1. Flared trousers.

2. The out-of-bed look is considered a hairstyle instead of an indicator of unemployment and slobbishness.

3. Victorian costume dramas.

1. People who say "my bad!" when they make a mistake.

2. The "muffintop" look.

3. Those half-size advertising overlays they wrap around sections of the newspaper.

1. Capri pants

2. Tatoos and piercings

3. "[blank] is the new [blank]!"

Just three?

Current pet peeve: all products must apperently be advertised with at least one, but preferably two, adjectives (natural mountain spring mineral water)

1. The saturation of terms like "teh", "own3d", "pr0n", etc. etc. - people who use these tend to think themselves brash and cutting-edge, when it merely identifies them as either geeks or illiterate.

2. Logos or cute slogans written across of the butt of sweatpants, especially in junior sizes - shouldn't it bother you that someone designed a garment INTENDED to make you look at the butt of an eight-year-old boy?

3. Fast-food outlets where the smallest size of anything is called "medium", apparently to make you think there's more of whatever it is. (And don't get me started on Starbucks' names for THEIR sizes; when is making it more difficult to buy something GOOD for business?)

1. Blogs that command you to "read the whole thing" when they link to an article.

2. Jewelry for men. Other than a watch and a plain band if they are married it is just wrong.

3. The way the beer pourers at Raymond James stadium in Tampa (home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) do not fill the beer all the way to the top but leave an inch of foam. The cost they are charging, per ounce, of that stuff rivals the price of gold. Is it too much to ask to have the darned cup filled to the top?

Although, I am pregnant right now, so this has not been too much of a peeve this year, so I am adding one more:

4. The way weather forecasters predict "the worst hurricane season" ever for this year (usually in a solomn over-dramatic tone of voice), which of course, means we will get none. Why can't they just say they don't know? Or when a hurricane is coming they give this definate path it will follow (usually targeting my house) and 90% of the time the storm goes a different way. They don't know and it would be better to just say so.

One more:
5. Children's cartoons. Yes, I'm getting old and, yes, I am complaining about tv shows for children but I have to watch these things with them and ban the ones that that are terrible (over 90%) admidst howling protests which results in reminding them that they live in a dictatorship not a democracy. Few of cartoons offer anything other than whiny loud-mouthed kids, stupid parents, blaring music, pop culture references in place of actual wit and lazy animation. And the music sucks.

The other day, I had a voicemail from the local university asking me to call someone (muffy, or Buffy, or some such) in the ticket office about my football tickets. I never ordered football tickets, and I'm sure they know that. They were telemarketing me, and they decided had to lie to me to get my attention. I decided that I won't be buying tickets to any football games this decade.

The people in business development seminars who exhort you to "think outside the box" are usually the most unoriginal, conformist people you'll ever meet.

"Hard news" segments on the local TV channel--robbery, murder, fire, flood, rampaging alligator, horriffic industrial accident--that start from a "human interest" angle. For example: "Harriett Cranchford has lived on Wistful Vista Court in Flufftown for thirty years. 'It's always been a quiet street. Kids play out in the cul-de-sac; you just never think anything's gonna happen, y'know?' But that quiet was shattered early this morning when a North Korean Taepodong-2 missile crashed into the house next door . . . ."

Buttercup, better you should turn off the TV and only allow pre-screened videos for special treats.

My favorite was the "Magic School Bus" series. I enjoyed watching them as much as my granddaughter did.

I can still hear her giggling at something particularly silly, but we both learned an amazing lot in Ms Frizzle's class.

Another local TV annoyance: the Yet Another Baby Panda segment at the end of the broadcast.

1) (blank disease) is serious because it's the "(blank magnitude) leading cause of (possible unnatural qualifier)death in (blank race)(blank gender) aged (blank-to-blank)"

2) Pronouncing forte "for-tay" instead of "fort" if you are not referring to a musical score

3) "No right turn on red" anywhere and even left turns for that matter if nobody is coming.

Well, if Buttercup is going to cheat, so will I. Mike reminds me of another infuriating one--TV interviewers covering a disaster or horrific crime who think that asking a victim or witness "How did you feel?" is serious journalism.

Also, people who high-five their co-workers for just doing their jobs.

People who are taking left hand turns, and don't move over as far as they can to give room on the right to pass. Makes traffic jams in my stupid town that much worse.

1.) "Edgy" advertising that tries desperately to be hipper than the room by using what they think are the latest trends or buzzwords, complete with quick cuts and strange camera angles (I thought the SNL "hip-hop" version of a Preparation H ad a few years ago might kill this trend off, but it didn't. Hopefully, the non-parody version of this now out for Pepto Bismol will do the trick).

2.) Excessive tatoos/piercings (agreeing with the above post from Greg here). Yeah, I know it's tougher for teens and young adults to annoy their parents nowadays than it was 35-40 years ago, since so many other statements of independence have a "been there, done that" quality, but really people, don't you get little piece of food stuck in that tounge stud that you have to floss out, and isn't that around-the-arm tatoo going to be a little incongruious when you're meeting your grandkids in 2028 or so?

3.) Pundits/Editorial writers who still haven't figured out the memory abilities of the Internet. Attention Gail Collins: Even with the Times Select wall keeping most of your editorial page's inanaties out of the main traffic flow of the web, you still cannot write screeds today that tottally contradict not only what you were saying during the Clinton years, but also what you were saying in the early years of the Bush Administration and think noone will ever know the contradictions. People can easily Google up your past claims, do a side-by-side comparison, and show you have no logical underpinnings except for whatever the administration is doing now, you're against, even if this is what you called on them to do in the past (and this isn't only a West 43rd Street phenominon -- so many of the other big media outlets and high-profile pundits also think they can say one thing now that's totally at odds with what they said in the past, and think the public is too stupid to note the discrepency).

erp:

No offence, but anyone who has anything at all good to say about Ms. Frizzle doesn't know the meaning of the word curmudgeon.

(1) the word "proactive" and the people that use it.

(2) women over the age of 35 who insist on dressing like they're still 18. Now that I think about it, ditto for men.

(3) The fact that no one in baseball is willing to throw inside and move Papi's fat *** off the plate. (That'll change next season when Phil Hughes makes his debut).

(1) Misuse of the David and Goliath analogy.

(2) Midriff shirts on chubby chicks

(3) Dog owners who tell you: "Don't worry, he's really friendly." As if you wanted to be friends with their dirty mutt....

1) Being called chief, bud, dude, big-guy, etc., by other male co-workers in their lame attempts at developing male camaraderie.

2) Indian food – no you don’t really like it (unless you are Indian, then only maybe), and I don’t want to hear about the one place you know that’s really good, it’s nasty too.

3) People who keep photos of their loved ones on their desks facing outwards towards would-be office visitors. If you don’t enjoy staring at your brood what makes you think I’ll get a kick out of it.

1) The 'word' "performant" and the people who use it.

2) Products that prominently advertise a 'feature' it would be nearly impossible not to implement, and which is rendered moot by other flaws. "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs - 0g fat!"

3) Low-rider cars. I'm all for gratuitious car modifications (if want to put a jet engine in your VW beetle, well, God Bless America), but modifications whose only function is to destroy the utility of the machine offend me. (The lowrider pants annoy me too, but not nearly as much as mutiliating the poor automobiles.)

Mike E: say what you want about the cars, but don't even think of putting down the song.

oj: Midriffs + Fat Girls + Low-rider jeans = the "muffin top."

Dog owners who tell you: "Don't worry, he's really friendly." As if you wanted to be friends with their dirty mutt

As for other annoying things, mostly I do them, I don't receive them. But I do not like DVDs for children that don't auto-play.

1) People who add extra syllables to words, "preventative" versus "preventive" for example.

2) People who "verbalize" nouns, especially when there is a perfectly good verb to use.

3) Covers of rock songs that are barely distinguisable from the original. Memo: the minor differences are never improvements.

I might have mentioned baseball caps on sideways but I fear Lou Gots would come after me if I took his #1.

Advertisements that contain blatant internal contradictions. A current example would be those Verizon ads that use the tagline "There's only one reason to choose a cellular company -- it's the network" after a commercial that talks exclusively about the features of some ritzy new cell phone. If the network is the reason I should go with them, *tell me about the network*. Don't tell me about something other than the network and finish off by telling me that everything they just said is irrelevant.

Advertisements that use obviously useless statistics, such as the insurance company that brags about how people who switched to them saved $X, and then admit in the fine print that the $x figure is derived from surveys of people who chose to switch to them. Um, guys, your sample pool is skewed by the eliminatio of all the people who *wouldn't* have saved money by switching, which makes the statistic completely irrelevant to the question of whether *I* should choose to switch.

Actually, I may just be annoyed by advertising in general. It seems to be targeted to idiots and innumerates.

Jeff: There I was, poised at my keyboard, set to strike out at perverted basebal caps. The defiance of reason and order, the great "Non Serviam!" of the sideways baseball cap cannot stand.

This act of rebellion against natural law serves as a paradigm for every evil act of rebellion. The baseball cap rebel demonstrates his arbitrariness, grasping at solipsistic pretended autonomy, not realizing that he is making himself a slave to the desire to feel free rather that to be free.

Curmudgeon complaint No. 2: "Music" taken from the soundtracks of Johnny Weismuller movies at the point before the elephants arrive. (Bracing myself for some throw-back adherent of 19th Century racist sociology accusing me of "Racism" for preferring fine music to the barbaric)

No. 3: Pride at ignorance--the boastful exihibition of cultural illiteracy. This is usually accompanied by a complete failure of deference, whereby the militantly unlearned not merely admits, but celebrates, his or her lack of knowledge.

1) Cell phone-distracted automobile operators. [how on earth is this one still available to list? and please note the specific avoidance of the grossly inacurate term "drivers"]

2) Any National holiday which happens, because of the calendar, not to fall on a Monday or Friday. [calendar is the irritation, not the holiday].

3) People who use the term and/or food that is served as "BBQ'd" or "Bar-b-que[d]" etc. where the cooking method is merely grilling.

inaccurate [irony knows no bounds]

People not using "z's" anymore to spell words....Apoligise, civilisation, prise,...drives me nuts.
People in left turns who think they are the only one waiting to turn and taking their own good time.
people on cell phones in line behind you in stores. Get off the darn phone!!!!! I don't care who you had sex with last night!!

one more. People who misuse the word "bring". You can't bring something with you to grandma's but you can "take" something with you. "I'm going to bring this with me when I go shopping".
No!!! You are going to take something with you when you go shopping.

Ms Frizzle is the anti-curmudgeon.

1. Why the heck should I have to "Press 1 for English"? I'm in the United States, dammit.

2. Using Safeway's discount card means the cashier knows your name, and they are obviously instructed to thank you by name at the end. The forced, faked familiarity is always awkward.

3. Safeway's baggers must be similarly instructed to always ask if we'd like help getting our groceries to the car. Um, no thanks, I'm an able-bodied six-foot tall man, and can do that without the help of a five-foot tall, teenage Asian girl.

People who don't know the difference between "reign" and "rein" or "sight" and "site" and "cite."

Love how they reign in the actions of the president or sight some law review.

I will second the poster on the use of cell phones. I just spent an hour on a bus last week sitting across the aisle from a guy who spent the hour calling all his friends and telling them over and over what a bitch his ex-girl friend is for breaking up with him. I almost told him she was totally justified because he was such a putz but I was nice and didn't do it.

People who let their kids run wild and don't stop them. This really started when I was a teenager working for my dad. He had a bakery and my job every Saturday morning was to spend an hour crawling into the cases to clean all the glass with ammonia water. Invariably this one customer would come in with her kids straight from the breakfast table and she would spend 10 minutes trying to decide what kind of donuts to buy while her kids were rubbing their hands covered with grease and jelly all over the windows I had just spent all that time cleaning. She never even looked at them the whole time. I see it a lot at the Starbucks with the kids running all over the place and the mother and her friend sitting there talking and ignoring their kids.

1.) Copious use of weasel words in corporate or government documents.

2.) People who wear Che t-shirts.

3.) Football announcers who jinx you by proclaiming, near the end of a game in which you are rooting for a particular team, that said team hasn't committed a certain mistake (turnover, bad snap, etc.) all day.

Peter B:

Gotta confess, I take inbound calls for a living and I do both A) and B) quite frequently. Should I recite "O Canada" three times for penance?

Sorry, erp, but one more: People who assume that because I let my children watch tv then my kids must be zoned out zombies who barely are aware enough to wipe the drool from their mouths as they stare blank eyed at the tv for hours on end. And of course their own children only watch the most educational programs, if their kids are even allowed within spitting distance of the tv. Somehow, these people usually turn out to be the ones who can give you detailed plot lines and character descriptions of at least 10 tv shows.

As far as Frizzle, only Barney inspires more curmudgeonly thoughts than that nauseating know it all. On the occasion we've seen that show I was hoping the kids would grab the wheel and back the bus over her and end my pain.

Matt:

We believe in nepotism around here, so we'll give you a pass. But I warn you, if I ever get a cold call from you that starts: "And how are you today, Peter?", it's six months' banishment to dailykos.

Buttercup:

You have just raised the art to a whole new and exciting level. Bless you.

Papaya:

because you folk won't work a switchboard.

OJ, I'm talking about ATMs and phone trees, which are automated and not "worked" by anyone. The designers/programmers, no doubt English speakers, made the politically correct decision to dethrone English as default, and force everyone to choose their language, though it means an extra delay and keystroke for 95%+ of us.

The "Press 2 for Spanish" thing is much less annoying, because it defaults to the majority, and only the few percent who need Spanish need to hit an extra key. That's better UI design.

Papaya:

You aren't a real curmudgeon. You're just a grump. A grump whines about whose team gets to press "1". A true curmudgeon spends a whole dinner spluttering about how neither route ends with an invitation to press "0" to talk to a real person.

One of the things I do for a living involves interface design, so it's a double slap for me to see political correctness trump common sense and good design habits.

But yeah, since the U.S. is my "team," I think its national language should be the default. And I'm totally fair about it: I don't think residents of other countries should have to "press 1" to get whatever language 90%+ of their citizens speak, either.

Papaya: DITTO!! Why did I have to e-mail BofA to tell them that their "new, improved(tm)" ATM could not remember after several uses whether I prefer "English" or Spanish? After you've used the thing 3 times in a row requesting English, you'd think your preference should be pretty obvious, no?

Worse, I'm fairly fluent in Spanish so, for kicks one time after at least a dozen "English" selections, I decided to press Spanish to see if the Machine would eat my card like it does when you enter the wrong pin repeatedly. Nope.