Fancy Fast Food

Found this lovely little website that transforms fast food meals into haute cuisine...

... at least in appearance.

I'm curious what it actually tastes like. But it's amusing enough to peruse.

You're welcome.

Of course, "This Is Why You're Fat" documents some true envelope-pushing creations...

[WARNING: Though some of the entries are mundane, many are profoundly disturbing...]

Love the incredulous shaggy dog in the background: he's all like, "Go ahead... eat that fucking thing and lose your soul..."

I swear, I don't even understand this one. It's like looking at a grisly car accident where you're not exactly sure what you're looking at but you just know... it's literally heart-breaking. Seriously, what's the point if it's profoundly joyless?

I admit, I've actually tried one of these, at the Shake Shack on the Upper West Side. It's a bit much. I tend to feel a deep sense of self-contempt after I eat at the Shake Shack, so I don't go that often.

How about something from that trip to Oregon that I just took...?

This is the "Reggie Deluxe" at Pine State Biscuits. Fried chicken, bacon, egg and cheese on a big fat biscuit. With gravy.

Apologies for this poor, horror-film shot:

This was the special dessert at lovely Le Pigeon. Profiteroles filled with foie gras ice cream. Unimaginably good. And unaccountably deadly.

Dining with a death wish.

Michael Chiarello is a douchebag.

(Happy birthday to DMC today!)


(And warmest regards to Mr. & Mrs. Cohen!!)

This is the last of the entries I pre-blogged before my Oregon odyssey. Next week, we'll see where my head's really at...

Get an Ugly Girl to Marry You

This might be a good place to mention the issue of Link Rot. The transient nature of the internet means that websites constantly move or vanish. You dig through the archives of a blog like this, you're bound to find a slew of entries with links to things that don't exist any longer. Once in a blue moon, if I really feel like wasting some time, I might go back and update broken picture links on an archived month, but it's an endless battle against link rot.

Earlier in the summer, Bacardi Breezers launched an incomprehensibly offensive ad campaign suggesting that it's better to hang with ugly/uglier girls in order to make yourself look hotter. The fact that they were trying to market to women makes it even crazier.

One of the things that baffles me with something like this is, how do you hire women to portray specimens of "ugly girls"? I assume the models are human beings. And you can get anyone to do anything if you offer money and exposure. One would imagine these women have a high level of personal confidence to debase themselves in this manner.

This story's from earlier in the summer and links to the advert websites are long-dead now. Hopefully, this YOU TUBE clip hasn't been yanked yet:

Crimes Against Cake

Enjoying your Aces of Cakes and Cake Bosses, America? The quality of cakery on those shows is debatable, but what about some good old fashioned cake disasters? Genuine cake travesties...?

Cake Wrecks

Cake Failure

Bad Cake Gallery @ ebaum's world

Honestly, a lot of those cakes look perfectly fine to me...

Sesame Street Interlude

Feist is like a young, sexy, cleaned-up Patti Smith.




I bet she'd be a cool girlfriend.


I bet.

Mad Max

MAD MAX is so good...

The entire bezoomny franchise...

MAD MAX.

THE ROAD WARRIOR.

MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME.

Most of you may know the drill. First one was a big hit in Australia. They redubbed all the voices (including Mel Gibson's) for the American release to get rid of those nutty Olivia Newton-John accents and it tanked here. Which is why the U.S. release of the "Mad Max 2" was retitled "The Road Warrior".

"Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" received a mixed reception, though I adore that motherfucking movie. Wikipedia tells me something I didn't know before:

George Miller, director of the first two Mad Max movies, lost interest in the project after his friend and producer Byron Kennedy was tragically killed in a helicopter crash while location scouting. Miller later agreed to direct the action sequences, with George Ogilvie directing the rest of the film. There is a title card at the end that says, "For Byron."

But that first one, "MAD MAX", is a little gem. Clearly the most budget of the series. Takes place in some between-time right before the entire landscape turned into a wasteland: pre-post-apocalyptic. Some semblance of civilization exists. Mel plays a cop, Max Rockatansky. He's got a pretty wife and baby who are clearly (**SPOILERS**) doomed...

Max is a reluctant hero who tries to escape from the downward spiral of society. Until it affects him personally. Then it's a revenge movie.

But the cards are really well-played throughout. It's not the sheer exploitative Death Wish type of affair that you might expect from a prison colony like Australia.

One of the things I really like about the trilogy is the sense of continuity. "Blaster", the simpleton oaf that Max has his famous Thunderdome battle with --

-- actually makes a cameo in the original "Mad Max"! You think he's a threat until you see his face, at which point you feel sorry for him. Seeing him in the third film, you get the sense of what this character has had to do to fit into the new paradigm of this post-apocalyptic society.

August Reruns

I didn't sell this article enough when I linked to it in February. Some people don't bother to click through, so I'll set it up more...

It opens with this quote:

"Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs. The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. . . . [In a related study] scientists used a dose on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day."
—The Times.

The body of the article concerns Noah Baumbach and a mouse named Louis who embark upon an experiment to drink 35 bottles of wine a day.

Excerpts:

September 27th

Last thing I remember is doing a handstand three days ago. That’s O.K. But I wouldn’t have minded if someone had moved me from the floor to a mattress. Or at least cleaned up the blood. Louis is staring at me. “You said some weird shit,” he declares...

October 28th

After we smoke a bowl, I unscrew a 2008 Ralph’s generic-brand red. It has a sugary vinegar nose and a vinegary, sugary, vomity biley taste, but after five bottles who gives a shit? Louis wonders aloud if resveratrol might also be found in tequila, Jägermeister, and cocaine. I have to dip a little further into the grant money, but we’re able to score some blow by the side of the highway. Once we get back to the lab, we discover it’s baking soda. Louis wants to hunt down the guy and murder him. It takes me, the monkey, and the entire control group of mice to restrain him. Fortunately, the hookers arrive and all is forgotten...

Read and/or reread the rest of the New Yorker article here.

Hope you've enjoyed your July.

Heading off to spend the first patch of August in Portland, Oregon. With the mother and sister. I've dutifully pre-blogged a bunch of entries so I don't have to worry about the blog while I'm away. (We'll see if the celebrity deaths I've predicted pan out.) Why do I bother...?

World without Malice

Where did July go?

This blog has been overrun with a lot of frivolous entries lately. They're easier to publish and they keep the tone nice and frothy but here's a straight entry to mix things up.

Pennies are being placed on the eyelids of July and I'm left contemplating what 2009 has become for me. Spin-machine powered down, 2009 has been a bizarre, blind-folded race. I really hoped I'd have more accomplished by this point and, to be honest, it kills me that I'm about to head to Oregon for almost two weeks because it's just about THE WORST time for it. Way too much goddamn time to be away. Way too much goddamn time to be spending with family. My mother's moving down in Florida in October and she wants to spend some time with her kids and I am ONLY doing it to make her feel better...

... and yet I'm afraid I'm going to be fucking pissed off the entire time.

I'm going in negative and I'm trying to fight that. I just can't pretend to be the sweet son that my mother wants. My mother gets on my nerves really easily, and I can fight that for a few hours, or maybe for a few days with careful planning... but TWELVE FUCKING DAYS?! In a small apartment filled with cats??? I'm going crazy just thinking about this...

PURE DREAD.

I'm annoyed and pissed off and this is probably the last time I'm gonna see my mom and sis for a really long time. It's a completely pointless trip, entirely too long, I need to be writing and trying to hustle for jobs because I CAN'T AFFORD to do a whole lot of nothing for two weeks in Portland...

Okay. All right.

Fuck it. FUCK IT ALL.

I hate it. I'm annoyed at my mom for guilting me into this bullshit. I'll be in a worse place when I return on the 12th. But I will move past all of this stupid fucking shit because that's what I do.

Wow! This inadvertently turned into a rage-filled rambler! So much ANGER on Misanthropy Central!

Light a candle for me.

Zombie Andrew Zimmern

EXT. POST-APOCALYPTIC WASTELAND - DAY

ZOMBIES stalk the scorched earth, eviscerating the survivors, shoveling brains into their gaping maws...

ZOMBIE 1
Brains!!!!

ZOMBIE 2
GUK!
The zombies are suddenly distracted by ZOMBIE ANDREW ZIMMERN in a corner who's enjoying his own bizarre feast...

ZOMBIE 1
Whoa, dude... why are you eating that?

ZOMBIE ANDREW ZIMMERN
(slurping)
I don't know why you guys are avoiding this stuff.
You're throwing away the best parts...!

ZOMBIE 1
You know, you don't have to eat that stuff. There's
plenty of survivors to go around here...

ZOMBIE ANDREW ZIMMERN
Oh, come on, give this a bite and tell me it's
not the best thing you've ever put in your mouth...
The zombies RECOIL in horror.

ZOMBIE 1
Get that away from me...!

ZOMBIE 2
Ugh... I think I'm gonna be sick...
Zombie Andrew Zimmern shrugs. Slurps up some more guts.

ZOMBIE ANDREW ZIMMERN
Hey, if it looks good, EAT IT. More for me!

John Cho Entry

Here's an interesting interview with John Cho (of the Harold/Kumar and Star Trek franchises). Chronicling his rise from the ghetto of Asian-American movies to the mainstream.

Perils of Wisconsin

Oh, Wisconsin. Gang violence, necrophilia, what is going on in the Mid-West? What's it going to be next?

Last year, an awkward high school senior in Wisconsin went online, passed himself off as a flirtatious female student, and conned dozens of his male classmates into e-mailing him sexually explicit images of themselves. What he did next will likely send him to jail for a very long time...

Full story HERE.

Twitter Industrial Complex

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

I realize that most of you are still cool and have resisted the non-lure of the Twitter Generation. I still can't exactly tell you why I broke down and joined...

For the uninitiated, one of the foundations of the Twitter Experience is following the feeds of your favorite celebs.

Obvious problem: the internet is rife with fakes. And Twitter does very little to weed out the frauds.

Case in point, there is the Jonah Hill cautionary tale.

You know, the whole laughably prescient Andy Warhol "15 minutes of world-fame" thing is getting too true. Every day.

Trent Reznor abandons TWITTER.

Reasons to be Pretty

Pity the beautiful people. They just can't catch a break, can they? Whenever I see a beautiful girl on the street, I feel sooo sorry for her!

Fortunately, there's hope.

"Model Lounge", as its name suggests, is a New York City lounge exclusively for female models. They can hang out, enjoy a sammich, support each other and just do, you know, whatever!

I'm so proud that New York is progressive enough to foster supportive environments for gorgeous women.

Me, I just hang out at the Fug-Ugly Lounge with the rest of the normals.