4 posts tagged “requin”

Do NOT fall for their treachery, their trickery, their theivery!

Do NOT be duped, fooled, or otherwise taken in!

Do NOT waste your money, time, or energy!

Extra does NOT have long-lasting flavor, NO MATTER WHAT THEY TRY TO TELL YOU.

Granted, I can only vouch for the "cool watermelon" flavor. I bought it today with the mentality that I would soon be enjoying the delicious taste of watermelon for minutes at a time. I WAS SORELY MISTAKEN.

The gum loses flavor after exactly 7.23 chomps. I have done the calculations numerous times and can verify that their flavor is neither long nor lasting, not by my standards, not by ANYONE'S standards!

On a related note, do the nutritional facts on gum labels only apply if you actually consume the gum? For example, one stick of Extra gum has five calories (but is not, according to the label, a "low calorie food") but will I get those calories by chewing alone, or only if I swallow it? Are the calories in the flavoring or in the gum itself? I don't know why this is bugging me but now that I've thought about it, I feel like I need to know.

It says, "Real cheese!" on the plastic wrapper of my string cheese dairy product.

This concerns me.

Call me crazy, but when I buy a product called string cheese, I am going to assume that the product I will be consuming is, in fact, cheese. I don't really need to be told that string cheese is made from cheese.

Yet the company that produces my delicious afternoon snack feels the need to reassure its consumers that they really mean it when they name their products. Not only is this string cheese, it is string cheese made from real cheese. Ingenious.

However, these words say much more to me than just real cheese. Those two words tell me that the company is worried. That the company assumes that their consumer needs to be told that they are actually eating cheese. This is either a comment on the quality of their product or a comment on the stupidity of the average American string cheese consumer.

Or it could be a placebo effect of sorts. They tell me it is real cheese, I believe it to be real cheese, I eat it and think I have consumed real cheese and will now feel the benefits of a healthy diet with the appropriate amount of dairy. However, perhaps it is not real cheese at all, and I haven't had my daily recommended dose of dairy.

Those bastards. Now I don't know who to trust.

I mean, it's not really natural for cheese to come apart in such neat little strings, is it? Surely real cheese wouldn't consent to be peeled like a common banana. Real cheese prefers to be chunked, even melted, not stringed. There has to be some sort of genetic or chemical engineering going on there.

Then they slap on that slogan, real cheese!, not bothering to get FDA approval, and proceed to make millions. And we, the consumers, slurp down string chemically-altered-former-dairy-product like the animals we are.

Will my sudden epiphanies stop me from buying string cheese? Has the string cheese industry lost the support of one formerly dedicated customer?

Hell, no! This stringy stuff, whatever it's made from, is delicious.

This is a question that has been weighing heavily on my mind for many long days now.

How do other countries know when to stop wearing white, so as to avoid committing one of the most grievous fashion faux-pas known to man?

In the U.S. it's simple. You are allowed to wear white between Easter (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox) and Labor Day (the first Monday in September). In other countries, it cannot be this black-and-white.

Do they observe the white season from the first day of spring until the last day of summer? Do they use their own Labor/Labour Days as the benchmarks?

In the Southern Hemisphere, is it completely reversed? Do they wear white from Labor Day until Easter?

Is it only Americans who understand and acknowledge that white is a color that cannot be worn year-round? That to wear a white skirt to a fall dinner party would bring on waves of outrage and pity from the fashionistas in the room? If so, the knowledge must be spread. Abuse of the color white must be stopped!

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, and you are reading this, and you are wearing white, you must take it off right now.

And if you happen to be an attractive male who just stripped out of his white pants, you must take pictures. It's all about spreading the knowledge.

Oreo, a chocolate sandwich cookie produced and distributed by Nabisco, used to rely on the slogan, "AMERICA'S FAVORITE COOKIE." Lately--in the last two, three, I don't know, years-- this slogan has transformed. An Oreo is now "MILK'S FAVORITE COOKIE," and it just begs the question, what prompted this change?

I see a frenzied board room meeting among the top execs at Nabisco, the guys (and gals) that first came up with the concept of taking two thin, wafer-like, nearly tasteless "chocolate" cookies, slapping some "creme" of questionable origin in the middle, giving it a strange name, and delivering them into the chubby hands of Middle America all sitting around in a panic.

"What do you mean the results of the studies are different this year?" one shouts in the face of a scared young newcomer.

"It's just that, well, since the dawn of the Great Oreo, the yearly studies have given us utterly conclusive evidence that the Great Oreo is, indeed, the favored cookie of the great majority of Americans," he explains, words tumbling over each other as he tries to save his ass while still delivering the truth. "This year, though, something's different! We're not really sure that Oreo is 'America's favorite cookie!' anymore!"

There are anguished cries. Groans of defeat. The PR department is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. What to do, what to do?! They put $75 million into that advertising campaign, and now the slogan has no basis! Oreo is not America's favorite cookie! Sales will plummet, lay offs are certain, the whole company is going down, down, down!

"But wait!" A voice calls out, threaded through with hope and confidence. "We can just change the slogan!"

Gasps of indignation and disbelief.

"No, really!" The voice continues, and no one's really sure who's speaking. Is it the voice of the Great Oreo itself?! "No need to be drastic. We'll just... we'll use a slogan that can't be proven... and therefore cannot be disproven!"

"But where will we ever find such a slogan?" Nabisco's CEO asks, morose and resigned to his dark fate. He wondered if Burger King was hiring.

"Milk's favorite cookie."

An ethereal light burst through the proverbial clouds hovering over that conference room. And the company was saved.

But then again, maybe "Milk's favorite cookie!" is only new in America. Of course they couldn't ship Oreos overseas with packages proclaiming the cookies to be "America's favorite cookie!" Was the Oreo also "Canada's favorite cookie"? "Mexico's favorite cookie"? "Uganda's favorite cookie"? Or perhaps, instead of wasting money on the production of so many different packages for so many different countries, Oreo was simply "milk's favorite cookie" when it ventured beyond the borders of America.

Then, when America's loyalty shifted and the Oreo was no longer a favorite, they were simply able to fall back on the slogan already popularized in other countries. The graphics specialists just had to do some clever cutting-and-pasting in the commercials, a quick ADR session and they looped the word "Milk's" over the word "America's," and all was well in Nabisco once more.

Of course, it will be another dark day in snack foods history when the Wheat Thins slogan, "Great Taste... Big Crunch" comes under scrutiny due to the general consensus that the crackers' crunch is more "medium-sized" than "big."