Top 7: Hills I will die on for no reason

There are plenty of reasons to compromise your position on a subject, such as in governing where maintaining the peace for the greater good of all people is paramount. However, there comes a time when you simply cannot compromise. You cannot compromise your core beliefs; you cannot compromise your ethos or your logos — no matter how tantalising the short-term gain may seem.

Keeping in the theme of righteousness, I will now list 7 stupid, trivial and utterly pointless hills for which I will gladly die upon. I am correct and all dissenting opinions are wrong. I will not be taking any questions:

Chocolate goes in the refrigerator

Cocoa and cocoa butter may be from the tropics and sub-tropics of South America, but it took the temperate climate of Switzerland, Germany and Belgium to perfect what chocolate could be.

Chocolate was born in the warmth but it was forged in ice. Chocolate that is crisp is far superior to it’s room-temperature counterpart. There’s a snap you get when biting into cold chocolate which is deeply satisfying, unlike the sludgy bite you get in a warm piece of chocolate.

iPhone and Android are basically the same

I’m from the generation that grew up in the early days of the gaming console wars and in my youth I fanned the flames of brand loyalty much to the glee of Microsoft and Nintendo. When, as a young 20-something, I had enough income to afford all three of the major consoles on the market at the time I wept. For like Alexander, ‘I had no more worlds left to conquer.”

Only on introspection, the kind Alexander rebuffed from Diogenes, did I realise that the ‘console war’ was really a brand loyalty war. Where people had invested thousands of dollars on one or the other and wanted to somehow objectively ‘prove’ that their toy was the best one compared to the other.

Enter iPhone and Android. For the last 15 years a duopoly has formed between Apple and Google and they fan the flames of vitriol, of loyalty, of honour between their user base and whatever numbered device is released in September. Surprise! The camera/data size/security/bandwidth/screen is better than the one you bought 12–24 months ago.

The software is basically the same, the hardware is the same for all intents and purposes — the only difference is the exclusive apps. Sounds like the modern console war.

It goes: sock, shoe. Sock, shoe.

I won’t go into this too much because this is logical.

What absolute loose unit is out there putting their socks on, then putting their shoes on in one sitting?!

If you have socks on already — walking around the house, whatever, then of course you have socks on so shoes go on next. If you have bare feet, it goes sock, shoe. Sock, shoe.

Tomato sauce goes in the pantry

For the same logic chocolate goes in the fridge, tomato sauce goes in the pantry. Tomatoes may have come from high in the frigid steppes of the Andes mountains, but their use was perfected by the sun-kissed Italians.

The midday Tuscan sun beating down on vineyards of glistening red flavour orbs, picked and processed into sauces and preserves by a dozen generations on family land. Cut to the vast growing fields of tomatoes in Mexico, southern United States and Australia — three of the hottest places on Earth.

Tomatoes are processed to the tomato sauce (or ‘ketchup’) we all know and love and we thank those who cultivate, refine and package our red deliciousness. Tomato sauce is shipped in unrefrigerated containers across the world and consumed by hundreds of millions all of the world.

At what stage do you need to insult this gift of the gods by keeping it in the fridge? ‘Because the label says to refrigerate after opening?’ Why?! The heat made this delicacy — tomato sauce craves the heat from whence it came. ‘Because the air gets to it, and bacteria grow in the tomato sauce and that’s why…’
You haven’t survived a global pandemic to be taken down by bacteria which, frankly, has better taste than you, person who likes cold sauce. Even microorganisms know that cold tomato sauce is terrible.

Most Star Wars films are not great

Another one which I won’t dwell on because I don’t want to:

A New Hope and Empire rule.

Return and Force Awakens are fine.

The Prequels are bad, the majority of Sequels are bad.

Solo is terrible.

Rogue One has got legs; but they only did something interesting because it ended with ‘everyone dies at the end’. Spoilers, I guess, for a film which came out 8 years ago and has been available on Disney+ since the service launched.

The Legend of Korra is as-good as Avatar: The Last Airbender

Avatar: The Last Airbender is more-or-less the story of Journey to the West. Aang, Katara, Sakka, Toph and Appa are all combinations of Tripitakka, Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and the Horse (that is actually a dragon). The four pilgrims journey from the Eastern Kingdom (Southern Water Tribe) to India in the West (Fire Nation in the East) in search of enlightenment as directed by Buddha (Spirit World) and to do the bidding of spiritual forces far greater than themselves.

This is by no means a knock against Avatar. Julia Lovell’s Monkey King: Journey to the West is my favourite adaptation of Sun Wukong and the story of Monkey may be one of the greatest stories ever told. Avatar emulates these fables from hundreds of years ago in a setting and art style which honours the source materiel and tells them well.

Korra, on the other hand, is a story unlike anything I can think of in popular media.

The creators knew they could not simply emulate Journey to the West again, and the allegory of a long physical journey to get your powers and your skills sharpened for the singular ‘big-bad’ is the same heroes journey they had already done.

What they did was a gritty cop drama and noir detective story, followed by patriarchal power struggles within a failing kingdom. They had to contend with enemies who were objectively more powerful and more cunning than they were and, they needed to unite the worlds of heaven and earth against a dictator they helped create.

While this is happening, our protagonist struggles with their identity, they make mistakes and push away those who love them. Korra is the classic gifted child at school who excelled without trying in all things assigned to them. Their ego was massive. Then, in the real-world Korra struggled. Not just because she was essentially home schooled and had limited interaction with the outside world, but because she realised that there were others out there who were as good as her — if not better — and she had never learned how to learn. Her enemies could improve and adapt, she could not.

They are both different stories, but they are equally as ‘good’.

Alcohol is overrated. So are all recreational drugs.

N.B. In the interest of full disclosure I’ve had a few while writing this.

It is though, right? Who actually enjoys drinking or racking lines or punching cones or shelving or whatever it is the kids are doing with their disco biscuits these days.

I dunno… this one is the tough one because I like the occasional beer or wine or whiskey but I just don’t vibe off it in the same way I see others necking grog on the nightly. I certainly don’t brag about my consumption of anything — something which we Aussies seem to love to do.

I guess this last one is the anti-climax of the whole article as it’s not a hill I’ll die on so much as a hill I’ll kind of trip over when someone is looking. I don’t really have anything against drugs either to be clear. Just that they, like booze, are overrated in their appeal.