My loathing for vuvuzelas is color blind

By now, anyone who has watched more than 3 minutes of a World Cup game in one of the South African venues, or even been within, say, a hundred meters of a house with a game on, knows what a vuvuzela is and hates it. If they don't, they're either stone deaf or have copious stock interest in the manufacturer of this small plastic horn-like device. I can't call it a horn or a trumpet because the single note it plays is not on any musical scale, not major, minor, diatonic, chromatic, or even Phrygian. When a herd of these hornish horrors is in full throat inside a soccer stadium the sound most closely approximates a mass of Bombus terrestris, who have just been informed that pollination has been forbidden by their queen.

The amount of rhetoric flying around the media about vuvuzelas is not surprising given how obnoxious these things are. Someone even determined how to banish the vuvuzela from his World Cup audio by selectively muting four frequencies on his equalizer.

What is surprising is the number of defenders of this undefendable annoyance. And the most common argument in their favor is based on the color of skin of blower. Blog comments like "I'll make a broad assumption: you probably wouldn't have an issue if the people blowing the horns were of a lighter hue would you?" are all over the blogosphere.

Let me be clear. I would have an issue with these things even if my son was blowing into one. These horns are terrible and are ruining the World Cup for television viewers. If I were king, they would have been banned on day one. And jeeze can we leave the race card out of this? Obnoxious knows no color.