Andrew J. Chinnici

Today someone brought this to my attention:



With 132% of the recommended daily fat intake (190% saturated fat, 131% sodium), I've seen people deride this pile of meaty deliciousness as offensive, obscene and shining example of why one-third of American children are overweight or obese.

I call bullshit. No one who even remotely considers buying this thing for any reason other than a joke gives a wet fart about their potential health or weight problems. No one is being tricked by marketing into thinking they're getting something that's good for them. Every man or woman that buys this knows exactly what they're getting into. I mean, it's called "the Baconator". It's named after a killing machine from the future. Consider what was once said about its namesake:

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

As advertised.

At 11:38 pm on a Thursday night, my brother started randomly texting me quotes from 'It.' Not the lame ones, either:

I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in The Easter Bunny. I believe in the Tooth Fairy. But I dont believe in you. This is battery acid. And now you disappear.

I am very much a fan of the random awesome text.

To: Marianne Amssoms
Subject: Getting Tennents Super in the US

Good evening, Miss Amssoms!

I normally wouldn't send this kind of request directly to the VP of global external communications of a multi-national corporation, but I wasn't able to find any way to contact anyone via email at the ab-inbev.com website.

Anyway, tonight I was reading a funny review of the film Harry Brown that mentioned Tennents Super (http://bina007.blogspot.com/2009/11/harry-brown-only-permissable-bigotry.html), and now I'd really like to try the stuff. I read on Wikipedia that Tennents is owned by In-Bev but, sadly, the Tennents website didn't seem to have any way to contact anyone via email, either. You should really talk to your IT people about that - it's kind of a big deal.

Regardless, do you have any idea where I can find Tennents Super here in the middle of the US? I'm in St. Louis, Missouri, right down the street from the Anheuser-Busch brewery as a matter of fact. How about places to order it online? If not, we can always work something out under the table - I can ship you some decent local microbrews or perhaps a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon or two (PBR is fairly popular around here and I understand you can't get it on that side of the pond).

Waddya say?

From this post in the New York Times' Happy Days blog about a month ago:

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.

The 2009 Ig Nobel award winners have been announced. My favorite:

Peace Prize
Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42. DOI:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. The trailer for the most disasterific film of all time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW2qxFkcLM0

Thanks SirMildredPierce!

From today's entry in the New York Times' Lens blog:


click for a larger version

Mr. Jones’ angle on the historic encounter is vastly different from four other versions shot that day, taken at eye level moments before the tanks stopped at the feet of the lone protester. Wildly chaotic, a man ducks in the foreground, reacting from gunfire coming from the tanks. Another flashes a near-smile. Another pedals his bike, seemingly passive as the tanks rumble towards confrontation.

The photograph encourages the viewer to reevaluate the famous encounter. Unlike the other four versions, we are given a sense of what it was like on the ground as the tanks heaved forward, the man’s act of defiance escalated by the flight of others.