Overrated

22Sep08

It’s not that they suck, but will you please all stop raving about the following, k?

Sweet Chilli Sauce
Once upon a time, the only time one really had to deal with sweet chilli sauce was with wedges, and sour cream, and the sour cream made it all worthwhile. And then all these people without any taste buds liked the sound of it, and started pairing it with everything. And when they ran out of things to pair it with, they married it to chicken and forced it to have babies and suddenly it was sweet chilli chicken this and sweet chilli chicken that and on and on and somewhere along the lines people forgot that it was basically a bland, syruppy concoction littered with stewed red flakes that breaks the most basic of all chilli rules by being not at all hot, and now it’s taken over the world.
Secretly the thing that irritates me the most about the popularity of sweet chilli – besides it’s utter shiteness as a flavour – is that it’s marginalised the far superior of ‘’sweet’ flavours: sweet and sour. There was a time where one could find several wonderfully tangy sorts of sweet and sour sauce in ones local supermarket. Now there’s a wall of sweet chilli varietals and very little else and it’s really not fair. Sing it with me folks: Sweet and sour forever! Sweet chilli never!

Melbourne
I’ve been to Melbourne. It’s quite nice. It has some lovely people and I hope the lovely people from there who read this don’t take it one jot personally, but – as a tourist destination – Melbourne is just. not. that. great. And before you start: I know it’s better if you know a local. I’ve been down there to visit locals and I have had more fun than when I went on my own and didn’t know anyone, but that’s mostly because I liked the people I was going down to see, and they would have made a week in outer Minto a joyous experience I would remember forever for the sheer amount of fun I had. And besides – where isn’t better if you know a local? I loved wandering the cobblestoned streets of Prague and getting lost and discovring things on my own (or with my boy), but dammit, if I knew a local I wouldn’t have ended up in that dingy basement restaurant waiting an hour for my (lukewarm and rather tasteless) entree on my last night in Europe. I would have been eating somewhere awesome, and cheap, and fun. Because I’d know a local, and they’d help me avoid the places not really worth going.
And so every time someone tells me I’d like Melbourne more if I knew a local, I wonder why exactly they feel the need to make so many excuses for what is basically a city not that different from any other … with some nice parts, and some boring parts, and some good shops, and some boring shops, and some shops like you find at Parramatta Westfield, and some good pubs, and some lame pubs, utterly shit beaches and an inner city that seems to close around 7pm.
Unless you know a local.

Sex And The City
I don’t know if I’ve expressed this before here, but this was not the best TV show ever. It did not depict female relationships in a more realistic way than any other show ever – because guess what, me and my female friends all have jobs and thus can’t gather for brunch every day to discuss orgasms and shoes. And if I tried to leave the house looking like Sarah Jessica Parker, my friends would not compliment me on my fashion-forwardness, but instead remind me that I should really only wear one belt at a time and that bras go under shirts and that I can’t just cut the top off my Aunt Hilda’s wedding dress, attach some suspenders to the skirt and call myself dressed.

The Time Travellers Wife
You know, I really did love this book the first time I read it. But then I made the mistake of reading it again and … it’s really not that good. Sure, it’s quirky and it’s engaging and it’s romantic and all of that, but it’s also kind of creepy. I like to think that if The Dude suddenly went back in time, he wouldn’t befriend the seven-year-old version of me. He could swing past my house and note that I was a cute little kid (even though I wasn’t) – but that’s about it. I don’t know why but any more that that would kind of squick me out, like it squicks me out that Katie Holmes fancied Tom Cruise at four and then married him.
And then there’s the fact that aside from the two leads, all of the characters are so poorly fleshed out they may as well not exist, and that even the two leads aren’t characterised in any really strong way and all I can remember about them after having read the book twice is that they loved each other. Oh, and she did some stupid thing with paper and he worked in a Library. Vivid characterisations indeed.

Denim Shorts
I have to be honest here, I would probably like demin shorts more if I had a better body. My main gripe with denim shorts is similar to my main gripe with sweet chilli – they seem to have pushed something I actually like (demin skirts) out of the mainstream fashion sphere, and into the periphery. Why – major denim retailers – can’t you just have a selection of both? Five styles of short, and five styles of skirt. Or … even three styles of skirt. Anything more than the one belt-like micromini with a slit up the back, even.

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Tags: outer Minto, random