Holes in My Hostess Part II

So I received a response from Hostess regarding the 20 pinholes in the package of my Hostess fruit pie. The response kinda freaks me out, I gotta say:

"Recently we began perforating the product film with pin holes to reduce moisture in the package.  We feel this enhancement will provide a flakier crust and is not considered damaged packaging.  Your concerns have been forwarded to our Quality Managers and you should receive follow up correspondence via U. S. mail."

Dude...what??? Okay, I don't know much about food packaging but I have to assume that if they've got the balls to poke holes in their pie wrappers then there must be a "logical" reason. But I'm sorry, I wouldn't buy a candy wrapper with holes poked in it, I wouldn't buy a box of cereal with holes poked in it, and I certainly wouldn't buy a pie that has holes poked in it. Whoever's working in their brand management is a moron for thinking this is actually a good idea. If you know me then you know how much I love sweets, but I will absolutely not be purchasing this product any longer and I told them as much.

This is almost as annoying as when Poking on Facebook was mainstream

Seriously, with all the germs and other crap that supermarket shelves inevitably pick up, and you're gonna basically carve a way for them to get onto your products? Disgusting. "Sweetest comeback in the history of ever"?  I could think of a few different adjectives to describe it.

Holes in My Hostess

I haven't posted any sort of food-centered blog in a while, but today's incident got me so angry that I simply couldn't resist.  I'm not going to say that this is my triumphant return to food blogging, but...it's something.

So, Hostess.  A little over a year ago they went bankrupt, then they were bought over, then Twinkies and other like products returned to the shelves.  I like Twinkies.  I like pies.  I like Chocodiles, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Sno Balls, Zingers, Donuts, Donettes, etc.  Some of those I don't think they've brought back yet but I digress.  A couple weeks ago at Albertsons I reached for one of the Hostess pies when I noticed something really frickin' creepy: all of the packages had little pinholes pricked all around them like a kid with zits all over his face.  Every.  Single.  One.  I took one of the packages to customer service with the theory that someone had deliberately poked holes the pie packages with a needle or something.  They were then promptly removed from the shelves.

Fast forward to today.  I again reach for one of the pies only to find that the packages are littered with pinholes.  Every.  Single.  One.  And the holes are all in the same spots, so this wasn't deliberate.  No, this is on Hostess.  So I purchased one to take home, take pictures of, and write directly to Hostess.  Here, my friends, is the specimen:

The specimen

Look closely

If this pie were a camera it would be a pinhole

Seriously, what the hell is this?  I counted TWENTY of these tiny little holes around the package.  Now, unless some butthole is coming into Albertsons and meticulously poking the same pattern of holes in every single Hostess fruit pie, then clearly something is going wrong during the manufacturing process.

I'll update you on my correspondence.

Just an FYI

Just an FYI to people coming to this blog (and according to my numbers apparently a good few still do), no, this blog is not very active at the moment but no, I have not abandoned it.  I actually come here everyday and I still read all the comments from old posts.  I'm just not posting as much.  Blogging is hard.  Blogs will return at some point.

As always, thanks for reading!

Merry Christmas!

I know I don't update this site as much as I used to but naturally I have to show off the important meals:

Turkey drumstick, mashed potatoes, stuffing, dinner roll, and cranberry sauce - the meal of champions

Gnarly brownies and chocolate chip cookies - all homemade

All American Dessert - Christmas Version

Okay, so last year I made this same dish but forgot to put the grapes in.  Honestly though, this version doesn't really do it for me.  The grapes just aren't sweet enough, and the canned cherries to match the red Jello aren't exciting enough.  You may ask "well, Greg, why don't you just put strawberries to match the red Jello?  Are you stupid or something?"  Yeah, strawberries aren't in season this time of year, jerk.  I'm not putting sub-par fruit in my dessert, thank you very much.  Anyway, in addition to the fruit and Jello (lime and cherry) you've also got the layers of pound cake and whipped cream. 

Aerial View

The top layer consists of more whipped cream, the rest of the Jello, candy cane shavings, maraschino cherries, and kiwi.  

Christmas Sandwiches!

Hope everyone had a great holiday season.  And ate lots of good food.  Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!  Best meal of the year right here:

Giant turkey leg, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and a dinner roll - you can't go wrong

And lest we forget one of the best parts of Thanksgiving: the leftovers and the opportunity to make CHRISTMAS SANDWICHES!!!

CHRISTMAS SADNWICHES!!!

Christmas Sandwiches: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy packed into a buttered dinner roll.  So.  Freaking.  Good.

Oh...oh yes.

Splurging with food is fun.  Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was great.  If you went shopping afterward then you suck.

Why is Blogging so Damn Hard?

It's funny, even after switching things around on this site I'm still having trouble finding motivation to blog about stuff.  About anything.  I was gonna write about how the Detroit Tigers are the biggest chokers in the game, but that's boring.  Then I thought about listing the top 5 worst franchises in Major League Baseball, but that really would have been just a bunch of bashing on the Dodgers and Angels, and everyone already knows those franchises totally suck.  Then I just kinda sat there and picked my nose.  What the hell am I gonna write about?

I have stuff to write about, it's just getting that motivation to open the blog up and get to work.  I guess motivation was really the main reason my food blogging lagged.  So I started thinking about what happened and it's really actually pretty simple: blogging is hard.  I mean, even when I stopped marketing and would only post a few times a month, the website never went to waste.  It's going on three years which is a long time to stay active on a blog.

So I'm gonna do a case study on blogging and today's topic is:

 What the Hell Happened to Basketbawful?

Basketbawful (the best of the worst of professional basketball - and there's a lot of it) was the premiere blog to read up on the daily failings in the NBA.  Every morning there'd be a new post trashing Darko Milicic, the Charlotte Bobcraps, or how David Stern secretly controls the outcomes of all the games.  It was a pleasure to read because Mr. Bawful's writing was cynical, sarcastic, and just damn funny.  Reading Basketbawful was a great inspiration for keeping things entertaining here at Greg's Gourmet.

But then something happened.  Bawful, who had a real job writing about the Chicago Bulls (By the Horns), gradually stopped blogging everyday and it was following the 2012 Finals where he basically dropped Basketbawful and quit.  Since I was a loyal reader since 2007 or 2008, I saw the warning signs early that he just wasn't into it anymore.  You see, the NBA doesn't have much of a middle class anymore.  You've got some really good teams and a bunch of really bad teams and that's it.  Finishing at .500 has really become a mirage.  While it does happen (Dallas finished 41-41 last season), you generally have a huge gap between the 50 win teams and the 30 win teams.  There's just not a lot of middle ground anymore, and it's the big wigs and the player egos that have caused this.  Bawful saw it coming several seasons ago and didn't make it a secret at how dispiriting it was, that basically the NBA just pimps out a handful of "super" teams (where all of the league's best players team up) now and that's it.

So last summer following Bawful's departure, Evil Ted (Bawful's friend and number 2 guy) opened applications for new writers on the site.  Essentially you could write in about anything related to the past season: a season recap, a playoff recap, draft analysis, etc.  With Greg's Gourmet's popularity at an all-time high and being a loyal Basketbawful reader for years, of course I applied.  This is where things got stupid.

ET's plan was to pick through the best submissions and post them on the site and let the public decide who gets to be a new contributor.  Ultimately three writers had their work posted for public evaluation and all three became contributors.  I'm too lazy to go through the comments, but I'm guessing ET liked their stuff enough and may have made them contributors either way.  So obviously I didn't get picked, nor did my submission even make it onto the site for public consideration.  It didn't bug me that much until I saw this posting from ET.

Note: I'm leery of people with their own blogs...while that shows dedication to something, I am seeking someone (or someones plural) to be dedicated to Basketbawful and make it what it once was...a nasty, sarcastic place for semi-literate anonymous people to vent. HA! Kidding. But not really. 

So...one of the qualifications to blog at Basketbawful is that you can't be a blogger?  Oooooookay.  And thanks for the heads-up after the application process, that's great timing.

Anyway, three new writers were brought on paired with ET and a couple writers who were carried over from the Bawful days, so you had about 6 people contributing to keep the site active on a daily basis.  But that didn't last long.  The writers who contributed during the Bawful days quickly abandoned ship, so we were then left with the three new guys and I'm pretty sure ET is pretty let down on how that turned out.

Jason was supposed to be the savior.  His writing most closely resembled Bawful's and he was entertaining.  When he was first brought on he was submitting several things per week.  Unfortunately once the 2012-13 regular season started, Jason all but disappeared.  His posts became majorly sporadic, like once a month if anything.  Another guy who was brought on, Paul, whose submission I don't even think was that great, never actually posted after the regular season started.  So that left Glenn, who gets major props because he went into the trenches to try and keep Basketbawful afloat.  His writing style is much different than Bawful's in the sense that Bawful would make fun and make funny of people and teams.  Glenn just makes funny, and the difference is night and day.

For example, Bawful would refer to underachieving teams such as the Detroit Pissed-ons, the Charlotte Bobcraps, and the Toronto Craptors.  Players who only got to see a minute or two of floor-time were lauded (in a taunting way).  And if a player had more turnovers, fouls, or missed shots than any other contributing statistic then they were praised as Basketbawful heroes for being so horrible.  Basically the more someone or something sucked, the more attention it got.  Glenn's writing just didn't have that fast paced sarcasm to it.  But he still posted nightly recaps every damn day without any help from any of the new writers.  Toward the end of the season and into the playoffs his posts became more sporadic until he disappeared.  He openly mentioned how doing the nightly recaps were exhausting and I don't blame him.

Jason has since posted a couple things over the summer, but nothing much and honestly, who really gives a shit?  The site's readership has tanked.  Unless Bawful comes back I doubt there'll be much activity this season at all.  This brings us back to the original idea of this post: blogging is hard.  A team of three new writers couldn't do the job of what one guy was doing.  And seriously, Bawful is a spectacular writer.  And the NBA season goes from late October to early June and this guy blogged about it every single day.  It was a pleasure to wake up to.  But even he got tired of it.

Am I upset that I didn't get a chance to write for Basketbawful?  Not really.  With its readership as high as it was you'll always need to be on your game cause the readers will know if you're half-assing it.  I would have liked to give it a try, but I think like Glenn I probably would have just lost interest, just like everyone else did.  No hard feelings of course, though I'm still baffled as to why ET didn't want someone who was already a blogger.  Like, dude, what?

Everything Wrong with "The Purge"

2022...unemployment is at 1%...crime is at historic lows...there's barely any violence...except for...on one night...DUN DUN DUN!!!

This is the best part of the movie

Forgive my vulgarity in this post but...what a pile of maggot sucking horseshit.  Seriously, how could a movie with such an interesting be so damn horrible?  

First of all, the poster says "from the producer of Paranormal Activity and Sinister", two films made on miniscule budgets that wound up making tons of money.  Sure enough, The Purge was made on a budget of about $3 million with the agreement that profits would be split up accordingly, most notably to lead actor Ethan Hawke.  Let me just say this to Jason Blum or whatever the hell this producer's name is...you've trolled Hollywood long enough.  You've shown you can make huge sums of money without investing a lot.  But it's time to start putting MONEY INTO YOUR FUCKING MOVIES!!

How could a movie like this be so horrible?  Let's go through the list:

1) First of all, the concept of a 12 hour period where all crime is legal is really, really hard to pull off but there's also a lot of different directions it could go.  Why they chose to confine this entire movie to a house, other than the producer being too much of a little bitch to invest some money in this, is beyond me. 

2) What the fuck is this shit?  

???

I spent the whole movie trying to figure out what this Timmy nonsense was and I still have no idea, other than perhaps it indicates that the boy is schizophrenic.  

3) Ethan Hawke plays a security system salesman, selling Purge-specific systems and it's found out early on that he's the number 1 guy for selling these things.  Keep this in mind. 

Hey, Wanda Sykes is in this movie

4) The Annual Purge starts at 7 PM on March 21st and the Sandin family is calmly eating dinner without a care in the world until 6:58 PM.  So shit's about to go down and these people are just like whaaaa???

5) Henry appears out of nowhere and pulls Zoey onto the bed.  Who didn't see that one coming?  

6) What the hell is up with Charlie's hiding place?  What relevance does this have at all to the story other than being a convenient spot to, uh, navigate your remote controlled baby doll tank from. 

7) Okay, so Henry's plan to win over his underage girlfriend is to fucking shoot her father?  Is this guy's head so far up Carrot Top's ass that he actually thinks that's a good idea?  And Zoey doesn't even check on her father after the shootout.

8) Why the hell does Charlie disarm the security system and let the Stranger in?  Like, I get that he doesn't like the Purge (neither do I, it's a shitty movie) but, like, there's some missing character development here to completely buy that he'd let this stranger in.

8b) Why does the stranger decide to stop in the middle of the neighborhood street and scream for help?  If you're being pursued by a Hummer loaded with members of the Manson Family then wouldn't it be best to STAY OFF the roads and RUN SOMEWHERE AND HIDE rather than stopping in the middle of the street and announcing yourself? 

9) Why does the stranger randomly run off after he's already in the house?  Why doesn't he just explain what's going on?  Why is this stranger such a jackass? 

10) Massive Plot Hole: OK, so Mary Sandin (the mom) is very secure in her home but when things start to get a little rough outside she proclaims "Purging doesn't happen in this neighborhood!"  Now, as Ethan Hawke was driving up to his house in the beginning we got a good look at said neighborhood.  Pretty upscale, right?  Like, mansions.  Which means this is likely a pricey part of town, yes?  So then WHY is there a PSYCHOTIC army of zit-popping fuckfaces hunting down HOMELESS people in the same area??? Even Malibu I'm sure has its homeless people but if you're gonna go all Manson Family and "purge" the streets then you're sure as shit not gonna do it in an upscale area where you're unlikely to find a lot of homeless people.  

11) Why the fuck are the zit-popping fuckfaces wearing masks anyway? 

Hey, you let the stranger in, so why not let these fine, friendly individuals hang out with you for a little bit?

12)  Better yet, why the fuck isn't THIS guy wearing a mask? 

I am Cornholio! 

13) Why the hell would it take an hour for reinforcements for breaking into secure homes to arrive?  The Purge starts every year at the exact same time.  Why do you need an extra hour?  

14) OK, so, Ethan Hawke sells Purge security systems, right?  And he's the best in the business.  He's even sold security systems to all of his neighbors en route to being named #1.  But then after the Stranger enters the house and the Manson Family arrives do we find out that the security systems DON'T REALLY DO ANYTHING!  They're a DETERRENT!  I mean yeah, the steel plates in front of the windows I guess help a little bit, but they don't cover "worst case scenarios" as he explains.  Well slap my ass and call me Bob...HEY ETHAN?!?!?!  ISN'T THE PURGE KIND OF A WORST CASE SCENARIO?!  WOULDN'T YOU WANT YOUR SECURITY SYSTEM TO WORK ON THE NIGHT THAT ALL CRIME IS LEGAL?!?!?!?  OUTSIDE OF WORLD WAR II I CAN'T THINK OF ANOTHER SITUATION WHERE I'D MOST WANT THE SECURITY SYSTEM TO ACTUALLY WORK!!!

15)  But it doesn't stop there.  Not even Ethan Hawke's own home has a legit security system.  His own FUCKING HOME!!!  This guy makes millions and millions of dollars and builds on extra rooms to his already massive mansion yet he doesn't think, hey, even though I'm scamming everyone with these half-assed security systems, maybe, just maybe, I should get a REAL one for my family.  I mean, it takes the Manson Family about three seconds to cut his electricity off.  How the hell has this guy been able to sell so many of these bullshit security systems?  Is America really that much dumber in 2022 that nobody sees how crappy these things are?

16) "We have tested the system.  It works 99% of the time.  It looks good.  It's strong.  They'll stay away."  So your entire research and testing method is based off your product looking good and 99% of the time it...looks good?  Did someone really write this shit? 

17) For a while there's a whole lot of nothin' going on.  Ethan Hawke sneaks around armed with a gun, Mary sneaks around armed with a gun, Charlie picks his nose, Zoey is off doing who the hell knows what, the Stranger is snooping around the house when he should be hiding, and for whatever reason the Manson Family are making violent gestures at the security cameras because they're totally insane and make no sense. 

18) So the anti-climactic last third of the movie consists of the Manson Family breaking in and bullets go flying, Ethan Hawke gets stabbed by Charlie Manson himself, but then, THEN, the big twist comes.  See, the NEIGHBORS enter the house packing heat and take out the rest of the Manson's and for a second we think they're the heroes but no, they're actually just there to murder the Sandin's themselves so, naturally, they had to get rid of the fuckfaces.  Does that make any sense?  Of course not, because it's so damn dumb.

19) Okay, so, while Ethan Hawke is badly wounded, the neighbors for whatever reason tie the mother and children up.  Why?  I don't know.  They're about to murder them but apparently they've just gotta be tied up because that buys some time.  But duh, of course they don't get to murder them because the Stranger comes in at the last second in, like, the third saved-at-the-last-second sequence and saves the day.

20) Why do the neighbors want the Sandin's dead?  Well, because Ethan Hawke sold them security systems and that made him wealthy so he was able to build more rooms into his house.  Yeah.  Seriously.  They buy his shit and make him rich and are mad about it so they kill him.  Right.

"I baked you some cookies and, oh, I'm gonna kill you later!"

As I mentioned, this movie was made on a budget of about $3 million but it may as well have been made for strips of regurgitated pork fat.  Generally if you've got a smallass budget then your strengths should be overwhelmingly placed in your script and/or your acting.  The acting actually wasn't horrible here, but the script is just, well, it's dogshit.  Too many plot holes, too many cliches, too many questions of "wait, why did that happen?!"  

The problem is that the otherwise big concept is contained entirely into this small budget, single location movie.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but you've gotta be more bold about it.  For one night all crime is legal.  Obviously the movie touches on murder, especially murder between acquaintances.  But what about rape?  Arson?  Vandalism?  Terrorism?  Drug trafficking?  Human trafficking?  What about the collateral damage that would come from the Purge and inevitably effect the other 364.5 days in the year?  What if all of Downtown Los Angeles is blown up during the Purge and there's nothing left?  I know the movie states nothing higher than a class 4 weapon can be used (which is a made up phrase for the movie, so presumably class 4 is probably a shotgun or assault rifle or something), but since all crime is legal, why the hell should anyone follow those rules?  Who's gonna enforce it?

These are the kinds of questions that should have been approached but instead were completely avoided.  Obviously the budget doesn't indicate how good a movie is going to be, but for something like this I think it should have been a much bigger production than it was.

So, to producer Jason Blum: IT'S TIME TO START INVESTING IN YOUR MOVIES AGAIN!!!

The Purge - what a horrible movie.