I Absolutely Hate That New Dockers Commercial

I have nothing against Dockers themselves mind you. I have a few pairs myself for when I’m unlucky enough to have a job that requires business casual or when I’m looking for a job that doesn’t. Right now I get to wear jeans to work, which is good, because I’ve surely gotten too god-damn fat to fit into my Dockers.

So, if you wear dockers to work, I have nothing against you. I have been you, and chances are I will be you again.

But here’s the thing. This commercial features some yuppie fuck, quickly cutting to all the moments of his life where he gets to gleefully wear his Dockers. Fast-paced scenes of a typical life I definitely don’t want superimposed with the words “work”, “weekend”, “dress” and “golf”, each inside a neat little box. I’ll tackle them one by one.

Work

OK, I’ve covered work. Dockers are OK for work, if you have to.

Dress

You know what? If you can’t wear jeans, a t-shirt and a flannel there, it’s nowhere I want to be. The only time I’ll dress up is for funerals, weddings and job interviews, and in those cases Dockers ain’t cuttin’ it. Maybe sometimes for the interview, but far as I’m concerned that falls under “work”.

Weekend

You know what? If you wear slacks on your days off, I fucking hate you. I don’t care if you donate all your money to charity and adopt crack-babies in your spare time, I would still relish the opportunity to jam a salad fork straight into your eye. The only reason somebody would wear slacks on their days off is because they think it makes them look important, classy, or rich, and you know what? If you were any of those things, you wouldn’t fucking be trying to look it.

Now if you’re applying for a loan on your day off, I’ll give you a pass. Technically, I wouldn’t consider that a day off. And a normal person would get home from the bank and immediately take the fuckers off anyway.

If I ever choose to wear slacks on a day that I don’t have to work, please remind me, “Dave, this is when you said it’d be time to kill yourself”.

Golf

Now, I really wish I could say I don’t hate everybody who plays golf, but the trouble is I’ve yet to meet a golfer I didn’t fucking hate. Sure, I’ve probably met some closet golfers and not known it, and that’s fine. I have nothing against the game itself, and though the concept doesn’t do much for me I can see why some people might enjoy it. If you’re playing golf just because you tried it once and liked it, you’re probably not the typical cocksucker golfer that has to let everybody know he plays golf (and needs special pants for it). You know who I’m talking about. The asshole that fills his office (they almost always have an office, go figure…) with all kinds of golf shit. A cup of tees here, a statue of some cartoon character teeing off there. Their pock-marked balls next to their keyboard. What the fuck’s with that? You don’t see softball players filling their workspace with softball shit. Why do you have to advertise your love for golf to anyone who comes within 10 square meters of you? I’ll tell you why: It’s because you think it makes you look important/classy/rich, you pompous fucking knob.

Now, Tiger Woods seems like a completely decent guy, but I’ve never met him, so my statement (”never met a golfer I didn’t hate”) still stands. Also, I should point out that Hot-Shots Golf doesn’t count. Hell, I’ll even give you the Tiger Woods games, though I can’t see how it’d be much fun without cartoony hydrocephalic Japanese characters.

So now some of you are thinking, “Well gee Dave, if your so god-damn opinionated about slacks, what would you have for a commercial?” Funny you should ask.

“Dockers: Because your job won’t let you wear jeans.”

There you go. That’s all you need. Your customers will understand, sympathize, and give you points for being honest and knowing your niche. The last thing you should do is try to invent some fucking imaginary lifestyle that nobody wants.

Smelly Fuck

I started a new job a few months back. Prior to this, I’d worked almost exclusively from home for over five years. That’s not really as great as it sounds, and in a lot of ways it’s nice to be back in an office environment.

Except there’s this one guy who works on my floor who completely fucking smells. Thankfully I don’t directly work with the guy, but I can walk down an empty hall and still know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this smelly fuck was there recently by the telltale B.O. trail he leaves. Imagine if you ate a giant Sam’s Club size jar of dill pickles, puked them all over a sidewalk and then pissed on them. Leave them there for three or four hours on a hot august day, and you’ll get a pretty good approximation of what this choad smells like. And strongly too. I swear, if this guy smelled any worse you’d be able to actually see the odor. If I’m heading to the men’s room and see this reeking fuckwad coming out, I keep walking. I’ll hold it in, thank you very much. The discomfort in my bladder is magnitudes more pleasant than the discomfort in my nose would be.

But here’s the crazy thing: This smelly fucker is a good looking guy. He’s tall and fit and has those chiseled facial features the ladies seem to love. He looks kinda like Brad Pitt. I know I sound totally gay saying this stuff, but come on, I’m not afraid to say I can recognize male beauty. I mean, I know what I wish I looked like, right? Anyhow, the guy could be a male model or something, providing the fumes didn’t damage the photography equipment.

And this fucker, blessed with good genes, can’t be bothered to wash his crotch and armpits every morning? Christ, I’m fat, balding, pale and hairy, but I’ve got the god-damned common courtesy to take a shower every morning before I go to work. Shit, I even brush my teeth and put on deoderant!

I figure he doesn’t know. He must not, because if he did he’d damn well do something about it. I wonder if he looks in the mirror and thinks, “Damn, I look good. How come I can’t get any pussy?” Because you smell like a fucking slaughterhouse, pal. I wish somebody would tell him. I can’t do it, I don’t even know the guy.

But here’s the worst part. Me and Mr. Pungent work on the 5th floor, and right below us on the 4th is customer service, which seems to be almost entirely staffed with hot 19 year-old college girls. Occasionally, I’ll get stuck on the elevator with this reeking bastard. That in itself is horrible, but then some hot 19-year-old girl will inevitably get on on the way down, and who is she gonna think the smelly fucker on the elevator is? The really good-looking guy or the fat son-of-a-bitch? In the mind of some hot young thing, I fucking stink, and I can’t have that.

So here’s what I do. If I’m waiting for the elevator, you know, already pressed the button, and he shows up I say “oh shit!” and pretend like I forgot something back at my desk. To make matters worse, the elevators are secluded between two closed doors, so if you go through one of those doors, you must be heading for the elevator. And of course the doors are solid, so you can’t see if anybody’s already waiting on the other side. This means sometimes I’ll walk into the elevator area and he’ll already be waiting there. In these cases, I say “oh shit!” and pretend like I forgot something back at my desk.

I’ll bet I’m not the only person to discover this stench avoidance tactic. I’ll bet this foul fuck thinks he works with a lot of forgetful people. No, we’re not forgetful. You smell like an outhouse filled with roadkill.

The Kids Are Alright

Something that never ceases to amaze me is people’s ability to completely forget what they were like as teenagers once their kids become teenagers themselves. My kids aren’t there yet, so my memories of my teenage years are, so far, still intact.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that I just saw a segment on the Today Show about a new study by the CDC into the sexual practices of teenagers. Who ever said research was boring? So here’s what The Today Show (and other reputable media outlets) had to say.

54% of males between the ages of 15 and 19 have had oral sex. 52% of females between the ages of 15 and 19 have had oral sex.

And it seems that everybody is up in arms about these statistics, which brings me back around to my opening paragraph. Now see, I’m 35 years old, soon to be 36. My kids aren’t teenagers, but there’s plenty of people my age who have kids that are. And I remember back in 8th grade, when I was 13 or 14, there was a fair number of blowjobs going around, so this is nothing new. And this was a special school for smart kids. We were the good kids, you see. Now I wasn’t one of the popular kids, so I never got blown back then, but it’s safe to say that by the time I was 18 I’d done about all there was to do sexually. I don’t think that was unusual then and I don’t think it’s unusual now.

And this is my problem with this new study. The only data anybody is mentioning is really vague. I mean 15 through 19? That may only be 5 years, but they also happen to be the years during which virtually everyone becomes sexually active. A 19-year-old could well be a sophomore in college for fuck’s sake. Is anybody really going to be shocked that college sophomores are engaging in oral sex? Honsetly, I’m surprised the numbers aren’t much higher than 54% and 52%.

Of course nobody is mentioning the full data. In fact, I couldn’t find a thing on it on the CDC website. Maybe they’re just slow to put their studies online. At any rate, here’s what we don’t know about this study:

• How many kids were surveyed?
• How many were male and how many female?
• How were they distributed geographically?
• How many were there at each age?
• Was their anonymity properly protected?
• How did their responses vary by age?
• How many of them are also engaging in full-fledged intercourse?

If we’re going to know anything about this study, what we need is a graph. Even a very simple one that your average USA Today reader could follow. Something like this:

I should stress that I just pulled some numbers out of my ass there, this is in no way a representation of the actual data (which as far as I know has not yet been made publicly available). I would imagine the actual data would follow a similar pattern though, where numbers progressively rise with age. For that matter, the incidence of parachuting will increase with age too, simply by virtue of having had more time to do it.

But a graph like that still tells us nothing of sample size, which is of course very important. If 75% of the respondents were 18 and 19, that’s going to skew the data quite a bit. I’m not saying that’s the case (of all the people who can properly conduct a study, I hope the CDC is one of them), I’m just saying it’s important information to have. It also doesn’t provide any context of other sexual activity the respondents are engaging in. All it does is breaks the numbers down by age, which is a start. It’d be much better than just throwing out two numbers.

The implication seems to be that teenagers are having oral sex before they have full intercourse, possibly as a replacement for it. Again, from my personal experience, this is nothing new. I really don’t get what the fuss is all about. I also haven’t seen any data presented to support this, though presumably such data exists and the people discussing this in the media aren’t just jumping to that conclusion. At any rate, I don’t think anybody’s ever gotten pregnant from cocksucking, so if they’re using oral instead of the real thing, parents should be happy at least for that.

The bottom line is, teenagers fuck. They have for at least the last 30 years, since the invention of the pill and the whole sexual revolution thing. This is not news. The parents of the kids this study was done on were probably fucking in their teens as well. What’s the big deal? At some point you just have to accept the fact that your babies grow up. Teach them to be responsible and safe. They will not be traumatized by their first sexual experiences unless you have them riddled with guilt over something that is completely natural.

I’m not going to say that this study was designed specifically to be alarmist, or that the media presenting it is being alarmist, but Christ, could this country be any more fucking uptight?

Fuck iTunes

OK, so the last time I wanted to watch a movie trailer online, I had to upgrade my QuickTime installation. No biggie right? But interestingly, this time it forced me to install iTunes. I would think Apple, who has always been a pretty cool company (despite losing their genius-in-charge way back when), would try to distance themselves from Microsoftian tactics like forcing users to install software completely unrelated to the task at hand simply because they want it to become ubiquitous. But still no biggie, because I keep finding free downloads under bottle caps and shit, and I figure I’ll probably use it eventually. Every time I open task manager though, I see it there hiding in the background processes, sucking at my precious system processes like a giant quantum tit.

Anyway, today I find out about a free iTunes download for a musician my brother just turned me onto, so I figure I’ll see how this iTunes shit works, what the big deal is, why it was so important that I was forced to install it along with QuickTime. I immediately came to the realization that I had to go through some setup.

The first thing it asked me (I think, I’m writing this from memory after all) was if I wanted to scan my hard drive for .mp3 and .aac files. I didn’t see a button labeled “Abso-fucking-lutely Not!”, so I unchecked the little checkbox. You see, Apple, having still never broken even on the Macintosh (yes, I’m exagerating), has found a new gold mine in digital audio distribution, and they are hell-bent on becoming the defacto standard. Apple would like it very much if all digital music was purchased through them, and this might make them somewhat interested in what other .mp3’s I have in my possession and whether or not I actually have the legal right to have said .mp3’s. Caveat fur!

The other thing it asked me, I think in the same dialog, was if I wanted it to automatically rearrange all my audio files. Well no, thank you, I tend put my files where I do for a reason, and when I look for them I tend to look for them where I put them. Also, if iTunes moves them, how then will all my P2P clients find all the (completely legal) recordings (of bands who allow their live recordings to be freely distributed) that I share? (Seriously, I’d never consider infringing a copyright, even though I’ve bought countless CD’s at full price to get a single song or two, even though they told us CD’s were indestructible and would last forever, even though the RIAA routinely fucks the artists whose backs they ride all the way to the bank.)

All that ugliness aside, I was still onboard with the iTunes at this point. I mean hey, I was going to get a free song and not even have to look over my shoulder or find an open proxy server (not that I know anything about such matters). So eventually I see my song, with the price listed as “free”, so I click the download button. Oh boy, now I get to create an account. Yay! Nothing like one more password to have to remember, but what the fuck. I’ve got email addresses that serve no other purpose than to hand out to likely spammers, so I can create an account without fear.

But then the thing that drove me to declare “Fuck iTunes” from my godforsaken blog happened. It asked for my credit card info.

Now there’s so many ways this pissed me off. First and most obviously, why the fuck should I have to give up my credit card info to download a free song? I mean, the chances of me buying music through iTunes is pretty god-damned slim. Not that I wouldn’t pay for online music, but I’m not about to pay $.99 a song for music in a lossy format like 128K mp3, or in some format that restricts what I can and can’t do with the product that I fucking paid for. They wanna sell me flac files at that price, we’ll talk. Of course, they figure if they can get me to give up my numbers now, it’ll be easier to get me to buy in the future. Not bloody likely.

Another thing is, even if I were to buy music through their little service, I’d much rather enter my credit card info each time I make a purchase. Now maybe most users don’t want to be bothered with this, but if I’m spending money I want to be reminded I’m spending money. I also don’t want one of my kids getting in my office and buying a bunch of what passes for music these days because they thought it would be fun to bang on daddy’s keyboard. Or hell, cats sometimes get shut in here. I don’t want a cat buying Hilary Duff tracks by walking across my desk (and quit chewing through cables you stupid little shit, because if 120VAC doesn’t kill you, I will). And most importantly of all, I don’t want my credit card info stored on some computer at Apple.

So fuck iTunes. I don’t like being forced to install software I don’t want, I don’t like giving up my credit card number for something I’m not buying, and I sure as fuck don’t like Digital Rights Management. And fuck the iPod, because you have to transfer music to it through iTunes. If I’m gonna be carrying gigabytes of digital audio processing in my pocket, I’d like to be able to plug in a mic and record anyway.

It’s great that the digital music revolution is fucking up the RIAA, believe me, I’m all for that. But Jesus H. Christ, are we gonna replace it with something worse? Not if I can help it.

Fucking Blasphemy

A few nights back I watching a rerun of Conan O’Brien. One of his guests was Hilary Duff. Apparently on her new CD she does a cover of The Who classic “My Generation”. Now while just the mere thought of Hilary Duff singing The Who is bad enough, Conan mentioned that she changed the line “hope I die before I get old” to “hope I don’t die before I get old”.

What the fuck kind of bullshit is this?

Now, I’m not about to enumerate every reason why Hilary Duff should be painfully killed (the list would surely push me over my monthly bandwidth limits), but this has got to be pretty fucking near the top. I’m sorry, but you simply can’t do that. Many would say that rock and roll is all about being a pissed-off, angst-ridden, rebellious teenager, and “My Generation” is probably the single purest example of that concept. You can not take it and sanitize it like that. That’s a fucking crime against music.

Conan gave her some shit about it, but he kept it light. That’s why he’s a talk show host and I’m not. I may have snapped, yelled “Well too fucking bad!” and bludgeoned her to death with a microphone.

Nothing But the Dead and Dying Back in My Little Town

Though I’ve lived on the outskirts of Chicago for going on five years now, I spent the first 30 or so years of my life in Des Moines, Iowa. Most people don’t know much about Des Moines (pronounced “duh-MOYN”), so I’m going to tell you about it as it may feature prominently in future stories of my misspent youth.

Des Moines is the capital city of Iowa, with population just under 200,000, 500,000 counting the suburbs. Not huge, but not exactly tiny either. They are the largest city in Iowa, an urban area sprouting in the middle of endless corn fields. Their contributions to society include Slipknot, Cloris Leachman, and that’s about it. The best burger in Des Moines is from B-Bops, the best taco is from Tasty Tacos. And aside from having family and friends there, in my opinion B-Bops and Tasty Tacos are the only things Des Moines has going for it.

I left Des Moines for a reason, or technically for many reasons. It’s actually an old tradition for Iowa to hemorrhage young people. Even my 75 year-old retired mother wants out. People only stay because they’re stuck there. Everybody I know who has had the opportunity to get out has taken it. My wife and I refer to Des Moines as “the joy vortex”, because once you enter its borders, the overwhelming despair of the residents settles on you like thick smog, suffocating you and draining every ounce of joy from your being.

I think the biggest problem is simply that the town is dead. Dead Moines they call it. Seriously, there is not a god-damned thing to do if you’re too young to drink, and if you’re old enough to drink, well, you can drink. There are movie theaters I guess, but there was even a few years in the 90’s when there weren’t any of those. 90% of the theaters in the town were owned by one company, they didn’t make enough money and got the fuck out of Dodge. It took some time for anybody else to come in. Can you imagine? This is a town that wasn’t even able to keep an arena football franchise. How shitty do you have to be to not even have an arena football team?

So, for entertainment in Des Moines, what you do is if you’re old enough you drink in bars. If you’re not old enough, you drink and drive around in circles downtown. Since the downtown area virtually shuts completely down at 5pm, it’s not too big a deal to have drunken teenagers circling every weekend. And while doing either of these activities, there’s a higher-than-average likelihood that someone will try to start a fist fight with you for no real reason.

And in addition to the deadness, the town is completely fucking uptight. More than one friend has compared it to the town in Footloose. Here’s a city where when rave parties were all the rage, they passed an ordinance banning all-night dancing. When the local heavy metal station wanted to put on a concert in the park, the city refused them a license to sell beer, saying something along the lines of “if these here kids wanna have fun, why do they gotta be so noisy about it?” And don’t even get me started on the cops, who are absolute fucking cocksuckers. Christ, I’ve got six or seven stories on those bastards alone. It wasn’t until I left that I realized that not all cops are assholes. Imagine my surprise.

To make matters worse, in the 90’s crystal meth took the city by storm. No tank of anhydrous amonia was safe. As far as I know, nothing has changed in that regard. Nothing makes a dead, uptight town more livable than a bunch of pissed-off trailer-trash tweeker scumbags everywhere you go. I once worked in a restaurant where I was the only person on the kitchen staff who didn’t crank it up nightly. It worked well for me though, because in an effort to keep themselves occupied, they’d clean the whole kitchen and I wouldn’t have to.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to get a bunch of angry email from residents of Des Moines about this post. That’s because many of them live in a profound state of denial. It’s not uncommon for people to say how friendly people are in Des Moines. Well, that’s bullshit, and I imagine that the people who say that have, like many of the people there, never been anywhere else. I’ve had more strangers on the street start conversations with me in Chicago than ever did in Des Moines. The way I remember it, in Des Moines the rule is “avoid eye contact lest ye be snarled at”. I’ve never seen some random asshole try to start a fight since I left. There it was a regular occurrence. Guess meth makes you violent or something. The other one I heard all my life was “Des Moines has the best schools in the nation!” Well, having been through the schools there, I can tell you that that’s bullshit too. Every fucking town in every fucking state says they have the best schools in the nation. I hear it here all the time too, only I’m more inclined to believe it.

But you know, shitty a place as it is, it is where I grew up and I do still have friends and family there, and I’ve probably made it seem worse than it really is. Despite the lack of anything going on there, my friends and I were able to make our own fun, though we weren’t ever able to do so within the rule of law.

The title of this post comes from the Simon and Garfunkel song “My Little Town”, which my wife is sure was written about Des Moines. It also says:

And after it rains there’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack

While I know Paul Simon isn’t a native of Des Moines, when I hear those lyrics I think he must have at least visited it.

Who Are These Idiots and Who Gave Them Internet Access?

Patrick Gaskill was certainly struck by Inspirado when he created his Suggested Google Alphabet page. Here you can see an up-to-the-second list of the most popular search terms per letter of the alphabet entered into Google.

Unfortunately, it only confirms that the internet has been taken over by morons.

Because Patrick’s page updates with every hit, what you see by following the link above may be different from what I list here, but that’s not enough to stop me from making fun of the most popular searches as listed on 1/26/2005.

A is for amazon
B is for best buy
C is for cnn
D is for dictionary
E is for ebay

OK, right off the bat we’ve got 5 instances of people searching for the actual domain name of the site they’re looking for. The URL for Amazon is www.amazon.com you dumbass. As my good friend Larry would say, “What’s the number for 911?”. Granted, dictionary.com isn’t the only dictionary on the web, but it’s certainly the easiest to remember, and it also happens to be the top-ranked result Google gives (as of now anyway).

F is for Firefox

OK, wait. Maybe the internet hasn’t been taken over by morons after all. It really does give me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that so many people are looking for my favorite web browser. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, run—don’t walk—to the Firefox website, download it, install it and never use Internet Explorer again. You need reasons other than some asshole’s recommendation? OK, you see, IE is a piece of shit. Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is to get a virus or pick up spyware from going to a web site? That that can happen boggles the fucking mind. It’s almost as if IE was specifically written to allow it. Firefox won’t fuck with you that way. It won’t even allow popups if you don’t let it. And if that’s not enough, tabbed browsing rules. And did I mention the shitloads of extensions and themes for customization? Oh yeah, it’s also completely free.

Another reason the F entry gives me a little hope is that until recently, the URL for Firefox was not www.firefox.com. It actually was worthy of a search! On the downside, they may be searching for that shitty Clint Eastwood movie.

G is for games

Yeah, I suppose. Have fun sifting through the 360,000,000 results!

H is for hotmail
I is for ikea

I don’t know whether to ridicule people who search for these or pity them. Oh wait, of course I do.

J is for jokes

Welcome to the information super-highway, a tool that rivals the printing press for revolutionizing communication. Let’s look up some jokes to tell at the office.

K is for kazaa

While the address for this is in fact www.kazaa.com, I’m hoping they’re actually looking for an early version that doesn’t fill your PC with spyware. Or maybe they’re confusing Kazaa and Limewire. Or maybe they’re actually searching for that shitty Shaquille O’Neal movie.

L is for lyrics

Is it just me or are lyrics sites fucking horrendous with these days? Thank gods that the fucking Harry Fox Agency sued lyrics.ch into submission years ago. Now instead of one good site we have a thousand little shitty ones all pushing spyware and popups. They also completely fucked up OLGA. I hope those fucking cocks at HFA choke on their mothers’ shit.

M is for mapquest

You’re searching for Mapquest when the address is mapquest.com? You know what? You’re too stupid to drive.

N is for news

Since there’s maybe 2 or 3 news sites (tops) out there, you’ll surely find exactly what you’re looking for by punching “news” into Google.

O is for online dictionary

As opposed to all the print dictionaries that turn up on the web.

P is for paris hilton

Oh, give me a fucking break. If you give two fucks about this spoiled little rich cunt, please get the fuck off the internet and back in your trailer you pathetic waste of skin. If you’re looking for her porn video, that’s even worse. This woman (and I use the term loosely) is the very definition of skank. Her snatch is likely a rancid cesspool of hitherto unknown variations of herpes and at least one heroin-resistant strain of chlamydia.

Also, you can’t tell me the number one search for ‘P’ isn’t ‘Porn’. I think this was some judicious editing by the folks at Google.

Q is for quotes

Because nothing else starts with Q.

R is for recipes

Yeah, fine. Too bad you can’t even make toast.

S is for spybot

If everyone were to heed the collective advice of the geek community and forsake Internet Explorer for Firefox, nobody would need Spybot. You do need to pretty much use Google every time you want to find it though, because the URL (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/) is impossible to remember and spybot.com, .org and .net are all owned by assholes filching on Spybot’s good name. So this entry is pretty awesome. People are using Spybot, which is good, and using Google for something that actually needs searched for. As Chief Gunnery Sgt. Hartman would say, out-fucking-standing!

T is for tara reid

Looking for the titty pictures I’m sure.

But T should really stand for Thunderbird to go along with F for Firefox. The only internet application more likely than Microsoft Internet Explorer to give you a virus is Microsoft Outlook (noticing a pattern here?). If you run Outlook, dump it immediately and install Thunderbird. It’s better anyway, it’s free, and it has built in spam controls. And extensions and themes, of course.

U is for ups

I’ll say it very slowly: double-you… double-you… double-you… you… pee… ess… dot… com… you… dumb… fucking… turd.

V is for verizon

Well, thanks to shitty web design, Verizon has made the list for V. Thing is, 9 out of 10 people are looking for www.verizonwireless.com, but verizon.com brings up local service, DSL, and other crap that maybe some people on the east coast actually give a rat’s fuck about. There’s a link for wireless buried deep on that page, which takes you to another page with more crap, which then, finally, has a link to www.verizonwireless.com. Here’s a hint to the dumbasses who designed the Verizon site: Go to Google and enter “usability“.

W is for weather

I’m sure that entering “weather” into the strongest search engine on what is a vast global network of computers delivering information in all languages to all corners of the earth gave you exactly what you were looking for—the weather for Toledo Ohio on the morning of 01/26/2005.

And um, incidentally, there’s www.weather.com.

X is for xbox

Damn, I was rooting for Xenology Today.

Y is for yahoo

Dude, seriously. You’re not really that dumb, are you?

Z is for zip codes

Yeah, I can live with that.

Now that this horse is obviously dead, it’s time to beat it.

Of the most popular search terms for the 26 letters of the English alphabet:

• 10 letters (A, B, C, E, H, I, K, M, U & Y) were searches for the main part of the actual domain name of the site that was obviously being searched for. That’s roughly 38.5%. The mind boggles.
• 4 letters (D, V, W & X) were searches that would have taken you to a site that probably would have given you what you wanted had you surrounded it with “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.
• 6 letters’ searches (G, J, L, N, Q & W) were very vague. Narrow it down people. Try “toledo weather” or “lawyer jokes” or “general tso chicken recipe”.
• 1 letter (O) was redundant with another letter (D).
• 2 letters (P & T) were for stupid shit that nobody should care about.
• 5 letters (F, S, V, X & Z) were actually for useful searches.

Yes, I know those numbers add up to 28. A couple letters (W & X) made it into two categories.

Now I must ask, are people really so dumb they punch “amazon” into Google rather than typing www.amazon.com into the address bar? I think that’s probably the case, but there are some other possibilities I’ve come up with, listed below.

#1: Google steals focus

If google.com is your start page (it should probably be everybody’s) if you open your browser and begin typing in the address bar, you’ll likely get part of what you were typing in the address bar and part in the Google search box, especially if you are on dialup. This is because once the Google main page has loaded, the cursor is automagically positioned in the search box, regardless of whether or not you’re typing. Pressing enter then submits to Google.

While this can be a problem, I think the likelihood of it accounting for painfully obvious searches is small. It could up the instance of searches for “mazon.com” or “w.yahoo.com”, but not “amazon” or “yahoo” by themselves.

#2: Major web sites hacking Google

The idea here is that Amazon, Yahoo, Mapquest and Paris Hilton could be running programs that automatically submit thousands of searches to Google in an attempt to up their ranking. I don’t think this actually affects the rankings (I could be wrong, I’m not fully-versed in Google’s ranking criteria). Rankings are adjusted by the number of times a particular result link is followed, but just bulk searching may not have an effect. Even if it does, I’m sure the folks at Google are smart enough to discount consecutive hits from the same IP block when calculating the rankings.

This explanation also completely fails Hanlon’s Razor.

#3: People don’t know what the address bar is or what it’s for

It sounds crazy, but there’s people out there who have their start page set to some search engine or another (hopefully it’s Google) and don’t know how to enter an address. I overheard a conversation between my wife and a another person once where my wife was saying “open Internet Explorer (this was in the pre-Firefox days) and enter ‘www.weather.com’…OK, now see the zip code box…?” They didn’t see the zip code box. Eventually we asked what they did see, and it was something along the lines of “Yahoo search results”. They were searching Yahoo for www.weather.com, unaware that a URL goes up in the address bar.

I consider this separate from the “fucking morons” theory because I realize that there are plenty of otherwise smart people out there who are clueless about computers, just as I am clueless about calculus and playing the harp. I’ve actually even seen computers come with the browser installed so that the address bar is hidden in a cheap attempt to force users to use some shitty search engine.

#4: The internet has been taken over by morons

OK, I think you know where I stand on that one.

As an interesting side note, I’m going to mention that almost a month has past between my first seeing the Suggested Google Alphabet page and writing this. In that time I don’t think any of the search words have changed. Interestingly, since that page links live to searches for the most popular terms, it will have an effect on the most popular terms and help to keep them popular. Ironic, no?

So there you have it. When I decided to write this, I had no idea it was going to inspire such virulent rage on my part. All I can say in my defense is that the site’s called Bile Duct for a reason and that I fucking hate Paris Hilton. And the Harry Fucking Fox Agency.

On the upside, if all these words are such popular search terms, I should get a lot of inadvertent hits. Yay!