Cheezus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Is it just me, or do those look like tiny orange … uh … never mind.

Earlier this month, when Wirecutter ran a piece headlined “The Best Boxed Macaroni and Cheese,” I knew it was only the first course.

Today, behold the return of (drumroll, please) … Hamburger Helper!

Writing in The New York Times, proprietor of Wirecutter, food-industry reporter Julie Creswell tells us:

While most food companies are seeing declines in consumer demand for their products, sales of Hamburger Helper are up 14.5 percent in the year through August, getting an extra bump from its appearance on an episode of “The Bear” in June, according to the company that owns the brand, Eagle Foods.

And it’s not just because people are nostalgic for the good old Seventies, Creswell observes. Now, as then, the cost of food consumed at home is up considerably — 21 percent from four years ago — and the prices of beef, coffee, and many fruits and vegetables are likewise rising.

Thus Hungry America returns to Bullshit in a Box to keep their guts from greasing their backbones. Here’s Sally Lyons Wyatt, who advises packaged food companies at the research firm Circana:

“Cost-of-living expenses are up. Eating and drinking expenses are up. Consumers are looking for foods that fill them up for the least amount of money.”

More reporting like this, please. Americans may not care whether Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel still have jobs, but they might get sick of (or from) eating Yellow No. 5 with Extra Sodium three meals a day.

If you’re trying to cut corners as our “leaders” focus on the culture wars rather than cuisine, might I recommend Pierre Franey’s turkey chili? Herself and I can get three or four meals out of that one, spooned atop bowls of rice and sprinkled with crushed corn chips, cilantro, a sharpish cheddar, and a squeeze of lime.

Likewise this simple bolognese from Giada de Laurentiis. We got three servings apiece out of that one this week, over egg noodles, and then spread the remainder on a couple of corn pizza shells from Vicolo. Topped it with grated mozzarella and parmesan with a scattering of crushed red pepper.

But if you simply must have mac and cheese, well, take a whack at Bob Sloan’s recipe from “Dad’s Own Cookbook.”

And then tell the Dick Tater that he can eat shit. Hell, he already does.

‘Tedious and burdensome’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Page 1 of 85. I’m surprised the judge didn’t order these ambulance-chasers summarily hanged.

Well, “tedious and burdensome” is one way to describe The Pestilence’s latest lawsuit against The New York Times.

“Wall-to-wall bullshit” is another. Or “the ramblings of an ADHD preschool dropout ‘parented’ by an outlaw-biker uncle who makes him work without safety gear in his poorly ventilated meth lab.”

But Judge Steven D. Merryday of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida clearly is not one for hyperbole, and so he confined his observations to phrases like “tedious and burdensome,” and “florid and enervating,” noting that in alleging only two simple counts of defamation, “the complaint consumes eighty-five pages.”

“A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner,” Hizzoner wrote.

He added — without giggling, which must have been difficult, because this shit is funnier than Jimmy Kimmel on a good day — that the complaint, as written, “stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart” legal requirements that complaints must be “a short and plain statement of the claim.”

And then Merryday wrapped things up the way editors of my early attempts at journalism were known to do, by crumpling that big ol’ 85-page pile of bushwa into a wad and throwing it at the authors, with further instructions appended.

“This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” Merryday wrote. “The complaint is STRUCK with leave to amend within twenty-eight days. The amended complaint must not exceed forty pages, excluding only the caption, the signature, and any attachment.”

Then he dropped the mic and walked off stage.

‘No more fun of any kind!’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Disney CEO Vernon “Dean” Wormer pulls the plug on Jimmy Kimmel.

The Dean came for Jimmy Kimmel’s “Animal House” yesterday.

Nobody should be surprised, especially Kimmel, who has been attending the Hollywood School of Hard Knocks for the better part of quite some time and been sacked and/or compelled to apologize more than once over a long and checkered career.

Kimmel got his start in radio while still in high school, but didn’t land on America’s TV screens until 1977, when he provided the comic relief on “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” which aired on Comedy Central. “The Man Show” followed two years later.

And then in 2003 he got to hang out his own late-night shingle, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC.

Maybe he felt safe there. Comedy Central would fall under the pinstriped shadow of Paramount, which earlier this year punked CBS News and Stephen Colbert to get its merger with Skydance approved.

But this year, ABC — a lesser rub-and-tug parlor in the Disney chain of cut-rate whorehouses — found itself caught between two rocks and a very hard place.

Two big owners of TV stations — Nexstar and Sinclair, the first seeking FCC approval to buy a rival, the second a right-wing white-noise machine — said they would suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he addressed the killing of the recently canonized — or is that “cannonized?” — Charlie Kirk. Disney’s empty suits took notice and then gave same to Kimmel, reportedly as his audience was filing in for yesterday’s show.

If Kimmel didn’t see it coming, Calvin Coolidge certainly did. In an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925, the president said: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”

Some of them are, for sure. And you’re only funny until you get in their way.

’13 means shit and bad luck’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Glass don’t be even half full, yo.

You can read all 13 pages of the document, “Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need for Immediate Action,” or cut to the chase at John Fleck’s blog.

Either way, your reaction is likely to be, “Oh, shit.”

Water consumption in the [Colorado River] Basin continues to outpace the natural supply, further drawing down reservoir levels. While Basin State representatives pursue the elusive goal of a workable and mutually acceptable set of post-2026 operating rules, our review of the latest Bureau of Reclamation data shows that the gap between ongoing water use and the reality of how much water actually flows in the Colorado River poses a serious near-term threat. Another year like the one we just had on the Colorado River would nearly exhaust our dwindling reserves. …

A solution can’t wait for a long-term agreement among the states. It may be difficult, if not impossible, for the Basin States to take such short term action. That reality puts the onus on the Department of the Interior to act.

The Department of the Interior? Led by former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a fossil-fuelish kind of fella who briefly ran against the Pestilence, then kowtowed to it, and worked with his former rival’s campaign to develop its energy policy?

Talk about shit and bad luck. Oh, god … oh, shit. …

Round up the (un)usual suspects

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“No, not the trans antifa, you fool! The irony-poisoned, terminally online, neonazi groyper types!”

Some days I feel the weight of every nanosecond of the 71.5 years I have spent on this planet.

I’m so old that when some fresh young bit of news rears its pimply head, references from books — yes, books! — leap to what remains of my mind.

For instance, there’s P.R. Deltoid, the “post-corrective adviser” to the ultraviolent 15-year-old Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess:

“What gets into you all? We study the problem and we’ve been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”

Or the bruiser in the cowboy hat in Thomas McGuane’s “Something to be Desired,” who, upon seeing a used tampon land on his windshield at a drive-in movie theater, steps out to make a few inquiries among the usual suspects, which include the hapless Lucien, who had been preparing to continue a mutual infidelity with a casual acquaintance until a rare burst of discretion — “spraying ancient drive-in gravel” in headlong flight — came to seem the better part of valor.

“I got my fiancée here!” shouts the cowboy. “She don’t want to know about your little world!”

Alas, it seems that to gain some insight regarding the suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing I must leave the library and take a deep dive into the wonderful world of … Helldivers2?

In addition to everything else, I’m supposed to worry about whether the asshole on my six with two wheels in the bike lane is “a Nick Fuentes groyper and gamergate 4chan douchebro?” 

No thank you, please. I just finished an oldster’s breakfast of oatmeal, fresh fruit, and tea. It looks like rain. And I’m feeling the cowboy’s confusion here, with a geezerly side of These Kids Today.

I remember when games meant Monopoly, Scrabble, or just tossing the ol’ pigskin around. I don’t want to know about their little world.