Tom Bell Dot Net

1. Excessive, tacky Christmas lights. I’m fucking fed up with this shit now. A few years ago, it was still ironically amusing when a few sporadic eccentrics would fill their lawns with enough wattage to be seen from space. Now every street has one of these cunts, and it’s getting fucking tiresome. “It’s just a bit of fun!” No, it’s not. It’s an eyesore. Your neighbours hate you. And the waste of electricity alone is obscene. Climate change is destroying the planet: conspicuous over-consumption of energy should be villified, not celebrated. “It’s Christmassy!” No, it’s not. A wreath on the door is Christmassy. Flashing lights, illuminated inflatables, a robotic Santa waving his arm: it looks like fucking Vegas. Or rather, it looks like you were aiming for Vegas, and what you actually achieved was redneck brothel. “I’m raising money for charity!” Oh right, you spend thousands of pounds on decorations, and then expect ME to make a donation? How about you fuck off? I hope you short a circuit and burn to a crisp.
2. Multi-coloured, flashing Christmas lights. Pay attention next time you see a Christmas scene in a film or advert. One designed by a professional designer. I guarantee you, there will be no coloured or flashing lights. Contrary to the belief of tasteless suburban idiots, what ACTUALLY looks Christmassy is steady, warm white lights. Not flashing, not every colour in the rainbow. At a push, I can even forgive red and green lights: they still look shit, but at least I can see where you’re coming from. But fucking BLUE lights? When the fuck did blue become a Christmas colour?
3. Makers and sellers of novelty gifts. You know you’re making a load of shit, and you know it’s all going to be thrown away. You might as well dump it all straight into landfill, and simply steal the money from our well-meaning but clueless grandparents. As far as I’m concerned, you’re morally equivalent to OAP-targeting phone scammers. Or worse: at least their business model is less polluting.
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INDIA SPECIAL EDITION

I really enjoyed my trip around India. This special edition of the Hate List does not represent my overall opinion of the country and its people. For a balanced view, it should be read in conjunction with my Highlights of India blog post.

1. People loudly belching in the street.
2. People loudly hacking up phlegm and spitting it out in the street.
3. People chewing paan and spitting it out in the street.
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1. Progress bars which reach the end, and then spend an indeterminately long time paused on 100% before finally completing the task.
2. When someone, on a training course for example, lists sources of information, and one of them is “the internet”. You might as well say, “reading”. The internet is not a source. The internet is a means of communicating with innumerable sources.
3. “Free” wifi spots which you have to register with to use. I don’t need any more username and password combinations in my life, certainly not for some random wifi hotspot I’ll never use again.
4. The word “webinar”.
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(Originally published on 1st August, 2012)

1. Trying to spread chilled butter on cold toast.
2. The inexplicable fluff you get in an old jar of instant coffee granules.
3. Pillows which are too thick, so that while one isn’t thick enough on its own, two are way too thick.
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(Originally published on 5th September, 2010)

1. Most Haunted. I hate the fact that a successful prime-time programme has been made out of a premise little more convincing than your average YouTube compilation of “floating orbs” (ie. flashlit raindrops). And the fact that the analysis is on a similar level to YouTube comments. I hate the fact that for all the spiritualists, mediums, “parapsychologists” and other spurious experts featured on the programme, not one sceptic is interviewed to point out that nocturnal creaking in an old house can have a perfectly natural explanation. I hate the fact that no-one ever acknowledges or even mentions the possibility of mundane physical phenomena, tricks of perception and imagination, mass hysteria, or plain old deception by the “experts” profiting from the show. And even more than I hate Derek Acorah, who is a shameless fraud and liar, but at least knows what he’s doing, I hate the heifer-eyed credulous moron, Yvette Fielding.
2. Uri Geller, an unashamed, unrepentant fraud. Look into his eyes, and you will see a cold, empty vacuum. They are the eyes of a man who has lived by lies all his life, and who knows that his entire career, fame and fortune are built on nothing but foul deceit. He is a common scam-artist with pretensions of grandeur, a corrupt, dishonest little worm, and we shouldn’t stand for him any longer. Ignore him. Encourage everyone you know to ignore him. Don’t watch any programmes with him on, don’t buy any magazines with him in, boycott him until his snivelling little lies no longer get him any money or attention. In the name of truth, and the good of society, he must be crushed without mercy.
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(Originally published on 3rd October, 2010)

IT SPECIAL EDITION

Co-authored by Tom Bell and Wam Silliams

1. People who don’t know the difference between Google and the internet, so that if you ask them to go to apple.com, they will go to Google and type in “apple.com”.
2. People who don’t know that you can press Return to submit a form, and are hopeless on the mouse, so that after typing in “apple.com”, they will slowly remove their hand from the keyboard, timidly grip the mouse, and slowly move it over to the “Search” button. Hit Return, you mouthbreathing simpletons!
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(Originally published on 13th April, 2008)

1. People who read their phone numbers out loud and break them down into the wrong groups of numbers, eg. “072 814 67 89 4”, leaving you mentally floundering. How hard is it to read the code followed by two trigrams?
2. Posh crisps, particularly ones which try to make the flavour sound gourmet when really it’s just cheese and onion. The worst I’ve seen so far is “mature cheddar and lyonnaise shallots”.
3. Anything which advertises itself as containing “Ylang Ylang”. Or anyone who has ever uttered the phrase “Ylang Ylang”.
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(Originally published on 2nd May, 2005)

1. Student-produced magazines which use 47 different fonts.
2. The 15 people out of a million who buy products from email spammers, providing them profit and incentive to continue spamming. These people must be rounded up, stripped naked, and released into a forest. I will then enter the forest, armed with a variety of assault weaponry, and the Games will begin.
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(Originally published on 29th April, 2003)

1. Use of the phrase ‘I could care less’, which is a stunning example of people simply repeating something they’ve heard without spending even a fraction of a second considering what the words actually mean.
2. The US pronunciation of ‘croissant’, i.e. ‘cruh-SONT’.
3. The way Americans profess to love cheese, while the only cheeses available in the country are rubbery, tasteless versions of cheddar and ‘Swiss’.
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(Originally published on 25th July, 2002)

1. The word ‘beastiality’. As if ‘bestiality’ just means any sex, and one has to pun it with the word ‘beast’ to talk about animal sex. Look, you etymologically-challenged fuckwits, ‘bestiality’ comes from the Latin ‘bestia’ meaning ‘beast’. Which leads to my next hate…
2. Puns between two words which come from exactly the same root, like ‘beastiality’ above, or ‘terror-riffic’.
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(Originally published on 25th October, 2001)

1. Someone who will buy a round and then keep reminding everyone all night that they did, as if we should feel guilty, or give that person special treatment.
2. Charges for toilets. I really object to being asked to pay for something that I could do against the wall outside. Exactly what service am I getting for my money? None. The wall it is, then.
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(Originally published on 6th September, 2000)

1. Charlie Dimmock. It’s a shaming reflection on men in general that this woman has reached such a level of fame and success, simply by not wearing a bra. The fact is that she’s actually profoundly unattractive, yet she enjoys a huge popular celebrity status which can only be attributed to her poor, saggy, unkempt breasts.
2. Richard Whiteley. I can’t believe this man has escaped my lists so far. Countdown is turned into string of bumbling discourse and awkward silences by a man who is simply an incompetent presenter.
3. The coccix. If I were leading an advanced biotech research team investigating human gene manipulation, my first priority would be to get rid of this little bastard.
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(Originally published in 1999 or 2000)

1. Ex-“New” Labour spin-doctor Derek Draper: an unbelievably pretentious, hypocritical, self-important, right-wing tosser. On Question Time once he said that smoking should be banned outright, and when asked if he’d ever tried it, uttered the words, “I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life. I’ve tried a cannabis cigarette.”
2. People who say that because A is so much better than B, you can’t compare them. That IS a comparison.
3. People who say “y’know” (especially the culturally-subnormal American types on talk shows) If we did know, then haven’t you just wasted your time saying it?
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(Originally published between 1997 and 1999)

1. The sort of widespread ignorance of computers and the internet which was endemic in the late 90s, and resulted in incidents such as a Ford TV ad which ended with, “E-mail us at www.ford.com”. Unfortunately, if you look up Senator Ted Stevens you’ll find that such ignorance is still widespread, especially among exactly those people in charge of regulating the internet.
2. When a written document is shown in a film or TV programme, and you don’t know whether it’s important to the plot to read it or not. Then you try to anyway, but only catch a bit of it, and spend the next ten minutes of the film worrying that you missed something crucial.
3. People who think the only way to type a capital letter on a computer is to press Caps Lock, press the letter and take Caps Lock off again.
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