Craft beer’s battle is not against wine but against decades of cynical marketing from the giant breweries, which have done everything possible to portray beer drinkers as asinine fools. The enemy of good wine is the atrocious marketing that makes wine an aspirational commodity, just another luxury good to purchase for its status value. That has to offend the reverse snob in all of us.
[Arby’s] lacks the killer non-meat app—McDonald’s french fries, Burger King’s milkshakes—that bolsters margins and ropes in non-carnivores.
cureforbedbugs:
Girlboymusic on “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”:
I mean, think about it. Someone thought Pizza Hut was a good idea. Someone thought Taco Bell was a good idea. Not just someone — many someones! Enough someones to make both Pizza Hut and Taco Bell successful fast food chains, enough someones to justify an entire corporation (even more someones) being built around the owning and operation of these two brands (plus KFC). Then all those someones thought, “You know what would be better than Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell? A combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” And they started building combination Pizza Huts and Taco Bells everywhere. Combination Taco Bells and KFCs. Combination KFCs and Long John Silvers. Combination Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins.
It’s like the climax of fast-food culture: how can we make fast food — itself a mediocre imitation of other food, itself a diminished return — more greasy, more unhealthy, more quick and dirty and disposable? By jamming it into more fast food! And then a group came along and wrote a song about it, and the group insists their music is intelligent and incisive cultural commentary, but the song itself is nothing more than them repeatedly yelling the names of those jammed-together fast foods. And then another group, instead of writing a song of their own, remixed that song. And then that remix of the song got blogged, and reblogged, and quoted on Twitter, and liked on Facebook. It’s like that Lewis Black meme about how the end of the universe is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks. It’s like when you stand between two mirrors and see endless reflections of yourself, except instead of your own face you see everybody losing the ability to pay attention to anything for more than five seconds.
Oh, I just figured out which side I’m on. It’s a 10.
This genius necessitates inclusion of her original and great blurb:
Erika Villani: Okay, true story: I was hanging out with my two best friends, Stephanie and Jaime (who lives in Brooklyn), and we had spent the whole Saturday sitting on my bedroom floor, sharing two pizzas, two pints of Ben & Jerry’s, and a few six-packs of blackberry beer while we listened to Hannah Montana and our favorite songs from High School Musical 3. When we ran out of Disney Channel music, I was like, “You know what you guys have to hear?” and played them this and Cazwell’s “I Seen Beyonce” back-to-back. Jaime borrowed my MacBook so she could Tumblr about it, then spent five minutes giggling to herself and said, “Oh, Internet,” and I took my MacBook back so I could Tumblr about that. And the whole time, Stephanie was @replying celebrities on Twitter. So, in conclusion, this is either the best or worst song in the whole world, and I honestly can’t tell which.
[5]
![Das Racist – Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (Wallpaper Remix)
Das Racist stop just barely short of sensical here; their musical “Who’s on First” skit doesn’t actually include a punchline. Even if one of the guys is thinking Pizza Hut, and the other is thinking Taco Bell, it shouldn’t take this much talk to clear up their precise location; these collaborative franchises tend to make clear both chains are represented within their walls. The joke, if it is a joke, works at a liminal level; the gag disappears if you see it anywhere but out of the corner of your eye. Yet maybe this is merely evidence of my desire to contrive cleverness out of grand stupidity: “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” really works because its shouted confusion and insistent funk bass is distinctly reminiscent of the experience of ending up in a crowded fast food restaurant after a night out. There’s a lot of noise, people are yelling at each other trying to work out what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next, and amidst fluorescent lights, fast-food grease and barely-appetizing odors, the party goes on.[10]
Jukebox says [6.00]. WRONG.
(pic from here)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ku60sexfCp1qzazb5o1_500.jpg)
