Why do bugs take the trouble to get into light fixtures merely to die there?

No one wins: the bugs are dead, and my light is full of dead bugs.  Which is gross.

This baffles on two counts.  First, a lamp has no discernible appeal, even to a tiny, stupid bug.  There is certainly no food within your bog-standard light fixture.  Second, while the globe may not be entirely air-tight, it's close, and the effort expended to get into it seems prohibitively high compared to the pay-off (which is, we remember, death).

Get out, bugs.  This ain't no Starship Troopers.

Why does Williams Sonoma keep putting the Star Wars stuff on sale?

I have already bought both pancake mold sets and both cookie cutter sets.  That's right: I can make you a TIE Advanced x1 pancake.  It will look like an amorphous blob, but it's the thought that counts.  (N.B. The Yoda pancake is actually pretty awesome.)

But I do not need a Star Wars lunch pail, even if it is only ten smackers.  I would not need one if it were only ten cents.  And a sandwich cutter strikes me as the most useless thing in the history of useless things, not to mention that it turns your kid into a sissy by cutting the crusts off.  The sissy factor might be mitigated by having that crustless sandwich be shaped like the Millennium Falcon, but I wouldn't risk it.

So stop, Williams Sonoma.  Please.  I do not need to fill my cupboards with Star Wars paraphernalia.  I need that space for over-sized brandy snifters.

Why do dentists stab you repeatedly in the mouth and then complain when you bleed?

The urge to launch into The Merchant of Venice is almost irresistible, but I'll spare you.

Seriously, do they really expect us to floss ninety-three times a day?  Because that appears to be the expectation, given how much they bayonet and castigate you when you only floss like an above-average stickler for oral hygiene.

And today my hygienist apparently used an implement that hurts more when your gums are healthy.  What the hell kind of messed up incentive is that?

Why would podcasts ever have re-runs?

That is the opposite of the point of podcasts.

Why is that horrifying woman still making Progressive ads?

Not everyone remembers she was absurdly creepy as the archive at Wolfram & Hart on Angel, but, well, a) she totally was, and b) even if you didn't think so, she's tremendously off-putting.  Her skin and hair are no colors known to nature, her eye make-up is disastrous, and she's edging into clown territory for terrifying perkiness.  The bouffant helps nothing.

Also, only maiden aunts are named Flo.

Why did Mark Hamill have to break his face?

He was super cute in Episode IV.  This is true.  You think he's not because he was also super whiny, and because you retroject post-Wampa face.

Also because of Harrison Ford.

Anyway.  It's the worst.

Why are motorists still jackwagons?

So today I was almost hit by a car again.  It was daylight.  I had gotten to the intersection before this dude, stopped, and signalled that I would turn left.  So then I biked into the intersection, and he decided that he would also cruise away from his stop sign (I can't guarantee that he ever really stopped).  I yelled, "Hey, [mildly unprintable epithet]!"

This wasn't the classiest reaction, but my life was in danger, so I plead extenuating circumstances.

To his credit, he stopped.  But then he rolled down his window, and said, "You only had to yell, you didn't have to call me names."

Nope.  Once I have to yell, because you are carelessly endangering me, because you are not paying attention, you get whatever epithet I choose.  That I have to yell at all means that you are, in fact, a jackass.  If you don't want to be called names, there are easy steps to take.  They involve obeying traffic laws.

Why is Belle such a lying gold-digger?

She says she wants "much more than this provincial life."  But she doesn't exactly move to the big city when she shacks up with the Beast.  She ceases to be a bourgeoise, certainly, but she does not cease to be provincial.

Plus, all she's going to do for the rest of her life, apparently, is wear pretty dresses, make out with her new French husband, and read books.  It's the life I want (minus the Frenchness), sure, but it's not progressive, or artistic, or exciting.  Everyone in every Paris salon would laugh at her countrified ways, rustic complexion, and taste in literature, because everything she reads is hopelessly passé.  She shouldn't be nearly that self-righteous about her miraculous literacy.

At least she stops wearing that jumper?  I guess?

Why is the paper in Battlestar Galactica octagonal?

Way to make your props department's lives a living hell, there.  It's not like they didn't have enough to do with your ridiculous arrows and stuff; they really needed to spend hours cutting the corners off all the paper.  That makes so much sense, and is clearly the most advanced way to approach paper, as you can tell because the show admits that you can't even bind a book with octagonal pages, so the bound edge is normal and it's only the outer edge that has the corners lopped off.

But the real problem here is more fundamental.  It is true that regular paper does not look fancy and futuristic enough for a world in which robots have progressed to the point where they can have souls and interbreed with humans.  This is not because it is rectangular.  It is because it is paper.

Why is the new Google Reader awful?

Yes, everyone and his brother has complained about this.  However, I would like to remind you that it is awful.

First, it runs into the same problem as every other Google re-design, namely the proliferation at the top of enormous menu bars you don't want or need, which restricts the actual content of the page to a uselessly tiny box.  To exacerbate this problem, each item in the collapsed view of your Reader feed is now about twice as deep as it needs to be, so that you have about a third as many stories on the page as you used to.  Sure, it may look smooth and space-age and whatnot, but it loses functionality, so: F.  Minus.

Next, they took away the social functions.  This is to make you use Google+.  Which is actually a pretty comprehensible motive, so at least there's that.  However, as far as I can tell (and I'll back down on this, though I'm not a moron and have looked in what I consider to be the obvious places), you cannot easily import your Reader subscriptions, so we still have an annoying cross-application shift.  I'm assuming Google will fix this, but given the total FUBARing of Reader, I'm not all that sanguine.

And, of course, they totally hosed the entire transition.  It's Google, so they own your soul and they can do this--like the NFL, they have made themselves indispensable and can laugh at your puny protests.  But there was no need to communicate and implement all of the changes so clumsily.