One year of COVID-19!

Happy one year anniversary! It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year, huh? I know, it feels like it was just yesterday. Oh, you don’t know what it’s the anniversary of? Well, it’s been one year since Will and Paula contracted COVID-19! That’s right! We’ve been long-haulers for a full year now! Man, how time flies. Remember when we thought all of this would be over by July? Ha ha!

Man, having COVID sucks. It was one of the worst experiences of our life. But we were the first people we knew to contract COVID-19, and to this day, we still don’t know anybody else who has gotten it. And we caught a very mild case, mind you. We didn’t even have to go to a hospital about it. But in a way, it’s our little piece of history, just for ourselves. In our lungs. And in our immune systems. Though our antibodies have definitely worn off by now and we still need to get our vaccinations.

Roundup: 2020’s Most Foods

One of the fun little perks you get of being subscribed to us on Patreon is that you get free blog articles weeks in advance! Unfortunately, we blogged a lot last year due to not really having anything else to do, which means we’ve built up a sizable backlog of small articles that aren’t really worth wasting a whole calendar day to publish separately.

This marks the start of our roundup series, where we publicly premiere some of our articles that you may have missed. Please note: if you have not pledged to us on Patreon, these are new articles! Not just a bunch of rehashed content.

Pizza Hut dips into the Detroit deep dish deep end

We’re not afraid to say it: We hate Pizza Hut! We don’t like it. Of the big pizza chains they are the worst. Domino’s is okay, we adore Little Caesars, Papa John’s we’ve never had and don’t care to try, but Pizza Hut is just plain garbage. It’s greasy, it’s overpriced, its pizza sauce is so acidic it could burn through steel, it’s SO greasy, we hate it! It’s bad. 

Yes, we know we’re weird for putting Little Caesars above Pizza Hut. But Pizza Hut is so baaad though! So please understand that it took something as radical as introducing Detroit-Style Pizza to their menu to get us to eat there again. We love Detroit deep dish. Little Caesars introduced it to us, and it’s everything that we expected deep dish pizza to be: the fluffy, chewy crust, the X-Tra Cheese, the ladlefuls of sauce… Oh it’s the best kind of pizza there is, and so much better than Chicago’s tomato casserole excuse for a pizza. 

What choice did we have? If Pizza Hut was going to be the second big pizza place to get into Detroit pizza, we knew it would be the perfect opportunity for seeing where the sublime meets the mundane. Could Pizza Hut hope to pull this regional variation off?

2020 in review

What a fucking year, huh?

Christ. We have no idea what to say. This year feels like it’s lasted a decade in itself but went by in a flash. All years feel like that to us, but this one was especially bad. I mean… coronavirus am I right?? Quarantine??? LOCKDOWN???? Whoo-ee. In the words of literally every commercial, these are unprecedented times.

We’d like to think that we made the best out of a bad situation, because we spent 2020 trying to do our damnedest to work on our web presence! We blogged, we streamed, we played games and ate food and wrote as often as we could considering we’re both disabled and very broke all the time and also THERE WAS A PANDEMIC GOING ON! Like, holy shit! A world-wide pandemic that is killing real people! But even then, we kept our noses as close to the grindstone as we could afford to.

This is our first time doing a Year In Review Best-Of Type Article, because it’s our first time we’ve really had enough articles to do something like that. Our blog has grown a lot! Our whole web presence has grown a lot… We’re doing so much more than we even thought possible for ourselves. And we have you all to thank, you people out there reading us. In the eternal words of PBS, Thank You.

So hit the jump, and let’s travel back to the beginning of 2020, the worst year ever, and reminisce… on just how much damn blogging we did.

Homemade Dole Whip fills a void in my life

If you’re a long-time follower of this blog, you’re amazing, and also you may remember the Dole Whip Saga. In short: I really, really want to try Dole Whip, a pineapple-flavored soft-serve ice cream treat that can only be found in Dole-sponsored locations, the most prominent ones being Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

It has been over two years since the first installment of the Dole Whip Saga. I am going to be honest with you, dear reader, that things have not gotten much better for me since then.

A few months ago I got a chance to try Taco Bell’s Pineapple Whip, which satisfied the primal desire to taste a pineapple frozen beverage, but brought me no closer to enlightenment. Other than that, the chances of me ever obtaining a Whip have drastically lowered in light of the pandemic. In fact, Walt Disney World is now probably one of the worst places in America that I could go to for any reason, and it will probably remain that way for a long time. Going to Disney would be a moral crime, not only to myself, but to my loved ones and everyone around me. It is unthinkable.

Other things have changed since that fateful July of 2018. I’ve gained a better understanding of what Walt Disney World even is. For some reason when I wrote the original article I was sincerely convinced that the mascot characters talked. I also have a short list of rides I would like to go on (mostly Haunted Mansion), none of which my wife shares my enthusiasm for, because I think my wife would be a lot happier if I did not want to go to Walt Disney World in the first place.

Since I love my wife and do not enjoy causing disdain, I tried to refocus my goals into more realistic ones.

It turned out that the Minnesota State Fair serves Dole Whip! Holy crap! I’ve been to the fair multiple times and I’d never even seen it before. That was very achievable, and that became the new plan. I would go to the Minnesota State Fair, a place I associated otherwise with pain and sweat and resentment, and I was going to enjoy myself. I even started exercising with the hopes that I’d be able to fit on the fair’s admirable selection of rides.

And then, you know, literally everything happened.

Five Dollar Pizza is so much more than five dollars of pizza

Pizza is too expensive! We’ll just say it! It costs too much money to buy a pizza! Having to pay so much damn money for a simple bread, sauce, and cheese is exhausting. In the quarantine environment we’ve been living in for the past seven months minimum, pizza has evolved from an “easy meal” to “life-saving necessity” for us. We know that pizza isn’t cheap – the costs of cheese and toppings adds up quickly, and the margins are razor-thin even in the largest markets. 

Still, there’s a saying about bad sex and bad pizza: it’s still pretty good. Sometimes the cheapest pizzas are the best ones, not just for their quality, but for the experiences they provide. Some of our best pizza memories take place in parked cars at Little Caesars, at gas stations, in college cafeterias, getting the Pizza Hut personal pan at Target. Cheap pizza is something that’s worth hunting down and going out of your way for.

When we found a place called Five Dollar Pizza in Minneapolis, we really thought it was too good to be true. Ever since Little Caesars had shut down completely in our area, we had resigned ourselves to pizza costing over twice as much from now on.  We didn’t really mind, because Little Caesars pizza really tastes like it was made with five dollars worth of ingredients, so we willing shelled out for our local Domino’s “$5.99 for Two” deals and made do. Seeing that there was another place, an independent place, that offered pizza at a Little Caesars price seemed impossible. But, one day we were up in the area, and decided we simply had no choice but to drop in. For five dollars, what could we lose?

Kraft Dinner is now Kraft Breakfast and there are no more rules

Everybody who has ever lived in their life likes to eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is so popular as a dinner time treat, it’s simply labeled “Kraft Dinner” in Canada. But what if you wanted to eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at a different time of day? What if you wanted it for… breakfast?

This is unthinkable. It is called Kraft Macaroni And Cheese Dinner for a reason. Eating it for dinner is what you are supposed to do with it. You do not eat it for breakfast. That is a bad thing to do, and probably has spiritually negative implications. You are putting your mortal soul on the line by wanting to eat macaroni and cheese for breakfast. It is for dinner.

But Kraft is a kind god, and is willing to provide us an indulgence. Yes, soon there will be boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Breakfast on shelves! Maybe, I don’t know, it looks like it’s part of some kind of contest where you can win a magnet and a mug and a box of the Breakfast and stuff I really don’t care about it. What I care about is that it will be macaroni and cheese breakfast! This is new ground. Nobody has ever eaten macaroni and cheese for breakfast before.

But what about it makes it for breakfast?

Why do people hate the “poor baby monkeys”?

What drives seemingly ordinary, well-adjusted members of our society to partake in sadistic behavior?

That’s the common question I found myself wondering all over again when I discovered “MonkeyHateGate“. Deep in the bowels of YouTube is a community dedicated to a shared hatred of… baby monkeys.

Who are these people, and why do they hate baby monkeys? Seriously, they’re adorable. Right? Please don’t tell me you hate baby monkeys too. Uh oh. I hope we’re not going to have a problem here.

Yeah, at first glance, this whole thing sounded utterly laughable to me. I immediately concluded it must have been another dumb YouTube comment meme… I’m saying all this so that you don’t let your guard down. This article gets grim fast.

Why did Burger King bring back its spicy nuggets, here and now?

Burger King brought its spicy nuggets back. You didn’t know they had left? You didn’t even know that Burger King even had spicy nuggets? We can’t blame you. Burger King introduced spicy nuggets back in 2017, shortly after Wendy’s discontinued their nuggets, in a naked cash-grab. 

We’re not really in a position where going outside to grab a handful of chicken nuggets is something you can do in a lark anymore. Going out for Burger King is a thing now, like literally any reason you go outside. You gotta bring your mask, and your hand sanitizer, and carefully plan to make sure you don’t get too close to anybody else… it gets exhausting. You need a good reason if you’re going outside. Like, perhaps, Burger King offering those spicy nuggets at an unbelievably cheap price: eight for a dollar? We’ve had these nuggets before, but it had been years since we last tasted one… Well, grab your mask and hit the jump, what is there to lose?