If applause is what you wanted then Mission Accomplished!

How about a big round of applause for this post?

Put your hands together and let ’em really hear it even in the cheap seats!

Let’s have a warm WordPress welcome for that wacky and sarcastic negatarian.

Give it up for the guru of grumpiness!

Come on all you humans, and all you seals, too, don’t be shy now…

Aim your hands at each other and strike them together vigorously creating waves of energy that will travel at the speed of sound to tickle our eardrums.

Yes, I am ordering you to participate in a mass behavior that will both please your performer and reinforce your position within the group. Failure to comply would not be wise.

So seriously, make that mother-fucking noise for this jewel of a post brought to you by none other than Tom from the abyss!!!

“Thank you. Thank you. It’s really great to be here. Please, please. Take your seats. Anyone here from out of town? [beat] Let me say this: if I hear anyone – and I do mean anyone – ever dare to utter the phrase make that noise as a way of asking for applause – even just one more time – there will be blood.”

“Make no mistake. Do not test my resolve. My sensibilities have been attacked and my sensibilities will be defended. I will smoke out that phrase dead or alive. Especially dead.”

“Mr. Nick Cannon of America’s Got Talent – this especially means you! As of now you are a fugitive of justice and public enemy number one.”

For the future of humanity I have immersed myself in reality TV ad infinitum. It’s a rough job but someone has got to do it. As always I’m willing to do my part. After all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few – or the one. But seriously, folks. There have got to be some limits! After I hear a phrase often enough I begin to twitch like a pack of rabid Pavlovian dogs and then the spittle flies. Trust me. No one wants that.

There is no polite way to say it. The phrase “make that noise” needs to be killed. It needs to be shot, stabbed, thrown out of an airplane with no parachute, taken out by an IED, poisoned, lethal injectioned, beheaded, tripped down a flight of stairs, pushed in front of a bus, electrocuted, drowned, folded, spindled and/or mutilated. Preferably all of the above. Go for death by dismemberment and I don’t even care if that is covered in the insurance policy. Hell, at this point I’d settle for it being Jodie Fostered on a pinball machine. And then taken out back and killed.

The origins of the phrase are somewhat unclear, at least to me. Even the wise Wikipedia seemingly holds no answers. My guess is that the phrase is pretty young. Perhaps even too young to die. I don’t care. It has to die. The future of humanity depends on it.