I admire it, but I don't want it.

1. iPhones
Although it is undoubtedly the most remarkable piece of hand-held engineering ever developed, I simply have no use for the iPhone. On the few occasions when I've had to fiddle with one, I became claustrophobic trying to maneuver around its tiny display, and when I'm wearing contacts I can't even see the touchpad without reading glasses. Not only that, it makes for a lousy telephone. Now the iPad is a different matter altogether. You see, I'm old enough to remember chalk slates in school, and every time I touch my iPad it feels like magic. You will rarely see me without mine in my hands.

2. Barack Obama
That's hardly a surprise, since I never fell for the hype. But I did vote for the man, and I hoped he would bring at least some improvement to America's position in the world. But who could have imagined it would become this horrible? Eternal war in Afghanistan, interventions everywhere, drone warfare abroad and even at home, targeted killings, indefinite detention... Gawd help us.

 
No, it isn't terrible, but Radeberger just
doesn't live up to all the hype
(Source: Non-snob beer reviews) 

3. Radeberger Pilsner
Okay, so this beer used to be brewed by appointment to His Majesty the King of Saxony. Big deal. What is regarded as one of Germany's premier beers tastes to me as if someone had left it in a copper tea kettle overnight. I love Dresden, but when it comes to products from there I'll stick to the Christstollen, thank you very much.

4. Christopher Hitchens
Everybody's comparing the late essayist to George Orwell, but believe me: I've read George Orwell, and Hitchens was no George Orwell. Sure, I admire Hitchens' style and his ego. When he was good, he was excellent, even when tackling such blatantly provocative issues as Why Women Aren't Funny. I also respect the way he challenged the ethics of the torture method known as water-boarding by actually submitting to it on camera, and the way he confronted his terminal illness head-on by writing about it and sparing us nothing. His atheist writings were wonderful, particularly his debunking of the Mother Teresa phenomenon, even though I suspected most of his anti-religious stance revolved around taking cheap potshots at Islam. But his tilt to fullscale neocon savagery after 1991 and, particularly, 2001? It was painful to read a man so drunk on the Koolaid. If for Newt Gingrich (or William Kristol, or Benhamin Netanyahu) it's always 1938 and he's always Churchill, for Hitchens the calendar had gotten stuck in 1936 and he was always Orwell, heading down to Spain to combat (Isalmo-)fascism. So let's look at what Orwell wrote about this sort of delusion in his Politics and the English language:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’.

Last year, in explaining his fateful choice to act as President Bush's chief intellectual cheerleader for the most painful of options, namely an unprovoked war of aggression on a sovereign country, all Hitchens could say was "there are no pain-free options. You have to choose which future regret you're going to have." With up to a million or more civilians butchered in Iraq, both by US forces and by each other, that just won't cut it.

 
He was no Hitchens:
George Orwell (1903-50)

5. Wagner
The master of Bayreuth should be a shoe-in for me, since I adore all things nordic and pagan, and I love his Greatest Hits. But the only time I ever tried watching one of his operas on TV, the next thing I remember was that it was the wee hours of the morning and my set was going tüüüüüüüüü. Okay, I was still a student then, but the experience isn't likely to make me shell out 70€ or so for a box seat at The Valkyrie.

6. The Twilight series
I never expected to like it, but since I write YA novels myself I thought I should go ahead and at least find out what Stephanie Meyer was doing right. So at the Baltic coast two years back I bought a copy of the first book. The first two pages were okay - it was the typical YA setup of a young person getting uprooted and thrown into a new and potentially hostile environment - but it went downhill as soon as the boring vampire family was introduced, and by the time I got halfway into it the book was sailing across the room and landed in a heap in the far corner. I considered burning it, but I was afraid my neighbors would complain about the stink. My thumbnail review: Worst. Book. Ever.

 
If there's gotta be vampires, I'll go with this one.
(Scene from "Let the Right One In," 2008)

7. Mamma Mia
Okay, I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for Abba songs, and the plot of this movie sounded like a classic Shakespeare comedy. Wasn't there a chance it would have something even remotely intelligent to say about human relationships? But  this karaoke extravaganza was all shmoo and no Shakespeare. I left the cinema by the back door.

 
I do like this, though - genuine Dresden Christstollen
(Source: wiki)