I am in a bad mood this holiday season, and that means I'm taking you all with me. I have a lot of grievances that have had to remain unaddressed at the end of this year. Too many to count, and too many to ever get through, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to Andy Rooney this place up a bit with the ones I do remember, so here we go.
• Grievance: I don't like how prescribe, proscribe, and postscript mean vastly different things. In particular, proscribe does not mean what it VERY OBVIOUSLY should mean, and instead means something not at all like that. Proscribe should mean the same thing as prescribe, except the professional version. Doctors prescribe prescriptions, but specialist doctors who you are not allowed to see unless you have a referral written by a regular doctor and notarized with the blood of three goats that all make more money than you can write you a proscription, which is the gone-pro version of a prescription, and a postscription is a prescription that a doctor issues after already loading you up on a month's worth of sample packs to see whether or not it works.
• Grievance: Wed-nes-day. Seriously? No. Screw you. Wensday.
• Grievance: Maybe about 20 years ago there was this big restaurant trend in giving you "deconstructed" entrees. I don't know if it's a thing anymore, but the deal was that you'd go into a place that only took reservations and was booked weeks in advance, and one of the specials would be something like a "deconstructed" burger in which the meat, the bun, each topping, and each condiment would be brought to the table on a separate plate and you would be tasked with putting it all in your mouth-hole in some mysterious sequence that would allegedly end up far better than the original peasant version and by the way it costs 70 bucks now.
This was mainly done with salads: Here, have five undressed romaine leaves. No, we're not going to make them a manageable size, this is how they came out of the dirt, and you're going to savor and appreciate the time we did not spend putting ingredients on them instead of next to them. Twenty bucks.
• Grievance: I like Star Wars just fine. Don't get me wrong, I thought the first TWO movies were absolutely transformative. I watched the Star Wars Holiday Special on television, on the day it premiered, and it was just as insanely terrible as the legends say, I mean absolutely WTF-level horrifying, but we kids still put up with it and sat there in the required stupor because it was that or nothing. But I wish, I sincerely wish, that we could all just get together and agree that George Lucas was winging this story from day one and was certainly not trying very hard at it. There was no big plan. There was no, "Oh it's going to be a trilogy of trilogies and I have it all planned out in advance." He was making this up from movie two and didn't care if any of it made sense or contradicted the rest or blah-blah-blah.
Sure, right, Ben Kenobi took Darth Vader's child off to Darth Vader's original home planet to hide him, then had nothing to do with him until the robot that Darth Vader built but completely forgot about was caught in a space battle and crash landed on the same planet, some random Space Wensday, within walking distance of the hidden kid. Whoops! Oh, well, here, have a lightsaber.
What's this, Luke? The only nonparental female figure you have ever met IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY turns out to be your own sister? Who was also hidden from dad in the spectacularly cunning disguise of … a politically connected princess and galactic diplomat who interacted with the father, who could not be allowed to know of her existence, on at least a semi-regular basis?
What's that? The Force is not, in fact, an unseen animating energy that flows through all living and nonliving things but in fact has ONE VERY SPECIFIC EXCLUSION—a greedy desert-dwelling race completely devoid of this spiritual power, and therefore unmoved by its holy spirits of persuasion? Get. Out.
What's that, the plot of this next one is that the balance-of-power-altering superweapon has been rebuilt? Just how big is the space garage holding these things?
Here is the plot of every Star Wars movie after the first two: (1) Here is the world you love. It's neat! (2) Here is the new toy you're going to buy based on this movie. Here it is. Buy it. You can have the huggable plushie, the incongruous new vehicle, or the new bad guy's slightly different murder weapon.
Look, I get it, this is an amazing world with all sorts of just top-notch takes on what an ultrapopulated galaxy might look like, and it sends a thrill up your leg just thinking about it and there is nothing quite as theater-satisfying as seeing the local dirt rancher singlehandedly murder just absolute mountains of no-name goosesteppers. I'm on board. I just want someone, somewhere, to acknowledge that this thing lost plot continuity after one and 4/5ths of a movie and that there's someone in Disney now tasked with making sure it never, ever, ever gets it back.
• Grievance: Speaking of, you know, that, it appears the new game in town is for every individual media corporation to insist that you purchase separate "subscriptions" to only the media they produce and none of the others. That, the lords of capitalism decided, was what was really pissing Americans off about their cable companies: Paying money for three good channels and two hundred televised crimes against humanity is fantastic, but is there any way we can break this out so that we can have the experience of paying bills and navigating intentionally spiteful customer service menus ten times a month instead of once? Please? And for the love of God, make sure every subscription finances at least one absolute boardroom monster.
No, we don't want micropayments, where you tell us which shows you have available and we buy each one separately for some reasonable price reasonably split with the actual people who produced it; we prefer to be told that seeing the one show you're actually basing this whole cash grab around will instead require connecting an artery directly into your worldwide corporate plasma-extraction machine. Thank God we finally found a nice, upstanding solution to the problem of fragmenting media markets reconsolidating into gargantuan media monopolies.
• Grievance: There are too many kinds of cheese, which wouldn't be a problem except half of them seem to think they're better than we are. I don't like smug cheese. I realize this is not the biggest problem we are facing right now, but at some point this needs to be addressed.