Dan Harkless' Likes and Dislikes

Favorites

Up to 10 are listed in each category. Order is most favorite first.

Actors, Comedic / Comedians: Adam Carolla, Tom Green, John Cleese, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Jim Carrey, Dana Carvey, Dane Cook, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, Michael Richards

Actors, General: Johnny Depp, Patrick Stewart, Jackie Chan, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Bruce Campbell, Tom Baker, Brad Dourif, Peter MacNicol, Charles Rocket

Actors, Voice: Paul Frees, Mike Judge, John Kricfalusi, Rosearik Rikki Simons, Dan Castellaneta, Harry Shearer, Billy West

Actresses, Comedic / Comediennes: Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin, Paula Poundstone, Carol Kane, Aisha Tyler, Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGeneres, Tracey Ullman, Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo

Actresses, General: Cate Blanchett, Jodie Foster, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Christina Ricci, Anne Heche, Calista Flockhart, Martha Plimpton, Cybill Shepherd, Colleen Haskell

Actress, Japan: Takako Tokiwa

Ad Campaigns: truth: the anti-Tobacco-Industry commercials PowerBars: the old radio commercials where Tom Green would make a real-life crank-call to some business and ask if he could do something outrageous like rent a U-Haul trailer to tow behind his bicyle, saying it'll be okay because he's going to eat a Power Bar first California Department of Health Services Anti-Tobacco Media Campaign: especially the classic "'Mind if I smoke?' 'Care if I die?'" poster / billboard Gap: no, not the old "Fallll intooo the Gap!" , but rather the 1998 (?) ad that premiered the so-called "Matrix" Bullet Time effect, featuring khaki-clad twenty-somethings swing-dancing to Louis Prima's "Jump, Jive An' Wail" suddenly being frozen mid-jump as the camera panned around them Apple: the "Hello, I'm a Mac." / "And I'm a PC." campaign Burger King: the 2002 hidden-camera commercials for the "99-Cent BK Value Menu" where they would put a drive-thru menu board in some odd public location then have Adam Carolla talk on the intercom and heckle the people who came up to it Honda Element: the "road trip" ad where they "got a little lost along the way" has some of the only truly realistic acting I've ever seen in a commercial -- the lines "Once again, you're pointing here; he's pointing over there." and "247...!! Thank you!" always crack me up Apple: the late 90s / early 2000s ads for the iMac, iBook, etc., with Jeff Goldblum

Animal: Tapir

Author: Roger Zelazny

Colors: black, grey, white, clear, silver, fluorescents

Composers, Film: John Williams, Danny Elfman, Wendy Carlos, Howard Shore, Jerry Goldsmith, Trevor Jones, James Horner, Alan Silvestri, Brad Fiedel, John Barry (apparently I prefer composers with names 11 or so letters long)

Decades (for design, fashion, and entertainment): 1980s, 1940s, early 1960s, 1950s, 1930s

Directors, Animation: Don Bluth, John Kricfalusi, Mike Judge

Directors, Anime: Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Hideaki Anno

Directors, Live Action: David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker, Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, James Cameron, Peter Jackson

Disney Character: Ludwig Von Drake

Dog Breed: dachshund

Ethnic Cuisines: Indian, Thai, Japanese, Italian

Fabric: cotton

Flower: honeysuckle

Food: pasta

Holiday: Halloween

Humorists: Mike Nelson, Dave Barry

Juices: almost any fruit juice that's not from concentrate, but especially: tangerine juice (e.g. Trader Joe's), 100% cranberry juice (e.g. from Mountain Sun or Lakewood Organic)

Movies, Animation: The Secret Of NIMH, The Nightmare Before Christmas

Movies, Anime: Akira, Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi (AKA "Spirited Away"), Robot Carnival, Tonari No Totoro (AKA "My Neighbor Totoro")

Movies, Live Action: Tron, The Dark Crystal, Jurassic Park, Napoleon Dynamite, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, The Lord Of The Rings (I know, kind of cheating to name a whole trilogy, but of course Professor Tolkien did originally intend for it to be a single book, and all three movies were filmed simultaneously -- my favorite of the three is The Fellowship Of The Ring), The Thing, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Aliens, Edward Scissorhands

Musical Artists: Oingo Boingo, Front 242, The Cure, Skinny Puppy, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Kraftwerk, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Bow Wow Wow, Love And Rockets

Musical Artist, Local: Dead Man's Party

Musical Styles: Industrial, New Wave, Alternative Rock (mostly pre-Grunge), Electronica, Ska, Film Music, Swing, Punk, World, Classical

Musical Vocalist, Female: Siouxsie Sioux

Musical Vocalist, Male: Danny Elfman

Nut: pistachio

Radio Stations, Current: KPCC, KCRW, KUCI, KUSC, Indie 103.1 (KDLD / KDLE), FM94/9 (KBZT), KROQ (but these days, only Loveline and Kevin & Bean have any listenability -- KROQ-HD2 may be good too, as it reportedly brings back the Roq of the Eighties format, but I haven't had the opportunity to hear it)

Radio Stations, Past: KROQ prior to the Infinity takeover, MARS-FM, KMET, KTWV during its original new age music era

Short Film Series: Our Gang / The Little Rascals, The Three Stooges

Sports: volleyball, watersports, track & field

TV Series, Canada, Live Action: The Tom Green Show, You Can't Do That On Television

TV/OAV Series, Japan, Anime: Ranma 1/2, Cowboy Bebop

TV Series, Japan, Live Action: Trick, Long Love Letter: Hyôryu Kyôshitsu, Beautiful Life, Iron Chef, Meguriai, Saigo No Koi, Utsukushii Hito, Tsuiseki

TV Series, New Zealand, Live Action: Under The Mountain

TV Series, U.K., Animation: Danger Mouse

TV Series, U.K., Live Action: Fawlty Towers, Doctor Who (the Tom Baker years), Scrapheap Challenge, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Spitting Image, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, The Tomorrow People, Into The Labyrinth

TV Series, U.S., Animation: Invader ZIM, The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Simpsons, Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Beavis And Butt-Head, Futurama, King Of The Hill, South Park

TV Series, U.S., Anime: Robotech

TV Series, U.S., Live Action, Current: Lost, MythBusters

TV Series, U.S., Live Action, Past: Mystery Science Theater 3000, Scare Tactics, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek, Twin Peaks, The Tom Green Show, The X-Files, Max Headroom, Junkyard Wars, Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Weather: hot nights

Least Favorites

Up to 10 are listed in each category. Order is most disliked first.

Actors, Comedic / Comedians: Chris Kattan, Andrew Dice Clay, Carrot Top, Denis Leary

Ad Campaigns: (I hate these so much I boycott the prodcuts.) Red Bull: the hideously obnoxious and grossly unfunny "Red Bull gives you wings" animations and their radio commercial brethren Billy Mays commercials and informercials: where Mays brays horribly about OxiClean, The Ding King, etc. Carl's Jr.: "How to eat meat", "If it doesn't get all over the place, it doesn't belong in your face", "Don't bother me, I'm eating", etc. -- "crass, in-your-face celebrations of lunkheadedness", to quote a great O.C. Weekly article on the matter Sit 'n Sleep [sic. -- should be 'n']: their piercingly horrible "YOU'RE KILLING ME LARRY!" radio commercials; their illogical "We'll beat anyone's advertised price or your mattress is free!" claim is also very annoying on an intellectual level Old Navy: all of their ads -- mildly ironic that Gap Inc., purveyors of one of my most favorite commercials, also owns this chain McDonalds: the current-as-of-2003 radio commercials where calculatedly cheery faux chamber music tries to convince us that McDonalds is a sublime and sophisticated gift from God, not a lowest-common-denominator assembly line burger dispensary Mazda: "Zoom-Zoom", especially the "I see dead people"-inspired piercing kid whisper Video Professor: with the whining old fart begging you to "Try my product...!" Motorola: "Hello Moto"

Car: Scion xB

Colors: brown, beige, navy blue, offwhite, gold

Decades (for design, fashion, and entertainment): 1970s, mid through late 1960s

Fabric: polyester

Fashions: bell bottoms, the currently (2002-2003) all-the-rage jeans with just selected rectangular areas of the legs bleached, guys intentionally wearing their pants slung super-low so as to expose the top of their boxer shorts

Food Name: Buffalo Chicken Kickers (from Domino's Pizza)

Juices: carrot, beet, orange juice from concentrate (and from-concentrate juices in general)

Musical Styles: Conjunto (Mexican accordion music), Rap, R&B, Gospel, Country, Opera, Disco

Nut: Brazil nut

Sports: football, hockey, basketball, baseball

Weather: smog (if you can count that as weather), snow

Pet Peeves

Order is simply alphabetical.

Cars

• Bass-blasting car stereos
• Bootleg car stickers of Bill Watterson's Calvin peeing on logos
• Bulbous aftermarket exhaust pipes
• Deficient road signs
• "Factory Cash" (both the term and the concept)
• Low-riders and hydraulics
• Novelty fake boat propellers on the backs of cars, whose chrome surfaces often shine directly in the eyes of the driver behind, acting like a sun-intensity strobe light as they spin
• People who remove or disable their mufflers to intentionally make their vehicles generate obscene levels of noise pollution
• The new euphymism (coined by Toyota, as I recall) "certified pre-owned" to mean "used" (or even worse, dropping the "pre-owned" and just calling such cars "certified" -- very Newspeak, that)
• Those imbecillic spinning wheel covers

General

• Answering machines: businesses (sometimes even large ones) that are too cheap to buy one to put in outgoing-only mode to read off their operating hours, instead just letting the phone ring when they're closed
• Answering machines: digital ones that cut off your incoming message after some ridiculously low limit, like 15 or 30 seconds, and don't give you any warning about this (or an opportunity to re-record your message to fit) prior to disconnecting you
• Babies and kids that won't stop crying/screaming in public places (especially movie theaters), and their parents that do nothing about this
• Dogs that bark continuously for no reason, and their owners that do nothing about this
• Graffiti (in the "tagging" sense, not the Palm OS sense)
• Hip-Hop slang (bitch, def, fly, ill, jock, mad skillz, phat, representin', sticking extra "iz" syllables into words as in hizouse, etc.), especially when co-opted by advertisers to try to appear hip
• Inconsiderate people
• Littering
• Microwaves: people who routinely remove their food from communal ones partway through a cooking cycle and leave without hitting the Stop/Clear/Canel button, leaving the next user to be annoyed as hitting the keypad does nothing until that button is pressed
• Newsprint that rubs off on your fingers -- on business trips to Japan I marvelled at how the ink on their (awkwardly long and narrow) newspapers wouldn't rub off even if you intentionally ground your fingers into it
• Recent naming trends for companies and products: mixing a positive-sounding English word root with an agrammatical ending (e.g. "Celebrant", "Guidant", or "Thrivent" (full name: "Thrivent Financial for Lutherans" -- I kid you not)), taking a positive-sounding English word and chopping off part of it (e.g. "Cysive" or "Itanium"), and of course the overuse of an initial lowercase "e" or "i" (e.g. "eMachines" or "iCal")
• Smoking, especially cigars and pipes
• Sticker residue (does it really cost that much more for companies to label their products with stickers that come off cleanly?)
• Storage units (whether drawer units, CD storage, DVD storage, or whatever) that aren't inherently stackable
• Trash cans with hinged side openings that have springs that are so strong that it's impossible to get your trash in without either leaving it partially wedged in the lid, or else having the lid touch your hand when it springs back
• Wasting time (especially when forced to do so by other people, e.g. when stuck behind slow walkers or drivers)

Internet

• Animated GIFs and Flash ads (particularly those unbelievably asinine mortgage refinancing ads running rampant as of late 2006 with the loops of dancing idiots in silhouette), especially Flash ones that don't allow you to stop the animation with the context menu
• Non-disableable fuzzy searches that don't give some kind of clear indication of which results match only with fuzziness
• Pop-up and pop-under ads
• Spam
• Web form messaging systems that fail to submit your message due to bugs or unnecessarily short session timeouts, and then when you hit Back or log back in, the system has lost everything you typed
• Web stores that tell you not to type any spaces or dashes in your credit card number, making it a lot harder to check that you typed it correctly -- geez, guys, how bloody difficult would it be to write a routine to strip out the non-numeric characters??

Movies and TV

• Camera work that's intentionally amateurish, shakily framed to the point of being motion-sickness inducing, with lots and in-and-out zooms, to try to ram down your throat that what you're watching is gritty and real -- as seen on TV shows like Homicide: Life on the Street and The Shield, or the laughably badly-shot battle sequence of G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott ought to know better)
• DVD Easter Eggs (there's nothing clever or fun about having to press up, down, left, and right from every menu selection to see if anything's hidden -- if you've got cool special features, put 'em in the damn menus!)
• DVDs that disable the player's Audio button, making it a time-consuming pain to re-watch with the main audio track something pointed out in a commentary track, since you have to navigate through all the menus before and afterward to switch the audio tracks around
• Newscasters (at least in So. Cal.): the racial stereotyping -- an older white male as the primary anchor, a Latino female as the secondary anchor, an Asian female as the field reporter, black males as weathermen and sportscasters...
• Newscasters (at least in So. Cal.): the ultra-aggressive (to the point of exaggeration) authentic pronunciation of La-TEE-no names while simultaneously murdering other foreign names and words
• Obviously fake CGI (which is still most of it, at least when it comes to CGI creatures and characters, even in the highest budget blockbuster films -- so few productions live up to the standard of realism set by Jurassic Park way back in 1993)
• Obviously fake wire work (which accounts for a surprisingly high portion of it, even in movies whose effects are otherwise amazingly realistic)
• Pan & Scan movie prints
• The insultingly obvious "only in theaters" tagline used on TV spots for movies, especially animated ones
• TV networks like TNN and Oxygen that squash or crop show content so they can fit an obnoxious "info" banner at the bottom of the screen

Dan Harkless Last modified: June 9, 2008

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