THE GURGLING COD

Guiteau Monday - Mormon cookbook ed.

Heavy hearts around here, but the Guiteau Monday hits don't stop. Anne Romney, Mitt's wife, is writing a cookbook. Write your own jokes. 

Guiteau Lobster Monday

Hope all of the folks who went to the Lucy Van Pelt placekicking clinic have recovered. (I got into a tedious exchange last evening w/ a Googapologist, but I'll let Tony Scott have the last word.) Anyway, elsewhere, our correspondent J-Grizzle has disturbing news from the Hartford airport:

 Graham cracker crumbs? That's not cooking, that's vandalism, and that's just another Guiteau Monday. 

Guiteau Monday, DiMaggio retirement edition

The folks at Hardee's got Harmony Korine's dimwitted cousin to do a Mrs. Robinson reboot for their new burger, where they take crappy ground beef, and spice it up with the flavor of crappy Bourbon:

As a palate cleanser, Mr. Evan Dando: Thanks, Ev!

Pizza hut makes Friday feel like Monday

 
So, Pizza Hut Pizza Sliders. If you like playing tic-tac-toe with little tubs of cheese slurry, this is the pizza for you. Beyond the Taco Town-esque impulse to recombine disparate fast food concepts in defiance of logic, taste, and good common stense, the Big Pizza Slider makes it clear that American fast food is rapidly approaching its logical denoument in the form of compulsory ball gags filled with ranch dressing. 

On Trucks and Cows

So, one thing that happened is that Dodge blew off the atheist truck market, and ran an advertisement using an old Paul Harvey monologue that begins:

"And on the 8th day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker!" So, God made a farmer! God said I need somebody to get up before dawn and milk cows and work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board. So, God made a farmer!

Two minutes of this over pictures of farms and farmers, and then a discreet Dodge Ram pickup at the and. It has been getting what they call buzz, in part b/c it's, urm, recycled. I am not that concerned about the originality of the advertisement, but I am interested in its premise. At the end of the commercial, we see the tagline "To the Farmer in All of Us." Doubtless, the farmer in some of us is at the Dodge dealership this morning, seeing about trading that minivan for a truck, now that the kids are grown. It's an expensive proposition, as they start north of twenty grand and get much more expensive very quickly. 

We begin to arrive at a question, which is how do small farmers, of the sort valorized in the commercial, afford shiny new pickup trucks? Anecdotally, they answer is that the cannot afford to, or they prefer to spend their disposable incomes on things like mortgage payments and fixing holes in roofs. The last time I visited a farm, I happened to take a picture of a Dodge truck. It belongs to my Randy and Lisa Robar, neighbors in VT who run Kiss the Cow Farm (for some reason, they don't have a website, so no link). Here is a picture of their Dodge truck:

I was actually focused on the cows at the time, but you can see enough of the truck to notice that it is 1) old enough for an AARP card and 2) full of cow manure. You cannot see that it takes considerable tinkering and TLC to get it to start. When the farmer in all of us is at the dealer's, mulling over $395 for chrome steel bedrails, Randy and Lisa Robar, and others like them, are shoveling shit into vehicles that rolled off the assembly line when Ted Williams was still a fighter pilot, and spraying ether into air intakes in an effort to get them to start.  

The farmer in all of us, 99+% of the time, is not a farmer. Farming is hard work, and it pays poorly. The Robars took over the farm from a farmer who died on his own farm in a farming accident. "The farmer in all of us" is a nice, truck-selling way to refer to an inclination that Americans have to like the idea of farming. The valorization of farmers by non-farmers goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson:

"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." 

Ironically, had Jefferson been in office in 2008, he most definitely would have voted against bailing out Detroit: 

While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.

If you like Enlightenment-era aestheticization of farming, you might also enjoy J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur's Letters From an American Farmer, the Rocket 88 of the dilletante farmer genre. All of which is to say that the Dodge Truck commercial taps into a deep vein of US sentiment that likes the idea of farming more than actual farming. It is, in its way, not that different from Marie Antionette dressing up like a milkmaid, sexy Bo-Peep costumes, or dropping $1,300 on a chicken coop from Williams-Sonoma. 

I'd suggest, just as a conversation starter, that the average American's deep-seated fondness for the idea of farming, coupled with a preference for easier, safer, and more lucrative work, creates exactly the kind of environment where terribile industrial farming can flourish. As a nation, we are seduced by pictures like the ones in the Dodge commercial, and meanwhile the heirs of Earl Butz are busy making anaerobic pigshit lagoons. 

Is Fake Guy Fieri our foremost contemporary theorist of sexuality?

Through the good offices of Mr. Hall. Fake Guy Fieri drops some knowledge w/r/t homophobia and Notre Dame. And his hair is better than Michael Warner's! The whole Teo thing really only makes sense if he was making up a fake girlfriend as a way to get out of having a real girlfriend, which would not be a problem were it not for football's culture of compulsory heterosexuality. (Case in point: mention the possiblity that Teo is gay, and watch Domers rip you for "accusing" him of being gay. You can accuse someone of racketeering, which is a crime, but you cannot "accuse" someone of enjoying Lillet, which is not a crime.) But! most alarmingly, the Old Skool Pepperoni Pizza Eggrolls that I presumed to be a satiric concoction of EDSBS turn out to be all too real: 

It's early yet, so let's call this a contender for Guiteau Monday. 

Guiteau Monday, Hurricane Sandy Taco Impact ed.

Sometimes, this shit just writes itself: 

Applebee's: Honoring Veterans, pissing on workers

So, on one side veterans and active duty military eat for free today at Applebee's.

On the other hand,  this:

An Applebee's New York area franchisee is the latest CEO to go public threatening drastic plans to avoid costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

"We've calculated it will [cost] some millions of dollars across our system. So what does that say -- that says we won't build more restaurants. We won't hire more people," Zane Tankel, chairman and CEO of Apple-Metro, told Fox Business Network on Thursday.

Apple-Metro, which runs 40 Applebee's restaurants, employs from 80 to 300 people at each of its locations. Obamacare mandates that businesses with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty of $2,000 for each full-time worker over 30 workers.

So, this is what the gentlemen in the digital camo are fighting for? Sounds like Guiteau Monday to me. On a somewhat related note, Papa John's is threatening similar measures. In the case of Applebee's and Papa John's, shitty fast casual riblets and shitty pizza is no great loss. Recently, however, Aziz Ansari pointed out that the problem w/ the Chick-fil-A vs gays situation is that Chick-fil-A is very tasty - as he observed, if it were Long John Silver's nobody would care. 

More generally, it's interesting to the Cod that 2012 has been a year where fast food has become politicized, but in terms of gay marriage and health care, rather than on its own, rather dubious, terms. 

Guiteau Monday, The World's Largest Cocktail Party Hangover Ed.

The Cod has returned relatively unscathed from a visit to The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. As an addition to the Shitshow Bucketlist, TWLOCP can definitely hang witip h Mardi Gras, Derby infield, Indy 500 infield, the Head of the Charles,  etc. Hand to God, there was a trailer hitch stripper pole/trampoline hybrid. 

The most alarming thing, however, came from the folks at Miracle Whip, recently seen suggesting that hating on Miracle Whip = being homophobic, or something. There were foks going around handing out little sandwiches, looking like they should belong to some sort of cult, but a really shitty cult, because they were shitty little sandwiches. Little, b/c served inside koozies, and shitty, b/c made with Miracle Whip. Even considering that TWLOCP foodshed approaches The Road depths (the Cod may or may not have feigned support for Romney to cadge a hot dog from adjacent College Republicans), this was an easy snack to say no to, esp in consideration of the message on the koozie. Bad advice in general, especially so in Jacksonville.  Stay tuned for better food news soon, and those of you in Sandy's wheelhouse stay safe on this Guiteau Monday. 

A poppin' fresh Guiteau Monday

This guy: 

Now it is we are afraid of the doughboy. Also, can we all agree to be adults about pumpkin stuff?