"He’s a good-looking guy. He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person? He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that."

Who said it? And who did he say it about?

Bobby surrenders.

Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/LLzr5S9ugf

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 17, 2024

"Calm down people, it is not raw/cold, it is a veggie burger patty underneath a slice of tofu."

Said Chuck Schumer [CORRECTION: No, just some random commenter], quoted in "Chuck Schumer deletes Father’s Day photo tweet in front of grill after critics slam his spatula skills" (NY Post).

Oh, Chuck! Stand up for yourself. 

"Even though he had ordered a novelty item, Olive’s video about a $16 McDonald’s order went viral, racking up hundreds of thousands of views."

"After a McDonald’s revenue report recently, the same post went viral again earlier this month, with at least a half-dozen news outlets — including the Washington Examiner, the New York Post and Newsmax— picking up the story of Olive’s pricey patty. One YouTube video from this month with 2 million views inaccurately describes it as 'a Big Mac meal' that cost $16. Posts on Reddit, the conservative site Twitchy and elsewhere tied the cost to President Biden’s economic management: Inflation, the theory went, had gotten so out of control that the price of a fast-food burger was approaching $20. These stories soon reached the White House Office of Digital Strategy, which tracked the meme as one of many exaggerated examples of the nation’s economic woes, according to a White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal discussions. In reality, inflation has been steadily subsiding.... The average Big Mac nationally as of this summer cost $5.58, up from $4.89... before Biden took office.... That’s up more than 10 percent, but it’s not $16...."

From "The viral $16 McDonald’s meal that may explain voter anger at Biden/As some Democrats fear social media is exaggerating economic problems, the White House faces a crucial choice on election strategy" (WaPo).

The argument for censorship oozes between the lines: "TikTok abounds with misleading or inaccurate information about the economy.... [Some] economists fear that these exaggerated stories will ultimately lead to a worse outcome — perhaps helping Trump win reelection...."

Here's the TikTok video in question, about "a smoky double quarter pounder BLT." I guess a "double quarter pounder" is a half pound, but "quarter pounder" is sort of a McDonald's brand, so they had to say "double quarter pounder" and impose this math problem on us.

Seems like too much meat, but maybe for a large person, seeking a full dinner, a half pound is the right amount. In a steak, it would be 8 ounces, and regarded as small. Let's just say it was a large burger the size of a small burger.

MEANWHILE:

Celebrating 1237! #Trump2016

A post shared by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on May 26, 2016 at 2:29pm PDT

"Still, the baguette is under threat..."

"... with the country losing 400 artisanal bakeries a year since 1970 — a decline that is especially significant in France’s rural areas, where supermarkets and chains have overtaken traditional mom-and-pop bakeries. To make matters worse — and in a sting to French pride — sales of hamburgers since 2017 have exceeded those of jambon-beurre, sandwiches made with ham on a buttered baguette."

 From "A Slice of France, the Baguette Is Granted World Heritage Status/More than six billion baguettes are sold every year in France. But the bread is under threat, with bakeries vanishing in rural areas" (NYT).

The article links to this 2007 discussion of the deep cultural meaning of bread: 

Here are 8 TikToks to delight or vex you. Let me know what you think.

 1. "Ever since I was told that corn was real, it tasted good."

2. Yes, there is a burger bra. The question is what to wear with it.

3. For the European person — the coolest places in America.

4. Mr. Jeff's Musical Gizmos is open. 

5. Do you know the song my recently departed mother loved?

6. Getting searched at the San Francisco airport. (This can't be real, can it?)

7. Approaching the volcano in Iceland.

8. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell play "Jambalaya."

I've hand-picked 9 things from TikTok for you. Let me know what you like best.

1. Understand the difference between "ask" and "guess" cultures.

2. In a 1-bedroom apartment, the "bedroom" doesn't need to be the bedroom.

3. Just a guy falling. [UPDATE: Link removed because the video is no longer available.]

4. Photographing birds.

5. Your iPhone photo app has a built-in plant identification function.

6. A Southern etiquette lesson. 

7. Here's a way to make a cheeseburger — an insane way, but a way nonetheless.

8. Dolly Parton talks to Oprah Winfrey about losing weight and goes on for 4 full minutes.

9. A cover of "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

"On Twitter, the cloth has been fodder for jokes and even a parody account since Apple quietly put it on sale on Oct. 18."

"Later that week, when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted a tweet promoting a new retail store in Turkey, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, needled him by replying, 'Come see the Apple Cloth' with a trademark logo. (Mr. Musk’s company is also not shy about testing the strength of its brand and the fealty of its customers. Tesla’s website offers a company-branded 'handblown' decanter for $150 and a $60 umbrella....)"

From "Apple’s Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect/It’s a $19 cloth" (NYT).

This is an example of the use of overcharging to buy publicity, like when a restaurant has a $1,000 hamburger on the menu.

But I'm also interested in the veneration of a scrap of cloth. I'm thinking Shroud of Turin and if I could just touch the hem of Steve Jobs's garment. 

"Popular California burger chain In-N-Out is refusing to comply with San Francisco’s mandate that restaurants check vaccine cards before allowing customers to dine indoors..."

"... a move that resulted in a temporary shutdown of the city’s only location. 'We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,' Arnie Wensinger, the company’s chief legal and business officer, said.... 'It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant Associates to segregate Customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason.'... 'We fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business,' Wensinger said. 'This is clear governmental overreach and is intrusive, improper, and offensive.'"

From "In-N-Out Burger clashes with San Francisco over vaccine mandate: 'We refuse to become the vaccination police’" (WaPo).

"A quirky wooden sculpture of US First Lady Melania Trump is reported to have been set on fire near her hometown in Slovenia, prompting its removal."

"... The sculpture of Mrs Trump, which could be described as only bearing a crude likeness to the US first lady, was carved out of a tree trunk on the outskirts of Sevnica, her hometown in central Slovenia. The statue, which depicts Mrs Trump dressed in a blue coat similar to one she wore to her husband's inauguration and with a club-like hand gesturing to the sky, received mixed reviews when it was erected in July 2019. Some residents branded the statue a "disgrace", complaining it looked more like the Smurfs character Smurfette than the first lady.... Since Mr Trump was elected US president in 2016, Sevnica has become a tourist magnet, as visitors search for an insight into Mrs Trump's early years Residents have brought out ranges of Melania-branded merchandise, including slippers, cakes, and Trump-like burgers with fly-away cheese 'hair.'"

BBC reports.

As a statue of Melania, the Sevnica artwork was kind of like the notorious "scary Lucy" statue. It's just really hard to understand why the artist would depict the person that way. As for why someone would set it on fire, presumably it's politics, but it could be aesthetics.

And I just want to repeat the phrase "Trump-like burgers with fly-away cheese 'hair.'" Something delightful about that. "Fly-away cheese" alone would have intrigued me.

"In the fall of 2014, Greta stopped eating....Greta had her first panic attack one day in September, when the family was baking cinnamon buns..."

"... and her parents encouraged her to eat some. When Greta refused, Svante and Malena yelled at her to obey. Their daughter, Malena writes, let out 'an abysmal howl that lasts for over forty minutes.'... On the recommendation of doctors, the family started keeping a list on the wall of how much she ate every day and how long it took her to eat it. ('Breakfast: 1/3 banana. Time: 53 minutes.') If the consistency of Greta’s gnocchi wasn’t perfect, she rejected it. Too many gnocchi on a plate and she was overwhelmed. ('Lunch: 5 gnocchi. Time: 2 hours and 10 minutes.') Greta stopped speaking with anyone but the members of her immediate family... In early 2015, Greta finally received a set of diagnoses: Asperger’s, high-functioning autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as selective mutism. She started taking an antidepressant called sertraline. But, Malena writes, 'What happened to our daughter can’t be explained simply by a medical acronym.' Instead, Greta was simply exhibiting the only rational response to the world around her: 'In the end, she simply couldn’t reconcile the contradictions of modern life.'... Malena does not pinpoint the moment when climate change became Greta’s particular obsession; nor does she question the rightness of her daughter’s response. 'Greta has a diagnosis, but it doesn’t rule out that she’s right and the rest of us have got it all wrong,' she concludes. Greta sees our carbon dioxide 'transforming the atmosphere into a gigantic, visible garbage dump.' The hamburger on her plate is no longer food but 'a ground up muscle from a living being with feelings, awareness and a soul.'"

From "How Greta Thunberg Transformed Existential Dread Into a Movement" by Emily Witt (in The New Yorker).

"We are very proud of crafting this idea. Mold grows in a very inconsistent way. We had to work for several months, with different samples, to be able to showcase the beauty..."

"...of something which is usually considered undesirable. I never thought I would become a specialist in mold, but that was required to make this one happen."

Said Björn Ståhl, quoted in "Why Burger King Is Proudly Advertising a Moldy, Disgusting Whopper/The chain's anti-preservatives pledge breaks just about every rule in advertising" (AdWeek)("The Moldy Whopper campaign, created through a partnership of three agencies features intriguingly high-resolution photography and video of a Whopper being consumed not by humans but rather by the voracious maw of time itself. In other words, we get to see a Whopper rotting").



Very beautiful, not that you want to eat it, but the point is that you eat it freshly made, and the mold that comes later proves its goodness on Day 1. And Burger King trusts its customers to understand the science and to enjoy the beauty of the artistically photographed food in its post-edible phase...



Snobs will say anyone sophisticated enough to appreciate this approach to advertising would never eat at Burger King anyway.

ADDED: Something you might not know about me is that in the year before I went to law school, I worked at J. Walter Thompson. The biggest client at the time was Burger King, and the big new campaign was "Burger King and I":

"Beto O'Rourke was the one to come up with the name 'Cult of the Dead Cow' for the hacker group in April 1985."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Cult of the Dead Cow" because I was blogging about Beto O'Rourke this morning, and in the comments Ron Winkleheimer said, "i'm way more interested in the fact that he was in the Cult of The Dead Cow." I said out loud, "Why did they call it Cult of the Dead Cow? Was it because they were eating hamburgers?"

So I looked it up, and I see: "Beto O'Rourke was the one to come up with the name 'Cult of the Dead Cow' for the hacker group in April 1985." The footnote sent me to "cDc 079: The True Story of Cult of the Dead Cow by Psychedelic Warlord" (Psychedelic Warlord being Beto O'Rourke), and I actually took the trouble to read the whole thing, out loud, within earshot of Meade. Then I was going to blog it by starting with the most interesting quote from the piece, but looking back over it, I had to say, "That wasn't really very interesting, was it?" And Meade confirmed that it was not.

But I must say that it's ridiculous to read "The True Story of Cult of the Dead Cow" and come up with the flat Wikipediaese "Beto O'Rourke was the one to come up with the name 'Cult of the Dead Cow.'" Maybe it depends on whether you've rearranged your brain with hallucinogenic drugs, but to my mind, calling it "The True Story..." is a way to say This is a tall tale. And:

Well, it was about 11:30pm on cold night in April of '85. I had just
finished talking to Franken Gibe. I still kinda remember how it all went
about....

I still kinda remember... That means it's made up (to one degree or another)...

FG "Hey Psyche! I just had the greatest idea for a new organization!"

PW "Really? What are you planning on calling it?"...

FG "Comatose Cow Club.....

PW "Yeah... hey, why don't you call it Cult of the Dead Cow?."..

FG "Ahhhh Psyche... you are such a dreamer! And anyhow, "Cult of the Dead Cow" Ha! Who would want to join a group like that? Oh well... talk to ya later."

PW "Bye... but consider it, ok?"

You may say Psychedelic Warlord is a dreamer, but...

#EATLIKEANDY.

Another Super Bowl ad. This is risky...



Apparently, that really is Andy Warhol, not (as I originally thought) an actor trying to look and act like Andy Warhol. Not everyone recognizes Andy Warhol, and I suspect that a Venn diagram of people who recognize (and like) Andy Warhol and people who will eat a simple fast-food burger doesn't show a lot of overlap. But I appreciate the daring of this ad. It shows so much about the fast-food burger experience. It really is rather stark and lonely. Simple. Food. It is.

As Meade said, it's like Review Brah:



Unlike Pepsi, Burger King has chosen to accept and love the enervated, wan white man. In the Pepsi Super Bowl ad, critiqued in the previous post, a young white man is targeted for abuse for his meek, bloodless manner. Black entertainers are brought in to demonstrate a preferable vigor and zesty enthusiasm. By contrast, Burger King seems to be saying, you know, it can be cool to be a quiet, gentle white male. Andy was cool. That's a certified historical fact. You don't have to wish you had the style of Lil Jon, and it wouldn't be cool for you to emulate him. Just be like Andy.

Or be like Review Brah.

If it's possible to embrace whiteness without risking accusations that you are flirting with white supremacy, think of Andy.

ADDED: Lest you question whether that's really Andy Warhol, here's AdWeek, "How Burger King Turned Documentary Footage of Andy Warhol Eating a Whopper Into Its Super Bowl Ad/CMO Fernando Machado on how the fast-food brand made the spot":

Wow! Burger King made fun of Trump. (Who does Burger King think eats at Burger King?)

Think of how much of a laughingstock a president has to become to have *Burger King* make fun of him. Sad. https://t.co/aUBiBxQACr

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) January 16, 2019

In case you don't get the reference, Trump recently tweeted "Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamberders etc" (reported in "Trump’s ‘Hamberders’ Tweet Becomes Fodder for Late-Night Laughs" (NYT)).

ADDED: Maybe Burger King's tweet is affectionate. I shouldn't accept the George Conway spin.

"She was very well prepared. Since '... Baby One More Time' was the first song, we really didn’t know where to take it. We just kept on recording."

"We tried a couple of different styles. After a while, I could hear her stomach growl in the microphone. I asked if she was hungry. We’d been going for eight hours. She said, 'No, I’m fine.' I said, 'Let’s take a break,' and she had three burgers."

From "'Britney Spears wanted to be a star': An oral history of '...Baby One More Time'" (Entertainment Weekly).

"How Trump and Schumer Came Close to a Deal Over Cheeseburgers."

Do I have to talk about the "government shutdown"? I don't want to supply any audience for this political theater, so I'm just selecting one headline that I like. That's from the NYT.

Excerpt:

The negotiations between Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer, fellow New Yorkers who have known each other for years, began when the president called Mr. Schumer on Friday morning.... In a lengthy phone conversation, both men agreed to seek a permanent spending deal.... Less than an hour later, Mr. Schumer was meeting with Mr. Trump over cheeseburgers in the president’s study next to the Oval Office....

As the meal progressed, an outline of an agreement was struck, according to one person familiar with the discussion: Mr. Schumer said yes to higher levels for military spending and discussed the possibility of fully funding the president’s wall on the southern border with Mexico. In exchange, the president agreed to support legalizing young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.....

“In my heart, I thought we might have a deal tonight,” Mr. Schumer recalled later.... As the evening wore on, Mr. Schumer got a call from Mr. Kelly that dashed all hopes....

“What happened to the President Trump who asked us to come up with a deal and promised to take the heat for it?” Mr. Schumer asked on the Senate floor. “What happened to that President Trump?”

He's the same President Trump, the deal artist who touches your heart and then leaves you crying and wondering what went wrong.

Why ostracize Louis C.K.?

I'm reading "Now that Louis C.K. has admitted he’s a pig, can we keep him? The answer is still no," by Hank Stuever in the Washington Post.

Why can't we hate the sin but love the sinner? To ostracize a person is to say: He's very different from us. His sins are of a different order. By cutting him off from us, we are restored. We're the good people, and we've demonstrated our goodness by ridding ourselves of that devil.

Steuver explains why the remedy is exile:

The end of Louis C.K. — who, at 50, is alive, but in a sense dead to us now — is a difficult but necessary loss.... A certain piggishness was always part of his act, wasn’t it?.... Onstage, he... turned such subjects (pedophilia, necrophilia, chronic onanism; but also marital strife, loss of libido, body-image issues) into a kind of perverted, guy-centric gold....

In [his TV series] “Louie”... Louie makes progress in his understanding of women by sharing the duties of raising his two young daughters as a single dad,....

So, is this goodbye? C.K.’s statement Friday, filled with everything but “I’m sorry,” could almost read as a treatment for that long-overdue new season of “Louie”....

The arc is clearly there: Louie’s behavior costs him everything, including some of his dearest friends, and he must scrape his way up from rock bottom, by listening rather than talking. Part of me wants to say I’m eager to see that show. But the far better part of me would rather see shows made by people who don’t assault and humiliate the people around them.

The exile is not from all family and friends. Stuever isn't talking about whether people who know Louis C.K. personally should "keep him." He's talking about whether people who don't know him at all should keep watching his shows. That is: Should we consume the intellectual work product of a mind that causes a man to behave the way Louis C.K. has done?

Yesterday, in this post, I interpreted Louis C.K.'s statement to mean that "from an ethical standpoint, consent is never enough." I said:

To share your sexuality with another person, you have to mean them well. You can't be taking advantage of them, even when they like you so much they say yes to what you're offering them. This isn't a legal argument. It's philosophy.

Don't offer bad sex, even to those who will consent to it. Don't take whatever you can get. You should know when you're extracting perverse pleasure from humiliating or hurting someone else.

The commenter Jupiter wrote:

Is it permissible to buy a hamburger in a restaurant if I don't actually hope and believe the chef will get a kick out of frying it? People use each other all the time.

I said:

The chef, if he's not a slave, is working for money. You get an exchange by adjusting the money to the level the chef is willing to work for.

Sex is different. You should not be adding other benefits in a sexual exchange. Either the sex alone is good for both, or, under the morality I am advocating, you should not be having sex. If you have to throw in money to equalize the exchange, you shouldn't be doing sex. Go out and get a hamburger instead. Have a conversation. Maybe some day someone will actually want to have sex with you.

To get closer to a better hamburger analogy, consider the situation where the chef knows he's using meat tainted with e coli, and the customer either doesn't realize it or is too dumb to care or thinks it will somehow still be okay or he's just so hungry he's only thinking about now. The chef wants to make the money, but he should not serve the meat.

What I hear Stuever saying is: Don't consume the tainted product.

By the way, if you're thinking of reconsidering all the intellectual work product you consume — movies, TV shows, books, political arguments — here's a great place to start: "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. Johnson shows why you won't want to consume what's been cooked up by Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Noam Chomsky.

Maybe it's time bring back the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Brilliant positioning by Kid Rock.

Dinner time at my house. What do you think Schumer is spoon-feeding Stabenow tonight? pic.twitter.com/gomKgqBV2l

— Kid Rock (@KidRock) July 21, 2017

I love everything about the photograph, including the salt and pepper shakers that are luring haters to say things like "Nice salt and pepper shakers, grandma."

Stroh's = Detroit, Michigan.

In August 2016, Pabst partnered with a brewery in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood called Brew Detroit to begin brewing batches of Stroh's Bohemian-Style Pilsner, a beer derived from an original 1850's Stroh's recipe. The first batch was shipped to area bars, restaurants, and liquor stores on August 22, with special events all across metropolitan Detroit on the 26th.

Here's more about Corktown. It's named after County Cork in Ireland, from which many immigrants came during the great potato famine in the 1840s. I didn't know the name Corktown, but I have been there, because it's where Tiger Stadium is was, and I've been there a couple times (back in the summer of 1976, when Mark "the Bird" Fidrych was the rage).

Here's a Google maps link to let you take a walk around Corktown in Street View.

I took a stroll on a Brooklyn Street...



... down past the glove factory...



"On Hand Since 1912."

ADDED: I'll bet Dan Rather regrets creating this showpiece:

"My dad told me he knew he wanted to marry my mom when the McDonald's opened in Moscow after the USSR crumbled and she ate 6 Big Macs in a row."

From "Married men of Reddit: what moment with your future wife made you think 'Yup, I'm asking this girl to marry me'?"