kapgar: It doesn't matter who's wrong or right...

I don't know why I'm clustering two into one, but both are memes I like and I want to answer before they become too passe (sp?).

The first is a fun meme I got tagged with by Dustin. With a title like this, how can you not want to participate? The second comes from Chase and, while I wasn't tagged with it, I really liked it. So I stole it... it's mine. Just try and prove otherwise.

Top Five Nouns I Want to Fight: A Meme of Violent Proportions

Here are the instructions, as per Dustin: "We all have those nouns that annoy us to no end and would love to rough up a bit, so here is your chance. Fighting doesn’t mean killing (that’s a separate meme currently circulating Riker’s Island) or even drawing blood. Whether it’s cuss out, bitch slap, or body slam, it really all depends on your own pent up rage.

So here are my five nouns...

Randall Road
Ran-hell Road is the main thoroughfare that runs north and south near our home and is used to take both Katie and I to our respective places of employment as well as being the most available route for traveling to see Katie's parents. A mere 10 years ago, the greatest level of commerce this road had seen was a Chevrolet dealership. Not anymore. There is more shopping now than you can shake a stick at. We literally never have to leave Randall Road to find absolutely anything we could possibly need (pending availability, I suppose).

Of course, with the convenience of this shopping comes the traffic, the road expansion projects, the accidents, the cop traps, you name it. This road is hell. Fortunately, I can take alternate backwater routes to work. Katie, however, is stuck.

Dumbass Drivers
I know I've covered this extensively before, but it has happened again since that time. A woman was about to turn in front of me not realizing I was right there. In front of her. Not in a blind spot. In a bright red truck. Flashing not-safe-for-work hand signals in her general direction. Dumbshit. A select few drivers should be given the right to install rocket launchers on their vehicles to deal with such problems. I would like to officially volunteer my services to test such a contraption.

Comment Spammers
Admittedly, I was proud when I received my first bit of trackback spam some months ago. I felt it was my own little coming-of-age celebration as a blogger. However, in the last couple months, I have received dozens of trackback spams and quite a bit of comment spam. One particular attack screwed up my comment functionality entirely. Luckily, TypePad makes it very easy to eliminate comments and trackbacks that you don't want. And I do just that on a regular basis.

Despite these problems, I still refuse to activate CAPTCHAs to verify comment validity simply because the TypePad CAPTCHAs are practically impossible to read and I want to make your interaction here at kapgar as painless as possible. Here is an example...

Typepadcaptcha

Sadly, this is actually one of the easier Typepad CAPTCHAs I've ever seen. I hate 'em.

Child Pornographers/Statuatory Rapists
How? Why? What? I... I... I am just in shock that somebody can actually perpetrate such horrific acts on children thus stripping them of the childlike exuberance and love of life that is telltale of their age group. I just don't get it. What kind of sick fuck do you have to be to do this? Sorry Dustin, but in these cases, "fighting" does equate with "killing" in my book. Or, at the very least, "severely maiming."

Mac Haters
Most of the people I know who hate Macs are people that have never used them at all or at least not extensively enough to develop a well-rounded opinion. I really cannot respect people like that. They diss and dismiss without really giving it a shot.

Well, I'd like to tell you about a couple friends of mine, both former Mac haters. They bashed and bruised and attempted to sway me of my Mac-loving ways. The continuously espoused the merits of Windows XP and other PC related hardware and software. Last year, one of those Mac haters bought a new computer... it was a Mac dual G5 tower, and he loves it. The other recently announced that when he buys his next computer, it'll be a Mac. These are techie people. Freaks for their computing. Their lives revolve around their computers. And they've both gone back on what they claimed. Hmm...

I, at least, use both on a regular basis. So my hatred of Windows is well rooted in more than a decade and a half of personal experience.

I had to leave you on a slightly lighter note after the severity of #4.

Wikipedia Me

The rules are simple:

Go to Wikipedia
In the Search box, type your birth month and day (but not year).
List three events that happened on your birthday.
List two interesting birthdays and one interesting death.
One holiday or observance (if any).

My birthday

December 5

Events

1484 - Pope Innocent VIII issues the Summis desiderantes, a papal bull that deputizes Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger as inquisitors to root out alleged witchcraft in Germany and leads to one of the severest witchhunts in European history - Burn witches, burn! Broomstick inferno!
1776 - At the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Phi Beta Kappa is founded as the first scholastic fraternity in the United States. - And campus life was never the same.
1955 - Martin Luther King, Jr. leads the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 12/5/1955-12/21/1956. - No jokes, just pride.

Birthdays

1901 - Walt Disney, American animated film producer (d. 1966) - I always knew this one. Cool stuff.
1839 - George Armstrong Custer, American general (d. 1876) - Thankfully my birthday was not his "last stand."

Death