Foreign Cuisine Guilds

If you've dined out at all in America, you may notice that a lot of common foreign food eateries share too many qualities to be coincidental.  I've done a little research, and it turns out that there are 3 major restaurant guilds in America, the Chinese, Italian, and Mexican, and are owned by the respective mob bosses Wu Woo, Francisco Francisca, Jr., and Rodrigo Rodriguez.  I came across a few of their guild rules...

Chinese Restaurant
1. Cooks: Hispanic
2. Menu: Buffet and always include 1 general, either Tso or Tao.  Don't forget french fry.
3. Decor: Jade, dragons, fountains with those spinning stone balls and lots of gaudy golden crap
4. Quality of Service: What is refill?
5. Nightcap: fortune cookie: the cheaper the restaurant, the worse the grammar on the "fortunes." Don't smoking make man for long living...in bed.
6. Nomenclature: Each town has to have at least one restaurant with the words "super," "China," "buffet," or all 3 in the name.

Italian Restaurants
1. Cooks: Hispanic
2. Menu: Carbohydrates with a side salad.  Pre-meal snack is bread with oil.
3. Decor: lots of old black and white photographs of Italian scenery never excluding the Tower of Pisa, some sort of fake wine rack full of bottles that are never touched
4. Quality of Service: Pretty good if you get the gay guy
5. Nightcap: Cup of mediocre coffee at Starbuxx prices
6. Nomenclature: Bonus points if you have someone's name in the title (e.g. Johnny Carino's, Zio's, Mamma Mia's)

Mexican Restaurants
1. Cooks: Hispanic with one Chinese guy
2. Menu: Not-so-authentic Mexican cuisine that tastes the exact same at every Mexican restaurant.  Chips and salsa are pretty much mandatory by federal law now.
3. Decor: Bright colores, those wooden parrot things, a lone pinata, some trophies from of the restaurant family futbol team
4. Quality of Service: The less English speaking, the better the service
5. Nightcap: While paying for your meal, you get the opportunity for a cheap mint chocolate candy if you put a quarter in that slot in the box that may or may not go to some charity you've never heard of.
6. Nomenclature: Every town has to have a Las Palmas or a La Hacienda

M. Night's Social Theories

Spoiler Alert:  Details from The Happening are mentioned in this post.

The self-proclaimed prophet (see Lady in the Water), M. Night Shyamalan, makes some interesting, and somewhat inconsistent commentary about society in his latest project, The Happening.  The previous film, Lady in the Water, is erupting with the power of community and the call to join together.  However, we get a little different perspective in The Happening.  Apparently, consolidated populations bring on their own demise.  The largest cities of the world are "attacked" (New York, Paris).  Community is evil and plants hate it.  So we need to disperse.  But isolationism is just as deadly, as seen in the example of crazy old lady who lives off the grid.  As an added bonus, it seems to help your survival if you are inept at expressing your emotion, or if you are so empirically ordered that you talk like an android (Mark Walberg).  Oh yeah, and plants can now create wind.

Of course, this wacky social commentary is all based on the assumption that Shyamalan built in a moral to the story, which he usually does in his movies.  But I'm being too hard on the fella, because I really enjoy his films, even the ones that bomb.  He's creative, knows how to tell a story, and does some sick crap with the cameras to create a mood.  But The Happening has probably been my least favorite so far (Yeah, even worse than The Village).  But if you're a Shyamalan fan-alan, then it's still worth watching.

The Greatest Marketing Ploys of my Lifetime (That I Can Think of Right Now)

The marketing wizards exploit our psychologies all the live long day, and our only power against them is to realize how ridukulus their diabolical schemes are.  So here are a few observations I've made in which I hope we can all enjoy a boisterous guffaw.

1.  Labeling food products as "Trans-fat free."  Trans-fat is an artificial laboratory product that our bodies aren't really able to break down, so they build up in our arteries.  Therefore, by being responsible and socially conscious food manufacturers, they certainly bring a new level of reassurance to my heart when they stamp their "Trans-Fat Free" seal o' approvals on their products.  In other words they are saying, "Congratulations, we spared you a heinous artificial poison that should have never been in food anyway."

2. Pepsi One.  They already had a diet option with no Calories, but they really stepped it up by adding a Calorie.  That's what I call progress.  I assume this is their attempt to one-up Coke Zero, and I guess they did, sort of.  That's like adding a single gram of trans-fat to your bag of chips just to prove you can do more than the other guys.

3. Eco-friendly water bottles.  Bottled water is already hyper-lame.  Some goof convinced our country that you have to drink 2 gallons of water a day, and then the bottling companies tricked us into forgetting that cold tap water costs like $5/month, so here we are buying pallets of bottled water from our local grocer.  But to top it off, they've convinced us that we're helping earth by buying their extra thin plastic bottles that they only started because it saves them a bunch of money.  And they're charging the same price.

4. Putting the word "Xtreme" in the name of anything.  Why buy just antiperspirant, when you could have XTREME deodorant.  Why spell it "extreme" when you can spell it "XTREME!"

5. Any James Bond movie.  For some reason, there's always this hope that the new one will be better.  This is especially true when they anoint a new James Bond who has even bluer eyes and an even more British accent.  But you know what...they all blow, like Kenny G on a bagpipe.

6. The Magic Bullet food processor (As Seen on TV!).  This is a fantastic product if you're looking to create a full 1 ounce of ground-up goodness.  I've seen these things in action, and they don't do anything more than what my cheap blender does, and they have the volume capacity of about 2 grapes.

7. The Power Glove.  I think we all remember the disappointment that shattered our young hearts when we saw what a bogus piece of crap this was.  I couldn't ever get Little Joe to deliver a left jab, and you had to use the built-on controller for most of your moves anyway.  Freakin' lame, Nintendo.  On the up side, the Wii is a fine redemption of this failed project.

Well, I'm sure you all can think of some more good ones.  I'm gonna go wash some whites.