(Potentially) Unpopular Opinions, Jinxes, and Horcruxes Thread

While I think it’s sad when I hear about anyone dying of brain cancer, I just could never get into the Tragically Hip.

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They’re happy to hear that since they’d prefer not to be eaten.

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I like fruitcake!

I’ve never gotten the fruitcake hate. Maybe folks have had bad fruitcake, or their uncle always soaked it in lousy whiskey or something.

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People don’t like fruitcake??? But that’s the best kind of cake (except perhaps Battenberg).


Related: fondant icing is great, and frosting is rubbish.

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Every Christmas I read Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. I challenge anyone to read that story and not want one of those fruitcakes he and his cousin made.

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Yes!! Or even watch the hard-to-find PBS movie of it with Geraldine Page, which was a Christmas tradition in my family. My mom still says “It’s fruitcake weather!”.

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The whole idea of fruitcake is that it’s bacteriostatic because of being soaked in 80 proof spirits, yes? For me, the alcohol just gives it a bitter taste. But, as you said, maybe I’ve just had fruitcake made with cheap booze.

Still, I can’t imagine any fruitcake besting my springerle, lebkuchen, and marzipan stollen.

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I actually never had booze-soaked fruitcake until very recently. I actually prefer it without. The rum/bourbon kind of overwhelms it.

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20:1 there’s a fruitcake recipe out there that calls for bourbon and bacon.

(Literally thirty seconds later:) Yuuuuuuuuup.

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The pretentiousness of Moleskines follows a similar curve to the pretentiousness of Starbucks, and much like Starbucks it has universally elevated something that used to be cheap crap unless you made it yourself.

ETA: And I pronounce it Mole. Skin. Not Mole-ESS-skeenah. Not mole-SKYNE. There is no official pronunciation because the name is psuedo-European. I’d rather assume it came bound in the hide of a smelly backyard pest.

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What chance @japhroaig has made it?

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There is probably a whole dissertation waiting to be written on that topic.

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I like living in Florida.

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I think it follows the general trend of something that only people with too much money want to bother with at first, and then as more people give it a shot, prices come down a bit and then the rich people get tired of the riff-raff sharing the experience and move on to bulletproof coffee and writing on mouse vellum.

Is it weird that I think of middle-class people as being rich, now?

Incidentally, surely you’re ABD by now… Maybe? I suddenly feel like you’ve been in grad school forever.

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Not at all. Not having to worry about $$$ is a privilege and the truly middle class tend not to have to think about it. Of course, there are less and less people like that.

Yes, for a while now. I plan to finish up by the end of this semester, or at the latest by next semester… I should be going on the job market this year, in fact. A whole new kind of stress!

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That reminds me of the rum balls my mother made every Christmas that were wonderful.

My teetotaler grandmother would scold my grandfather for eating them–he said he looked forward to them all year–and he’d tell her “It’s okay, the alcohol bakes out.”

Then he’d discreetly wink at my mother because he knew damn well she added the rum after baking.

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My hand writing is way too big for that.

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I’ve made bread with barley (flakes).

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My Baptist grandmother seemed to “forget” and douse them two or three times. Because the good Lord wouldn’t begrudge anyone a little desSert.

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