First Posted: 2/6/2015
Welcome to another edition of “Things I’m Tired Of,” my running battle with tiresome trends, events and behavior.
I try to do a Things every six months, but I had let 10 months pass since the previous one.
I guess I got tired of it.
Fortunately, the Super Bowl — a few minutes of football wrapped in two weeks of overstatement — renewed my commitment to constructive fatigue.
So here are things that have tested my patience lately:
Weather nicknames
It reeks of branding, and I am very tired of branding.
Will people in Boston 30 years hence really call the recent winter storm “Juno”? That doesn’t sound like a blizzard. It sounds like something you’d name a cat.
Also, I urge CNN to retire the “Blizzardmobile” — otherwise known as a Ford Explorer.
February
Only three days in, and I’ve already had enough.
As I’ve explained before, it isn’t the weather so much as the triumvirate of a bloated sporting event (the Super Bowl), a made-up holiday (Valentine’s Day) and a national high-school prom (Academy Awards) that makes me want the month to go away.
Is there no way to spread out those things?
By the time the last Oscar statuette is hoisted on Feb. 22, I’ll have toxic levels of hype in my blood.
-gate
Watergate was such an enormous scandal, it was bound to influence scandal-related terminology for a while.
Forty years is long enough.
Are you listening, sports world — with your Tattoogate; Bountygate; and, most recently, Deflategate?
When you use the same suffix to describe a national crisis and the air pressure in a football, I’d say you’ve pretty much exhausted the gimmick.
Drone mania
Here’s a thought: Instead of blindly embracing a technology, why don’t we stop to think about its potential effect first?
I know, I know: Why be cautious about devices capable of blowing things up, surreptitiously snapping photographs and crashing onto the White House lawn? What could go wrong?
Cleanses
Let’s see: Trust internal organs that have evolved over millions of years to cleanse the body of toxins or trust emaciated celebrities who think it’s more healthful to drink only beet juice for seven days?
Not a hard decision.
For the record, I’m also tired of Justin Bieber eruptions, the new Star Wars movie (pre-emptive fatigue — the movie is due in December), binge viewing, postgame rioting, apocalyptic thinking and whatever grain this week is supposed to be the new quinoa.
