List of American Icons/institutions I'd love to see destroyed.

[BigDaddyFin]

1.  Playboy/Hugh Hefner.  It's bad enough the magazine sucks without having to look at this pathetic wrinkly old bastard.  To top it all off the magazine's attitude is essentially if you don't make $75,000 a year, you don't like naked women.

2.  Budwieser.  And this one hurts.  For years I was a huge fan and it was all we drank.  I had a massive poster of the Clydesdales framed on my wall.  I liked my Bud Keychain/Can Opener even if I kept breaking them and having to order new ones.  I wore my Budwieser racing hat all the time.  It was a comfortable hat.  Now they put that disgusting red label on the big bottles.  Now the company is owned by a bunch of spazzy Germans and Brazillians.  Plus August Busch IV turned out to be a total scumbag.  P.S. Bud Light sucks.  Stop running ads for it every ten seconds. 

3.  Academia.  I won't get into the political aspects of it because that's on record.  It's too goddamn expensive to go to an average college now.  Think about this for a second.  You can spend approximately what it costs to buy a Ferrari and when you get out, everybody has the same degree you do and guess what, they're working in a call center making the same $25,000 a year you are.  Also, stop fucking with the little kids.  I know it's the times we're living in, but stay the hell out of their lunch box, stop teaching them about sex in kindergarten and let them be children and enjoy childhood for awhile.  Believe me it gets taken away quick enough.  To make matters worse I actually learned more from the adults in my life than I ever did in a classroom.  Clearly I'd have been no worse off skipping college.  Also it's time to come to grips with the fact that Academia is a business now just like anything else.  The only difference is it's also subsidized.  Textbooks don't have to cost $100 and be reprinted in new editions every year.  You don't HAVE to buy every kid in school a goddamn personal laptop.  And no my child should not need a $200 graphing calculator to do their math homework. 

4. Parents who bitch about their children.  You had them.  Nobody put a gun to your head.  Don't whine because you have to take them everywhere.  Evidently that's kind of implied when you have children.  Along with feeding them, caring for them, and generally putting up with them for the next 18 years.  This also includes driving them places.  Don't bitch at me about their grades, I don't care if they got suspended.  You shouldn't be badmouthing someone you profess to love behind their back no matter how small they are.  And it's also not my problem if you're a "single parent."  You made the choice to have a child, you made a choice to fuck the other person, and at some point you made the choice to leave.  If you knew they were assholes when you got with them or couldn't be trusted, then why the hell would you have a kid with them.

5. ESPN.  I really have come to despise a cable network that plays nothing but sports.  The problem isn't the sports. The problem is the assholes on there.  It's bad enough they hate the Dolphins.  Chris Berman still has the same 5 cheesy catchphrases he always did.  If he can't come up with a new gimmick by now, get rid of him.  Also his objectivity is completely out the window.  I don't need sportscenter or its half hour version run repeatedly over and over again throughout the day.  Sports don't start until the afternoon, so stop replaying the goddamn same highlights.  Also keep politics the fuck out of sports.  I don't want to see the president throwing out the first ball, or sitting in the stands or having bracket time.  This annoys the hell out of me no matter who it is or what party they're from.  I also don't need to see that the women's international curling team was invited to the whitehouse.  We get it.  Win a national title, meet the president.  It's not news anymore.   Also don't tell us what a great athlete the president is.  If he were that great an athlete he'd be playing in the pros. 

6. Celebrity shows.  Entertainment Tonight is the one I'm thinking of but there's probably two dozen more.  I don't care who's getting married or who's dating.  If I want to know who's gay that bad, I'll spend the $3 on the National Enquirer.  I can read it on the toilet, I can do the crossword puzzles and the reporting is probably more accurate than 99% of the newspapers out there now.  Which brings me to...

7.  Bob Costas.  It's bad enough he looks like the dorky kid with the speech impediment we all used to chuckle at a little in high school.  He doesn't need to be on every sports network on the planet.  Nothing he says is original, and he like Chris Berman has no sense of objectivity.  If I see him I'm going to punch him in the face.  My beloved Indians were two outs away from winning their first world series since 1948.  But all we listened to was Bob Costas whining about how Jim Leyland was never going to get his world series ring.  Then when the Marlins won, I basically got to watch Bob do the journalistic equivalent of blowing Jim Leyland. 

8.  People who can't drive on the fucking highway.  They fall into two categories.  First: People who think they're Mario Andretti and can just slam their car in anywhere.  This annoys me for a couple reasons.  You're not cool.  Your car is almost without exception either a mid-life crisis mobile or a foreign pile of shit you put a knock off exhaust tip and walmart rims on.  Most of the time I stay in one lane and end up passing you.  Second: People who drive SUV's/minivans.  These people are usually cutoff happy and I'm not sure why.  I think it has to do with their failure to comprehend the concept of a blindspot.  Also either buy a goddamn truck or don't.  What the fuck is the point in driving something that's basically a truck you can't really put anything in?  Unless you have to carry like 10 kids around all the time or you're a repair man who needs a shitload of tools and equipment but doesn't want to expose to the elements, buy a sedan or buy a pickup truck.  Assholes.

9.  Whoever invented those goddamn scooters.  Get the fuck off the road.  I'm sorry you're too chickenshit to buy a motorcycle, and I'm also sorry the goddamn scooter only goes 20 miles an hour.  You're actually obstructing traffic and probably cause more accidents than your worthless ass deserves.

10. School Buses.  This didn't bother me so much until recently.  They leave the goddamn flashers on for too long.  There's no need to leave your yellows on for five minutes.  Pull up to the house or bus stop.  Put flashers on when children run out.  Turn on reds.  Open door.  Child inside bus.  Turn flashers off.  Tell him to sit his ass down and shut up.  Drive away.  Simple.  Also this thing where you can't turn on red, or in NY they have to stop at railroad crossings and why I have no fucking clue.  You're a vehicle.  Follow the same laws the rest of us do.  Otherwise you keep stopping in the middle of the road and holding up traffic for no reason. 

Don't worry there's more but I'm too goddamn tired from arguing with retarded people at work all damn day.  To be continued.

[tepop84]

3.  Academia.  I won't get into the political aspects of it because that's on record.  It's too goddamn expensive to go to an average college now.  Think about this for a second.  You can spend approximately what it costs to buy a Ferrari and when you get out, everybody has the same degree you do and guess what, they're working in a call center making the same $25,000 a year you are.  Also, stop fucking with the little kids.  I know it's the times we're living in, but stay the hell out of their lunch box, stop teaching them about sex in kindergarten and let them be children and enjoy childhood for awhile.  Believe me it gets taken away quick enough.  To make matters worse I actually learned more from the adults in my life than I ever did in a classroom.  Clearly I'd have been no worse off skipping college.  Also it's time to come to grips with the fact that Academia is a business now just like anything else.  The only difference is it's also subsidized.  Textbooks don't have to cost $100 and be reprinted in new editions every year.  You don't HAVE to buy every kid in school a goddamn personal laptop.  And no my child should not need a $200 graphing calculator to do their math homework. 

I read your other ones, but this stuck out most.  It is such a sham right now.  If I had a kid that was graduation High school right now, I would tell him to figure out what he wants to do and go to a specialized school.  College is a huge waste of money, and what do you learn.  Not that much.  Basically you pay a bunch of money, and then you get a piece of paper that says you graduated.  There are lots of people who graduate, who aren't any smarter than when they got it.

[Sunstroke]

Judge's Card: BigDaddyFin Rant (with judge's notes)

Passion:   7/10
(I felt his pain, but still came away feeling like he was holding back a little. Maybe to protect me. Yeah, that's probably it.)

Cohesiveness:   8/10
(A little choppy at points, but he kept the path clear enough for all to follow)

Logic:   5/10
(Score torpedoed by head-scratching Academia and School Buses sections)

Style/Humor:   6/10
(Style was fine, but what's that I'm not hearing? Oh yeah...laughter)

Grammar:   9/10
(BigDaddyFin wields the language well. Please give props to Academia...before they're destroyed.)

Stamina:   10/10
(Not only was it long enough to be considered "beefy," but the "to be continued" promises more steak for the grill soon) 

Overall:             45/60

[JVides]

Academia?  Really?  I have to say, the fellow accountants and attorneys I know are doing pretty OK for themselves.  So are our clients.  By and large, we all went to school, and most of us paid for graduate degrees.  University is NOT, by any stretch, a waste of money.

[mecadonzilla]

1.  Playboy/Hugh Hefner.  It's bad enough the magazine sucks without having to look at this pathetic wrinkly old bastard.  To top it all off the magazine's attitude is essentially if you don't make $75,000 a year, you don't like naked women.

Talk all the shit you want about the magazine, but Heff is one of the greatest humans of the modern era.  He made porn accessible across America! He sleeps with hot model chicks whenever he can get enough Viagra.  He wears jammies not because they're a fashion statement, but because he's about to go to bed with some hot chick...and he's almost 206 years old!  And I can't stress this enough...HE MADE PORN ACCESSIBLE ACROSS AMERICA! 

This man is living the life we all dreamed we could have as teenagers.

[bsmooth]

Not all colleges and universities cost the equivalent of a Ferrari.  It id going to cost me less than 100k to finish school and go to a very good law school.

[BigDaddyFin]

The Polar Bears in the Coca Cola commercial. 

If ever I'm at the top of a hill, and I see a bunch of my food dancing around, you can bet I'm not sharing a Coke with them.  I'm running down there with whatever weapon I can find and butchering the shit out of the place and then I'm taking that goddamn Beach Boys cd and smashing it.  Then I'm loading the coolers full of Coca Cola, and all the dead penguins into the back of the truck, driving home and hoping I have enough space in my freezer. 

Polar bears suck.  They're aggravating and they get too much TV time for a habitat WHERE NOBODY LIVES.  Instead there's always one floating away on ice somewhere.  Are these the only bears on the planet that don't swim?  Are they not smart enough to move to where the ice isn't breaking? 

And Meca, did Larry Flynt have nothing to do with making porn accessible?

[fyo]

Overall:             45/60

My overall grade of the rant is A-. A good rant should be a bit incoherent. What's lacking is that little dash of crazy.

[jtex316]

As an expert in ranting and raving and being incoherently comprehensible (nice oxymoron, right?), I'll give this rant a solid A+.

There are several qualities I like about it:

- It is ordered numerically, for organizational purposes
- It is staccato-ey in feel
- It's somewhat incoherent and rambling (a key essential to a good rant)
- It's wide ranging, covering a variety of topics from sports to education to human psychology
- There are curse words mixed in with rationale for emphasis
- There are cries for help (e.g. "...keep politics the fuck out of sports.")
- There is a threat of violence (e.g. "...if I see him I'm going to punch him in the face.")
- There is the quintessential "to be continued" ending

I don't agree with Sunstroke that it needs a pinch of humor, but I would say that a pinch more of anger and frustration is always good.

I also like how you transitioned between two completely separate topics (Celebrity Shows and Bob Costas). A great rant can mix oil and water together.

Overall, great work!

[Sunstroke]

As an expert in ranting and raving and being incoherently comprehensible (nice oxymoron, right?)...

Two thoughts...

1) Your use of "oxymoron" is about half right. Unfortunately, it's the moron half.
2) Asking you to be subjective on a rant is like asking a crack junkie to be subjective about how much rock to smoke on a Friday night.

I don't agree with Sunstroke that it needs a pinch of humor, but I would say that a pinch more of anger and frustration is always good.

I suppose that's a matter of perspective...

Adding more anger increases the therapeutic value for the ranter.

Adding more humor increases the entertainment value for the reader.

[Dave Gray]

Good rant in general, though I don't agree with some points.  I think that academia is still good and important in this country.  I think the problem with it is that we're teaching everyone that college is where to go after high school and wasting people's time.  I think that people on certain tracks should go to college, and others should go to a vocational school.  Some kind of higher education is important.  Unfortunately, we're lumping everyone into the same group.

That said, I do think that college is an important tool to weed people out.  It shows that you're serious, can commit to a long term goal, and have a basic level of general education.  You still will learn more on the job, though.

[masterfins]

Nice rant, good points. I'd give it a A-.

[bsmooth]

What did the polar bears ever do to you?

[StL FinFan]

Polar bears are a great asset.  They kill people stupid enough to get too close to them, thus removing more stupid people from the population.

[Dave Gray]

I'd like to see the Kardashians go down.  I don't know who they are, but I don't really understand why they're on TV all the time.