Here’s the last of my latest series of readers’ gripes. I hope your spleens feel thoroughly vented.

“My gripe is my husband. Married 40 years and he’s been a creep. Never a pleasant day. One of these days he better watch out. Please print this. Maybe he will change, although I have no hope for him.”

“David Letterman. I don’t laugh at any of his jokes. But he laughs at them hard enough for both of us.”

“What about the guy carrying a 200-pound beer belly, wears a short T-shirt and scratches the bottom of his fat belly after stuffing himself at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.”

“TV anchors who cannot stop smiling even if they are reading an account of a disaster that just wiped out an entire family.”

“The end of baseball season.”

“I find it offensive when people say: ‘God bless you’ in place of the equally annoying, ‘Have a nice day.’ I’m an atheist.”

“When I go to a funeral parlor to pay my respects and find the casket is closed. I feel like a fool.”

“People who insist on selecting the color of a rental car.”

“Department store executives whining about how they are losing out to the discount stores. They dug their own grave. They used to attract people because they had clerks who were knowledgeable about the products they sold. These clerks used to stay with the stores for years because they had full-time jobs with benefits. They replaced them with part-time teenagers who stay two months and quit and can’t help anybody with anything. That, and they also try to sell cheap, shoddy products at high prices. If I want cheap, shoddy products, I’ll go to a discounter. Unfortunately, all we have now is cheap, shoddy products everywhere.”

“Airplane food getting a bad rap. I like airplane food.”

“Sally Raphael doesn’t realize or doesn’t care about her viewers. She lets all the people talk at once and she doesn’t try to stop them. It’s disgusting.”

“Why is it most women cannot walk a straight line? They walk down the street swaying from side to side making it nearly impossible to pass them. This situation is compounded by the fact that they walk with their arms flailing outwards. Any attempt to pass them results in either a karate chop to the throat or a direct shot to your private area.”

“Finding empty ice cube trays in the freezer.”

“If people picked and chose mates as carefully as donuts and bagels, this would be a much happier world.”

“I simply cannot tolerate those stupid bumper stickers that read: ‘I (H) my wife, I (H) my husband, I (H) my dog, I (H) my cat.’ Who gives a flip what or who the (H)?”

“People crunching ice.”

“How about the bastards that have to throw their cigarette butt out the car window at the last stop sign before home. I live on a beautifully landscaped, well maintained corner lot with a stop sign, and I think every smoker that pus up to that stop sign throws out his damn cigarette butt. Do they think these things just disappear? Yeah, they disappear because I go out and pick up about a hundred of them a week to keep my lawn form looking like a giant ashtray.”

“The NFL player that kneels and says a prayer after scoring a touchdown. I’m not impressed with his religious convictions. This turkey probably hasn’t seen the inside of a church in 20 years.”

“Talk shows where they have guest after guest going on and on about nothing—and I wind up asking myself, ‘Very interesting, that’s fine, but who the hell are you?'”

“Why is it when there is a potentially exciting story about aliens or UFOs, it always winds up being told to us or to a reporter by some moron from the Ozarks? Why don’t they ever land in Carl Sagan’s back yard?”

“How come as a kid in the 1950s, so many senators—Javits, Keating, Dirksen, Paul Douglas, Talmadge, Smathers, Hugh Scott, Mike Mansfield, etc.—all seemed larger than life? But now, they all seem like buffoons.”

“The words ‘gridlock,’ ‘standoff’ and ‘compound.'”

“My hair stands on end when I hear leftists like Slick Willie prostitute the word ‘fair.’ Example: The rich should pay ‘their fair share of the taxes.’ The top 10 percent of earners pay 55 percent of all income taxes, 11 times as much as the bottom 45 percent. That certainly is unfair, except in a socialist society.”

“Henry Kissinger. With all his ‘brilliance’ he can’t manage to lose his thick accent.”

“The nine-digit zip code.”

“Women who perform their morning grooming rituals on public transportation: comb their dripping-wet hair into the laps of those behind them, apply lotion to their face, arms, legs and put on ‘war paint’ in preparation for the day’s battle. Gross!”

A native Chicagoan, Mike Royko attended Wright Junior College, the University of Illinois and Northwestern University. The home base of his syndicated column is the Chicago Tribune and it has been provided to the Star by Tribune Media Services.