Another day, another freak. This morning, I began the highly scientific process of opening a browser window and aimlessly clicking around with one hand tucked into my pants, when Yahoo!–as it has every day since they changed the front page to the new format–pissed me right off.

Fuck you.

Forget the idiot who likened welfare programs to feeding stray animals. Forget P. Diddy’s kid. Forget Gary Coleman. Forget Gary Coleman’s wife. Forget Gary Coleman’s wife’s busted grill. Yahoo! itself, one of the epicenters of Internet life, is downright freakish. I can’t describe how needlessly frustrating and counterintuitive this interface is. This must be how porn actresses feel when they’re in a bukkake scene.

First thing’s first: the moment the page loads, an enormous square pops up, obscuring pretty much everything: “Add your favorite sites!” Thanks for the offer, but I’m pretty sure I know why I came here, and it isn’t to do that. This is the 21st century. Nobody goes to Yahoo! anymore just for shits and giggles. People know why they’re here, so kindly try not to impede them.

But it’s not over yet. If your mouse pointer so much as breathes upon any of the dozen plus options to the left, you get more screen-obscuring pop-ups. It’s convenient, if you like things uncontrollably flying at your face, which brings us back to the bukkake simile. You also sometimes get advertisements that, again, occur on mouseover. Really, mouseover pop-ups are pretty much the worst thing to happen to human civilization since the Third Reich.

Using a small, tucked-away option in the corner, you can switch the format back to something resembling the way Yahoo! used to be, but that doesn’t erase the fact that this horrid design is foisted upon web users by default, or that somebody ever thought it was a great idea in the first place.

I know this was supposed to have something to do with freaks and stuff. Screw it. Pretend I said something about retards, midgets, Gary Busey, whatever. Something like that. P.S. Screw Yahoo!

Share/Save