And Now A Word From Our Sponsors

Mr M wrote a letter to Hardees the other day.

Now, depending on who you are and where you live, you may or may not know who Hardees is. I think they're pretty much, at this point, contained in the Southeast. They're what I've always called "The Southern McDonalds."

And let's get this out of the way right now. Hardees sucks. They suck just like the big fat weenies they put on their horrid hot dogs.

Hardees used to be your run-of-the-mill fast food chain. Cheap and cheerful, greasy food, employees in polo shirts and sun visors. You know 'em, you've been to a million like them. Then all of a sudden (this was about 4 years ago) they went and got all uppity and started selling something called Angus Beef, and something else called The Six Dollar Burger. The Six Dollar Burger's claim to fame is that it's supposed to be just like the burgers you get for Six Dollars in your restaurants, your Applebees and Chilis, only cheaper. Which always made me laugh, because if you bought The Six Dollar Burger and added fries and a drink, like you get at those other restaurants for free, your Six Dollar Burger ended up costing about Seven Dollars. Another fine feature of Angus Beef and The Six Dollar Burger was that it caused everything else on their menu, fries, chicken, drinks, to rise in price by about 10%. But we won't even go there.

(However - Hardees does do a nice breakfast, mainly because of their biscuits, made lovingly at 4:00 every morning by little old ladies, hopefully not in polo shirts and sun visors, and they rock, and you can get your biscuit all the way from plain bread to topped with as many items as there are in the Free Fucking Food World. Old people love this about Hardees, at least around here where biscuits are a big thing, and they also give Senior Discounts which gets the old folks bounding in first thing in the morning and knocking over the younger people, children, pregnant women, the disabled, etc, just to be first in line for their discounted biscuit. I don't eat biscuits anymore, which sucks, because I did used to love my biscuits, but it has at least freed me from the hellish world that is Hardees.)

Now, as you can probably tell, I don't like Hardees and never have, but I don't tend to spend much time dwelling upon it, unlike Mr M. Mr M once made me laugh out loud, a sharp howl of belly laughter, by asking me the question, "What is the coldest thing in the universe?" then answering the question with, "A freshly-made Hardees hamburger." Mr M never has good luck at Hardees, though he continues to go there because the B'burg Hardees is just a mile or so down the road from him.

But that's not why he wrote them the letter. He wrote the letter for another reason, for the same reason that you folks across our great land better hit your knees tonight and pray that Hardees remains contained in the Southeast. He wrote the letter because Hardees has the worst commercials in the history of advertising.

I don't know who Hardees got to come up with their commercials, and what they pay them. Whoever and whatever, well, they're boobs and it's highway robbery, plain and simple. Now, Mr M occasionally calls me LCD, or Lowest Common Demoninator, a nickname that makes me want to punch him square in the face, because I tend to sometimes take the "low road" when making a joke. But these commercials are of the serious Lowest Common Demoninator.

Hardees commercials are geared towards The Guy. Why this is I'm not sure, but the commercials feature random guys of the jeans and backwards baseball cap-type, stuffing oversized burgers into their cakeholes and being general slobs. Normally. There was one that featured a braless tank-topped girl riding a mechanical bull, in a bar, while eating one of their presumably cold burgers, and the voiceover said, "We were going to show you our new Whatever Burger, but we thought you'd rather see this instead." And to be honest, I would have, if at the end of the commercial some dude in a cowboy hat walked into the western bar there with a 30-ought-six and shot this girl off her mechanical bull, but, sadly, that never happened in all the times I had to endure this commercial. So I guess Mr VoiceOverGuy was wrong.

But like I said, most of the commercials just feature these guys, who, believe me, you don't want to know, stuffing their faces. There's the one where the guy is stuffing his face and working on his car while his girlfriend lays on the garage floor, spreading her legs at various angles and sucking on her finger, waiting for him to pay her some attention. What a life she must lead. And the one with a hotel room full of guys stuffing their faces and ignoring a group of very lovely and sluttily attired women who pass by their hotel room. I guess the overall theme is, "Hardees: Better Than These Women! And Almost As Cheap!"

But the commercials are getting worse and worse. There's the one for the new Philly Cheesesteak Burger, which probably had the working title "Heart Attack In A Wrapper" because it's a burger and a Philly Cheesesteak sandwich crammed together on a bun, and this commercial features a streetcorner upon which some guys are hanging out at their cab stand. And the joke here, I'm just supposing this because it's not funny at all, is that between the fact that these guys are from Philly and that they're stuffing these two-foot high burgers into their ugly faces, you can't understand a single word they're saying, so the commercial gives us subtitles. One can only hope that they all get fired from their jobs, for any number of reasons - that they're loafing, eating, or just terrible, terrible people - or that someone else was trying to eat his Philly Cheesesteak Burger while driving his cab and subsequently ran into that corner and broke all those guys' legs, but again, this doesn't happen onscreen, which is very disappointing indeed.

The latest Hardees commercial, and the one that prompted the Epistle of Doom from Mr M, has to do with two things, 1) cheese, and 2) the fact that some guys will eat anything. Because this ad features some ass giving a tutorial on the joys of the melted cheese that sticks to a burger wrapper and how fun it is to lick this cheese right off the paper. Which he proceeds to do for us, in case we didn't get the idea from his explanation. For some reason this one really gets up Mr M's snout, and it does mine as well, because for me, well, I always thought burger companies were kind of embarrassed about those cheese stickies on their wrappers. It's like the fast food burger equivalent of nasty stains on the underwear, and I'd just as soon not think about it, but of course, if it's like underwear stains, surely that's why Hardees chose to feature it in a commercial. Anyway, we all know that the cheese stuck to a burger wrapper is trash, it's to be wadded up and thrown away (I'm sure out a car window, if it's one of these Hardees guys), but apparently now everyone, at least here in The South, is going to be walking around eating their burger wrappers because Hardees said it was OK.

I only hope they don't do it around Mr M. What with the Shower Wall Debacle and all, I'm not sure I'll have bail money at hand.

So I've given you a few visual descriptions of these commercials for Hardees, these commercials that show way too much on every local TV station on the dial, but unfortunately, well, unfortunately for me, a veritable smorgasboard of fortune for you, you can't hear them. Because besides really bad taste, here's what all Hardees commercials have in common. The sound of neanderthal guys stuffing gigantic burgers into their cakeholes. And believe me, it's not a pretty sound.

In fact, it's not unlike this: Schnkarfkschlpschlpschlpskkkkrnch.

Onions and lettuce are crunching, tomatoes and mayo are squishing, stuff's rolling around between the teeth, there's nothing you can't hear. In fact, I think maybe the Hardees commercial people actually put a microphone down to a dog's mouth, after he's been starved several days then is served a big bowl of soft dog food, and they have another couple of people down at dog-level tearing up a head of lettuce and an onion and hoping the ravenous dog doesn't bite off their faces. It's the most disgusting sound I've ever heard, and listen, people, I live in the country and have been around boys and teenaged boys and even a few uncouth grown men, and no one - no one - I've ever heard sounds like that when they're eating.

You know, I'm actually kind of surprised we've yet to hear the big belch in a Hardees commercial. But dare I speak.

Now, speaking of dogs, which we were a little, let's leave Hardees and go up the road a ways to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Who are now, of course, embarrassed to align themselves with either Friedness or the State of Kentucky, and so they just call themselves KFC.

KFC is sporting some commercials for a new item on their menu that, well, in case you haven't seen it, I'll give you a heads-up. It's called the KFC Bowl and is, oddly enough, a bowl, into which is placed some mashed potatoes, and then some corn, and then some little pieces of chicken, and then some gravy, and then some cheese.

After first seeing this concoction on my TeeVee, I described it to Mr M and said, "And you know what that is, right?" And although his answer, "Heart disease," was a pretty good one and possibly correct, it wasn't the answer I had in mind. My answer? "Scraps! It's scraps! Think of what you feed your dog after you've had a meal!"

And yes, what dogowner hasn't at one time or other taken the leftovers from dinner, the mashed potatoes, corn, half-eaten chicken with gravy, and scooped it into a bowl for Fido to have at? Fido loves it, and so do the cleaner and more polished people on this KFC commercial.

Burger King, well, that's another story, and I don't like Burger King either, though I used to. My love affair with them came to an abrupt halt sometime in the mid-90s when I received a burger from them laden with so much stuff I couldn't really tell what was what when I started chewing on it, and some of the what didn't really feel like stuff that should be on a burger. I spat out what I had, threw the rest away, and I promptly gave the Burger King his ring back, destined never to become Queen.

Their commercials have taken a serious downturn as well. They have three kinds of commercials, and, well, neither kind is much good. There are the horrid "Burger King and his Family" commercials, where people walk around with foam rubber burgers attached to them, and Whopper (the dad) and Whopper Jr (the son) are always at each others' throats because Jr wants to sell himself for an undervalued $1. While Mrs Whopper (the mom) and Whopperette (the daughter) look on without interest, as if to say, "Oh, shit, Dad and Jr are at it again." I shouldn't care that the Whoppers are a dysfunctional family but I do, and I can't understand why anyone who does like Burger King would want to eat one of these burgers after finding out what kind of a hellish life they live.

Then there are their commercials that are innocuous but weird. Like the Human Burger, where people dressed as burger ingredients all pile on top of each other like they're playing some odd pornographic drinking game, and finally a girl dressed as a bun catapults herself on top of them all. These are so odd I don't even have much of a comment to make upon them.

But the worst are their chicken commercials, which feature a huge chicken riding a dirt bike and doing other extreme sporty things, and over top of this plays a song, a slow accoustical number, where a man sings, "Big Huckin' Chicken/You are big, you are huckin'." Don't even ask, because I don't know, but what I do know is that the first few times I saw this commercial the song was "Big Buckin' Chicken," and maybe the giant chicken was at the rodeo, but those commercials mysteriously disappeared and the Huckin' Chicken showed up, I'm guessing as a result of several thousand threats of fire-bombed Burger Kings by various viewers.

Whatever happened to nice fast-food commercials? Teenagers eating hamburgers and french fries, families enjoying meals, all happy and smiling, at least on-camera, till they got home and realized they were going to gain weight and have acne from it all? Remember that cute little McDonalds commercial where the pre-teen girl had a massive crush on some guy and ran face first into him at McDonalds? And good old Dave Thomas talking about how good Wendy's was and that everybody should adopt a child just like he adopted Wendy?

Well, maybe I shouldn't get into the whole Wendy thing. That Wendy's a weird-looking girl, with the red pigtails sticking straight out, and the freckles the size of quarters. I'm glad she got adopted, though.

Betland's Olympic Update:
*Acrowinners, we have acrowinners! And boy, look at the entries. I love you all. So, tell us all about Sherman and Peabody's Hot-Air Balloon Ride.
- Honorable Mentions goes to Flipsy, with her "Two pals in transit really soaring."
- Runner-Up goes to LilyG, with her "'Tree! Peabody -- it's there!' 'Relax, Sherman.'"
- And this week's winner is the inimitable Kellie (with an ie), for her little acro story. "Took part in throwing ravioli. Sticky! / Then Peabody Inched To Restrain Sherman. / Told Police, 'Ignore. Take Round Sprinkled.'" That was completely brilliant, my dear, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that's actually how it happened.
- Thanks to all who played, you made my day!