Question and Answer

[mrissa]

yhlee and pegkerr and several other people, I forget who, have been answering the "five fictional characters you had a crush on as a kid" question. I was reading along with interest and having a hard time coming up with any besides Egon from "Ghostbusters," because my interest in geeks apparently started somewhere around or before my fifth birthday. "Ghostbusters" came out in 1984, the year I turned six, and there was already no question in my mind which Ghostbuster was the appropriate one.

But then it hit me: the Westmark trilogy. Like, half the male cast of the Westmark trilogy. Florian, Justin, Stock, Theo. Keller. I totally sympathized with Sparrow on the point of Keller.

Is this a disturbing answer? I think it might be.

So anyway, I was answering a question redredshoes had asked about chocolate, and it got me wondering: what food products have you bought that disappointed you? They don't have to be disgusting things, just things that weren't nearly as good as they sounded. Mine (in the comments to the last entry) was Haute Fudge's Grand Marnier fudge. (The kind of fudge you heat and pour over ice cream, not the kind you slice and eat.) It's fine, but...who wants Grand Marnier fudge to be fine? So it lurks in the corner of the fridge, getting finished slowly, because...meh. And we can do better than "meh" for desserts around here.

How about you? What did you think was going to be wonderful that wasn't?

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Gevallia coffee. Too fruity.

Kama Sutra massage oil. Too viscous. Also not food, but you get the idea.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you like actual fruit and coffee combos? Like a mocha with raspberry syrup in it, for example? Or all fruity coffee items taboo?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Some are good and some are not. Strawberry syrup can be great in coffee. I prefer vanilla or caramel when I add flavors, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There is much to be said for a good caramel.

[rilina.livejournal.com]

I totally sympathized with Sparrow on the point of Keller.

Ditto. I originally liked Florian more, but the older I get, the more I like Keller. I think my taste is improving with age.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In actual men, I had a very sharp initial dating learning curve (starting with "horrible excuse for a human being" and improving from there), but I think my fictional taste in men has remained fairly constant. Odd, that.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Ah, but your fictional taste in men probably doesn't suffer half the consequences of your "real" taste.

When you expect something of a realtime human, they can let you down (especially if you imagine they have virtues that they do not possess). However, if you return to the page, your hero does exactly what he did before that caused you to sigh and flutter. He remains the same (whether the reader changes - and if so, how much, is a variable in the equation).

Cf. George Emerson's speech about Cecil Vyse in "A Room with a View." *sigh*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think the problem was something of the opposite: I wasn't expecting enough of realtime men. I got standards. That was a good thing.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Chocolate-chocolate chip pancakes with raspberry syrup. Too... meh. Don't ask me how this can go meh, but meh it went.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, I can see that, actually, because raspberry syrup is extremely easy to get wrong (including doing it right with meh raspberries -- ah, the hazards of fresh produce), and double-chocolate things can become banal fairly quickly if not handled well.

Oh wow. I am such a snob.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

The funniest thing about that post is this: "Oh wow."

Like the fact that you're a snob is news or something....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But there's "snob," and then there's "decided to apply the word 'banal' to a griddle-cooked item."

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Have you met you?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hey, Scott, did you know I'm kind of intense?

(Sorry, rest of the world; that's a decade-old in-joke.)

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Hee hee. "Kind of intense."

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I don't generally get disappointed about food products I buy, because I don't have high expectations for it. The closest I can think of is that sometimes I buy fancy cheese, and it turns out to be too much of a pain to cut, so I don't end up eating it before it goes bad. And that's a disappointment.

I do get disappointed in restaurants. Since I'm a transplanted Southerner, there are things that I Must Eat when I go back to NC, and if the restaurant is having an off day, oof. It *has* to be good, dammit, I won't be back for another year or so.

Fictional characters I had crushes on...hm. Eilonwy and Gwydion and Coll from the Prydain books. Simone on Head of the Class. Sarah in Labyrinth. William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose (the movie). Lucia Lombardo in Moscow on the Hudson.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Too much of a pain to cut.

Let me sit here and ponder that for a moment.

Okay, I'm drawing a blank: how? Why? What kind of cheese could possibly be too much of a pain to cut?

I didn't crush on it that I recall, but I loved the idea of Head of the Class, because the smart kids weren't all the same. They were all supposed to be smart kids, but some of them were into art and some into science and so on and so on.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Cheese that is firm enough that it really, truly needs a cutting board and sharp knife to be cut, because the knife goes "thwack" once it goes all the way through. I only eat so much cheese at one time, and having to wash a cutting board and sharp knife each time I do...often not worth it to me, even though I think it will be when I see the cheese in the store.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love pungent hard cheese like that, so it's always worth it to me to add another cutting board to the dishwasher. Or, more often, to use the one I was cutting tomatoes on etc.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

With the old dishwasher, there was only room for one cutting board or large pan or such. It was poorly configured, rackwise. When we had no dishwasher, well, every food prep choice for me was weighed with that in mind. Now we have our new dishwasher, yay! So perhaps I will be more reckless.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Various cheese knives make cutting cheese easier than doing so with a sharp knife. Also, large and heavy knives are much better suited to hard cheeses than a more versatile blade. You could cut a couple of days cheese at a time, too. Hard cheeses won't mold in just a day or two.

As for Haute Fudge, Mris, is that the one with corn syrup as principal sweetener? All the hot fudge products that are sweetened with corn syrup are sucktacular, the more so when you spend upwards of $10 a jar for them. Lunds has a really really really good one that's only sweetened with sugar, but it's wildly expensive. Cheaper to make your own.

K.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I went down to check, and it isn't, it's sweetened with white and brown sugar. I've had corn syrup sweetened chocolate sauces before, and they are indeed craptastic. This is just...meh. Wrong balance of chocolate and Grand Marnier for me, I think, so I'll just have to make my own.

Which will leave us with a partial bottle of Grand Marnier. Oh woe, oh alack; will no one help us with our horrid plight etc.

We have a good sturdy cheese wire for all but the hardest cheeses, but I like having to get out the big knife and go whack. Probably means I'm going to like the cheese.

It's 10 in the morning. There is no reason for me to go eat cheese and chocolate right now. In another hour, though....

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Logically, you're right about the cheese. Illogically, it is just Too Much for me to have a Multi-Day Cheese Plan.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Dried Mango slices. I love mangos (mangoes?). I like dried fruit. Dried mango slices are worse than a disappointment, they were just disgusting. They even smelled kind of fishy, literally, like fish.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, you know what else is no good? Dried canteloupe. I love canteloupe, but the dried kind I had was like dried sugar dipped in sugar sauce with perhaps a side of sugar, plus a little slightly-gone-bad melon. Bleh.

Also, some dried peaches are nice and others are really horrible and smell like a rotting member of the family rodentia. Possibly vole. I don't know what rotting voles smell like, but that's my current theory: rotting vole.

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Oh, hell yeah, Egon was Teh Sexy. All the way. Though about the time Ghostbusters came out, I was a little older, and assholish, wisecracking Peter Venkman characters were starting to turn my crank too. Now that I'm much older, Dan Akroyd has them both beat cold. Ten years from now, I'll be having hot fantasies about Rick Moranis.

*sigh.* Keymaster.

M

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Dan Aykroyd is always Mother to me, from "Sneakers," so...not a sex symbol.

I do love "Sneakers" and Mother. But...not a sex symbol.

Meep! I had forgotten that Dr. Hathaway from "Real Genius" was in "Ghostbusters," probably because I haven't seen "Ghostbusters" as an adult and didn't see "Real Genius" until I was an older teenager. (And speaking of fictional crushes and wisecracking: Val Kilmer as Chris Knight. Awwww yeah.)

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but did you ever see Grosse Point Blank, in which Dan Ackroyd was a hit-man? He was pretty cute in that movie.

I can't believe I'm arguing for the sexiness of Dan Ackroyd.

Anyway, back to geeky sex-gods ... let's not forget the Professor from Gilligan's Island! Smart and clean cut ... ROWR! I thought Christopher Lloyd in the Back To The Future movies was pretty scrumptious. But that attraction was not pure "geek", there were also aspects of my fascination with "crazy" too.

Which leads me to some deep psychological analysis of geek-fascination in women. Is it that we're attracted to men who are fundamentally unavailable (because they're thinking about so much other stuff)? Or is it that geeks are non-threatening because they are more likely to be cogitating over quadratic functions than trying to pressure one into hopping into the sack? Or is it that geeks are smart, and we believe they're more likely to take us seriously? Or is it that we feel that we'll have a lot in common, because we secretly believe that we share the same kinds of insecurities?

All the fictional heroes in my books are geeks, or geekish. I can't fathom how any woman would be attracted to a Conan, or a Hercules, or even a James Bond. They're too flashy. Give me a social retard any day.

M

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Or is it that geeks are non-threatening because they are more likely to be cogitating over quadratic functions than trying to pressure one into hopping into the sack?

Who are you hanging out with who is trying to pressure quadratic functions into the sack?

Heee.

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Um, remember, we're talking about *geeks* here ....

But yeah, you're right, I could have phrased that better. ;-)

M

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What alarming reasons for being attracted to geeks!

I take them more seriously.
I know we'll have a lot in common because I am one, too.
I don't find them non-threatening at all -- well -- not the bad kind of threatening, usually, but usually when people say non-threatening, they mean not-sexually-aggressive. Um, no.
They're often quite available.

And when a guy who gets that intense about computers/math/fiction/history/etc. gets that intense about me, this is what we know as a good thing. A very good thing.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Cherimoyas.

Season VIII of Red Dwarf.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It was even worse for me because I discovered we'd been having it for years and I hadn't been liking it. Selling out one's family for candy I didn't even like!

Edmund was still miles better than Peter or Susan, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The dragonscale thing was Eustace. But one of the things I liked about Edmund is that he didn't forget what a little jerk he used to be himself, when Eustace was around being a little jerk.

[heck.livejournal.com]

I had a huge crush on Egon (the animated one, primarily) as a kid. I was Ghostbusters-obsessed for years. He wasn't even my first animated crush -- that was the bass California Raisin, from whenever there was a California Raisins animated series. I was a hopeless dork even then.

As for disappointing food products: raspberry coffee. I love raspberry, and coffee, just not together. Candied ginger, which at least in that case was horribly bitter. Also fried plantains, which had been hyped up by my partner in crime and ended up just tasting like spoiled fried new potatoes. Bleah.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fried plantains are very, very easy to get wrong. If your partner in crime approved the kind you had and you still didn't like them, that's probably a good indicator, but it took us several tries to fry even a remotely credible plantain, after having them out at a good restaurant.

SIGH. Now I want to go back to that good restaurant (Bodegita del Medio in Palo Alto) and have their plato de vegetales. SIGH.

[sovay]

Keller, no two ways about it. (And while we're on the subject of Lloyd Alexander, am I the only person who ever seriously imprinted on Fflewddur Fflam? Yeah . . . I was afraid of that . . .)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Probably not the only one, no. But I can't say I'll join you in the Fflam Ffan Club that way. Sorry!

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Sort of the combination of him and his harp, I think.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Fflewddur-and-harp...it's sort of like King-in-Parliament...