Volume 6, Number 9  Friday, March 11, 2005

I'm Forever Yours -- Randomly

Now that it's been co-opted by McDonald's to sell chicken strips -- and that most Americans now know that it's not pronounced "chee-pottle" or "cheap hotel" -- chipotle has undeniably jumped the shark. Even worse, however, is that McDonald's new Chipotle BBQ sauce, a companion product, if you will, to their Chicken Selects, "is designed in part to appeal to Hispanic and African-American tastes," according to an article published by Northwestern University's Medill News Service. Although a separate Medill News Service article explains that "McDonald's spokesman Bill Whitman said that McDonald's never targets specific racial demographics with new products and that the sauce was only slightly spicy and was designed to appeal to everyone," it also adds that as part of the February promotion that officially launched what McDonald's executives no doubt are currently referring to as the Chipotle BBQ Sauce Era, "double-sided paper tabletop ads depicted a black man on one side and a Hispanic woman on the other, both beaming at the Chicken Selects they are holding with expressions approaching pure ecstasy." The next sentence in the article -- and perhaps now my favorite real-news sentence of all time -- reads, "Actual customers expressed their feelings toward the new menu item with mild satisfaction rather than ecstasy." I'm going to start checking the Medill News Service more often ...

Don't know if you've heard the big news, but the cover of the new Harry Potter book has finally been released. The new book, the sixth in the series (like I need to be telling you any of this), is called Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and though it doesn't come out until July 16, its presales have placed it atop the Amazon bestseller list since December. Maybe I'm just old, or cynical, or curmudgeonly, or crotchety, but isn't this whole Harry Potter thing over yet? I mean, I understand that people are interested in wizardry and whatnot, but when you've got websites like Wizard News out there, and they're publishing "Official Press Releases" about people urging the New York Times to let Harry Potter back onto their adult bestseller list, somehow "Get a life" just doesn't seem strong enough ...

Here's why I love the Internet -- because you can go looking for information about a crazy woman who is fighting for the New York Times to put Harry Potter back in the adult bestseller list, and five links later, you can come across a headline like this one: "Gandhi elected 2005 president of Minnesota PRSA." They're talking about Shireen Gandhi, of course, the vice president of the Minnesota Hospital Association, and I know you already knew that the Minnesota PRSA is the Minnesota chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, but, you know, it's still pretty funny, because there's this other guy named Gandhi, and ...

Speaking of official press releases, in researching ChipotleGate, I came across this sentence in a release on Hispanic PR Wire: "'The new chipotle BBQ sauce offers our customers yet another reason to try Chicken Selects®,' said Wade Thoma, Vice President McDonald's Menu Management." So when McDonald's executives speak, do they pronounce the ®, or is it silent, and the reporter just knew to put it in there? ...

If you've noticed that you're reading a random column for the second week in a row, and you're thinking, "What's up with that?", you should be embarrassed, because "What's up with that?" is so totally 2003 ...

I know I don't run my own television network, so it's likely this brilliant idea will just go into the ever-expanding pantheon/dustbin of brilliant ideas I have that I never do anything with, but if I did run my own TV network, sometime next week you'd be seeing the first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Next Generation: Clean Sweep. And if any of you out there do happen to run your own television network, please know that I'm completely serious, and that I will gladly sell you the rights to this absolutely genius idea. I mean, it's like meta-meta-television. And if you can't find robots to make fun of the people who invite the Clean Sweep crew into their houses -- and their ridiculous attachments to crap they inexplicably can't seem to let go of -- my girlfriend and I have been practicing our insult-lobbing for the last couple weeks now, so we'd be ready to start whenever ...

You know, I've been thinking about the Harry Potter thing, and maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe it's just a generational thing. Because during 24 this week, there was a commercial hyping the theatrical trailer for Star Wars Episode III, which was going to be shown during last night's episode of The O.C., and employing the magic of TiVo, I watched the commercial -- for a longer commercial -- three times ...

Speaking of Clean Sweep (not that I'm obsessed with it or anything) and TiVo (another thing I'm not obsessed with), I've been fascinated lately with the little descriptions they give of the different shows and episodes. Usually, a show has a plot, and so the blurb will explain briefly what happens over the course of an episode. But what happens over the course of an episode of Clean Sweep is pretty much the same every time, so usually the blurber (I assume some human is involved in this process) will write something about the crap that the couple has accumulated. But for an episode I watched recently, "Save the Last Receipt for Me," the episode summary read, "A man keeps business receipts." I'll tell you what, that's some Zen poetry right there ...

By the way, I hope that this week's title has lodged Journey's "Faithfully" into your head -- and if not, maybe this paragraph will do the trick. I've gotta say, I've been singing the thing for about a day now, and while it's pretty maddening, it's better than the Clean Sweep theme song, which had been there previously. Damn! Now Clean Sweep is back in my head! I knew I should've gone with "Don't Stop Believin'" ...