Ch-Ch-Chain Of Fools

Memo to Applebee's: YOU ARE DUMB.

Who the fuck do you think you are? Did the Nobel Prize add a "shitty chain restaurant" division? Did you decide Habitat for Humanity was getting too much of the good press that rightfully go to America's #1 provider of barbeque riblets? You have forgotten your fucking place, and you need, collectively, to be slapped upside your flair until you go back to doing what you're supposed to, which is providing me and my fellow countrymen with mediocre burgers and fries and hanging football jerseys on your wall. That is your role, Know it. Stick to it.

It was bad enough when your ads featured brightly-colored, lively rooms, full of happy, smiling people, enjoying tasty food prepared with care. That falls just barely within the acceptable limits of advertising bullshittery, because it's merely an idealized version of what it is you're supposed to be doing in the first place.

But now, I beg of you, stop showing me images of your sub-minimum-wage employees performing acts of holy altruism in their spare time. I don't care if your entire organization is run by clones harvested from the cell cultures of Jimmy Carter and Mother Theresa's public image, some waitress making three dollars an hour plus tips is not going to bring a doggie bag of mesquite chicken wraps to a lonely old lady after her shift. And if she did, the old woman, who's been watching nothing but the Lifetime network for the past six years, would stab the employee in the leg with a kitchen knife and call 911. In words immortalized by the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series, THIS NEVER HAPPENS.

Not only does it never happen, it fucking well shouldn't. Despite my general hatred of the Applebee's experience on a purely abstract basis, I have some sympathy for those forced to do it. The fake cheer, the crappy food, the sub-par pay, having to deal with people for whom eating at Applebee's is a rare treat, or worse, a regular haunt... these are the activities that would try the hardiest soul. Chain-restaurant service puts very specific, spirit-crushing demands on these people, and many of them, as far as I can tell, have broken under the weight. These are not the people I would ask even more of. They've done enough. Plus, with the assault weapons ban gone, we really shouldn't be overburdening ANY of our support industries these days.

In the other commercial I've seen, an entire night crew at Applebee's, having done all the cleaning up, shutting down, money-counting, etc. required before locking the front door, are confronted by some late-night diners with some form of sympathy-inducing community role. It's probably a sports team, although my memory is a bit fuzzy for some reason, and there's a head-shaped dent in my wall. So anyway, in an I Am Spartacus, Band of Brothers moment, the intrepid Applebee's employees, one by one, agree to re-open everything, warm up the deep-frier, and by God provide these weary travelers with the chicken fingers and sizzling fajita-platters they deserve.

It's a stirring, heartwarming moment... or it would be, were it not for the despair-inducing retardation it represents. Because I guarantee you, if there is a single Applebee's in this country that is NOT five minutes or less away from an open-all-night Perkins, then the locals, well-aware of the precarious state of their existence, have stocked their larders with frozen french fries, bags of French onion soup, and bread formed into the shape of bowls to prepare for just such an occasion. They are hardy folk, and do not need to rely on some magical, Santa-possessed Applebee's crew for their needs, because as they know all too well, playing those odds leads to starvation and cannibalism.

I've never worked in a chain restaurant, but I've worked enough retail and fast food in my life to know that the shit you do at the end of the night carries with it the kind of finality, the fundamentally irrevocable nature, of jumping off a bridge. There is no turning back once the register has been balanced. There is no do-over once the trash bins have been emptied. Everyone knows it, and any assistant manager who tried to talk the rest of the crew into heading back into the Alamo would find himself throat-deep in a dumpster full of discarded jalapeno poppers. It is the way of things.

Applebee's would like you to think that The Way Of Things doesn't apply ot them. That they're different. That they care. That they go above and beyond the call of duty just to simplify your already too-easy, pampered life. That they are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for your dining pleasure. They are lying sacks of popcorn-shrimp-laced shit, and, like Icarus, should be punished for their hubris by crashing and burning. Or at least shutting the FUCK up and getting me my burger.

Custard's Last Stand

sOne of these days, I'm going to go through the archives, and make some kind of Map of the Fifty Hates, just to see how many of the great states of the Union have felt the mighty wrath-hammer that is my prose.

You'd think I'd have done Kentucky by now, right? Google doesn't seem to think so. Kentucky has always struck me as more "hick" than "redneck", anyway. Slightly lower chance of having a cross burning on your yard, but still damn difficult to find decent Thai food in. But Kentucky is not without its deep red-state (Sorry, Mr. Obama) idiocy, as evidenced by Midway, Kentucky's unique form of pro-American protest.

Burning ice cream.

Now, setting stuff on fire IS a time-honored traditional protest, whether it's Tom Sawyer novels, Twisted Sister records, the American Flag, or your own gasoline-soaked body. But just because something is traditional does not make it a good idea across the board. When planning to set something on fire in protest, one should research the product in question as to it's overall, say, FUCKING FLAMMABILITY, YOU HILLBILLY RETARDS...

Ahem. Of course, anything is flammable eventually. You won't go up like flash paper if you drop a match on your skin, but that fact hasn't put our nation's fine crematoriums out of business. Still, without some kind of professional-grade kiln or furnace, it's probably a bad idea to try an burn a FROZEN LIQUID DAIRY PRODUCT. This is what happens when you let the Intelligent Design fuckers write your TEXTBOOKS. You end up with generations of Scopes rejects who think milk will ignite.

Having now explored, if not necessarily answered, the question of why they tried to burn ice cream, we now turn to the greater conundrum of why they tried to burn ice cream. What did pure, innocent, ice cream ever do to anyone? Well, it seems that the founder of Ben & Jerry's recently created the "PantsonFire-Mobile"*, which is a car with a large statue of Dubya on it, and the Dubya statue's pants are on fire for obvious reasons.

Seems Chuck Bradley, whose family owns a corner market in Kentucky that sells the glorious B&J pintage, didn't take kindly to that mean ol' Vermont liberal, who no longer owns the company that makes the ice cream that Bradley attempted to burn, badmouthing his President. So, you know. Make a pile and get some matches. Which is, when you think about it, reactionary-bordering-on-caveman. Don't like something? Make a pile and get some matches. If he'd only thought to hit the ice cream with a rock, he could have made a fortune off the National Geographic circuit.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"We've got a great country -- thousands of men have died so we can stand here today and speak our minds but not bad-mouth the leader of the free world." - Bradley, in the kind of pontificating on the nature of "freedom of speech" that can only result from a lifetime of brain-freeze.

So now that we've learned what kind of hayhumper tries to set ice-cream on fire in anger, we turn to another burning** question: What kind of elementary-school dropout comes out to support and watch the attempt? Let's hear from Charlene Harris, who brought her TWO AND FOUR YEAR OLD CHILDREN to watch the protest, thereby ensuring that both kids will grow up to join Gay Drag Queens For Kucinich if there's a shred of fucking justice on this planet.

"It was kind of hard to explain to them why the ice cream was bad. We do support the president, but they like ice cream."Charlene, it was hard to explain to them because, first, as we've shown, it makes no fucking sense at all. Second, YOU were trying to explain it. Third, you were trying to explain it to a two-year-old and a four-year-old. And lastly, you were trying to explain it to a two- and four-year-old that share your genetic code. I just got a message for you from Sisyphus. He says you should give up.

* Fun idea, but that's the kind of proper-noun construction that gives style-guide editors conniptions.

** Really, it's more of a sputtering, melting question that runs into the gutter and attracts flies for a week.

You Say Potato, I Say Retardo

Hands off the potatoes, you meat-crazed carbzombies.

What's wrong, mashed cauliflower wasn't doing it for you? Tough. Youi're the one that decided that carbohydrates were Evil Incarnate. You've gotten all the restaurants to serve Meat Salads. You've clogged the aisles with your mysterious processed fake versions of baked goods. You've jacked up the meat prices for the rest of us. The line must be drawn HEAH.

And that line separated all you low-carb, Atkins, South Beach motherfuckers from my potatoes.

Dieting, you bacon-humping simpletons, is about giving things up. Giving up a little bit of everything, or giving up all of one thing. Crazy or sane, healthy or Atkins, the whole point of going on these regimens in the first place is to stop doing something. It is NOT about crossbreeding some fucking Frankenpotato* so that it's LOW-CARB.

Those are my potatoes. Those are my French Fries. My chips. You don't get them. You gave up carbs. If you miss potatoes so bad, then give up the goddamn Atkins, return to the world of normalcy, and have a Tater Tot. Leave the potatoes out of this. They are blameless, innocent creatures whose only crime is to be full of starch during a time of national insanity.

The way it seems to have worked out is this. The Dutch were fucking around with potatoes, trying to make better ones. Which is fine. I'm all for better potatoes, because that way, when I wave them under some Atkins penitent's nose to taunt them, it'll work THAT MUCH BETTER. But then they tested it and found out it had 1/3 the carbs of a russet. Nobody's saying what takes the place of that third, of course. Could be Dutch worm farts, for all I know.

So now it's all "Coming In January, The Low-Carb Potato!" and asinine marketing statements like "The combination of good Florida soils, warm temperatures and the experience of Florida producers sets the stage for delivery of a fresh potato flavor treat". That's Don Northcott, a Canadian whose job it is to pimp Dutch potatoes to Americans. That is a niche fucking job right there. I almost feel bad for him, but then I remember he turned the phrase "fresh potato flavor treat", and I want to shove metal spikes into his eyes to see if he can power a clock.

Potatoes should be one of the prizes reserved for those of us who are not dumb enough to be on Atkins. You know how dumb Atkins people are? I bet you THINK you know, but I bet you don't know. Unless you've seen the Atkins Crunchers.

Authentic Atkins-branded soy-protein crisps. Marketed as a replacement for potato chips. Some soy protein and tapioca starch, turned into tiny faux-chips, and then dusted with that same barbecue or "sour cream and onion" crap that's probably turning our DNA inside out, but who cares, because that flavor dust makes it all worthwhile. Anyway, soy protein, tapioca starch, a bit of flavor dust. One-ounce package. Price at the grocery store? $1.89.

That's THIRTY DOLLARS A POUND. If you want to snack carb-free and spend thirty dollars a pound, you should be buying lobster. And with the money you have left over, buy me a week's worth of potato chips. If you spend $30 a pound on soy protein and tapioca starch, you should be in a home. A judge should just commit you, because you should not be allowed to roam the streets. You spend $1.89 on a bag of Atkins Crunchers, and after a penny and a half for the bag and what they spend to make your ounce of chips, that's $1.87 going straight into the pockets of Atkins' estate.

It's roughly the equivalent of playing the "got your nose" game with a child, then billing the child $3,000 for "rhinoplastic services". And you Atkins chimps are lining up to pay.

* With apologies to the star of Run Lola Run and the upcoming Bourne Supremacy.

Desperation Dinners

Memo to Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross: YOU ARE DUMB.

Or you think we are. Or you know we are. Or your editor at United Features Syndicate is. Or some combination of all four. Maybe we could just have everyone involved in any way with the article I'm about to describe congregate in a meeting room of some kind. Or, even better, a small, secluded cabin in the woods. A nice, peaceful retreat. That explodes or collapses or something once everyone's inside.

Apparently, Mills and Ross are the masterminds behind "Desperation Dinners", some kind of regular column. And website. It provides "helpful" "tips" for "time-strapped" "families" who want to "eat" "together" in "healthy" and "flavorful" "ways" on a "budget". And their tips get syndicated, and get sent to newspapers, and get put up on newspapers' web pages, where I read them. And that's when my walls get peppered with brain meats and skull shrapnel.

Because I just read an entire thirteen-paragraph article explaining how families can have the convenience of convenience foods without the price. By making their own convenience foods at home. Which in and of itself is problematic, because if you're spending time and energy and dirtying dishes in order to make convenience foods, that pretty much eliminates the convenience and turns them into FOODS.

But then the article gets weird. I mean, I've been writing stuff, for pay and for free, for a long time. I learned how to pad and bullshit early in my academic career, and it's served me well ever since. Hell, the first three paragraphs of yesterday's YAD were, in some ways, the culmination of over two decades of practice in the fine art of Padding With Bullshit.

But not even in my most jaded moments would I have had the gall to produce something as vapid and space-filling as this convenience food article. In the padding world, I am a concrete floor, and this article is the forty stacked mattresses a princess sleeps on. SANS PEA.

The article provides DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS on how to create home versions of: pre-shredded cheese, baby carrots, pre-cut celery sticks, pre-separated broccoli florets, pre-sliced bell pepper strips, pre-chopped onions, pre-chopped ginger, and pre-sliced mushrooms. You may begin to see where this is going.

For every single one of these items, the instructions are to perform the action that turns them from an inconvenience food into a convenience food, then put the result into a plastic bag, then put that plastic bag into your refrigerator or freezer. ALL EIGHT. The only thing that isn't 100% obvious in the entire article is that baby carrots can be simulated by taking large carrots and cutting them until they are small. That's only 98% obvious.

This is worse than the ranch powder thing. Who is the target audience for these? How many people are out there thinking that elves use shrink-rays and magical slicing powers to take vegetables, separate them into their component parts, and place those parts in plastic bags picked from the magical petroleum tree? If you need to be told by the newspaper that to create bagged celery sticks, you first cut celery into sticks, then place the sticks in the bag, then you CANNOT BE HELPED, because you are probably using the newspaper to shit on.

These people have put out TWO COOKBOOKS. Probably with big fonts and wide margins to up the page count. I know that's what I did in high school when I didn't have jack shit to say. But then, my history class was somewhat different than the Desperation Dinners website. I could not get away, as they have, with an entire article that boils down to "SPICE BLENDS ARE DIFFERENT SPICES BLENDED TOGETHER. WOW!", or "SALAD COMES IN A BAG NOW, WOW, WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE!".

They have to be evil. They have to know. Because in my mind, the kind of person who could write "Grilling out? Check out the myriad of new rubs and other seasonings for steaks and chops. They usually contain black pepper with various other spices thrown in for good measure." with a straight face, yet NOT be a conscience-free, money-grubbing loafer out to scam the entire world, would try to eat the keyboard halfway through the third word.

The Residents Of Hidden Valley

Memo to the residents of the Hidden Valley: YOU ARE DUMB.

I mean, OK, I like a bit of ranch dressing as much as the next non-Atkins, salad-eating American. But this does not mean that I want to add ranch flavor to every single aspect of my life.

And even if I did want to do that, I'd be able to figure out the incredibly elaborate process on my own, thank you.

You see, for those of you who have not seen the ads, the fine people at Hidden Valley are spending millions of dollars to inform an ungrateful nation that you can add ranch flavor to ordinary foods by... adding ranch powder to ordinary foods.

Of course, they're not nearly so general in the actual ads. No. They have to be specific. They have to tell you that, through arcane processes learned from the ancient Druids, by merely adding ranch powder to salsa, you can turn salsa into... ranch salsa.

HALLEFUCKINGLUJAH.

I mean, before this fifteen second spot, I had merely been content with ordinary salsa. There was a void in me, a void I didn't even know existed. A void in the exact shape of a hideous culinary abomination known as Ranch Salsa.

Two foods per 15-second spot, about four different fifteen-second spots, usually shown in pairs. So, if you watch a lot of Food Network, and who doesn't, during any given hour you will watch, mouth agape, as dozens of people are not only informed of the process by which X is transmogrified into Ranch X, but are actually astonished that such a thing is possible.

"My God! What deviltry is this? My potatoes are infused with a nigh-otherworldly zip I had previously only associated with salad dressing and 82% of the TGI Friday's menu! It is as if they were... RANCH POTATOES! And you are saying that I can achieve this effect on my own, in my home, without thousands of dollars of expensive machinery, or a framed baseball jersey hung on my wall next to an alligator-head plaque? Do not toy with my emotions so. It cannot be! I weep creamy ranch tears of delight at your alchemic powder's abilities. I am born anew!"

That's not a direct transcription, but it captures the feel pretty well, I think.

And, really, who besides the Hidden Valleyans have been sitting around thinking that NOT ENOUGH SHIT TASTES LIKE RANCH AS IT IS? By 2015, scientist have determined that there will be only two flavors left on Earth: Ranch and Ice. Oh, honey mustard and cheesecake will put up valiant fights, but in the end, there can be only... two. And ranch will be one of those two.

The valley's not hidden. It's just that nobody outside wants to go in there for fear of becoming Ranch Long Pig, and the people inside can't figure out how to leave. Because THEY ARE DUMB.