Meme time again

Time for another meme. This one comes via Perverse Access Memory:

List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can�t really understand the fuss over.

Since this blog covers multiple interests that are beyond the ken of "mundanes", I'll try and include one from each of them.

1. Depot layouts: A model railway consisting of a traction maintenance depot, with loads of locomotives, but no coaches or freight wagons. Sorry, but I'm interested in trains, not just locomotives on their own. At one point, for diesel and electric era modelling at any rate, depot layouts had become as bad a cliche as those endless GWR branch termini (half of which were of Ashburton)
2. Morrissey and The Smiths: A good candidate for the most overrated singer of all time. If this self-obsessed bore was really as good as his fanboys claim he is, he'd have sold a lot more records than he did. At least Roger Waters had some music to back up his miserablist lyrics.
3. The entire superhero genre: Comics, films, RPGs, the lot. I find the common tropes of the genre so inherently ridiculous I'm unable to suspend disbelief enough to care about the characters or the stories. If people started developing incredible superhuman powers, why do they adopt silly codenames, wear brightly-coloured Spandex costumes with their underpants over their trousers, and Fight Crime! And silliest of all, why do they always have to have secret mundane identities? And why does the presence of vast numbers of superpowered beings have no significant effect on history or culture?
4. Dice Pools: As used in Storyteller, and the horrid Deadlands. I guess the idea behind dice pools in RPG game mechanics was to create a level playing field between those who could do basic arithmetic in their heads, and those who are functionally innumerate. The problem with too many dice pool mechanics is that the designers themselves don't seem to understand the probability curves of their own systems, which for me can lead to some very unsatisfactory gaming. When I keep rolling critical failures, I'd actually like to know whether I'm just being unlucky, or whether I'm attempting things my character doesn't have the skill level for. Or whether the probability curve is so opaque that the GM doesn't know what target numbers to set.
5. Football: If I go to the pub at lunchtime with work colleagues, most of the time they spend the entire lunch hour talking about bloody football. I'm sure the number of sad obsessives amongst football fandom exceed the total number of roleplayers, railway modellers and prog-rock fans. And when was the last time serious drunken violence erupted at a model railway exhibition or an RPG convention?

And now I'm supposed to pass the meme on. I'd like to nominate Amadán, except his blog is in limbo. Or Steve "Electric Nose" Jones, but he doesn't do memes. But I can nominate Scott, Silkenray, and Carl Cravens.