"It's Not Delivery, It's Far, Far Worse…"

"It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno!" How many times do you hear that? Solidly probably once a day. Every other at its most seldom? Maybe it's the fat black guy who lies to his wife about letting his friends destroy their white carpet by tracking mud and dirt through it right after they paid to have it professionally cleaned. What's his clever cover? "But the pizza came with cheesy breadsticks!"

Because the only thing better than pizza
is pizza with more bread, cheese and marinara.

Yes, he truly believed that having purchased a microwavable pizza-like dinner product that came with bread sticks was enough to pass blame off to a fictional pizza delivery man who for some reason was allowed to enter a home, walk into the living room and deliver his charge, all while ruining the carpet the homeowner just paid for in front of the guy.

Because bread sticks.

But DiGiorno wasn't satisfied shilling crap pizzas and crap pizzas + "breadsticks." They had to break into the poultry racket. That's why they came up with DiGiorno Pizza + "Wyngz."

At least I think it's technically considered poultry. I'm even fairly sure they can call it "chicken" and "white meat" since that's how the box reads, but you will readily notice that they are not legally allowed to refer to the product as "wings." I'll let you draw your own terrible conclusions from that choice bit of information.

And now they're just starting to go crazy, it seems. The latest concoction is DiGiorno Pizza + Nestle Toll House Cookies.

Yes, they are packaging a pizza with another brand's product, one which should really include raw egg and liquid dairy, therefor being ineligible for either being frozen or sitting around in a supermarket as long as I imaging any DiGiorno pizza would. I know they're done both already, but I speak from experience on this: if you consume even 20% of a package of raw, pre-cut cookie dough, you will enter into a sugar and egg daze that lasts for at minimum 36 hours and you will black out during the last half of your Math final. DiGiorno might be trying to kill you.

Oh, but not will their raw cookie dough. I just meant that DiGiorno is to frozen pizza what Denny's is to a balanced diet for sober people.

It doesn't even look appetizing on the box, guys. How can you do that? How can you make a product so awful it won't even look edible when it's been flash-fried, blowtorch grilled and shellacked with a mixture of butter, acrylic yellow paint and industrial sealant? That bread looks uncooked, the cheese looks lukewarm and the pepperoni isn't even crispy, goddamit. I don't even see sauce.

What happened, DiGiorno? Did you finally realize your product was so terrible you couldn't sell it unless you were forcibly packaging it with other products that look more appealing? Was that it? Did you get a hold of Domino's and their (completely futile) "We're better than this" ad campaign?

Bryce from Minnesota, Domino's still sucks. Hard.

DiGiorno, who are you trying to beat? I'm pretty sure you already have a stranglehold on the Frozen Pizza Name Recognition Market. You don't have anything to prove there. You don't have to compete with Domino's. That would be like trying to compete in T-ball where everyone gets on base. Jesus, even Pizza Hut gave up and started pushing their passable zitti platters over actual pizza, and "pizza" is in their name.

Just stop, DiGiorno. We don't like you. We don't want you. Every person in America is already a huge fatass. And it's actually because of that that we all know when it comes to microwavable pizza, Mama Celeste is the only way to go. Unless you're jonesin' for some French bread pie, then you hit up the Red Baron for a little gastronomic dogfighting. Under no circumstances should you ever get a DiGiorno pizza.

I mean, unless you're trying to make a microwave pizza ironically. Then by all means, kill yourself for performance art. That'll be pretty sweet.…I mean "swe3+z."

On Snow Days

I had had a plan for yesterday, or rather, I had a plan for a good snow day activity and I just wasn't in the mood for it yesterday. Perhaps if I elaborate you'll understand why.

A while back I came across a recipe for cookies. As you can see, part of that recipe includes functionally prepared cookies. No, it's not some trick, that's a recipe for a chocolate chip cookies with a prefabricated cookie inside. It's a cookie with a delicious other cookie center. Marvelous.

And yet, I just wasn't prepared. I had things to do, people to see, conversations to be had and materials to read. Honestly, I just wasn't in the cookie baking mood. Really, up until this point in my life, I never imagined there was such a thing.

Of course, the last time I ate a dessert that had an Oreo on the inside, I didn't poop for four days, so maybe that had something to do with it.

On Time

I'm sitting here eating a box of Girl Scout Samoa cookies and it occurs to me that the little girl on the packaging is only moderately adorable.

She's got a mouth full of baby teeth and eyes that have yet to be completely crushed under the weight of the world's expectations. I mean she's being crushed under the weight of the world's expectations, but it's an ongoing process. She's only recently accepted that "boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls." She doesn't really understand why, but she knows it by rote. Still, she feels something like elation she can't quite understand when they ask her to wear a burned-out helmet and pretend she's a firefighter.

Then it occurs to me that this picture is probably really old. Based on the girl's little turtleneck and the look of everyone giggling and crowding around a gushing fire hose on the package's reverse, I'm guessing it's at least five years old, perhaps as much as ten.

Which is really weird, because it means that cute little girl could be a sexy, entirely legal coed by now. (Though, as a girl scout and judging by bone structure she's more likely reasonably attractive with an okay face.) This is a disturbing possibility. She's probably pretty cute, with a wildly narrow-minded Type A personality, resulting from her yuppie parents pushing her into overly structured, backwards social interactions at an early age.

Anyway, Samoas are delicious and this will not ruin a good cookie for me. It's the same as I've been saying for years about Dave Thomas' adopted daughter Wendy: somewhere out there there's a seventy-five year old man who, every time his children drive him past the fast food franchise, says, "Wendy? Yeah, I hit that."