Why do people drive Miatas?

Seriously, that has got to be the poorest excuse for a sports car I have ever seen. If you're having a midlife crisis badly enough to require a sports car, wouldn't you require a real one?

I actually have no idea how the Miata stacks up, performance-wise, against real sports cars--the Corvette, or the BMW Z3, or one of the little Mercedes ones that says "Kompressor" on it.

This kind of actual data is completely irrelevant. It looks like something a child might have as a toy. A female child.

It will not make up for your bald spot.

Why don't people understand auxiliary verbs?

Mostly I take issue with the disappearance of "have."

Now, I know that "I could've" and "I could of" are pronounced in roughly the same way. This, however, does not prevent "I could of" from being totally meaningless.

I remember having to memorize a list of all the common helping verbs for school. "Of" is not one of them. It does not change the sense or tense of any verb. It is a preposition. It has no place in the predicate.

This error wouldn't bother me quite as much as it does if it were confined to illiterate eighth-graders. But I saw it on National Review Online the other day (and not on one of the blogs, either). This is inexcusable.

Have we forgotten how to teach our children their own language?

Why do people perform Friel when they could perform Synge?

So, let's take the proposition that an Irish play must be put on, and accept it.

Now we have another question. Why would anyone, ever, in any situation, perform Dancing at Lughnasa?

As an incidental concern, no one knows how to pronounce "Lughnasa" (except for me, so please don't get uppity and tell me). Beyond that, even if they've figured out "Lughnasa," they must at one point in the play say "Armagh," which has, in my experience, proven difficult (again, I know how to say it, but I appear to be in a tiny minority).

But also. That play is terrible. It's depressing and miserable and damn-all happens.

Why wouldn't you do something by John Millington Synge instead? My personal preference would be for Playboy of the Western World, because it's completely hilarious and nothing really bad happens to anyone, even though they're Irish. But if that's not drama enough for you, you could do Riders to the Sea. On no account Deirdre of the Sorrows, though.

My high school did Dancing at Lughnasa while I was there. Everyone hated it. Nobody went. It was horrible. And now they're doing it again. I suppose enough time has passed that no one remembers, but the play is, get this, still horrible.

There are good plays out there, people. You don't have to do bad ones just to prove you can.

Why are non-widescreen videos released?

There are very few things I hate more than watching a movie when large swaths have been cut off each side. Also that stupid "formatted to fit your television" message at the beginning is like a slap in the face.

While it is true that most of the time it's pretty hard to tell that stuff is missing, that makes it even more annoying when you lose letters off the edge. I'm hoping that the film was shot and produced with enough care that it's actually significant that I'm losing large percentages. And I watch movies with lots of explosions, so I want the maximum amount of bang for my buck.

There's the argument that cutting off the edges allows everything else to be larger; if you have little black bars at the top and bottom you're wasting screen space. This is becoming less important every day--screens are bigger and their proportions are closer to cinematic screens. And even if this weren't true, fullscreen is still stupid.

I watch most of my movies on a fifteen inch laptop screen. Independence Day loses a little oomph, but it would not have more oomph if it were fullscreen.

I would just like them to stop releasing fullscreen so that people can't screw it up when they buy me presents.

Why is talking with the mouth full a lost art?

It's entirely possible to do so in a polite manner. I learned this from Gigi when very young. Also, formal dinners would be pretty silent, if it weren't. Or everyone would go hungry. Neither of these is a good option.

I guess the key thing here is that you shouldn't have too much food in your mouth while trying to speak. Nor should you chaw savagely upon your food as though it is a small animal you are trying to subdue.

The worst offenders I have seen recently are a family who apparently get a snack somewhere and then, while eating it, go to a different shop and buy things. There are a lot of steps that are wrong here, but it's the talking with the mouth full that's the worst. It is almost plausible that they are merely extremely hungry, and therefore they are allowed to eat. But they really should attempt to do so in a more subtle and less disgusting way. I'm sure the people who work in the shop are pretty insulted. I was.

And you before you say that they must just have had a negligent upbringing, the mother is one of the prime culprits. We are two generations removed from any manners at all, people. I, for one, am terrified.

Why does Helen go with Paris?

I know that, if she doesn't, there's no story. Bear with me here. (Also, forget Aphrodite for the moment. She's rubbish and a weasel and therefore immaterial.)

Paris is the worst. He is only one of Priam's fifty sons, he has no real future expectations, and he's a total jerkweed.

I know that in the Alexandros, fragmentary though it is, we have some hint of a macho, worthwhile Paris. Deiphobus is all concerned about his status as tough guy, and Hector has to be placatory to everyone involved. Paris, here, is quite an athlete and a warrior and displays the hardy, honest constitution you would expect from someone who had been brought up as a shepherd on a mountain.

Unfortunately, unlike Hector, who, though he was to the manor born, retains some vestiges of a sense of personal responsibility, Paris takes the opportunities of living in a king's house to become an effete pustule who shirks absolutely everything.

Sure, he's dashing and handsome, I guess. But enough to sneak away from your husband (who is a king) to a place where your husband will not be a king and everyone will think of you as a whore? Even before you bring total ruin and despair to their city? I think even Orlando Bloom would pall, really. Especially after ten years of watching him let everyone else die while fighting his battles.

You would think she would have some standards, wouldn't you?

Why do theatre companies ruin perfectly good shows?

This generally goes for Shakespeare more than other playwrights. Apparently directors feel as though, since the play has been put on for a few centuries, they must do something "new" and "different."

Usually this seems to involve grit and poor lighting. And a Iago who talks into a barrel very quickly the whole time, so that you have no idea what he's saying. Also as much nudity as possible.

Why would you do this to the Bard? What has he ever done to you?

Modern dress doesn't bother me. Victorian dress doesn't bother me. What bothers me is inscrutably insane theatrical choices that make the play difficult to watch. Come on, people. Your pretentious artiness is making everyone else miserable.

Why is so much cheap beer made?

You know, I watch football, and I see hundreds of ads for not-very-good beer, and I wonder what would happen to the quality of the beer if Budweiser, for instance, put all the money they spend on advertising into making their beer better.

But no, these companies keep making the same vile garbage, year after year. Why?

I know, I know, some people don't care enough about how beer tastes to spend more than ten bucks for a 30-rack. Or probably the taste is completely immaterial, and all they want is the alcohol content.

Acknowledgment of this makes the beer companies into cynical manipulators, playing on the weaknesses of the common man to spread bilge merely because they can. I find this grasping and evil.

Do we not have a moral duty to these poor slobs to keep them from drinking swill?

Why does facebook have all these stupid applications?

Facebook is useful for a few reasons: you don't have to remember birthdays, you can check sexual orientation and relationship status (sometimes), and you can stay in touch with people on an informal and largely stress-free level.

I do not care what the next movie in your Netflix queue is. I do not care what kind of zombie, ninja, or pirate you are. I am completely indifferent to virtual hatching eggs with enormous gerbils in them.

Your favorite movies hold enough information for me on your cinematic tastes. If you love the Red Sox that much, you can put them in your interests. You can even join an "I love the Red Sox" group.

What I don't need is pointless boxes I need to close in order to glean any kind of relevant information from your profile. What I don't need is massively increased load time just so I may have the privilege of minimizing these boxes.

Can't you keep track of your own bookshelf without duplicating it on the internet?

Why do people write to "Dear Full Name?"

It actually makes the letter look significantly more impersonal. If the last name is involved, it should be with the honorific.

For instance, "Dear Miss Terwilliger" is infinitely better than "Dear Gwendolyn Terwilliger." You may run into some problems with which honorific to use. But "Ms." is always safe for women (it makes me want to throw things, but I am not typical), and if the addressee holds an advanced degree he will probably not get particularly angry if he is addressed merely as "Mr." It's not ideal, but at least you don't look like an unlettered slob.

And if you're that worried about which title to use, just go for the first name. "Dear Gwendolyn" is obviously better than "Dear Gwendolyn Terwilliger." It might be a shade too familiar (although if you're not in the honorific zone, it shouldn't be), but, again, you don't sound like an idiot.

Using both names makes it sounds like some kind of sweepstakes scam, or a letter from the government. Aren't these things best avoided?

Why are all hybrid cars ugly?

They all look like the less attractive kind of small burrowing rodent. Which is not a car I would ever drive.

Possibly the most beautiful cars of all time were the Jaguar E-Types (I exclude larger beautiful cars, like mid-30s Bentleys, for the purposes of this argument). Now, not many cars can look like that, given strictures of engine size, car size, and basic cussedness and copyright issues.

However. I am only willing to take a certain level of aesthetic hit in order to be a tree-hugger. It must be possible to build a nice-looking hybrid automobile. I refuse to believe that it is not. There has to be something between Prius and E-Type that is both efficient and attractive.

It's as if the hippies all banded together and said "Ah, we will make the ugliest car we can come up with, so that anyone with an ounce of aesthetic sense will refuse to drive it and we can sip our soy milk and denounce them for wasteful hooligans."

I'm all for efficiency. I just don't want to drive a car that looks like a gopher.

Why don't bartenders know how to use bitters?

When I ask for a pink gin, what I mean is a gin and tonic with eight to ten drops of bitters. And I like bitters more than most people.

This should turn the cocktail pink. Thus the name. It should not turn the drink brown or orange. That is far more bitters than should be in anything ever.

Sometimes I don't trust the bartender to know this, so I say that I would like a gin and tonic with bitters. Well, I used to say that. When my drink came back brown (which must have used about half the bottle of bitters) I stopped saying that, and started saying I wanted a gin and tonic with a "dash" of bitters.

Apparently "dash" is one of those difficult words that people who are nominally trained as bartenders do not know.

A pink gin is not a weird drink. Bartenders should know how to make it. I should not have to give specific instructions. It is not a martini.

God forbid I ask for a Manhattan.

Why is Red Dawn not the best movie ever?

It has Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. It has the Soviets invading somewhere not coastal. It was made in the eighties.

By my calculations, this should be a movie involving lots of explosions and excellent one-liners. And mostly likely an improbable, seemingly impossible love story concerning Patrick Swayze and some girl with a funky nose.

BUT. Even though Jennifer Grey is actually in the film, and therefore all of this would seem a no-brainer, it's atrocious.

Lea Thompson (who is also, one would think, a guarantor of cinematic excellence) merely has a weird, awkward non-romance with a stoic military type. Charlie Sheen whines a lot. The Commies are neither cartoonish enough nor evil enough. No Kenny Loggins is involved. There are no one-liners at all.

And everybody dies.

What the hell kind of awesome eighties film is this? Yeah, sure, it was the Cold War. Yeah, sure, we were actually pretty worried about the Soviets. That's all fine. You can make a serious film about that. But why in the name of all that is holy did it star Patrick Swayze? That's just false advertising.

Why do people toss about the word "martini?"

Let's review. A martini is made of gin and dry vermouth, garnished with an olive or a twist. At a stretch it is made of vodka and dry vermouth, but if you garnish it with an onion it's a gibson.

Now, as far as I can tell, the common ingredient is vermouth. So maybe vermouth is the necessary condition to create a martini. (This also makes sense because Martini & Rossi makes vermouth.) We do not, for instance, call a gimlet a "lime martini."

So why is pucker and vodka called an apple-tini? Why is any vodka-based creation of a bartender's fevered imagination called the "fevered imagination martini?"

Vodka does not make a martini! I'm not even willing to admit it's a martini if you add vermouth, but I'm damn sure that just vodka (plus whatever sissy fruit juice you add) does not qualify something as a martini.

That's right. I'm a purist. Go soak your head.

Why do restaurants mess with success?

There's this restaurant I went to a lot while in college, called Triumph Brewing Co. They made the best burger in the world, called, imaginatively enough, the "Triumph burger." Its excellence was in no small part because of the chipotle mayonnaise, which sounds kind of gross but was in fact utterly delicious.

So now they have a location in Philadelphia, and I thought I would try it out. I had been craving a good burger.

But, because the guy who owns the restaurant is apparently deranged, you cannot in fact get the real, eponymous burger in Philadelphia. It's still called the "Triumph burger," but this is a cynical lie. They cook the tomatoes and onions before they give them to you, seeming to forget that this is a hamburger and ought to be food. Also they have only two cheese options, which is criminal. And there is no chipotle mayonnaise.

I pass over the presentation, which screams "sushi bar," and not "brew pub," which is pretentious and irritating.

When I go to a place that brews its own beer, I want to drink beer and eat beer-harmonious food. And I want it to be the beer-harmonious food that it claims.

Why don't people check their e-mail as obsessively as I do?

It's really inconsiderate. Unless I am physically more than a mile from my laptop, I can probably reply to your e-mail within a minute and a half.

I expect the same courtesy in return. This whole "wait two days and then reply" thing is totally unacceptable. Maybe if you have some complex response to formulate that involves getting a large number of ducks in a row, but, other than that....

It never helps to have e-mails hang around in one's inbox. Once they're there for a couple days, I just forget I have to answer them. So the whole deliberation thing kind of backfires.

I can't believe people aren't always on tenterhooks to see if I've e-mailed them.

Why are modern male vocalists so whiny?

I never hear a song written after about 1998 (and there are many that were written before) that does not have an unbelievably nasal and whiny lead vocalist. Strangely, this seems confined to men. Women just have that pseudo-soul thing going on (which is also bad, but is also more palatable).

As Exhibit A we have Maroon 5. I even like some of their music. But that dude is really whiny. If someone tried to do effective karaoke he would have to hold his nose the whole time.

As Exhibit B we have the Killers. In this case it's not just the guy and his nasal voice. It's also the songs, which all sound the same and are all along the lines of "my life is really hard wah wah wah possibly because there is a gerbil in my nose and also I'm in love with some girl."

Now, there have been whiny, lovestruck songs since we invented music. "Greensleeves," for instance, or, almost as old, at least three quarters of everything Elvis ever recorded. But neither the Elizabethans nor Mr. Presley sounded like they had head colds.

Why are there churches that look like dentist's offices?

I refer generally to Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, since I am given the impression by my more Protestant friends that they prefer their churches to look dreadful for the better mortification of the soul (or something).

But it used to be that people would build churches to be beautiful. And they were. They reached toward the sky and their windows broke the light up into little gem-colored rays. They blended mediaeval splendor with nineteenth-century aesthetics and theology and were hugely successful.

I know that building a church that doesn't look like a massive cinderblock is more expensive than building one that does. That is not an excuse.

Everyone says "well, God doesn't care." Which I somewhat doubt, but is irrelevant. I care. I, strangely, prefer not to have my skin crawl in horror at the plaster and poor proportions and banners batiked by blind hippie children. It makes an attitude of reverence very difficult.

And why do they build these monstrosities when venerable and beautiful churches lie empty or half-full? I was in University City the other day and passed the chapel from the old Episcopal seminary--now in disuse, as far as I could tell. It was imposing and lovely (it had some questionable choices in its stained glass, but that is neither here nor there).

I have been in many beautiful churches, but it will never pall. I have been in more than zero ugly churches, and that is far too many.

Why do people leave the taps dripping?

I don't mean when the washer's busted. I don't know how to fix that, and I don't judge. I mean when it takes only the amount of work that turns the tap about ten degrees.

I know this makes me sound like a huge hippie, but that's not really it. I just don't like waste. I certainly don't like waste for no reason.

You can own a Ferrari. This means that you use more gasoline than is strictly necessary. This does not bother me. You own a really hot car and you have fun. That, to me, is totally worth the hit in petrol (but then, I like cars).

You can run through the sprinkler or spray your siblings with a hose. This is buckets and gobs of innocent enjoyment. I'd prefer it if you were simultaneously watering your garden, but, again, I'm no killjoy.

Is anyone excited about leaving the tap on? Is this fun for anyone? If it is, well, get help.

Why do publishers no longer employ editors?

I actually don't know if this is true, but given some of the books I have read lately, it's the only possible conclusion.

We start with Eragon, and the whole Inheritance trilogy. Now, first, it's derivative as hell. But that doesn't really bother me all that much; most fantasy is really derivative, and much fantasy that isn't derivative (e.g. A Song of Ice and Fire) just makes you want to jump off a bridge.

So...the story is an amalgam of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, which is only to be expected, and could have been executed well. And it has dragons, which should make it awesome. But it was written by an adolescent boy. And the publishers, instead of sending it back with a note saying "Yes, this is nice, we will publish it in about eight years when you actually know the English language," just published it.

It's bad. It's really, really bad. The pacing is excruciating--realism can be taken too far, and nobody cares about the seven weeks it took you to cross the desert without incident, so maybe you should only spend a paragraph on it--which could have been easily solved by an editor with a red pencil.

The other problem is that the author has no ear. He is uncomfortable in his vocabulary, and he set himself the task of dialogue in a mannered but not awkward dialect. Shockingly, he failed miserably. (He also attempts an "ancient language" à la Tolkien, but he has neither the linguistic chops or the sense of euphony that Tolkien had, so it's rather dreadful: Tolkien gave us Tinuviel, and Paolini gives us Izlanzadi. This just sounds like a fifteen-year-old kid was trying to come up with an exotic word. Which is what happened, but also means it shouldn't have been published.)

This problem also appears in a trilogy of books intended to tell the story of Pride & Prejudice from Darcy's point of view. This is clearly not a good idea in the first place, but it definitely could have been better than this. The author does not understand that historical detail does not fit with Jane Austen, that multi-syllable words are not always the answer, and that making Fitzwilliam Darcy into a huge whiner is not a winning proposition.

No one wants a sense of upheaval in an Austen-centric story. We know about the wars against the French, but aside from providing Captain Wentworth with his fortune, we don't want to hear about them. Riots in the Midlands? You can keep them. Austen is satire, and one of her most attractive features is the not quite but almost timelessness of the stories.

I give you the first line: "Fitzwilliam George Alexander Darcy rose from his seat in the Bingley carriage and reluctantly descended to earth before the assembly hall above the only inn to which the small market town of Meryton could lay claim." Seriously. This is not as good as "It is a truth universally acknowledged (&c.)."

Editors would solve these problems. Editors would run screaming. Less paper would be wasted. Fewer psyches would be damaged. Life would be better. I want editors.

Why do people drink vodka martinis?

And I mean "martini" in a strictly soi-disant sense.

Now, I like vermouth as much as and possibly more than the next man. But I wouldn't really want to drink it straight. I am more in favor of the subtle blending of taste that happens when you take a cocktail shaker, fill it with ice, six parts gin and one part vermouth, and shake (Somerset Maugham can go hang; my gin never complains).

Since vodka, for the most part, tastes like nothing, a vodka martini is a lot like drinking straight vermouth. Except that vodka martinis are generally extremely dry. I know of at least one person who uses a tiny little Misto to put the vermouth in a vodka martini.

Which means that they taste like vodka. Which is not really a martini. And unless you drink really excellent vodka--I'm talking the Chopin or Ciroc area, not the Grey Goose--this means that it tastes like rubbing alcohol. Why is this desirable?

At least real martinis taste like Christmas trees.

Why do people say "in lieu of" when they mean "in light of?"

They do not mean the same thing. Not at all. And "lieu" is French, and therefore pretentious, and therefore you must be doubly certain that you know what it means before you use it.

"In lieu of" means, quite literally, "in place of." In the same way, for example, that "lieutenant" means "place-holder." I know that for those of you who know or speak British English this is confusing because the first phrase is not pronounced "in leff of," but you'll have to deal with that.

"In light of" means "taking [whatever] into account." This is not, you will note, equivalent to "in place of."

I really don't think it's too much to ask that someone know the word he is attempting to use (unless it's in some kind of postmodern seminar, where at least he won't be alone). Watch where you're pointing those fancy touches, bucko.