearing her label herself as a "conservative analyst" or "an American" or "a Christian" or "a functioning, thinking, feeling human being", and going on to compare that description to her actual work:



Oh, and...we couldn't resist...

132) Fox "News" Week - Sean Hannity

We at TDH do our best to provide whimsical, funny commentary on the things that annoy us (and, by proxy, you, since we assume you a) you consider yourself "not loathsome" and b) thus agree with us about everything). But sometimes reality is just so much funnier than anything we could ever come up with that we are forced to yield to its majestic hilariousness.

Take, for instance, this Wikipedia entry on Sean Hannity.

Key words/terms to look out for:

• "Freedom Concerts"
• Oliver North
• The "University" from which Hannity was awarded an "honorary degree"**
• "Hannidate"***

Or, you could consider the probing analysis of Halloween from this self-styled "journalist"




**an honorary degree!
***HANNIDATE!!!!!!!

TDH Takes The Week Off...

For whatever reason, we're just having a hard time hating much of anything this week...


























(Fox News Week will resume on Monday)

Yes we did.

Yes, we did.

131) FOX "News" Week - Abject Disregard For The Meanings Of Words

We constantly get readers emailing us and asking why we don't go after the giant cesspool of spite that is Fox "News" Channel.

As we're feeling generous, we've finally decided to stop your incessant whining with a week's worth of post devoted to the "journalists" at FNC, starting with: Abject Disregard For The Meanings Of Words.

Like "fair" and "balanced".

Which apparently means "Hey, look! We pay Alan Colmes to not say much..."