The Inferno

Hell is not a Wikiname.

Therefore The Inferno is my shiny new room 101 for things one doesn't like- ideally wikirelated. --WJR

(NEW!) New York Inferno.

Feel free to add your own twopennorth of hatred:

• Sport disrupting TV schedules
• Cruelty to animals (q.v. '28 Days Later'. Vivisection turns people into zombie psychopaths --TL) This story made my blood boil: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2788921.stm> -- WJR
• Idiot machines/politicians/tabloid fodder (eg Ulrikakakaka etc.)
• Silly discussions about who exactly is the 'greatest' Briton which amount to precisely nothing
• People disrupting your TV watching by wishing to watch sport, or your placid attempts at emailing by playing sport where sport should not be played, eg the JCR...
• Wikizens who rant on about particular issues without revealing their identity: Wiki Is Open, but it sure ain't a chatroom Is that by any chance directed at me?
• LBM and (though he has appeared in another Room 101) Michael bloody Grade --TL (Judging by his opinions in latest DWM, Colin Baker could probably be persuaded to appear on Room 101 and deposit Michael Grade therein- Seigneur Grade could then spend the rest of eternity with Doctor Who where he consigned it... heh heh heh) --WJR
• NASA and the ESA being too incompetent/underfunded to get us into the future predicted by all the space operas without the rather dubious help of the Russians --TL
• British Weather --TL
• Micro Soft(TM) Windows (TM) 95 onwards, or indeed any operating system that looks more smart-alec than it actually ends up being. That Paperclip comes in for particular vilification --TL
• Herald whenever it 'dies', thanks to the incompetence of OUCS or its contractors, or any Web-based mail account, or any website whatsoever, that thrives on those bloody pop-up adverts. Grr. Worse: websites that thrive (e.g CNN.com) on pop-unders. --TL
• Couples who don't know when it's time to get a room.
• The sheer obstructiveness of the laws of physics. 4 years to even get to Proxima Centauri? Come off it, that's worse than British Rail! --WJR
• Persistent people in the street, by which I mean not just the usual 'change please' but all the market researchers/advertisers etc. --TL
• Inadequate Investment --TL
• Dead links where there should be links to something you're actually quite interested in... --TL
• Rumour Mills --TL
• Cherwell, the Flooding Thereof -- WJR
• A computer which will apparently boot perfectly well first thing in the morning, but not at any other time of day. I know some people are 'morning people' (and are strange and wrong), but that's just ridiculous! -- WJR
• Fog. "What's fascinating about fog?" -- WJR It may look eerie by moonlight, but it's flipping cold --TL
• Drunken Singing. -- WJR Bad enough when they're singing something you ordinarily like; worse when they're singing the likes of 'He-e-ey Baby' etc. --TL
• Websites that are designed with flashy advanced technology and whose designers omit to provide the slightest link to a simpler HTML version for those of us who are browserally impaired. When this prevents you actually spending money on them, they're the ones losing out. -- WJR Yes, there are, regrettably, some websites which are the epitome of style over substance. Guardian Unlimited, mercifully, is not one, but too many of the websites upon which people may well depend are just too clever-clever to use... --TL
• Computer Telephone Services. It's not the 'Press one for life. Press two for a high voltage shock down the 'phone line' aspect I hate so much, as the 'cut'n'paste' spoken word kidnapper's note dialogue. Would it be too much to ask for the same voice to record all the words in a sentence? Or indeed for them to be recorded in a sane, even tone? Oh, and: "Please hold. We are transferring your call. Your call will be answered in approximately six minutes. <muzak>...." -- WJR A weakness of voice synthesisers, I think: probably (possibly) this will improve over time. As for the muzak, thank goodness you've never had to call Northwest Airlines' Customer Service department, where they not only play Muzak but blast you with adverts for loyalty schemes/scams while they do it... --TL Well, as far as pre-recorded voices go, you can't get much more disturbing than West Anglia Great Northern Railways, whose on-board announcements appear to be courtesy of Servalan. Not to mention the fact that poor tape editing makes her seem to announce imminent arrival in "Blundon King's Coss". -- WJR
• Those occasions when a piece of technology you need is working perfectly reasonably, but a techie feels it could be working more efficiently and, in taking it apart or reprogramming it to 'improve' it, breaks it. -- WJR Is that by any chance directed at me? I remind you of the BOFH's dictum - 'If it ain't broke, open it up and find out what makes it so bloody special.' -- TA Actually was directed at Nick -- WJR Okay, never mind. I'll get you next time, Ramsden! -- TA
• Politicians who try to use moral blackmail- e.g. anyone who says "Anyone who disagrees with me on this point is supporting the terrorists!" etc. We're old enough to make up our own minds, and polarising difficult issues helps no one. -- WJR And, sad to say, it's this sort of attitude which leads to a self-defeating Mc Carthyism --TL Oh, it gets scarier. In the 1960s, at Manchester University (then rather liberal and left-wing) an American politics lecturer justified the Arms Race by, in all seriousness, telling his students "Better Dead than Red." -- WJR
• On a related note, policies that are more likely to persecute those who have nothing to hide, and might well lead to serious miscarriages of justice in general: the PATRIOT 2 Act of the US <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_Security_Enhancement_Act_of_2003> in particular --TL
• <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2810203.stm> rather made my blood boil, especially after the whole 'comparing Saddam to Hitler' thing has been so comprehensively debunked. There's no descriptive meaning here, it's all expressive. The full article is here <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,905294,00.html>, and makes him sound like a megalomaniac. "History will be My Judge" indeed... that's really the sort of rhetoric we need when we're trying to convince the Arab nations that this isn't an anti-Islamic Crusade, isn't it, Tony? -- WJR
• When Yahoo/Lycos/other quickly and competently loads all its adverts into your browser, and then sits around for upwards of two minutes downloading the bits of the page that you actually need- i.e. the e-mail login. -- WJR Yes, the world is being needlessly deluged in advertising. The only good thing that can be said about those bloody pop-ups is that they save on the trees shredded to make the paper that would be required to make more of those fall-outs you find in anything from the Times to the Radio Times... --TL
• The TSA. Fear ye, fear ye. --TL
• Tech Angst. -- WJR
• The corollory of Tech Angst- machines that you think are broken when they aren't, because you're not jabbing the on switch hard enough. -- WJR
• Lost Property -- WJR
• Cheap Political Jibes --TL
• Disturbing Dreams -- WJR
• Inconsiderate parkers of bicycles, who artistically arrange their resting iron steeds so that their handlebars catch the stomachs, coats, sleeves, or scarves of passing pedestrians. -- WJR What is it about cyclists that seems to make them most a menace to non-cyclists? Broad St has become more of a gauntlet to run than ever --TL
• Queues of unnecessary length: I can just about bear them with philosophy, but a student of queues <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-561166,00.html> has found that most Britons do not. Adieu, the 'orderly queue of one'... --TL
• Inexplicable stupidity on the part of those in power. For example, the government's flailing about in pursuit of its 50% higher education target, in the context of the fact that 25% of secondary school students leave without five good GCS Es (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/features/mike_baker/2713299.stm>). Is this another example of Government By Panic? -- WJR
• Government By Panic in general. -- WJR
• Excessive Sabbatarianism. Why is it that you can get a copy of the Sunday Sport or whatever on a Sunday, but you can't send something by post which might be quite important, or so much as buy a Bible? I mean, they're not so solicitous about respecting the Jewish or Muslim holy days, are they?--TL
• Paranoid Smoke Alarms. -- WJR
• The Nokia Ring Tone Of Evil -- WJR Also known (to Nokia users) as 'Grande Valse'. Immediately recognisable as the stereotypical mobile phone ringtone, sadly still used by some unenlightened philistines --TL
• Extreme religious fundamentalism into which even well-meaning evangelism can subside: <http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,899641,00.html> is the best I've seen on the subject --TL
• <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2813753.stm> If the speculation here is true, then it rather makes Tony Blair's promises of 'plenty of opportunities for debate' on the Iraq issue a little empty. Mind you, it's not yet clear how much this 'War by the Back Door' may be the RumsfeldBushDevice pushing things on at their own pace. -- WJR
• Old women who can't use cash machines using cash machines.
• Spam (junk email)
• Bureaucracy. Oxford City Council. Two evils with but a single MO. -- WJR
• Cinema Economy Class Flight Syndrome -- WJR
• Meaningless pretension: <http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern> I rest my case.
• People adding new (non sub-heading) entries to lists at random points in the list, rather than at the end, making locating updates a pain. -- WJR
• Downham Market Town Council -- WJR
• Borked Recordings --TL