Past imperfect

Inexplicably, my mom subscribes to Hello! Magazine, the British periodical whose mission statement is "celebrities are infinitely interesting, even the British ones you've never heard of; it's just too bad our photos are blurry rubbish."

In a nice nod to the commoners, the magazine devotes its last few pages to recipes (which are photographed much better than anything else in the publication). A few weeks ago they had a recipe for bangers and mash, which can be accurately described to North Americans as "sausages and mashed potatoes." The recipe went something like this:

1. Grill or fry some sausages.
2. Boil potatoes and then mash them.
3. Get ready to loosen belt, fatso.

It's a British magazine, and thus will use "fatso" rather than "fatty."

As much contempt as I have for Hello!, I do have to thank them for alerting me to another term I'd like to adopt: "soured cream." That's what one of this week's recipes called for. (I think the recipe was for Victoria Beckham's Easy Tuna Casserole. An unwanted celebrity and a high-school-level chef? She's a double threat!)

It never occurred to me that you could call sour cream "soured cream." I'm such a ridiculous stickler for "iced tea" and "whipped cream" that I always hoped there were more needlessly nitpicky names for foodstuffs I could use. Welcome to the team, soured cream; we've got some pierogies with your name on 'em.

That being said, I continue to be baffled by some folks' insistence on calling homemade cd compilations "mixed" cd's. We never called them "mixed tapes," did we? No! So why are their techonological descendants "mixed cd's?" Because they're not; they're "mix cd's" and they always will be!

OK, this post was kind of pointless, so I'll toss out one more Into the Wild criticism that's kind of a spoiler, but that continues to bug me days later. Say what you will about director Sean Penn, but you have to admit that he's a principled dude. So why would he go and change the ending to Into the Wild? It's really a rip-off to have the kid survive at the end. Certainly, it works in the context of the film Sean Penn wanted to make, but it cheapens the real story and I think Penn should have tried harder to reconcile the true story with the story he wanted to tell. I'm a little surprised no other review I've read has mentioned this aspect of the film, but it's gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews so I suppose everyone else thinks Penn made the right decision in having the kid survive his Alaskan adventure. For me, it simply didn't work.