Tag Archives: IHOP

December 6, 2013 · 2:05 PM

The Horrors of Anthropomorphic Food

Just a quick reminder that I created an Etsy shop and it is well stocked.  I added some new stuff, including two pairs of earrings.  Click back to the previous post to read all about it or just click here to have my shop open in a new tab.  I don’t have a lot of ways to advertise, so even if you don’t buy anything, if you could share the link around it’d be much appreciated [EDIT 12/31/14: I closed my Etsy shop because I’m a quitter.  Sorry].

On to the post, which has nothing to do with writing.  I just want to get something off my chest:

Selling food in commercials by anthropomorphizing that food is horrific!  Please stop!

There are three offenders I want to talk about today, though I’m sure there are more that I should include.  Think I’ve forgotten an important one?  Let me know in the comments.

1. M&Ms

The thing I hate about anthropomorphized food is that we’ve taken something we eat and given it the chance to either scream and fight back or smile pleasantly, as if ignorant of its obvious fate.  M&Ms fall into the former category.  Commercial after commercial has presented our two male protagonists – Red and Yellow – finding themselves in various situations where they are about to be eaten alive.  And we are supposed to find this funny.

M&Ms

In this image I took from a recent commercial, the female, brown M&M is at a party.  She learns there is a woman there – Kristin – whom she should “steer clear of” because “she can’t control herself around chocolate.”  This goes from bad to worse when it cuts to Brown setting Red up with this woman.  The commercial ends with the woman – Kristin – dragging Red outside.  Red even comments “Oo strong grip.  OW!”

So let’s break it down: One living chocolate is casually told to avoid a person at a party because that person will straight up murder her with her teeth.  Then, knowing this, the brown chocolate arranges for the murder of the red chocolate.  There’s no other way to see this.  We are supposed to laugh as the red M&M is dragged to his slow and painful death.

I could go on to talk about how the two female M&Ms – Green and Brown – are portrayed as sex objects, but I honestly don’t even want to touch that one.  Let’s just move on.

2. Frosted Mini Wheats

Frosted Mini Wheats’ mascot used to be a two-faced, M&Ms-esque cartoon.  I tried to find a picture or an old commercial on Google and YouTube respectively, but could not.  So we’ll just move on.  The current Frosted Mini Wheats commercials have taken on a new advertising tactic – make the cereal pieces seem like little smart-making shoulder angels for children.  I guess some scientist found somewhere that eating a food consisting entirely of stuff your body can’t process or take nutrients from – pure fiber and sugar – was  a surefire way to help kids concentrate and learn.  And how do they convey this?  With adorable little cereal squares that have smiling faces, legs, arms…

Frosted Mini Wheats

…and a total acceptance of the fact that they are going to die very soon.  Here you can see them lounging in a hot bowl of milk.  The blue one and the pink one actually start off outside the bowl and they choose to get in with the others rather than run for their lives.  What the advertisers want you to think is: Oh, that cereal would taste good with warm milk.  What you should think is: Oh, all those cereal pieces are perfectly happy to be eaten alive.  But nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare with this:

3. Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Just look at this picture here.  But be prepared to lose your appetite.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Yep.  Cinnamon Toast Crunch decided to take this to a whole new level.  Not only do their cereal pieces have faces and limbs, but they actively cannibalize each other.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch 2

Cinnamon toast crunch 3

See?  They eat each other.  They friggin eat each other!!!  How is that okay?  How does anyone see this and think, “Hmm…I see.  The cereal is so delicious that it can’t even resist eating itself.  I fully intend to buy a box, and I hope I only find one piece inside of it, having just finished polishing off its brethren.  And then after I eat that one piece, I’m going to murder some hydrangeas.”

I will end as I started: Please stop!

Word of the Day: Anthropomorphic (adj) – ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human, especially to a deity.

Oh my!  What is this?  That’s right it’s a comic!

Writer's-Block-Strip-39

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May 16, 2013 · 12:47 PM

The Shy Comedian

I’ve never been a stand-up comic.  This is in part because I have only been alive on this earth for a very short time (relative, of course, to the grand scheme of things), and most of that time was spent sitting at tiny desks learning about exponents and analyzing the messed-up life of Boo Radley.  (For those who don’t know who Boo is: Leave.  Leave right now.  Buy a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and read it.  Seriously, how on earth have you lived?)  Not a lot of time there to visit open mic night.

But mostly I’m pursuing other careers that aren’t stand-up comic related, and I don’t intend to change that.  I don’t think I’d be very good on stage anyway.

Stand-up

Despite that, I think I’ve accumulated some good material in my relatively short life.  And I decided to share a bit here.

First off, I’ve told this story to everyone I’ve ever met because I can barely believe it’s true:

My roommate in my sophomore year of college was a fashion design major who was a bit…confused.  One night, as I was sitting on my bed reading, my roommate was talking to a friend.  She was trying to tell her friend about a certain scandal of sorts behind a young woman who  had run in a race earlier that year and won.  The woman’s gender had been called into question and it was just horrible.  But as my roommate attempted to explain this, she fumbled a bit.  “The problem was that she had a uterus but no testes…or wait…she had testes and a uterus…”  Finally she asked the question, “Is the uterus a male or female part?”  (I paraphrased here, since I can’t remember her exact words).  And this is a true story.

Speaking of fashion (sort of), I now have two jobs.  One is at IHOP, and the other is at a store called White House | Black Market, which sells over-priced women’s clothes.  One thing I noticed at WH|BM is a line of dresses that are supposed to make women appear two sizes smaller.  I haven’t tried one on, so I don’t know if they work.  What I do know is that they sell that dress in a size zero.

Let me break it down.  Size zeros are so thin that the clothing industry can’t even assign a numerical value to their body type.  (I will ignore the fact that WH|BM also stocks a size 00).  So what happens when you take a dress that reduces your size by two, and you put it on a size zero?  You get a dress that doubles as an invisibility cloak, I imagine.

Invisible

I will close with an observation on the concept of slimming dresses.  Do I think they’re a good idea?  I don’t know.  The whole point of wearing one, I assume, is so you can look more “attractive.”  (I put “attractive” in quotes because I am using it in the context of the fashion industry’s impossibly high standards for women which dictate that thinness is key rather that admitting that every woman has a unique body type that should be cherished and celebrated, and encourage their models to starve themselves just to fit into the clothes that were only made to fit a select few in the first place, all of which plays into an elitist class system of sorts that serves to make a good majority of women feel inferior as they gaze upon an ideal that they are conditioned to believe in but biologically unable to live up to.)  But if you think you look more attractive in that dress (or in that padded bra that turns your Bs into Cs maybe?) then surely you’re hoping that other people will find you attractive.  And when other people find you attractive, well…one thing leads to another.  Maybe that dress comes off.  And maybe it looks like you’ve been wearing a visual lie.  And maybe you don’t care about that.  Hopefully the person who got that dress off of you doesn’t care either, because shallowness is not a virtue.

Have I rambled enough today?  I think so.  Especially since I think I veered off the “stand-up” course a little bit.  Ah well.  This is why I’m not cut out for the stage.

Comic! No need to click to enlarge today!  (You still can if you want, though)

Writer's-Block-Strip-26

Word of the Day: Subterfuge (n) – an artifice or expedient used to evade a rule, escape a consequence, hide something, etc.

P.S.  Wanna see something cool?  Check it out:

Strip 26 Panel 1 Stripped

This is panel 1 of the comic minus a couple layers.  I thought it looked artsy and cool.  Maybe I’m wrong.

P. P. S.  Sorry the post got a little preachy today.  Working in retail…it does things to you.

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April 29, 2013 · 12:09 PM

Working Woman

As my last post may have hinted, I have found a job.  I am now working as a short-order cook at an IHOP.  This means that, of all the training and life skills I received in college, it was my time working in the dining halls that proved most useful to me.  Ah well.  It is hard work, and most days my legs feel like they’re going to fall off, but…money.  It’s also a fitting job for me, considering how many books I’ve discussed with my friends while eating late-night pancakes.

Anyway, about writing.

I’ve talked so much about the concept of “Show Don’t Tell.”  There are so many posts, and I know you’re not going to go back and read all of them, so I shouldn’t even link to them.  But I’ll give you a few, just for the hell of it.  Here’s one and then there’s this one, and there’s another here.

The thing is, after all that preaching about the concept, I found I’ve made a mistake.  I failed to specify when you should Show instead of Telling.  This occurred to me because I was rereading Hellbound, and I realized that sometimes it’s the narrator’s job to Tell.  That’s what description is, after all.  Sometimes you’re going to write something like this:

Sally looked at the old house on the corner and shuddered.  It looked ready to fall apart, with boarded up windows and peeling paint.  Plus, no matter what time of day it was or what the weather was like, that particular house always seemed to be in the shadows.

The above paragraph employs description to inform the reader.  That form of Telling is okay.  Sometimes you just need to tell the reader what a person or place looks like, who said what, what someone is thinking, etc.  You will notice, however, that the first sentence employs more of the Showing technique.  It implies that Sally is scared of the house, or creeped out by it, without explicitly saying, “Sally was scared of the old house on the corner.”  There is a difference between exposition and “Telling” in the bad way.  A lot of it comes from instinct and practice.  And the whole reason I’m bringing this up is so you know that I am not an advocate for trying to “Show” your readers every last little detail of the book.  I don’t even know if that’s possible.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.  Have a comic.

Writer's-Block-Strip-23

Word of the Day: Carapace (n) – a bony or chitinous shield or shell covering some or all of the dorsal part of an animal, as of a turtle.

 

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