My Top 10 Rants At This Very Moment

I try to keep this space as positive as possible but occasionally I feel compelled to rant about things that annoy me. Typically my rants here are atypical yet topical. This is my first top ten list of things that piss me off lately or for longer than that. If you are annoyed by this blame my fellow-blogger (and slum-lord landlord... and childhood friend and neighbor) Mark Wiberg and his Stop Posting Your Kids On The Internet - A Rant! blog piece tonight for triggering my rant by way of a butterfly effect negative feedback loop. His blog isn't very good which you can determine quite nearly immediately upon first reading it. I double-dog-dare anybody reading this to follow my links through to his blog let alone read it. If you read it and fall asleep don't blame me! (I keed! I keed!)

These are in no particular order other than that in which they appeared in my brain at the time of composing this.

1. Persnickety and picky people (obsessive-compulsive and anal retentive belong here, too). I've been working with somebody who is this way in a most insufferable fashion such as I have never encountered in my entire life. I love this person like a brother but sometimes feel the urge to indulge in some tension-releasing tough love and give them a full roundhouse bitch-slap.
2. Poor people on welfare of any kind who smoke and/or drink heavily and sport multiple expensive tattoos. What the fuck is wrong with these people? The folks who can least afford these vices seem to indulge in them the most... often at my expense as a poor taxpayer. 
3. The Weather Channel storm documentaries that keep replaying the same damned highly-edited storm footage (very brief little segments) over and over and over in order to fill time with a minimum of actual content other than replaying the same damned clips in order to drag out the quickly-exhausted suspense  (such as it was to begin with). This will even carry over between multiple advertisement sequences and to refresh our short memories when they return from the advertisements they jump back a little in the story and replay the footage some more. They retell us for the umpteenth time what they told us and showed us multiple times before the previous advertising sequence. I saw this yesterday on a tornado program. The footage of a tornado approaching and ultimately crossing an interstate highway was shown over 20 times... the same exact several second clip. This is why I NEVER watch their programs although I love storms and other weather phenomenon. I refer to this phenomenon's effect on storm purists such as myself as "stormus interruptus".
4. Cries of "class warfare" by politicos and talking heads. Puh-leaze! This has been going on since the beginning of our nation and both sides of our political duopoly do it. To those whom complain that the "other side" is doing it I remind them of the old saying "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". 
5. The tendency of the Liberal-dominated television and print news media (and Leftist blogosphere) to focus on the wealth and privilege of Republicans but ignore the same of Democrats as we are now seeing with Mitt Romney for whom I feel disdain unrelated to his wealth. 
6. The tendency of the Conservative-dominated radio news media (and Faux News and the Right-wing blogosphere) to focus on Obama's deficit spending and the weak economy but ignore the fact that the previous President went on a spending spree without increasing taxes or cutting spending to cover it and Congressional Republicans are as much big spenders and whores to special interests as their Democratic colleagues and the current President came into office inheriting an economic cluster fuck.
7. People who speed up as I attempt to pass them in Lane #1 of a freeway whom I rapidly overtook to begin with until I attempted to pass them. Add to this category those for whom I move from Lane #2 to Lane #1 on a freeway so they can merge in from an on-ramp only to see them force me to have to  dramatically speed up or slow down to move back over into Lane #2  where I belong given that Lane #1 is supposed to be a passing lane only. 
8. This segues perfectly into another one of my motoring pet peeves: those who seem to consider Lane #1 to be their personal express lane with no regard to the bottleneck they are creating by hogging it and not moving over to the left to allow faster traffic to pass them. 
9. People who think they are so smart purchasing uber-cheap Chinese-made crap at big box stores failing to realize they will have to purchase that product more frequently (and at greater expense) over time than if they purchased a better-made more expensive one (probably not available at the big box store but maybe at a smaller store in town or can be acquired over the internet) which they would have to purchase much less frequently and whose use would cost them less over time.
10. Pakistan having their panties in a wad about our Osama bin Ladin-killing raid when he was living in a military city within sight of a major military base and taking out their tantrum on a Pakistani doctor who aided us charging and convicting him in tribal court of treason all the while receiving financial aid from us to fight terrorism which they have been receiving for years. This all the while our own weak and anemic President continues to fail to hold Pakistan's feet to the fire over the fact OBL was being protected by them after we warned them of the consequences of aiding terrorism against us even as he thumps his chest over the killing of OBL having happened on his watch as if it was his plan and his courageous leadership that enabled it to happen.