Family Style Dining

Ah yes, family style dining. Typically seen in Chinese and Italian restaurants, this method of dining out causes me and many others extraordinary amounts of grief and agony. You see, the point of going out to a restaurant is twofold, the first being to enjoy an evening with friends or family, but the second, and I think most important aspect of the restaurant experience, is everyone ordering and consuming EXACTLY the food that they want to eat. No compromising, it's your decision and yours alone as to what you dine on, and with family style dining that aspect of the dining out experience is completely destroyed.



As you can see in that image above, the son on the left is being forced to eat vegetables against his will, the mother has a look comprised mostly of scorn and disdain because she did not want to order the fried chicken, and the daughter is looking longingly at the mashed potatoes because that is the only thing on the table that she likes to eat.

Let me offer up this typical scenario. Six people go out to an Italian restaurant to eat, and immediately everyone starts combing through the menu deciding what tickles their fancy at that given moment. Some people immediately reach a conclusion as to what they desire to eat, while others agonize over their impossible decision. It is this latter person who will always suggest the family style dining route. What always ends up happening is this, there will be one main decision maker, let's call him the leader. The leader decides what would be best for the table, how many main dishes to order, the appropriate sides to accompany said main dishes, and then he or she will usually offer up some completely off base opinion as to what these items should be. Three or four of the others at the table are the weaklings, the ones without backbone, who will simply follow the leaders wishes because they either don't want to or simply cannot rock the boat. So we are left with the one lone person, the dissenter, who doesn't agree with the leader and has no desire to dine in a family style manner.

The leader has two options here, either to acquiesce to the dissenter, let him or her order their own meal, while everyone else shares the preselected dishes. Usually this person is on the receiving end of dirty looks for the entire meal. The other option the leader has, which is the route they usually take, is to suggest that, fine, we will also order the dissenter's choice dish in addition to the preselected dishes, and the dissenter will be forced to share. This puts the dissenter on the defensive, in an unwinnable situation. You cannot say no to the leader's offer to add your dish to the rest, it would simply make you look like an ass, but what inevitably happens is that the special gnocchi that you ordered gets devoured by the rest of the table, leaving you with a small pittance of the amount you originally desired, forcing you to partake in the other, less satisfying dishes. I always find myself in the position of the dissenter, being both a picky eater and someone who does not like to share. The other dilemma you face as a dissenter is this: do you simply take more than your fair share of the dishes you actually want to eat, leaving not enough for the rest while simply ignoring the dish you don't like? Then you run the risk of being the "hog" at the table, the one who takes advantage of the family style dining scenario by eating twice as much food as anyone else. In the end, you don't get the food you want and leave hungry, or you do get the food you want, and have earned the scorn and disrespect of those dining with you. Either way, you lose, and that is why family style dining is well deserving of unbridled hatred.

The Toyota Prius

Today’s hate rant will center around the Toyota Prius (pronounced pry-us for added disdain). It is quite simply one of the ugliest cars you can purchase, right up there with the Scion xB and the dreadful Nissan Cube. There is not a single angle from which you can look at the car and have it look aesthetically pleasing. The car is so downright revolting that I’m surprised it doesn’t come with a bucket for you to keep in your garage next to your Prius for the inevitable vomit that will be expelled from your body after being forced to look at it for more than 3 seconds.



Sorry for that NSFW image, but it had to be done. There are many schools of thought on why the Prius looks the way it does. Some say that the design is extremely aerodynamic to improve fuel economy, but many believe, as do I, that the people who drive this car want to shout to the heavens that they are saving the earth. Since the motor is silent under 5 MPH when it runs on electric, and when it runs on fuel it sounds like a wind up toy, they figured the best way to let people know about their self-righteousness was to make it uglier than Sarah Jessica Parker, quite an astonishing feat if you ask me.



And this brings us to our main point, the drivers of the Prius, the self-righteous so-called saviors of the planet, who drive around glaring at people who own Land Rovers and cars with big V8 engines, proclaiming that we are destroying the OZONE layer with our CO2 emissions and wasting what precious little oil still lurks beneath the surface of the planet. What these ignorant buffoons fail to realize is that their precious little “green” cars do much more damage to the environment than any Land Rover will ever do. The nickel in the batteries that power the electric motor is mined in Canada, which is then shipped to Europe where it is refined, then to China where they make it usable in a battery, then to Japan where the nickel is actually placed into the batteries and then into the cars. Once you consider that the batteries must be replaced every seven years or so, you start to get the picture.

So, not only is the car not environmentally friendly and uglier than Sarah Jessica Parker’s face, but if you drive it like a normal person, it’s not even more fuel efficient than a normal vehicle! Top Gear did a test driving the Prius and a BMW M3 around their test track for ten laps, and guess what, the M3 got better gas mileage by almost 2MPG! The bottom line is this, the Prius is ugly, the people who drive them are for the most part complete idiots who think their shit doesn’t stink, and the way that it is made causes more damage to the environment than a Land Rover. That is why my hatred for the Prius remains unbridled.

Self Checkout Stands

We've all seen them, most of us have even tried using one at some point in our lives, and they're all rubbish.



Yes, the dreaded self checkout stand. The allure of a smaller line, not having to deal with the pimply faced bag boy asking you if plastic is okay. But, as with most things in life, these self checkout stands do not live up to their promise. You will inevitably have an item that simply refuses to scan, you have to scroll through twenty pages of items just to weigh your fresh produce, and don't even try to buy beer from one of these things, it's worse than pulling teeth. In my opinion, they only exist to entertain me as I walk through the market, watching people in their later years stare at the screen like it's written in Aramaic, unsure of what to do as the machine is screaming at them to place their item in the bag. At the very least, if stores expect people to use these horrendous machines, at least give us a discount for doing the job of the grocery store employees.

Country Music

I absolutely hate country music, and to be totally honest, it's not because of the music itself. While I find that most country musicians lack any sort of musical talent, most musicians today are completely devoid of musical talent, so that's not it. It's not the lyrics either, because a lot of country songs are about booze and women, two things which I hold very close to my heart.

So what is it about country music that I hate so much? It's the people who like country music, the apologists and the evangelists of this style of music.



These are the people who listen to country music constantly, who proclaim to the heavens that the "artist" must have been writing the song about them, and who for some reason cannot comprehend the fact that someone can't like country music. They will spend hours telling you the reasons that you in fact already like country music, with such nonsensical arguments as "But you love The Eagles, and they're pretty much a country band!" These arguments in fact do not make one want to listen to country music, but rather drives them further away from it, faster than an evangelical Christian drives through West Hollywood at night. These are the people who go to three day country music festivals, spend half of it not listening to the music but rather drinking beer out of the back of a pickup truck and urinating on fences. Who in their right mind would want to associate themselves with this type of behavior? The bottom line is this, if you like country music, that's fine, but don't try and get me to like it too, because my hatred for it is unbridled and my mind will not be changed.

About this blog

Hi, I'm Kyle. There are a lot of things in this world to hate, so I'm going to write about them.