Oh Yes?

While I was at the gym, fortified by half a packet of bacon and Bison Daughter's home-made pancakes, reminding myself why squats and deadlifts are best done on different days, Mrs Bison was shopping. Until recently she split her food shopping time between Target (great prices on meat and many other items, shit selection of fruit and veg) and Dominicks (good fruit and veg, more expensive meat). However she recently stumbled upon a store called Garden Fresh, or something like that, which is a "third option", and today she went there.

I haven't been there yet, but it seems to be set up to cater to the food shopping needs of a clientele that can best be characterized as "immigrant", predominantly Eastern European. The other shoppers were hard-faced scary-looking types. Certainly Mrs Bison felt somewhat isolated there today, as the sole (apparent) English speaker. At any moment she expected Liam Neeson to jump out and start looking for his kidnapped daughter.

So Mrs Bison came home with a pile of vegetables, some assorted meat, and a selection of ethnic "treats" to add a little extra to our Sunday lunch. There was a box of "choco cake" from a company called Haitai, which came from Korea, and whose principal selling point was the legend on the box which read "Presents for your delicious taste. Enjoy your happy times". I mean, what could possible go wrong there? In addition she had a bag of Russian pick'n'mix. She'd experimented with these two weeks ago, with some success, and so this time she jumped right in with a new assortment of Soviet candy.

Having partaken in a salad, designed to create just enough sense of healthy eating to justify shameless indulgence in foreign sugary treats, we moved on to the Korean choco cake, sold under the brand name Oh Yes. Well, just in case the outer box didn't put you off there was writing on each of the individually wrapped choco-effect, fake coated synthetic sponge squares, which read "You know that sweet things make smile. We love to see you smile with your people. So just taste this cake." Apart from the halting English (OK, my Korean isn't so hot either) you have to admire the logic behind this selling proposition:

Sweet things make you smile. We want you to smile. So eat the sweet thing.

The only problems was the lack of significant sweetness in the "thing". In fact the text on the wrapper should be updated to read:

We know that sweet things make you smile. This is a very bad cake. Don't give it to your people.

So, flushed with disappointment we moved on to the Russian pick'n'mix. Each of these was individually wrapped, but unlike Western candy, where a coconut candy might have a picture of, say, a coconut on the wrapper, these things had pictures which could not possibly have borne any relation to the ingredients. At least I sincerely hope not, since otherwise I have just consumed two pieces of chocolate candy containing ground penguin (or possibly ground swallow).

The other pieces had pictures of poppies, a cherub and daisies, and I would venture to suggest would have tasted significantly better had they in fact been manufactured from these ingredients, rather than the sawdust, cocoa and cigarette ash which I can only assume were the principal components. How hard is it to make candy taste good? You only need a bit of sugar, milk, chocolate, and maybe a few nuts. They teach tiny kids to make candy in elementary school (or at least they did when I was a kid, before they got concerned about all the two hundred pound fourth graders showing up). What possible reason is there in any civilized society for people to be eating candy that tastes like a cocoa flavored ashtray?

The very best candy in the bunch tasted a bit like a protein bar, which, to any one who's actually eaten one, is a pretty good indication of just how shit it was.

Maybe this goes some way to explaining the miserable, scary disposition of the other shoppers at Garden Fresh. If the most you have to look forward to, having loaded up on beets and sausage, is a bag on candy that tastes like dog-ends, and a choco-effect cake to make your people smile, you too might wonder just what the fuck happened on the way to the American dream.

I'm sure all the Albanian people-traffickers in "Taken" would have been quite happy to have stayed at home had they just had access to some decent sugary snacks in their home country. But as Liam Neeson would say: "Good Luck".


Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Reality Ever After

Mrs Bison is watching re-runs of Sex and the City, and I have to admit that it doesn't seem half as bad as I remember it. OK, no need to demand my "guy card" back just yet, it's not as though I'm watching it myself. How can I be? I'm writing this. No, my point is not that it got better, nor that I turned into the kind of limp-wristed, flamboyant excuse for a man that would actually enjoy it. My point is that compared to the utter crap that's cluttering up my cable TV these days, Sex and the City is brilliant.

Do you remember when TV shows had actors and stories? Or when we had interesting documentaries, or investigative shows? Now I trawl through the channels and all I find is "reality shows". You name it and someone's made it into a reality show. I cannot fucking believe that there are shows out there solely about people who make cupcakes, and all the trials and tribulations of being a cupcake maker. There are shows where people compete in stupid contests to become the next top model, or cake boss, or apprentice or whatever fucking idiot idea someone in LA or NY just came up with. This is about as "real" as little green men probing your anus while whistling the theme from Bonanza.

I could go on and list all the dumb "reality" shows that center around some lifestyle or profession, such as clamping cars, being a woman cop, getting married, hunting wild hogs, giving our parking tickets, collecting scrap metal, buying a wedding dress, operating a pawn shop, having a makeover or losing about two hundred pounds of bodyweight, all of which are chock-full of completely staged situations, created to bring drama and suspense to the tiny-minded plebs watching. What really pisses me off, though, more than anything else, is the plethora of "celebrity" reality shows, centered around the kind of vacuous bullshit non-people whose only claim to fame is being famous. Once upon a time we just had Paris Hilton, but now we have the overpaid, overexposed, real housewives of just about anywhere, all prancing about like utter twats in a massive celebration of the collective stupidity of the American populace.

Unlike the internet, which allows people to self-select according to their tastes, and where absolutely anyone can find something of interest to them (farmyard porn anybody?) cable TV is all about appealing to the masses. Only by attracting enough viewers to support advertising can TV companies make any money, so they work extremely hard to make sure that EVERYTHING we see is targeted at as broad an audience as possible. We can assume that they've got pretty good at it by now (economic Darwinism working its magic), so we can by extension assume that the swathes of reality TV shit that they put out are exactly what the majority of the American viewing public desire. I mean, TV companies aren't stupid.

Now we've reached a new low. Bethenny Ever After is coming. A woman famous simply for being on reality TV is now getting yet another reality TV show, just about how tough her life is now that she's married and has a kid. (Makes a change from a litter of six kids, or nineteen, I suppose.) What the fuck? I'd never heard of this weird looking cow before, but it turns out she's been on an apprentice show, been a real housewife, and also had some other show about planning her wedding, and now we're being offered a chance to watch the next episode of her life. Jesus wept! That's what America's doing now - tuning in to see what this "famous for nothing" celebrity bitch is doing in her manufactured life every week.

If we could decide for ourselves which cable TV channels we wanted in our bundle you can be absolutely fucking sure that this piece of trash wouldn't be on my list. I'm about ready to junk cable altogether, because it's nothing but crap and cartoons.

How did we get to this stage? The great moronic mass of the voting American public is sitting down every night to worship synthetic celebrities. Now we have Kim Fatarse Kardashian (where the FUCK did she come from?) hawing herself, her perfume, her clothing, and just about anything else that you can stick a brand name on. She's only famous for being famous, and that's what gets paid for in America today.

You know, compared to that load of old crap, even horse-faced Sarah Jessica Parker's looking good these days...


Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison