One of my neighbours has a dog-walker because she's too busy not working to take her own mutts out for a pee. For similarly valid reasons, she has several gardeners to tend to her playing card-sized front yard.
Today she deigned to accompany her dog-walker down the road, but instead of helping her, she simply commented "There's a good girl!" as the walker scooped up the pampered pooch's poop.
Yesterday someone said to me, "My son can't study in Sweden. You can if
you're Canadian because that's part of the European Union. But not if
you're American".
Perhaps now that it has joined the EU (albeit secretly), Canada can help bail Greece and Spain out.
America isn't exactly known for its haute cuisine.Indeed,
as regularly readers of this blog will be aware, its culinary
innovations - viz deep-fried butter or Paula Deen's Heart Attack - are more likely to trigger head-shaking than salivation in
those of us who didn't grow up over here.
Being the country that gave the world convenience and junk food, much of the developmentsby restaurants tend to be related to fast food. So it is with two recentnovelties that even go one step further by cannibalising (if you'll excuse the pun)on the fast food concept and could therefore be termed autophagous.
The first such aberration comes from Pizza Hut,
a chain that could charitably be considered the second-lowest common denominator in
Italian food in the US (outdone only by the Olive Garden chain). Clearly eager to
muscle in on the gustatory heights attained by McDonald's, Pizza Hut has
taken a leaf out of the hugely successful burger joint's book to create
the Crown Crust Pizza.
This may sound harmless enough, suggesting that
the periphery of said oven-baked delight has somehow been
embellished, perfected, anointed.But it ain't.
What Pizza Hut
has actually done is threefold: Firstly, they've liberally sprinkled a pizza base with small meatballs. That's slightly odd for a pizza, but not entirely alien
since America also invented the "authentically Italian" spaghetti-with-meatballs that is available only in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Secondly, Pizza Hut has clearly taken a side salad and emptied it slap-bang in
the middle of said pizza. Stranger still, sure, but not completely off-the-wall
since this is also practiced by "fusion" restaurants such as California
Pizza Kitchen.
Finally - and this is the crème de la crème - they have studded the
crust with a dozen hamburger patties ... topped with melted "plastic" cheese. The
net result: a cheeseburger-and-salad pizza.
Meanwhile, Taco Bell - which probably did for tacos what Pizza Hut did for pizza - has hit upon a similarly noteworthy concoction. Painfully aware of the irresistability of Doritos chips (a fact that I and my bulging waistline can attest to), this pseudo-Mexican fast-food chain has hit upon a way of making its supremely resistable fare somewhat less unpalatable: the nutritionists at the Taco Bell development lab have jettisoned their boring, Mexican-tasting hard tortilla, and replaced it with .... you guessed it ... an oversized Dorito.
It's hardly surprising, therefore, that Taco Bell christened its new fast-food-meets-comfort-food "Locos Tacos" - i.e. mad tacos. I concur: it is mad (not to mention daftly plural for a singular noun).
