"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing." ~ Kingsley Amis

This is precisely what print media does for me: annoys the everlovin' SHIT out of me. We get a total of nine magazines and one daily newspaper in our home every month and rarely do I feel like I'm getting the whole story. Now I grant you, specialty magazines are going to have a slant, especially ones like "American Rifleman" and "Cycle World." They're writing to a particular crowd of like-minded people.

However, if you're writing to a much larger, more general demographic - men, women, parents, THE HUMAN RACE - you should really try to be less biased. This is especially true where the newspaper is true. We get the San Jose Mercury News and I occasionally peruse the articles while on my way to the crossword puzzle, one of a few elements necessary to my morning getting off on the right food. I can't stand that newspaper. The Chronicle is worse. Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find a newspaper I like. I get my news during the morning news and online. I don't much care for ABC/CBS/NBC news either but we watch it for local news, traffic, weather, etc.

My beef today is with magazines, namely "Details." My husband subscribed to this magazine through theCoke Rewards program when we couldn't figure out how to spend our points. We just selected four or five magazines. The rest of the rewards were crappy. So Details was on the short list. It's totally irrelevant to Rob, it caters to white-collar, fashion-conscious guys who shop at stores whose price tags show more numbers to the left of the decimal than to the right. Not my hunny. Heh.

But in the interest of not letting a rag go to waste - and in the interest of having bathroom reading material - we read it. Some of the articles are interesting and revealing but some are irritating and mind-numbingly bizarre. This also got my goat. It's in the "exit" section of "Details," which is the last page and it's a blog-type-thing written by, as near as I can figure, the office ghost. For the life of me, I can't find an author to this damn thing.

The top half of the page...please note the blue box of text. Annoying, juvenile, presumptuous and possibly even racist:


And the bottom half of the page:


This magazine is so pretentious! Needless to say, we won't be renewing this subscription next summer. Anybody need 12 months worth of kindling?