Hello Darkness! The Official Blog of Helen Keller

Folks, there are simply too many phrases what should make your blood seethe and rage. Enough of an introduction, let's get on to the phrases that need to be eliminated from the vernacular faster than Nicole Richie puking a grape.

Here we grow again!

This little diddy is usually found on massive fucking billboards festering away at intersections like a rampant yeast infection. It implies that some sort of massive commercial empire is annexing a portion of a box mall but they want to announce it in a cutesy-pie way lest you recognize them for the slave-driving gouge-mart they're sure to be. Either that, or you've got some shitty house-builder announcing Phase II of it's new survey, either Rosegarden, Tanglebum or Locks on the Glugaglug.

It's the faux sincerity (how's that for an oxymoron? Somebody fax me a PhD in English from that stupid University of Arizona at Phoenix for which I keep seeing banner ads.) that enrages me. It's a cliched phrase and could also properly belong in pre-packaged humour.

The only cure for such a disease is to cut the base of the sign down. The Ozymandean image of a trumpeted announcement of growth cut down at the knees and face down in the mud is too rich to pass over.

P.S. Fuck you Wal-Mart.

That's why he/she/you/they make the big bucks

Do you know somebody that made a good decision? Have you ever heard somebody follow up that good decision with a splattering of idiot mud? That idiot mud would be this phrase. And, by the by, nothing is more pretentious than some dipshit who announces it about himself. Anybody who stands up to announce that "that's why I make the big bucks". This person needs to have a fax machine thrown at him immediately. Nothing fancy, just a Brother to the mouth.

Also, there's no irony in using this phrase. That would be like announcing you have ironic kidney failure. And if you have ironic kidney failure, you've still got to get humbling dialysis. So there.

What do you do, read the dictionary?

There are some intellectually stunted folks that command a whopping nine word vocabulary. Consequently, they are stunned and caught off guard if anybody happens to use/know/state a word which exists outside of "The Nine" (not to be confused with the pretentiously bad follow up to Lost on ABC). These people then have no problem employing the "Me No Dumb" theory which means, quite simply, that if THEY don't know the word then YOU must be some sort of powernerd because, of course, in their world, "Me No Dumb." Once the thought that you know a word they don't emerges from the dark static-fuzzy cloud that is there thought process, they've got to take you down a peg lest they be seen as retarded. Again. So, they'll use this phrase.

I have to admit that I've countered this phrase with a pilfered comeback, but it rings true. I stole it from Ron Gilbert's fantastic Secret of Monkey Island. A simple staredown propped up with "No, but if you read more, you'd know that one" is usually enough to gain supremacy back again.

And afterall, supremacy is what this is all about.

I've been hatching farily poor endings lately, so just imagine that last scene from Tron where Dillenger watches the code for Space Paranoids scroll on his sexy desk-monitor. Then picture a smug Jeff Bridges. Or the part where Sark gets the disc in the head.

Whatever.