Oh look! It's a trio of things that bug the crap out of me!
Captcha!
I love getting comments on my blog. I can only assume that other bloggers like getting comments too, so I try to leave them when I can. Unfortunately, given my time constraints, it isn't as often as I'd like. For every comment I leave, that's time I could have spent reading other blogs. On top of that, it seems that comments are getting more and more time consuming to write thanks to "captchas"...
Captchas are those goofy little code blocks you have to decipher in order to leave comments on so many blogs now-a-days. They are supposed to foil spammers, but they keep getting longer and more complicated, so they are foiling me too. It sucks, but whatcha gonna do? I'm thinking of initiating my own captcha system for Blogography comments. But I'm not settling for today's technology. I've developed my own Super-Captcha of The Future...
Oh yeah! Suck on that spammer bitches!
A pity captchas bug this crap out of me, because mine is sweet.
Hillary!
I don't really care for Hillary Clinton. Never have. Her politics and position on issues never seems to quite mesh with mine. I'm particularly against her censorship-driven stance against all forms of violence in media... from video games to television. It's not the job of society to babysit other people's kids. If I want to run around shooting fake people in my Xbox to keep me from going out and shooting real people with a gun, it's none of your f#@%ing business.
But then she goes and drafts a brilliant bit of legislation which binds Congressional pay rates to the National minimum wage index. This means that dip-shit politicians can't keep voting themselves pay raises again and again and again, while people trying to survive on minimum wage get shafted. Any raise in Congressional pay has to be matched with an equal percentage raise in minimum wage! Sweet. I'm for anything that limits Congressional idiots from rewarding themselves with pay raises they DON'T deserve.
It bugs the crap out of me that I am actually admiring Hillary Clinton for something, but this would be it.
Repetition!
If there's one thing I absolutely loathe about television shows, it's repetition. Characters who do not develop or grow in-between episodes. Situations that never change. Plots that are recycled over and over and over again. Why should I bother to tune in if it's just going to be the same shit I've already seen?
The show Medium is a classic example. EVERY EPISODE Allison has a psychic vision about something in her sleep. She then tells her husband who gets cranky and tries to blow it off as "just a dream". She then tells her boss who dismisses it outright. And then she gets dismissed by the detective guy too. Never mind that her dreams are right on the money EVERY F#@%ING TIME!! Seriously, WTF?!? You've seen first-hand that the bitch is a serious psychic... like what... A HUNDRED TIMES NOW?? At what point are you going to stop dismissing her or questioning her and just ACCEPT THAT THE STUFF SHE SAYS IS FOR REAL?!? How stupid are you morons?
STUPID. STUPID. STUPID!! If it weren't for the constant disbelief by people WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER, the series would be great. Great characters, terrific stories, decent acting... get rid of the blatant stupidity, and it's actually worth watching.
The fact that I continue to watch this junk is seriously bugging the crap out of me.
Argh. I guarantee you that I'll have at least another twenty things I can add to the list by lunchtime.
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I don’t particularily like Hillary that much either, but if that’s our horse…that’s our horse.
And to the person who just emailed me about how minimum wage DOES increase… you need to understand that Congress sets NATIONAL minimum wage, whereas States have the option to set their minimum wages independently higher.
Congress has not voted a minimum wage increase since 1996 (it’s been $5.15 for TEN YEARS now)… yet they have voted THEMSELVES a pay raise every single year since 1998 (they’ve gone from $136,700 in 1998 to $165,200 in 2006).
So, despite a period of economic depression and war… your politicians still make sure they get their money (an extra $3,100 each this year + health and insurance benefits of course). Yet many people are still going without health care.
Oh yeah… for those not wanting to do the math…
$5.15 x 40 hour work week = $206
$206.00 x 50 working weeks = $10,300
Granted, your State may have a higher wage rate but Congress has kept the National rate at $10,300 annually for the past decade.
In the same time period, Congressional salaries have RISEN by $28,500.
Hmmm. This might be a spoiler for people who didn’t see this last week’s Medium …
I was watching Medium the other night — she goes in to see her boss to try to convice him Kelsey Grammar did it. She talks, he says ‘but,’ she talks, he says ‘but,’ etc. This repeated for a brief period.
He finally blurts out “but I believe you” and I was shocked because I was soooo used to the other stuff.
Maybe this whole season has been a setup for that single scene. That single, boring, non-eventful, lasts-just-a-second scene. Writers are a nutty bunch after all.
Yea. I’ve been wondering when the other people in the show were going to catch that she’s got the power. If I were one of her coworkers I’d be rubbing lottery ticket sheets on her before I filled them out.
Have you noticed that spammers, in order to try to avoid detection by spam filters, are using some of the same technology? I get emails with words that are images that are a bit hard to read on a wavy background. Like “Cialis” or “Viagra” – and the spam filters can’t catch them because they can’t read the words. How bizarre.
Brent: I just think it’s cool that Hillary has the balls to do this. If drafted into law, it may not raise the National minimum wage much… but at least Congress won’t be raking it in despite it all. 🙂
Delmer: No… that was my point. Her boss DIDN’T believe her. When he said “I believe you” it was only AFTER Kelsey Grammar had shut down his office and left the country!! Up until then, he didn’t believe her… it wasn’t until “Death” did something to make him really look guilty that he even entertained the idea! Crazy! 😛
Avitable: Spammers are always one step ahead of the curve, unfortunately, That’s why we will never be rid of spam until there is a death penalty for sending it! 🙂
Dave …
I stand corrected. You are correct sir.
Hey… it happens to everybody from time to time… even me!
🙂
Didn’t get much sleep last night, eh?
Dave = *grumble grumble grumble*
Captchas- Okay…everything in my settings says I have them turned off….EVERYTHING…because they annoy the hell out of me, and my blog isn’t popular (or blogspot-y) enough to get spam. So, what’s the point of making commenters jump through hoops?? However, I notice that every once in a while, when I go to respond to someone, it throws me a captcha. WTF?? Does this happen to my normal commenters? Lemme know if you have to fill that crap out when you comment, and I’ll yell at Typepad.
Hillary- I.hate.politics. ’nuff said.
Medium- Yeah, I always wind up thinking that, too. “HEY….DUMBASS!! WHAT DOES SHE HAVE TO DO TO MAKE YOU FRIGGEN BELIEVE HER??” (This is another reason that you have to start watching “Ghost Whisperer”. At least her husband never questions her. Neither did Andrea…but, that’s gotta change next season. Booooo!!!) And…wow, I watch WAAAAAY too much tv if I get invested enough in shows that I’m actually yelling at the tv!
Medium is one of the few shows I try to make sure I get a chance to watch, but I agree with you 100% on the “get a clue” thing.
The other night at the end of the episode when Allison bolted up in bed in the middle of the night (like she does several times every episode), my wife laughed and said, “My God, she’d be irritating as hell to sleep with!” I thought that was pretty funny.
Have you seen the Typepad captchas? They’re ridiculously impossible. They make the ones above look simplistic by comparison. Even your self designed one. This is why I still haven’t instituted them on my blog. Then again, my spam still is tolerable… so far.
“Medium,” yeah…I enjoy the show but the things you point out bug the crap out of me. I love the relationship between her and her husband. The chemistry seems very real, and so does the dialogue between the two. And I love their middle child…so rare that children are given decent (unique) personalities in TV shows.
Oh…and I’m pretty sure YOUR captcha could trigger seizures in about 15% of the population.
I’m still happy I saw the orange.
🙂
how funny- my blog today is all about things that are annoying me! great minds dave. 😉
as for medium, i soooo feel you. my housemate and i have a running commentary that goes something like: “oh they are in their pjs again! i wonder if she will wake up startled and her husband will be cranky? oh there it is!”
and yet, i still watch it. ugh.
Ugh – word verification bugs the heck out of me, but I’ve tried taking it off of my blog and I get hit with about 8 spam comments inside of a minute, and that bugs me more. Originally it was a handful of letters – “nekso” I can deal with, but now it’s “jeoxmepsinnnd” and it’s driving me nuts!!
To be honest, I used to have a lot of respect and admiration for Hillary. That was before she became a senator. Before she started pandering to gets votes on her side.
Her position on removing violence from video games and TV is beyond what I call acceptable. I hope Johnathan Tasani takes her down in the upcoming election.
As far as the cryto-type that some of these blogs and web sites are doing, it can be annoying. I see most of them for contest entries, but every so often, Yahoo Mail makes me put one in when I send a reply. I understand their purpose, but I’ve mistyped one or two characters and had to get another cyrpto-code assigned just to post something.
As I said, annoying.
Captchas: I never had the word verification turned on. For a while it was fine; eventually, 10 or more spam comments per post, so on with the word verification.
Hilary: She’s a politician with a brain. We don’t see that too often. She’s always been about protecting children, which is why she’s concerned about the violence in videogames and such. While yes, people should care for their own children, guess what? They DON’T! People get their kids videogames because “everybody else had it” especially Surburianites, regardless of whether its appropriate for children. I’m not for censorship, but I can at least understand why there’s a concern about children being subjected to violent content.
Medium: I love watching the show, especially because I love Patricia Arquette and the stories are interesting, but, yes, friggin just BELIEVE HER already. It reminds me of X-Files where each week people tried to tell Mulder that there were no aliens. And her husband Joe, does he have to wake up every time she does? Just fucking go to sleep, Allison doesn’t need your damn attitude every time she has a nightmare — and a nightmare that will eventually help solve a violent crime, for which your wife is paid! No dream = no salary. Suck it up, Joe!
I love the bit on “captcha”. Did you make this term up? I never heard it before.
Annoying, yes. But they work. I’ll never forget that I got comments on my very first blog and it was only spam.
i swear there is a hidden message in the “captcha” thing…i keep starting at it and it is saying things to me….is this a new trick to get people to read your blog?
I LOATHE captchas. But I loathe weeding out spamments even more, so there ya go.
Why are so many of my regular reads blogging this week about TV shows I’ve never watched? Oh yeah, it’s season-finale time on the regular networks.
I really need to remember that my TV does in fact get more channels than SciFi, Food Network and Showtime.
Dude, Dave, you have to chill on Medium. Of course they don’t believe her. we never see the days on the show where she comes in and tells the boss about some dream, and it turns out to be completely false. You have to suspend belief for an hour and you can’t do it? And you still think Star Wars was great? come on, Dave. If they showed all the ancillary crap in Medium, you’d think it was boring and wonder why they can’t just show the parts where she’s right. Also, she’s a freeaking MEDIUM, for crying out loud. You’re already suspending belief, just give te other characters a break.
With “Medium”, every time I watch it with my boy, he always says “God, that poor guy is being woken up again! Why does she have to always wake him up? He never gets any sleep at all…”
Uh, hello, the husband knew about who she was before she married him. Why is it a surprise? Hell, if it bugs him so damn much, maybe he should sleep in a different bed?
And, comment verification? I’ve got one better, actually. I’ve coded in a big long string of banned words in the comments (including all the name brand drugs), and have dissallowed comments from email suffixes which are known spamming domains. Next, though, I think I’m going to institute a email-back with ‘click here’ to verify your comment! Here you go, dumbass… I won’t even see your comment until you give me a valid address, and your box gets completely loaded with crap! Take that! Ha!
Your synopsis of “The Medium” reminds me very much of my ongoing beef with the show “House.” Every episode, some patient has weird symptoms and Dr. House is convinced it’s some wacky disease, they tell him that it can’t be Wacky Disease and if they try and cure Wacky Disease the patient will die…
It’s repetative. But that’s television for ya.
Blogger’s captchas were forged by Lucifer himself.
I don’t trust Hillary Clinton any further than I could spit an elephant; she’s an excellent example of the two-faced politician who’ll espouse almost any opinion just to get a vote.
I hate “Medium,” but the wife LOVES it, so I end up listening to it against my will.
If they always believed her when she told them about her dreams, Medium would only be a half-hour show. Maybe less. Convincing the dumbasses that she’s right is what the show is all about.
OH!! Kachina TOTALLY beat me to my own comment! Yes, “House” is another of the “same plot, different setting” shows, and also has that element in common with “Medium” in that the main character is NEVER, EVER WRONG, and yet is fought every step of the way on every single episode. Bleah. And we keep watching.
The other thing I have to contend with when watching “Medium” is my husband’s running commentary about Patricia Arquette’s “big ol’ man-hands” every single time they appear onscreen.
And yes, that legislation is brilliant.
And yes, Blogger and Typepad word verifications absolutely suck. I thought of moving to Haloscan, but it seems that if you do, you lose all your previous comments. I’m sure there’s some clever way around that, but I don’t know what it is.
During the GBBMC week, I had my word verification turned off, because I was moderating comments for that week only. I could not BELIEVE the amount of spam that I had to moderate during that week. I’ve never had any get around the WV feature.
Hillary’s just a Hmzxceidllmnuitrpqqzlnxpdyifii.
Kachina Crowe–I hear what you’re saying about House. The only difference I see is that Allison always gets bothered when no one believes her and tries to convince them of what she knows to be true, etc… House knows he is right and he knows he is awesome and doesn’t give a crap whether anyone believes him or not because he knows they have to do what he says.
I would happily watch House’s repetitiveness over Medium’s any day.
Oh my god…I totally want to steal your captcha and use it as verification of my comments, so the bloggers whose posts I comment on will have to decode it before getting the benefit of the painstaking insight and breathtaking wisdom of my feedback.
I gotta say Medium isn’t as bad in this respect as the X-files was. For 3 or 4 seasons Mulder would see something and Scully – who just happened to be unconscious or in another room or going in through the front door – as opposed to the back… didn’t.
It got really old.
Then, she’d tap dance on some “logical” explanation for it – which sounded like a bigger load of crap than what Mulder said in the first place…
Then again – no matter what iteration of Superman you have seen, Lois Lane and the people that work at the Daily Planet are a bunch of dumb f#*kers. No-one once says “Hey! Clark, lose the glasses and slick your hair back – We all think you look like Superman”
TV… Sometimes, you have to just suspend disbelief.
Captchas: I understand why people need them but sit smug behind my Akismet Spam protection… Mind you, my blog is still samll so I don’t get hit that often. It’s only had to save me from 744 spam comments in the past 3 months I’ve been running it.
As Lewis Black says about the Dems and Reps… one is a party with bad ideas and the other is a party with no ideas. I want him for President.
Dave if the captchas at my blogger were what ticked you off, I hope they don’t chase you away. But I’m with Bre as to why and am too much of a cheap ass to buy my own space.
That’s how I got to BE a millionaire.
What?
Ok, the thing with Medium is she’s not always right. There have been several eps where she’s completely misread the signs. Even this latest one… she thinks Death is coming for her when that’s not the deal. She thought Joe was cheating on her in one ep, when really he ends up giving some woman the heimlich maneuver because she’s choking. In most eps, it takes her a while to correctly interpret her dreams (that I’ll grant is repetitive).
As for the DA, his response doesn’t read as disbelief to me as much as just because she tells him something that doesn’t mean he can get a warrant or arrest someone.
Oh, and I hate captchas too (they’ve been kicking my ass all day today), but I was getting so much spam on my blog before I added the w.v.
I was so planning a blog on the dirty messages often written in the captchas (and probably will still write it at some point).
I really wish I could leave them off my blog (I hate filling them out every time I post a comment on my own blog even when I’m obviously logged in) but I was getting so much spam it was driving me crazy!
Although they’re obviously designed to drive you almost as crazy as getting spam. I can’t tell you how many times I have meticulously typed it in letter for letter only to be viciously rejected and have to type a longer one in yet again!
They had a funny sketch about MEDIUM on MAD TV. Now, I don’t know if that show bugs you also, but they were right on the money on every observation you complained about. I’ve been looking for a viral vid about it to download to my iPod, yet who knows if those captchas will prevent me ….hahahaha…lol 🙂 And if iPods bug you, then I guess I’ve bugged you too! You’ve been BUGGED 🙂
WTF was that??
I think we should ALL know by now that iPods don’t bug you. 🙂
I sure -heart- my iPod! 🙂
I’m not crazy about Hillary Clinton, but I hate Captchas! And some of those captchas are so hard to read that I feel I might need to sue Blogger for forcing me to buy new glasses.
Ditto what Neil said about Hillary. I really have to stop commenting everywhere I go too, it takes up a lot of time and time is valuable. Like just now, I wasted 3 mins commenting when I could be reading other blogs, damn you Dave for making want to comment!
P.S. I like Medium.
P.P.S. I like Medium.
hi! a quick comment on medium: LMAO! What you raise is precisely why i stopped watching that show! I think the network could have done so much more with it, but instead it just became a friggin repetitious boring thing, ugh! And expecting the same repetition, I just never bothered with the Ghost Whisperer. :p
I saw Medium once. it stressed me out. SLEEP already!
Captchas drive me nuts, only because they make me feel like I am not seeing so good anymore. Am I the only one who finds them impossible to read? Do I need reading glasses on top of my high powered normal glasses?
Hillary Clinton: I think she coulda been a contenda had she not married Bill. I saw this documentary on her, and it really showed how she was on her own trajectory towards a bid for Prez before she married him, but then she got sidelined as First Gov Lady and then First Lady. She’s a very smart, but not very charismatic woman. I think maybe her heart’s in the right place, but there is something opportunistic there, as well. I dunno. The trust is not there or something. I definitely think she is the smarter of the two, but Bill got the charm.
On Medium, I totally agree. Why hire a psychic to help solve crimes if you aren’t going to listen to her…
Damn! My eyes didn’t need that!
Your captcha rocks!
With EE, like on my blog, if you become a member the captchas go away.
I love Medium, but then I’m easily amused.
I like Medium, but you are totally right that every episode follows a tried and true formula, and it makes no sense that her husband and boss continue to be so skeptical about her dreams.
Otoh, I think House is a much worse offender in the “every episode is the same” sweepstakes. Oh, here’s the point when House mocks the underlings. Here’s the point when the patient almost dies. Here’s the point when Cuddy yells at House for breaking the rules . . .
And of course, that’s reason #3,492 why Veronica Mars is the best show on network TV. But that goes without saying. 🙂
Unfortunately I realised I was fast-forwarding through so much of Medium it was no longer worth downloading!
I agree that they are dumbasses – the only time I would accept that they might doubt her is when she has a REALLY WEIRD dream that doesn’t make sense and her hubby says it was just a dream – because who knows, it might have been. But I get what you mean – you would have thought by this point they’d stop doubting her!
By the way I found you through Buddha on the Road. I love the capatcha thing! 😀