I don't know how it happened. I saw the ads, I watched the commercials, I heard people say, "Hey, Quiznos ain't as bad as Subway!" and somehow I decided Quiznos must be good. Why am I always the last to know? Well, second to last, in this case, as their photographer is still coming up with shots of attractive food.

One busy afternoon I picked up a Quiznos sandwich and was startled by the vast chasm between reality and my mental picture (and, in fact, the picture in the window). Naturally I emailed to ask what was up. Basically I wanted to know why they hadn't been shut down by the fraud squad because, you know, you can't exactly advertise gorgeous sandwiches and then serve up stuff that looks like dog vomit.


I knew I had to be tactful if I wanted a reply, so I just asked why my sandwich didn't resemble the photo. Here's the reply I got:

Dear Mr. RomanHans,

I'm sorry to see your complaint about the T-B-G. [Ed. note: Turkey Bacon Guacamole.] You know, nobody can guarantee the real thing looks as same [sic] as the picture in advertisement. But I would like to honor you as our customer. I prepared a coupon of a free small toasty combo for you. Next time when you come to this store, you can get it from the cashier.

Sorry for your inconvience [sic] again!

Jasmine
Manager

Now, I appreciate the reply. Jasmine seems friendly and sweet and perky, and not at all like the rode-hard-and-put-away-wet chick who makes her food. But this wasn't anywhere close to a logical reply. "[N]obody can guarantee the real thing looks as same [sic] as the picture. . . ."? Really? So, can I advertise sensuous massage with a photo of a busty young blonde but then send a sweaty forty-year-old computer nerd on all my calls?

As for the offer, well, it took half the afternoon to get the tautology straight in my head. Yes, Jasmine is actually offering me free disgusting food to make up for serving me disgusting food.

Wish me luck. Oh, and email if you want a massage.

Photography Lesson

In my quest to become a World Class Photographer, I've started finding incredible photographs online and then trying to duplicate them myself. Using the works of the masters as a model, I figure I can learn their techniques, and once I've learned their techniques I can start to develop my own voice.

For my latest lesson I decided to venture into the world of food photography. I scoured the internet until I came up with this amazing photograph:


Is that incredible? I mean, this Turkey Bacon Guacamole sub is absolutely gorgeous. It's plump and fresh and you just want to grab the thing and take a bite out of it. I found the photo on the Quiznos website, so I figured I'd go to Quiznos to get one of those sandwiches and see what I could do.

When I got home, I unwrapped the sandwich and set it on a table, then got out my Canon. Hmm: if there's one commonality to all brilliant photographers, it's that they make their hard work look easy. I spent several hours trying to capture the essence of my sandwich, but this is the best I could do:


I keep examining the two photos and trying to figure out what I did wrong. Is it the black background that makes the sandwich pop? Is it the lighting? Do you think their photographer used a tripod? Flash?

As much as I try to deny it, the truth is clear: there's a pretty stark contrast between the two photos. Quiznos would probably never hire me to take pictures for their website, even on a freelance basis.

Well, I knew it'd be a long road to becoming a great photographer. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind taking that kind of journey, but I ate that sandwich about half an hour ago and now I'm not feeling so well.

BM: It's what's for dinner.

Could somebody please explain to me why Boston Market still exists? The name tips you off to the problem: I mean, when everything they serve is brown, you'd think they'd be a little more careful with their initials. You go there and you stand in line and you choose between three or four entrees and a couple sides. It’s been sitting around for a while so you pick whatever looks closest to its original color and they plop half a spoonful onto a plate and staring at it pitifully you carry it over to an empty, food-crusted table.

And you think, isn’t this what it’s like to eat in PRISON?

These are the main reasons I don’t want to go to jail: I don’t want to eat old, discolored food, I don’t want angry people making minimum wage to portion it out, and I don’t want to eat a meal where the largest component is cornbread. To be fair I guess there are a couple differences -- in prison you get nicer utensils, and you get enough food to survive. After a couple Boston Market meals even Jared from Subway would be overturning tables and jabbing the help with a sharpened spork.

Take their “family meal for four,” for instance: you get four sides, four cornbread, and one and a quarter pounds of turkey. Now, this works out to a little over four ounces of turkey per person. In fact, this is so little turkey that you could dump it into a liter of Coca-Cola and still call it TURKEY-FREE. If my folks had served this for dinner I’ve have been angrier than when I came home from summer camp and found all my belongings piled up on the lawn.

People must buy this stuff, though, which strikes me as pretty remarkable. Because if your average turkey is sixteen pounds and each person gets a quarter-pound, they’re feeding sixty-four people with just one bird. You start wondering why they don’t get more press -- I mean, Jesus fed fewer people with all those loaves and fishes, and he got massive coverage in the Bible.

They’re just as stingy with their sides. For instance, they think one serving of corn is like a spoonful. I feel like telling them, hey, corn is not an endangered species. It grows on stalks, from the ground. Yet with a scoop of mashed potatoes and an inch-thick slice of meat loaf this is what they call an “individual meal,” and it costs $5.99. You could wander around Costco, get more food for free, and the people smile when they serve it to you. Set the Boston Market “meal” out on the street and pigeons wouldn’t fight over it. They’d waddle over, glance at it and waddle back. “Maybe later,” they’d think. “I saw some strawberry Bubblicious over by the porno newsrack.”

If you’re still hungry when it’s time for dessert, you’re going home hungry. I’ve been to Thanksgiving for like thirty years straight and let me tell you, a pie serves six people, tops. Whenever I serve one I make the first cut down the middle and immediately some wiseguy yells, “I WANT THE PIECE ON THE LEFT!” Make more than two more cuts across it and people are going to start throwing ashtrays. At Boston Market, though, a pie serves like eighty. They slice them with laser beams because when they use a knive nine or ten servings stick to the blade. Try serving a piece this thin at home and people will laugh at you, right before they start looking for blunt objects. “Uncle Fred, you’ve already had a half-inch of pie. Leave a quarter-inch for Aunt Edna.”

Yet somehow Boston Market can be stingy and people keep coming back. I think it’s because they keep apologizing, over and over. Like six months after they opened the first billboards appeared: “We aren’t such stingy bastards any more!” You go in and give them another chance but now they’re doling out the mashed potatoes with a teaspoon. “Fooled ya!” they say. Their stock plummets again and there's more apologizing. These days the commercials promote “the new Boston Market.” And you walk in and now they’re measuring the turkey with calipers, on a gram scale.

There’s a guy down the street from me who’s freer with his merchandise, and roast turkey doesn’t have a street value of fourteen thousand dollars an ounce. I tell him the story and he stares at me in disbelief. “One pie? Eighty people?” The calculator in his head starts going, and dollar signs appear where his eyeballs used to be. He calls somebody on his cellphone and as I wander off he starts to talk excitedly about Colombian farmers planting vast fields of cherry trees, and unmarked airplanes dropping baked pastry shells over abandoned airfields.

Since I am young and handsome, Wendy's food SUCKS.

New York recently passed a law that says all restaurants that provide nutritional information, whether on request or online, must include the same information on their posted menus. A few fast-food restaurants took exception to this, and decided to dodge the rule. They decided to make the nutritional information unavailable, thus avoiding the need to post it in the stores.

Wendy's defended this on their website:

"We fully support the intent of this regulation. However, since most of our food is made-to-order, there isn't enough room on our existing menu boards to comply with the regulation."

Now, if they'd taken Miss Duggan for English at Our Lady of Lost Causes High, they'd currently have an eraser wedged deep inside an ear. Because as she all-too-frequently told us, when one uses a "since" clause, the second half of the sentence has to be related to the first. And what does the fact food is made-to-order have to do with available space on a plastic board? It doesn't make any difference whether the food is made by squirrels from Lithuania, or has been laying around since Jesus took off: the menu originally listed stuff like HAMBURGER, CHILI, and SALAD MADE OUT OF OLD FRITOS, and now it'll say HAMBURGER 440 calories, CHILI, 330 calories, and SALAD MADE OUT OF OLD FRITOS 770 calories.

But no, rather than address us like thinking beings, Wendy's tries to dazzle us with bullshit. Like we're all Homer Simpson, and we'll be thinking "Mmm, made-to-order food," rather than "What the hell are they afraid of? They don't want us to know we're eating eight days worth of saturated fat in a six-minute span??

Since I'm attractive and successful, they're imbeciles of the first degree.