Icefarmer's back. Expect to see him more regularly in the future.

In every other newspaper, magazine, or article-based website these days, you're likely to see a Top Ten list. The author will get up on his soapbox (something that you will never see me doing, ever) and tell everyone who decides to read what he thinks are all the best things in a certain category. Music. Television. Even esoteric topics like Renaissance artists or influential dance pioneers. Yes, I did just make those two topics up, but that's the point: any hack writer can decide that he wants to use an overplayed formula to cut corners in constructing a compelling and fun to read article. When I came to this realization, I thought to myself "I've got to get me a piece of that pie,” and here we are. So join me, the hackiest of the hack writers, on a spectacular journey through The Bottom 10 Worst Things of all Time. If you thought for a second that I was going to play this thing straight, then you obviously haven’t been religiously reading my articles, scrub(Editor's note: scrub is being used as a noun, as in "you are a scrub."). So, without any more stalling, let's get on with this.

Number 10: Fanfiction
For those of you not familiar with this un-genre, fanfiction is a creative medium (and I use that term lightly) where an author who did not create the setting or characters involved writes a story using both. For instance, you could (though I hope you don't) write a story about Captain Kirk going on a blind date with Harry Potter and the like. Writers of such abominable tales tend to fall under two demographics. They might be unpopular, homely and heavyset girls who make themselves pretty in their little creation and have their newly created avatars fall in love with one of the canon characters. That happens about fifty percent of the time. The other fifty percent is written by unpopular, homely and heavyset girls (sensing a pattern?) who wish that two characters in their chosen setting decided to get their groove on. Fanfiction is Number Ten on this list because it exists to destroy any bits of originality left in the world, which I can assure you are few. It is only Number Ten because at least these terrible writers aren't getting published. An exception to that comes later.

Number 9: Faux-Friendliness
After Columbine, it would seem, schools around the nation wised up to the bullying going on in schools. And for a time, it was good. But then the cretins started thinking. "What if," a particularly creative bully began, "we gave the teachers exactly what they thought they wanted?" So instead of going up to the quiet kid and breaking his nose, they went up to the quiet kid and decided to prey on his insecurities. How? Simple. They acted friendly. ‘Acted’ is the key word, there, because these apes wouldn’t know friendly if it gave them a scholarship for being able to throw a ball further than some other guy. I digress. They force their victims to make conversation that clearly, their victims never wished to make. It’s always easy to make socially awkward kids squirm, is their reasoning. You just need to apply pressure to different places. My contempt for those who practice in Faux-Friendliness runs deeper than the ocean runs wide. Faux-Friendliness is Number Nine on the list because it keeps smart kids from being able to feel like they’re worth something.

Number 8: Dennis Quaid
I don't even know where to start with this guy. There are a lot of actors in the acting business who can't act (I'm looking at you, Affleck), but there aren't a lot of people in the acting business who aren't even actors. Dennis Quaid is lucky enough to be counted among the latter. And somehow, he’s found work since the eighties. Mind blowing. At least one person has called him “the poor man’s Kevin Costner.” This is interesting, because Kevin Costner is already the poor man’s Billy Bob Thornton. Do you see what I’m getting at, here? Mr. Quaid has had the honor of starring in such movies as The Day After Tomorrow (which was awful), G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra (which was similarly awful), and recent release Legion (which gave several orphans cancer). Yet he still finds work. Few people know why. Even I have trouble figuring it out, but I think it’s because he’s willing to do things that no actor (not no other actor, but no actor period) will dare touch. He’s made his career on being in terrible movies. It’s an interesting and unfortunate loophole: bad movies require bad actors. That’s the only reason that the former still exist. Joy. Dennis Quaid is number Eight on this list because he keeps bad movies in theaters and didn’t even have a career before he started selling out.

Number 7: Brokencyde
If you haven’t heard of Brokencyde, count yourself lucky. You have been spared the worst music since the Shaggs back in the sixties. Brokencyde (short for "Broken Inside") is of a genre known as Crunkcore, which has been called the worst genre ever created by critics. Brokencyde combines hip-hop and screamo to form a type of music that sounds like the vocals were recorded in a Chinese prison and the actual music was done by a computer given the instructions “make their ears bleed.” I didn't actually think that it was possible to create music so horrible, but with lyrics like “If you want me baby feel me in/’cause I don’t waste my time with lesbians,” I was proven horrendously wrong. What the hell? I mean, what the HELL?! That is offensive, stupid, uninspired and plain bad, and it costs ten bucks on iTunes. Tip: don’t buy it. But seeing as it reached 68 on the Billboard 200, at least two thousand people decided "You know, I’ve been listening to some pretty good music lately. I think I’ll go propagate the production of terrible music while genuinely good, yet undiscovered, musicians drink themselves half to death in bars." If you’d excuse me, Brokencyde, we’re trying to have a civilization over here. Your social decay is not welcome. Brokencyde is Number Seven on the list because they aren't a part of musical decay in the twenty first century, they are musical decay in the twenty first century.
Editor's Note: I feel this adds a bit of context.

Number 6: Mogadishu
Oh sweet Lord. There are places in this world that come close to an American’s vision of “hell,” but none closer than the capital of the not-country Somalia, Mogadishu. A few years ago, a military coup d’etat got rid of the government. They did not do what most military coups do, they didn’t take over. Thus, Somalia is a country without a government, and Mogadishu is what Obi Wan Kenobi would call “A wretched hive of scum and villainy.” If you are a resident of this city, you will have a crime committed against you before the day is done. If you are a woman, you will have your rights as a human being violated by the time you finish breakfast. If you are a tourist, then you aren’t even here, because the day may never come when tourists want to have a piece of jagged metal thrust through their ribs. Now, I don’t hate this place like I hate all the other things on the list, but Mogadishu is one of the most physically harmful places in the world right now, so I thought that it deserved a place on the list. It is, by the way, Number Six because going there almost definitely guarantees the fact that you won’t be coming back.

Number 5: The American South
This would be the second and last location on this list. I wanted to keep one thing per category on it, but this place is so deserving that I had to use it. The Onion describes the South as a place where “the mistakes of the past come alive.” This is not too far from the truth. In fact, it isn’t even an embellishment of the truth. It is the truth. Now, people often have first impressions of the south. They picture a rich, old guy from Georgia sitting on a porch, wearing a white suit, and sipping a mint julep. Never have these people been more wrong. Replace the “rich old guy” with “inbred redneck,” replace “porch” with “week-old deer corpse,” replace “white suit” with “ill-fitting tee shirt” and replace “mint julep” with “fifth bottle of moonshine this Monday.” Now you have an idea what the average citizen (if they can so be called) from the South is like. This place has two kinds of people in it: hicks who thankfully don’t vote, and hicks who vote republican. This is unlikely to change any time soon. But I don’t think I’ve described why this place is so horrible: no one stops to think. Ever. Minorities aren’t what you’d call “welcome” there. Neither are intellectuals. Or gays. Or people who use the words ‘am not’ instead of combining them into ‘ain’t.’ This place is just plain bad, people. It’s a bad place full of bad people thinking bad thoughts. And it has politicians that think the same things as the local yokels. The American South is Number Five on this list because it never stopped being the thirties down there, and I don’t think I have to remind anyone that the thirties weren't exactly our glory days.

Number 4: Mimes
They know what they did.

Number 3: Wolverine
Ah yes, the poster boy of Marvel Comics these days. It’s hard to put into words the hatred I feel towards the man known to some as Logan, to some as Wolverine, and to me as Bub Schnk’t Rip. To put it simply: Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate Wolverine since the mid nineties. There are 75 trillion cells that fill my Body. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of billions of cells it would not equal one-billionth of the hate I feel for Wolverine at this micro-instant. Hate. Hate. Kudos to those that get the reference. I think I should explain. Wolverine has become Marvel’s little pretty boy. The writers fell in love with his character and ever since them, he’s been getting the spotlight again and again while more deserving heroes like Spiderman or Iron Man were stuck with bad writers making them look like idiots. Let me explain something, and I hope my message reaches those in charge of Marvel Comics right now: I will never feel anything more than a smoldering contempt for the man known as Wolverine. He represents everything wrong with the comic industry right now: an obsession with the gritty, gruff voiced, permanently stubbled antihero. Wolverine is Number Three on the list because he is the favorite of the writers, not the fans.

Number 2: Stephanie Meyer
You had to see this one coming. Mrs. Meyer is a blight upon the human race, a glorified fanfiction writer who came up with a premise that was so full of double standards, chauvinistic undertones, and contrived writing conventions that it was too horrible not to work. Let’s break down a few of the terrible things that she has done to teenage literature and to teenage culture in general. First, she has convinced a good two thirds of the teenage girls I know of that if someone stalks you, as long as he’s pretty, then you should be flattered and not deeply disturbed. Ladies, let me set the record straight for you: no matter how attractive a stalker is, he’s still a stalker. He has plans for you that you yourself will definitely not want to take part in. Just because he sparkles doesn’t mean that he does not have a host of disorders that need to be dealt with. Next, she has taken the word “vampire” and warped it to the point where the word only means “better than you.” There was a time when vampires were feared. It was long ago, I suspect, when the sexual overtones that they are associated with radiated “rape” more than it did “hot, passionate, undead nookie.” I don’t really know how they decayed into what they are now, but it’s unmistakable. Finally, Mrs. Meyer has been charged with the brainwashing of countless teenage girls, making them think that they should behave more like a housewife from the fifties and less like an independent, educated and self-sufficient woman from the twenty first century. If we want complete gender equality, we need to ignore every single thing Meyer says about anything. It’s the only way. Stephenie Meyer is Number Two on the list because she is actively trying to backpedal our culture into times when men solved problems in a relationship with the argument “because I’m a man” rather than talking things out.

Number 1: Idiots
I admit, this topic is pretty broad. It could encompass everything from George W. Bush to your average chat room resident. And yes, it may seem like a copout putting it at Number One, but hear me out: everything listed above can be traced back to idiocy. Stephenie Meyer? Moron. Wolverine? The product of idiot writers. Mimes? Don’t get me started. The South? Full of racist, inbred, drunken idiots. Mogadishu is the product of idiotic politicians and revolutionaries. Brokencyde is a band composed completely of irredeemable dullards. Dennis Quaid’s career has been built upon idiots that continue giving him work. Those who use faux-friendliness as a method of intimidation are idiots to the nth degree. And fanfiction writers? Some of the dumbest people I know. You see, idiots, above all, are the biggest threat to society that we face. You see, people aren’t evil. No, most evil acts that people have committed can be traced back to sheer, unadulterated stupidity. The crusades, for example, were the result of a misinterpretation of the Bible. World War One was the result of a bunch of belligerent fools unwilling to talk things out for fear that they might be wrong. The Third Reich in Germany rose because people were too dumb to see the devil in plain sight. It’s all because humans are dumb pack animals that believe everything that someone in a tie or a lab coat will tell them (someone in a tie and a lab coat? That’s considered a form of mind control) without considering things for themselves. Idiots are Number One on the bottom ten list because it’s all their fault. Everything. Name a problem with the world. It was become some guy forgot that he had a brain.

Thank you for reading. Now you know who your enemies are.

4/1/2010
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