Waitr recently published its list of the 20 items residents of Lafayette most often ordered through the service in 2018. You can find the list at The Daily Advertiser site.
The food most often ordered through Waitr in Lafayette was Classic Nuggets from Chick-fil-A. Of all the foods available, that’s the one people wanted most. They saw it as the very finest of all the food options available to them.
Classic Nuggets from a second Chick-fil-A finished at No. 10.
I’ve never been able to see the appeal of deep-frying little pieces of chicken breast. I certainly don’t eat them except when I’m trying not to offend someone who’s offered them to me.
I’d be less inclined to eat the third-most ordered item on the list: the “Classic Chicken Sandwich” from Chick-fil-A. Putting a fried chicken breast between two pieces of bread? I don’t get that either. It’s just a fact that fried chicken breasts are often dry. Cooks agonize over how to prevent chicken breasts from drying out when they’re cooked. I know from my eating history that the cooks aren’t overreacting. A Classic Chicken Sandwich from another Chick-fil-A finished at No. 17.
The No. 2 (and No. 8) most-ordered item — “Traditional Wings” from two different Buffalo Wild Wings — would be fine it were just a matter of fried chicken wings. But if there is some sort of sauce all over them, I’ll take a pass.
Isn’t it odd that with all these chicken items, regular fried chicken is nowhere on the list?
At No. 4 (and 11) is Ham Salad. Until I saw this list, I didn’t know there was such a thing as ham salad. I don’t want to find out what it is.
Ranked at No. 6 (and No. 18) is the worst choice of all (from my perspective) — potato wedges. I don’t eat these things even when they’re served to me on a plate. Experience has taught me these big slabs of potatoes are rarely cooked all the way through. Undercooked potatoes are even less appealing to me than the blandness of the cooked chicken breast.
I was surprised to find that half the items on the list appealed to me to some degree. There was create-your-own pizza from two different pizzerias. I figured if I could choose my own ingredients, the pizza could only be so bad.
Then there’s the Landry special pizza from Village South. Its toppings of pep, ham, shrimp, onion and jalapeno seem as if they’d make an unusual and at least somewhat tasty combination of flavors.
There was pasta salad from two different restaurants called Deano’s. There were crunchy rolls from two different venues. There was a spinach and artichoke dip from Walk-On’s Bistreaux. I’ve never had a spinach and artichoke dip that wasn’t tasty. It must be one of those dishes that’s hard to mess up.
At No. 19 was a surprisingly sophisticated choice: edamame from the restaurant Tsunami. Edamame are soybeans cooked in the pod.
The next time someone starts telling you that Lafayette is vastly more cultured than Lake Charles, you can, if you like, point out to the speaker that a full 40 percent of Lafayette’s 20 most ordered foods come from either Chick-Fil-A or Buffalo Wild Wings. You certainly don’t need to travel to Lafayette to get food from those venues.
Etsy Is Run By The Illuminati
In his last Lagniappe political column of the year, Jeremy Alford quoted Third District U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins as saying, “Twitter is run by socialists.”
Damn! He’s right. I have no idea how he found out. But he’s right as rain.
Well, now that Higgins has let the cat out of the bag about Twitter, I guess it’s OK for me to level with you about exactly who is running some of the sketchy social media out there.
Fact of business, Facebook is run by communists. Yep. Instagram is run by Bolsheviks. Shapchat is run by anarchists. Tinder is run by the deep state. Lords of Pain is run by radical feminists. I Can Has Cheeseburger? is run by Juggalos. And eBay is run by the Bilderberg Group. That’s why eBay makes so much money.
I can also tell you for a fact that Google is run by the American Sewing Guild. But the guild is waiting for the 2020 election before it exercises a full political clamp-down on the site.
If you want to find out what nefarious group really runs the particular social medium you happen to be annoyed by at the moment, you need to get a copy of Community Standards: The Secret Underground Groups Behind Social Media — a fine book by “English” Billy Boynton, official positivity coach of Wagon Rut, Texas. Go to Wagon Rut and pick up your copy directly from “English” Billy, or send $1,000 (cash only, please) to Billy Boynton c/o General Delivery, Wagon Rut, TX 757010.
Year-End Round-Up For Free TV
My theory is that the U.S. has developed a feudal economy: our national economy has regressed to the point that it’s the same as the economy Europe had in the medieval era.
Part of the fallout is that the U.S. no longer has a middle class. The 20 million Americans the Pew Memorial Trust pollsters say identify themselves as members of the middle class, when in fact they are not, are actually part of the working poor. They’ll figure that out when they finally max out all their credit cards.
According to my theory, the U.S. now has four classes: the rich, the affluent, the working poor and the nonworking poor.
The reason I’ve written all this heavy, abstract stuff is to explain why the only entertainment I consumed in 2018 was entertainment that was free.
And that brings me to Free TV, 123movies and other such services. It was pointed out to me that on these services, I could watch all sorts of eccentric people without having to pay a dime. The shows I watched over the course of the year, as I recall it, were Sixty Days In, Love After Lock-up and My Crazy Ex.
Let’s review some of the profiles of extremity that I found in these TV chronicles of American culture in 2018.
Love After Lock-up is a reality show based on the premise that a person who has corresponded with a prisoner for some months wants to start a relationship with the ex-con when he or she is released from jail.
In some of the cases, the ex-con is as bad as you’d expect him to be. In one episode, a young woman with a rough background is kicked out of her house by her druggie mother. Having no resources, the woman moves in with the mother of her beloved convict, who’s about to be released. The mother warns the young woman about her son’s short temper, violent nature and former addiction to meth.
The young woman then calls the prisoner in jail and tells him, “Surprise! I’m with your mother.” The prisoner drops the F bomb three times within a minute. For someone with my dull life, that would be a deal breaker. But the young woman says she must go ahead with the plan of living with the ex-con at his mother’s house; she looks plaintively at the camera and says, “I don’t have a choice.” I think she’s being honest. It’s a true-to-life picture of what sort of thing happens to people when they run out of resources.
But in another episode, the ex-con is surely the victim. A very tough-looking male, he’s committed to marrying a not extremely attractive woman who’s a devout Mormon. He seems to be going above and beyond to be committed to the woman and her three kids, who come to like him a lot.
But on the wedding day, the Mormon mom transforms into a monster, saying she can’t get married until her “shoe designer” makes her special wedding shoes. The angry bride-to-be tells her friends and relatives, “The shoes are the most important thing” in the wedding, and adds, “If your father [or] your mother dies [before the wedding], don’t tell me.” The guests must wait four hours before the bride finally walks down the aisle in her grotesque see-through plastic designer shoes.
My Crazy Ex may be the least known show of this bunch. This show is made up of short, flimsy reenactments about significant others who became way too much to handle. In one episode, a man cozies up to a mysterious, dark-eyed woman he’s just met. On their first date, she hits him hard on his jaw with her fist. Again, for me, that would be a deal breaker. It wasn’t for this guy. I can’t remember exactly which torment drove him to break the bond.
Sixty Days In is a reality show about people who’ve never been imprisoned pretending to be newly arrived convicts at tough jails. Interestingly, this turns out to be not all that hard a thing to pull off if the noobs keep their wits about them, are courteous, don’t act like jerks, and follow the rules (both guards’ rules and prisoners’ rules).
It doesn’t always happen that way. One moron spends much of his pre-imprisonment training railing about his opinion that prisoners have it easy and that prison time is really a vacation during which one is waited on and doesn’t have to work. Within five minutes of his admission into the jail, he walks over to the communal television, smacks it with his hand and says, “Dibs. Monday night. Bills game.” Of course, a brand new prisoner does not decide what is going to be on the TV. This cocky loud mouth becomes one of the few to ask to be let out of the jail before his 60 days are up.
Backing up my theory of a feudal U.S. economy was the nature of the commercials I saw. Yes, for this programming, the viewer must watch commercials. After all, the programming is free.
What few commercials I saw that weren’t for designer prescription drugs for exotic illnesses were advising viewers to give their loved ones new SUVs for Christmas presents. Brand after brand sent out the message that a vehicle straight out of the showroom was the gift to beat.
The day after Christmas, I saw a commercial that tried to guilt those who hadn’t bought a new car for a Christmas present into buying one after Christmas. It wasn’t too late, we were told, to give the recipient a gift he or she really wanted. The imagery that accompanied these messages was of a young nuclear family going outside in the snow to see the family’s new car. Two children of three or four jumped wildly up and down and waved their arms, as if the prospect of a new car was much more exciting than any toys they’d been dreaming of for months.
I put it to you that these are commercials for affluent consumers. And on free TV, no less.
If you’re ready to admit you’re no longer in the middle class, these are a few of your free entertainment options. If you’re not there yet, keep paying your monthly entertainment bills.
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