I’m sorry, but if you live alone, and your apartment kitchen is so small that it doesn’t have a dishwasher, why the hell are you wasting $300 and your precious counter space on this silly thing?

Oh, wait; maybe your kitchen isn’t tiny, it’s just pretentious:

And this is really going to impress that special one-and-only guest that you can have over for dinner:

A later picture reassures the potential customer that it’s small enough (16x16x17 inches) that even women can easily lift it (30 pounds).

Corona-chan won’t be gettin’ all up in her face!

To appease wokescolds, Land O Lakes butter is killing off their iconic Indian maiden. A design created by a Native American to celebrate Native Americans, that is quite popular with Native Americans, is now considered offensive by people whose only interactions with Native Americans are gambling, buying cheap cigarettes, and acquiring virtue-signalling jewelry and home decor.

Maybe they should just change the name to Trail O Tears…

The primary reason I preferred it to other brands was that they were the first company I found offering half-Elgin packaging (4-tablespoon sticks, which keep better when you live alone), but that’s become fairly common now. I like Challenge butter, but they use the fatter Western-style 8TB sticks.

The worst part is, it won’t work. You never get rid of the Dane…

Adventures in petty bullshit, Safeway edition

When I left the house on Monday, the rule was that you could bring in your California-mandated reusable shopping bags to avoid the California-mandated 10-cents-or-more fee for paper bags, but you had to bag your groceries yourself. Since I prefer the self-checkout lane, that’s not an issue.

Today, while I waited for my loaf of Semolina Sandwich Bread to rise, I went to the second-closest Safeway for some diet pepsi and wet cat food. I got a cart from the sanitizing team and turned to enter the store.

Sanitizer #1:

(points to girl behind me)

J:

(pulls out earphone) “Sorry, I didn’t hear a word you just said.”

S#2:

“Reusable bags aren’t allowed in the store right now.”

J:

“Then I won’t use it.”

S#2:

“No, you’re not permitted to bring it into the store.”

J:

“And?” (replaces earphone, continues into store)

Honestly, there’s only so much petty bullshit that I’m willing to put up with. What were they going to do, get within six feet of me?

This grocery store magazine display explains a lot about why the publishing industry is in trouble, especially the once-relevant Life magazine. One suspects that the people who assembled the Anne Frank special griped about not getting an important assignment like Lucas or one of the Obamas. Props to Rolling Stone for making Scoldilocks look like a male Neanderthal, though.

Related, I really hate how Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen have turned into a shitty publishing mill, with endless abridged reprints, appliance-specific repackagings of previous recipes, and blatant product placement replacing serious reviews. The web site still has enough good content to be worth a membership, but I just don’t see any reason to buy their dead-tree products any more.

Part of their things-you-might-need-right-now page, which also includes a mask washer, a “personal air cleaner” torc that wouldn’t do jack against viruses, a desk fan that would just spread viruses, and their famous full-face pollen shield, which at least has the virtue of keeping you from touching yourself.

Glasses, full-frame and frameless. Kind of like mixing oppai and chippai, which leads to the question, “are pince-nez the loli of eyewear?”

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I approve of your decision to make a larger 16-ounce bag of your delicious Splits pretzels. However, I think perhaps you should have had the graphic design team put a bit more thought into the layout of the bag…

Also, the design for the Rings pretzels always makes me think they’re a LotR tie-in product.

Tell me more about your efforts to prevent price-gouging…

This is for one (1) 1-pound bag of yeast. For comparison, the best price right now is $53.99 for six bags with free shipping, a difference of 22x. The ordinary, non-panic price at King Arthur Flour would be $5.95.

The good news is that between these assholes and eBay, when legitimate suppliers restock, we’re going to have the freshest mail-order pantry goods ever. All the expiring stock will be rotting in their garages.

Unrelated, apparently Good Eats: Reloaded season two starts Monday.

Update

(now that I’ve placed my order…) King Arthur Flour has SAF Gold back in stock for $6.95/pound. Gold is a specialty yeast for high-sugar breads (because sugar sucks up the water that yeast needs), but it works fine for regular breads as well. My existing supply of Red is good for another ~25 loaves, but given the current shipping delays, if things don’t open up again by the end of April, I might need it, if only to share with deserving friends and neighbors.