Every now and then my pet peeve level reaches the point where it boils over the top and runs out of my head like some kind of acid. My skin starts to itch and burn and the only cure is to share the misery. So, in order to get the vitriol level back to something that's tolerable, you're gonna get to hear a few of my unfavorite things.
Here's one that always annoys me. Right now I'm reading a novel called Mortal Fear by Greg Iles, who is normally one of my favorite mystery/suspense author's. However, this book was written some time ago and Iles made a mistake here that makes the story a little less readable to me. The book isn't really a period piece or anything like that. It is set in the here and now, which for this book was nearly ten years ago. The problem is that the technology that is prominently featured in the storyline is the technology that was extant, and the author seems to think was cutting edge, at the time the book was written. I'm sure that was a couple of years before it was published and that was nearly ten years ago. Having earned my bread and butter in the high tech industry for decades before I retired, I know that most of the things that Iles goes into excruciating detail to explain and constantly talks about in the novel were not really that extraordinary at that time. In fact, some of them were at best passe and in some cases nearly obsolete when the book hit the stands. Of course now that makes them about as current as rotary telephones. I hate it when authors do that because it dates what would otherwise be a timeless story.
I mean, if I was reading a Sherlock Holmes story or picking up some noir fiction like The Maltese Falcon, I would want to have the feel of the period. When I choose to read something that is supposed to be contemporary fiction I want it to sound like it is happening today. Of course I realize that when Doyle wrote the Holmes stuff and Hammett wrote about Sam Spade they were writing in their present and that's what gives their work the feel it has today. Still, it would be really easy to write a good suspense novel like Mortal Fear in a way that would make it seem fresh no matter when you first encountered it and there are a lot of authors who do that, whether consciously or subconsciously I don't know, but it sure does make the book a more interesting read when you don't trip over all that out of date stuff.
One of my other major annoyances these days is Facebook. There's probably some generational thing going on here to begin with, since it is always annoying to see someone young enough to be your grandkid that is rich enough to buy Rhode Island and didn't really pay the dues to get that kind of money. I think it's more than that though. First of all, I'm basically an anti-social person except when it comes to family. So the whole concept of a social network clashes with my personality (such as it is). I only got on FB because a lot of my relatives are on it and that's the only way I can communicate with them these days. I'm kind of a private person (I know, I know: this blog will live in some archive forever and anyone will be able to read it, but at least it isn't broadcast to the world, unless I take steps to make it so.) and don't really like everyone knowing what I am doing at every moment. Some people do, though, and use Facebook and Twitter to live their lives like they were the subjects of The Ed Show or something like that. I don't even watch those kinds of so called reality shows on TV, so I really don't want to know that my FB friends are sitting in an Oh Boy at the local farmer's market or spilling Starbucks all over themselves on their way to have their hair done or whatever; and I don't want to see a lot of links to articles about how some serial killer found Jesus in prison and is now running a mini storage and home for unwed mothers on the mean streets of Weehawken.
So when one of my FB friends starts to post a lot of stuff I don't want to read, I set the FB subscription for them to only show me "important" posts. Here's the problem with that: it is Facebook that decides what is important and what is not. And they don't appear to want to tell you how they do that. So sometimes I see posts from friends FB apparently thinks are important but I do not. Worse than that, sometimes I don't see posts from friends whose subscriptions I have set to show me all of their stuff. So it seems that FB has decided to consider some posts unimportant even though I haven't asked it to. And that is damn annoying.
FB does have it's good points though. These days when people want to resend cartoons and jokes or whatever to everyone they know, they do it with FB rather than email. So you don't have to download some humungous file before you realize that you really didn't want to look at that picture after all. That's a plus.
OK, so here's another thing that is annoying: USAToday had this article the other day about the "dangers" of taking calcium substitutes. Apparently my father-in-law read it and got all upset thinking that his kids were going to have heart attacks because they take calcium substitutes. However, if you read that article, you will see that the alleged results were claimed by someone on the basis of one study. There is no mention in the article about who did the study nor is there any claim that the same results have been reported from other independent studies. In addition, there is no information about the dosage of calcium supplements that were taken by the people in the study, the amount of time they took them, the breakdown of heart attack deaths by age group, amount of dosage, length of time taken or anything else that would amount to real data.
It is pseudo-science articles like this that are one of my pet peeves. It is certainly possible that there is really a danger here, but you can't tell it from that article. I never pay any heed to articles like that because they pretty much just do a lot of hand-waving and don't really say anything. IMHOP it is much better to get health information from a source like Science in the Public Interest's Nutrition Action Healthletter which does objective reporting, delivers real facts and names names. CSPI's newsletter will tell you if a study has been independently confirmed or not. Their articles also contain an analysis of the situation that spells out the implications. So, e.g., if the CSPI newsletter reported on the study mentioned in USAToday and, if it appeared to the authors that there was something real there, they might suggest cutting back on calcium supplements until independent studies either confirmed or refuted the results from the initial study. So I give the USAToday article a thumbs down.
Well, that's enough whining for one day. I'll try to be a little more upbeat on my next post. And more timely too.
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