Jerry Springer: Too Hot For TV! (1998 VHS Review!)

It was easily the most coveted video cassette of my seventh grade year. Twenty years later, however, does the infamous VHS live up to all of that junior high hype?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

For better or for worse, The Jerry Springer Show defined U.S. pop culture in the late 1990s. At a time when Oprah and Rosie O'Donnell ruled daytime TV, Jerry Springer's unrepentantly trashy talk show came out of nowhere to give squeaky clean, corporate-backed pseudo-wholesome afternoon television a swift kick in the anus. Unlike Geraldo or Sally Jesse Raphael or Ellen or The View, the point of Jerry's show wasn't to fawn and circle jerk over celebrity worship culture or promote some sensational, synthetic-moral guardian alarmist agenda. No, Jerry's program completely abandoned the sociopolitical rabble rousing and shameless Hollywood self-promotional whoring and dropped any pretense of being anything even remotely resembling a journalistic endeavor. Instead, Jerry's show gave Americans what they really wanted to see - a whole bunch of trailer trash and ghetto ass niggaz punching each other in the face 'cause of adultery, sans any sort of attempt to "intellectualize" the senseless violence.

I don't think there has ever been a TV show that's ever failed the old SLAPS test as hard as Springer. There's nothing artistic about watching morbidly obese people whale on each other and God knows what kind of "political" message can be culled from watching dudes with mullets and Jheri curls swing chairs at one another to defend their sister/lover's honor. At least pro wrestling has the fact that everybody knows it's fake working in its favor; if we're using the classical Miller test  as a gage of decency, The Jerry Springer Show pretty much DEFINES what it means to be "obscene" television.

Of course, being the low brow lovin', lowest-common-denominator-footstool-usin' cretins we were in the late 1990s, we just ate up Springer like retarded hippos. The show was getting boffo ratings, with the syndicated series actually beating Oprah's long-running talk show in the Nielsen war. Love it or hate it, Springer had found a winning formula: put a bunch of lower class slobs in front of a studio audience of slightly higher class snobs and convince them to curse, flash their titties, and bonk each other over the head with furniture for an hour. Remember, kids: at one point, this actually WAS the most popular daytime TV show in America, and it wasn't even close. 

Yeah, I know The Jerry Springer Show is still on the air today, but back in 1998, shit was different. This guy was having mainstream movies made about his program and fucking Congress was trying to open inquiries into whether or not the producers of the show should be arrested. This was a cultural tentpole on par with South Park and Columbine, and its social penetration was impossible to deny. 

So for those of you who didn't grow up during Springer-Mania, the idea of the Too Hot For TV! video special might seem incredibly stupid. However, you have to remember: this was before YouTube, and really, before online video streaming. What you saw on TV was pretty much all you ever got to see unless you ponied up the moolah for a video cassette, and lemme tell ya - for the pre-Intenet age, that damn video was about as big as things got.

Other TV shows, most notably Cops, had already done special edition "Too Hot For TV" videos. However, none of those shows had the immense cultural permeation that Springer had, and his "uncut, unedited, uncensored" video came out at the very zenith of Jerry-Mania. This wasn't just a coveted video, perpetually hawked in late night TV commercials, it may have been the most coveted video of the late 1990s that didn't have the word "sex tape" in it. In my small-ass hillbilly hamlet, every video store in town ordered multiple copies, but what do you know, they were ALWAYS checked out. Short of stealing your mama's credit card and order the tape off a hotline or owning an illegal cable box (though by the time the "tape" was making the PPV rounds, it'd already been in video stores for a couple of months) and with no Internet piracy around to save us all, it was damn near impossible to get your hands on the material. And of course, its unavailability made it all the more mythical, with my lunchroom compatriots passing along all sorts of off-the-wall rumors about the tape's contents (including one kid who told me the tape actually showed a man having sex with a horse ... which I'm pretty sure he got jumbled up with an entirely different Springer show, but whatever.) 

And, as much as I hate to admit it, I never did get around to seeing the tape, even after Springer-Mania tapered off and you could easily amble on in to any Walmart in the country and buy the VHS cassette for $4.99. Still, my mind sometimes wanders off to that inescapable hype from 1998, the kind of pop cultural folk tale that has all but vanished from the face of contemporary society thanks to the presence of the Internet as a universal obscure media aggregator. Lucky for me, though, it isn't too hard to find the special on the Internet - in fact, it's so easy, you can probably find it in one Google search.

So how about you pour yourself a cold beverage of your choice and journey alongside me as we revisit this 20-year-old relic from the absolute apex of trash television? It'll be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, I promise you ... or at least, more fun than a barrel of monkey excrement. Hopefully. 

Alright, we begin with a logo from Real Entertainment. This funky, warbled 1990s alt rock music starts playing over an opening montage of sloppy fisticuffs and craggy bare asses. So yeah, we are off to a rollicking start already. 

The video begins proper with a janitor sweeping up a destroyed set, with chairs and broken table fragments all over the place, like there had just been a Dudley Boys match or something. Jerry stands beside a giant CRT TV and says that a lot of stuff has been cut out of his show - until now. "It's a crazy world," he tells us, "have fun with it."

Which is exactly the same face the TV viewing audience was making at home.

In the first clip, a woman named Tammy says she's slept with all three of her sister's husbands and we waste no time at all before she gets up and yells "you're full of shit" and starts slap fighting with her biological kin like E. Honda. Security restrains them while they yell "I'll fucking kill you" and the guards say "just relax." Naturally, the crowd hoots and hollers like an ECW crowd circa 1995, or a bunch of ghetto high school hoodlums cheering on in-between class fisticuffs. 

The clips aren't really edited together very well, so it feels like they kind of lap over one another. In the next sequence, a woman lets her sister know she's brought three guys from her hometown onto the program who want to date her. The only problem is, her current boyfriend is on the show, too, and as soon as the would-be suitors hit the stage it's time to see some motherfukers get whacked over the head with ... roses? Of course, a total donnybrook ensues and the stage is flooded by security guards in blazers, suspenders and - for some reason - top hats. Meanwhile, petals are fuckin' everywhere, man. I mean EVERYWHERE.

Next scene, a white woman who looks like she works at your bank calls a mulatto woman a bitch and slaps her right on the forehead. For a full-extension backhand popper, that was downright excellent form. Since the mixed-race bitch is literally a bitch, she refuses to fight, cries, runs backstage and says she's going to call the police and the white woman is going to jail.

Next up, we've get these two hillbilly sounding women arguing about an affair and the man meat in their love triangle - who has a Jeff Foxworthy mustache and a mullet - calls the other lover "a little dick head." Of course, he comes out next and the jilted mullet head immediately shoots for a running takedown. There's some brief ground and pound before the guards apprehend Mr. Mullet. The other guy is some blonde Eminem looking metrosexual, and in the most late 1990s moment ever, his wounds are treated by a woman with a short platinum blonde do and tribal tramp stamp.

After that, a dude with a mullet who looks just like mid-1990s Eddie Guerrro gets decked right in the fucking head by some dude who looks like he works an office job and has the word "integrated systems" in his job title. Eh, not much here. Although I did dig the woman with the perm and the checkerboard jacket; I honestly don't remember that shit being fashionable that late into the 1990s.

We get a REAL TREAT, folks, because up next it's a clip from the episode "Holiday Hell With My Feuding Family." Just like professional wrestling, Springer wasn't above a gimmick match every now and then, and this was one of the show's more ingenious. Basically, they replaced the set with a giant dining table, complete with wine, bread sticks, pasta and all the other accouterments of your standard holiday banquet. Naturally, this results in a morbidly obese woman hitting her mama over the head with a turkey leg and her husband engaging in nationally televised domestic abuse by throwing a handful of crowder peas and mashed potatoes in her face. Of course, the audience - many of whom are wearing gaudy Christmas sweaters - roar with approval. These two guys even run across the studio to high five each other, and it is glorious.

One guy tells another guy "don't tell me what to fucking do" and they scuffle for a bit. Nothing too exciting here.

We get a pretty funny moment where the Jerry Springer logo falls off the wall and Jerry picks up the missing letters and says he's now "half the man he used to be."

A woman with giant tits feeds a dude ice cream and then these two guys in flannel shirts wail on each other.

Yet another mulatto woman - this one, wearing lip liner as lipstick - uses the phrase "ax him" instead of "ask him," which has always been one of my biggest verbal pet peeves. As soon as the other woman having sex with her man sits down, she hits her with a hard Mongolian chop to the jugular. They yell "bitch" and "fuck" a lot and wrestle again. A guard tells her to stop flailing her arms and start acting like a lady instead of a "bar room brawler." 

Two old white women shove each other. Yeah, not a whole lot to see here.

A dude who looks like Adam Driver gets slapped by a dude who looks like Ryan Reynolds' retarded older brother. The producers have to break them up during a commercial break. Some really pussy fighting on display here.

Oh, 1998. Back when white skinheads could choke black homosexuals on live television and it was ALRIGHT to cheer. 

Two black women who look like they could be in a really bad TLC tribute act call each other "bitch" and engage in a brief slap fight. One of them responds with perhaps the first truly great putdown of the tape - "you a temporary thing, baby, I'm forever."

"You ain't nothing but a white trash ass stripping wannabe piece of shit," some guy in flannel tells his girlfriend. She slaps him and he calls her "a nutty psycho." She smiles the whole time. So, uh, maybe she's corpsing her way throughout the whole ordeal? Then another Eddie Guerrero looking guy (well no, he looks more like Roman Reigns mixed with Fes from That '70s Show) comes out and hits the flannel guy with about three or four solid body shots. The guards get involved and the other guy LITERALLY kicks the other dude in the ass. A producer in khakis puts one of the dudes in a fucking beautiful side headlock. Then flannel guy Pearl Harbors mullet man with the shittiest running Superman punch you've ever seen. He tells the guard "if you'd leave me alone I'd kick his ass." You know, a lot of people have conjectured about the fights on Springer being faked, but come on, there's no way anybody scripting TV back then could've produced anything this entertaining.

A fat drag queen tells an audience member he looks better than her and has a bigger dick than her boyfriend. "She looks like Marcia Brady after 20 years," another catty and skinnier drag queen comments.

A woman in a cowboy hat and a silver bikini shakes her boobs for a little while. 

The Eddie Guerrero lookalike and short haired office man from earlier have a brief scuffle again. Yawn.

Two skanks that look like extras from Melrose Place get into a brawl and then a black dude with droopy drawers  gets in a blonde woman's face and she slaps him and the guards hold him back.

A black lesbian pulls a white lesbian's hair. The third leg of the fish eating taco love triangle comes out and the brawling doth continue.

Two gay black guys wearing wigs (one is in a hot pink bell shirt) get into a shoving match and then head security guard Steve Wilkos puts one of them in a rear naked choke and it is goddamn hilarious. 

An angry guy with a mullet (yep, another one) says he's going to rip off another dude's head and shit down his neck but he's leaning back too far and his chair tips over and he falls off the stage and we all LOL, 

Oh hell, now we're really getting to the good stuff. From an episode titled "I'm Proud To Be Racist," the KKK is on stage and a white woman in a black robe (ironic, I know) calls an audience member "a nigger." Then a black dude throws two chairs and there's a near riot on stage but the guards quickly break it up. Then an audience member tries to storm the stage to fight one of the Klanswomen and everybody in the crowd gets nervous as shit. Well, when a Jerry Springer audience is clamoring for peace, you KNOW some serious violence is dangerously close to transpiring. 

More fat white woman are fighting and cursing. One of them insults the other by saying she drinks a bottle of everclear and fucks five guys in one night. This is followed by a "blooper" of an audience member taking the mic and accidentally cramming her ponytail into Jerry's mouth. He blames it on having a "big nose" which may or may not be an allusion to the fact he's Jewish and, as the Mayor of Cincinnati, once used a personal check to purchase hookers. Not that the two can't be mutually exclusive coincidences, of course ... 

More trashy tramps fight, and  there's another pull-apart on stage. There's also this great moment where this fat cow of a woman pops a big boobed stripper looking woman right in the face. Hard. 

A white woman accuses her black boyfriend of trying to hit on the 16-year-olds and 300-pound fatasses in the green room so she slaps him. Then his mistress comes out so she slaps her. 

Hey remember, the audience member that wanted to fight the Klan woman? Well, she's back as a guest herself and she finally gets a chance to confront that Ku Klux Kunt onstage. Oddly enough, her boyfriend looks JUST like Jake "The Snake" Roberts. The guards, unfortunately, break things up before anything too exciting happens. 

A woman says another woman has a big fat pussy. "How many pets do you have?" Jerry responds. He then does a broken live promo where he jokes about wanting to interview guests who date sheep.

And believe it or not, kids, that's actually the entire video. Of course, Jerry being Jerry, he just has to conclude the tape on something of a psuedointellectual note, so below, you'll find a verbatim transcript of this most special edition of Final Thought (aka, the final part of the show where he tries to say some semi-insightful, flowery things to make up for the last 59 minutes of unabashed mayhem.)

"You know we pride ourselves on showing you from time to time the more outrageous people of our society. Those who are either wildly eccentric or in their  political or social beings, simply defiant of convention. And perhaps none are more eccentric or defiant than the ones we've just shown you. Now, while  none of these lifestyles or manners are particularly ones we would necessarily choose for ourselves, how boring life would be if there was no outrageousness. That is to say, none among us who would push the edges of the envelope. Please understand because we show it does not constitute an endorsement of it or any particular view or behavior any more than reporting a murder on the news or a prime time movie about a rape is an endorsement of those horrors. Look, television does not and must not create values. It's merely a picture of all that's out there - the good, the bad, the ugly. A world upon we which apply our own values learned and nurtured through family, church and experience. Remember, if we only permit the views that only the majority of us hold, then you and I are free only as far as we agree with the majority. If you believe nothing else I ever say in these commentaries I offer at the end of every show, believe this: the politicians or companies that seek to control what each of us watch are a far greater danger to America and our treasured freedom than any of our guests could or ever will be. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other."

Yeah, it's a pretty smarmy way to end a half hour of trailer trash and ghetto niggaz (or, perhaps, crappy actors pretending to be trailer trash and ghetto niggaz) beating one another up and showing their stretch-mark-covered titties to the world, but hey, this Springer guy - who has now been hosting the program for 25 years - knows not to mess with a winning equation. If all it takes is a minute of half-assed pseudo-intellectual drivel to offset the unabashed exploitation of poor and possibly retarded Americans for cheap, mean-spirited entertainment, I say keeping running with it, Jerry-Boy - the fact you're STILL on the air today is more than enough proof middle America is A-OK with your shtick. 

Barely 30 minutes long, the fabled Too Hot For TV tape doesn't offer a whole lot of content, and considering it was battling stuff like Bum Fights and the first wave of CKY tapes for shock-humor supremacy, all in all you really can't chalk this stuff up as anything but a disappointment. The fights are funny and it's nice hearing all that profanity, but to be frank, there's nothing here that will really make you shake your head and go "yep, now that is some messed up stuff right there." Even by 1998 standards, I don't think the contents herein were all THAT provocative. Of course, our mamas didn't want us watching 'em, but hey, it's not like we were jacking off to Faces of Death, either.

So what sort of historical value does this tape offer to us, citizens of the (current year?) Well, it does a pretty good job showcasing how trashy TV was in the waning days of the analog set years. Nowadays, the amount of sex, violence and obscene language on network TV easily outdoes Springer at its absolute wackiest, and compared to the stuff on cable and premium TV, this shit is woefully subdued. But back then, Springer was pretty much the raunchiest and rudest thing on the airwaves. Irked parents and opportunistic politicians condemned it as an agent of societal decline, and in a way, I guess they were right. Springer was a show that, perhaps inadvertently, opened the flood gates for trashy reality TV to reign supreme, and I wonder just how successful that Dating Naked/Cheaters/The Anna Nicole Show format would've been had the masses not already been inoculated by Springer's antics. Oddly enough, by pandering to the lowest common denominator, perhaps Springer's show made U.S. society - as a collective - more desensitized to depravity and debauchery. I mean, you can only wheel out fist fighting fat girls calling each other "whores" five days a week before it becomes mundane, and there's even a potential argument that Springer's show made America more welcoming of alternative sexual lifestyles. Regardless, Jerry's impact on the American conscience is undeniable, and probably a whole lot more pronounced than most pop cultural historians would ever give him credit for. I mean, the program taught an entire generation that vomit fetishes were a thing - that alone entitles the show to enshrinement in the Smithsonian some day. 

And this, I guess, represents a sort of encapsulation of the essence of The Jerry Springer Show. By now there has to be literal years worth of taped Springer content, and factoring out all his boring ass pre-fisticuffs daytime talk stuff, what you see in Too Hot For TV is pretty much what Springer's been serving us nonstop for 20-some odd years. Two hundred years from now - long after a solar flare has wiped out all our precious digital archives - somebody can pop in this ancient video cassette and INSTANTLY grasp the appeal of the program to the plebs of 1998. It had cursing and punching and people yelling and fatties flailing at each other and in the middle of it all, this ex-country singer Jew in an unremarkable tuxedo playing ringmaster for our carnival of lower class violence and making a shit ton of money off it. 

And if that doesn't sum up the American media consumption landscape in the late 1990s, I honestly don't know what does...

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How Do Guys REALLY Feel About Fat Girls?

Weighing in on what dudes actually think about overweight women.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Back in 2004, The Daily Show published a book - titled, simply, America: The Book - which was filled with your usual tongue-in-cheek, liberal-tinged social commentary on W's America (in addition to a gallery of nude Supreme Court justices, but the less said about that, the better.) Perhaps the most interesting section of the tome, however, was a chapter exploring the conjectural future of democracy. Guessing how social tastes will change in the not-too-distant future, one blurb predicted that ever-climbing obesity rates would force Americans to change the definition of what constitutes female beauty, because it's simply easier to accept morbidly obese women as "hot" than to really do anything about the public health crisis. Hilariously - if not eerily presciently - the "joke" concluded with a line about singles ads in the non-specified future containing the closing lines "yes fatties." 

Well, flash forward 12 years later and what do you know, we're living in a "body positive" Orwellian state where 300-pound-plus women are deemed "sex goddesses" and Sports Illustrated is more or less threatened into putting models with cellulite on the covers of their swimsuit issues or else the jelly-rolled and double-chinned majority will raise Cain. Internet feminists the world over incessantly rail against "unrealistic beauty standards" and how the so-called "male ideal" is nothing more than misogyny masquerading as marketing - this, despite the fact that an unusually high percentage of male fashion kingpins are homosexual and virtually all of the major fashion media operations are ran, and are predominantly staffed, by females. If big fashion and Madison Avenue really dictates female body image standards, rest assured it's not a template being set in place by the aggregate, red-blooded, heterosexual American male. 

The whole "body positive" movement is pretty weird, seeing as how it is a rare example of the majority clamoring for persecuted status. According to national data sets, two-thirds of all white women in the United States are categorized as overweight while an astounding 77.2 percent of all Hispanic-American women and 82 percent of all African-American women are also designated as overweight. In fact, one-third of all white women in the country - and an unfathomable HALF of all black women in the U.S. - meet the medical criteria for "obese" status.

At heart (which in this case, is no doubt generously sprinkled with clogged arteries), the body positive trend is a fairly fascistic, narcissistic ideology that ironically shames people for being healthy. It's an unrepentantly prejudiced mentality, in which the thunder-thighed masses are demanding that people look - and foster the same life-shortening predilections - as they do. Imagine, if you will, a national movement that sought to lower IQ standards and shame scientists and math wizards for not being like the common peoples; ludicrous, to be sure, but in theory and practice, it is really no different from all this body positive claptrap. The anti-obesity movement has hardly anything at all to do with promoting unrealistic beauty standards or encouraging eating disorders or making women look the way men supposedly want them to. It's about saving lives and preventing chronic health issues like diabetes that cost the nation billions each year. No pun intended, but I don't think Americans really grasp just how gargantuan an issue obesity is as a public health matter: according to a study published in The Journal of Health Economics in 2012, totally-preventable obesity-related illnesses costs the national health system at least $190 billion each and every year - a sum that represents 21 percent of ALL health care expenses in America. 

Being fat, despite whatever nonsense you may hear to the contrary, is not a genetic condition. Unlike race, gender and (perhaps?) sexuality, obesity is something that can be explained solely through environmental factors. Yeah, some people might have thyroid conditions or Prader-Willi Syndrome, but the overwhelming majority of overweight people are simply the byproduct of a.) too much caloric consumption and b.) sitting on their asses all day. The battle of the bulge, ultimately, is the hideous bastard child of gluttony and sloth; if people just had the common sense and basic willpower to not shove their faces into buckets of ice cream and actually burn off some calories instead of marinating them with mayonnaise, Coca-Cola and Twinkie creme filling, the problem literally solves itself. 

But for all the excesses of the body positive trend - and yes, there are indeed lots of them - there is a central truth about overweight women in American culture that, for some reason, remains shrouded in secrecy. That huge, gigantic and somewhat blubbery revelation? 

Deep down, all straight guys in the U.S. LOVE big girls. Every. Last. One. 

But wait, some of you may be thinking, doesn't popular culture reinforce the ideal that all women look like half-starved waifs whose only "meat" comes in the form of silicone-infused boobies? Shows how much you've been paying attention, amigo. Hetero dudes have never been into the whole sickly Victorian/Eurasian ballerina/vegan marathon runner/heroin chic stick figure look. In fact, throughout human history, the most coveted women in virtually all societies have been the chunkier chicks. Why? Because not only are they more fertile than the Ally McBeals and Natalie Portmans of the world, they just exude a stronger aura of sexuality. Their curves are more entrancing, and the extra adipose tissue ensures their skin looks younger than their bony counterparts. And the sex? As a guy who has had his fair share of overweight poon, I can say this without hesitation: intercourse with a fat girl is much more pleasurable and intense than intercourse with a normal-sized or petite girl. Hell, bigger girls even tend to give better oral, for that matter. I'll let you make whatever crude joke you want about them "already being experienced with their mouths" your damn self.

Of course, we don't talk about it out in the open. Oh, sure, historically we've gabbed on and on about how hot Farrah Fawcett and Pamela Anderson and Brittany Spears were, but when we got home, I promise you we were jacking it to Queen Latifah, post-weight gain Kirstie Alley, way-past-her-prime Tina Yothers and - my personal favorite - post-reality TV, pre-death Anna Nicole Smith. 

The funny thing I've noticed is how self-congratulatory the mass media\entertainment\fashion\beauty industrial complex is for promoting plus-size models, like they're doing some sort of humanitarian good deed placing a 140-pound woman in Gucci ads instead of some sack of bones with sunken cheeks who weighs, on a good day, 100-something pounds. Granted, the whole beauty industry has never been about vaulting actual feminine beauty - rather, the idea was to contour the female frame so as to better highlight their clothing and jewelry and make-up. And what better way to show of your designer duds and handbags and overpriced eyeliner by showcasing breast-less, ass-less and curve-less models and actresses with frames reminiscent of a 12-year-old Hungarian boy circa 1930?

The blowback from online feminists, however, has forced the media/fashion cabal to at least somewhat alter their standards. Today, our preferred cover girls have plenty of T and plenty of A; Kim Kardashian, Christina Hendricks, Ashley Graham, Kate Upton, etc. However, isn't it actually sort of insulting to describe these women as "plus-size" or "curvy?" Those hyper-sanitized, industry-speak euphemisms belie a still palpable resentment for the overweight female body; yes, Kim K has an out of this world ass and Ashley Graham's thighs might rub together when she walks, but in no way, shape or form would I deem any of the models\actresses listed above as "fat" in the traditional sense. Despite patting themselves on their backs for being more "body size inclusive," the fashion\media complex still fosters an (un)healthy disdain for any woman who doesn't look like a desexualized mannequin. In their eyes, "fat" remains anyone who wears a C-Cup or larger, and models and actresses who actually are overweight - Melissa McCarthy, Mo'Nique, Rebel Wilson, etc. - are never depicted as sexualized women. Instead, they are almost always posited as clumsy, oafish and loud, if not borderline psychopaths worthy of contempt. Their "fatness" is consistently mocked in their feature films, to the point it becomes an inescapable qualifier preventing them from assuming any sort of two-dimensional persona. In an industry that actually considers people like Jennifer Lawrence and Jennifer Lopez "overweight," I'd go as far as to say today's beauty\entertainment\fashion Leviathan refuses to even humanize fat women, let alone posit them as alluring, or attractive or sexually desirable. 

Admittedly, I am what many people would consider a "chubby chaser." From puberty onward, I've fostered a certain taste for the bigger girls, for reasons that, even now, I am not sure I can fully comprehend. Ever the wannabe iconoclast, I've always been attracted to everything that isn't "mainstream," and while all the other kids in high school were daydreaming about making it with the captain of the cheerleading squad, I was rubbing 'em out thinking about the 180-pound goth girls who used to hang out after school at the local 7-11 smoking cigarettes until nightfall. 

Fat girls, by and large (pun, not intended), are more interesting people. They have to develop unique personas to "compensate" for being overweight. Unlike all of those suburbanite Barbies out there, they can't rely just on their good looks to get by. There was a good two-year time span in college where I did pretty much nothing but date big girls, and it was a blast. On the whole, they were more creative and thought-provoking than the "normal" girls I dated. They dressed weirder and their make-up was always more outlandish. They were funnier and they always had more eccentric attitudes. Across the board, they were less prudish about their own sexuality, and they viewed sexual relations through a much more libertine perspective. They saw nothing wrong with tongue kissing on the first date - or even within the first hour of knowing each other - and by date number three, our genitals were usually well acquainted with one another. Neither of us wanted anything long-term. We weren't looking for love, or a spouse, or anything like that. We just wanted to live for awhile, and take it from me, nobody out there has a greater urge to just live and enjoy life than young fat women. At the end of the day, the thing guys want most out of a woman isn't for her to look hot, it's for her to never be boring. We want to be around girls that do unpredictable things and want to live life on the edge a bit; by sheer biological determination, that's how fat girls keep the genetic cycle a' going, and ultimately, that's what makes them most appealing to the male species. Pretty and flowery, we can give or take, but a girl that's fun to be around is an absolute necessity. 

I really can't explain why fat girl sex is so much better than "normal" girl sex. I am sure there is some aerodynamics explanation involving extra girth, vaginal suction, gravity and probably neutrinos, but from my experiences, it is just so much more pleasurable and that's all I really need to know. Maybe fat girls are just more "into" it than smaller girls? Maybe they know they don't get to pick and choose whoever they want to have sex with and every time they hit the sack they know it could be a while before the get donged again, so they - sometimes, literally - soak it up for all its worth? Believe me, you don't know what "great sex" is until you've done it cowgirl style with a gal north of 170; having a fat girl on top of you doin' it is something that ought to be on everybody's bucket list, whether you are male OR female. 

And let's face it - again, pardon the pun - fat girls, a lot of times, are just prettier than skinny girls. Compare the facial features of bone-thin false-rape accuser Kesha with those of the much more adiposed Adele. By the time Kesha is 50, her mug is going to look like a second-hand store cutting board, but at the half century mark, Adele's chubby-self is still going to look drop-dead gorgeous. Along those same lines, Miley Cyrus up close looks like Ripley from Alien 3 after eating a ketchup-heavy hot dog; meanwhile, 300-pound model Tess Munster looks downright stunning, even without dousing her face in her trademark garish makeup. 

Now, I know what you are thinking. "Jimbo, old buddy, what sort of message are you trying to get across here? You spent the first half of the article talking about how fat acceptance is bullshit and promoting an unhealthy lifestyle, but for the last couple of paragraphs you've been droning on and on about how big fashion and big media still look down upon fat girls even though dudes inherently have an attraction to bigger women?" Well, to respond, you are right on both accounts. Folks have to remember that, sometimes, a thing can be right and wrong simultaneously, and this is one of those occasions. Body acceptance proponents are wrong for embracing a fascistic ideology that, unquestionably, leads to profound health risks later on in life (in turn, increasing the economic burden of thing like diabetes for the general public.) But, they are also right for being miffed at the big fashion and entertainment complexes for refusing to accept them as sexualized beings, especially when men - for the most part - are more attracted to them than smaller women. You have to remember that in all public arguments, nobody ever really wins - the best you can do is break even, and here, calling it a half and half is probably the best we can hope for. 

Contrary to the popular cultural narrative, men are not intrinsically repulsed by fat girls. In fact, the opposite is the case - we LOVE us some big women, especially the ones with spunkier attitudes and tons of confidence. Go to a pool party and I promise you the fat girl in a bikini who doesn't give a damn about her flab hanging out and is flirty with everybody will get way more attention from the guys than any other gal in the water. She's interesting, and sure of herself, and open about her amorous intentions. That, my dear readers, is what constitutes that all too common adjective "hot." Being sexy has nothing to do with pounds or hairdos or how much eye shadow you are wearing, or whether your bra and panties were made by Victoria's Secret or came in a four-pack at the Dollar General. Sexy is an attitude that defies all categorical descriptions, like "short" or "tall" or "thin" or "fat." Sexy is the way someone expresses themselves, and projects their presence in a room. Sexy is confidence, and directness and to a certain degree, fearlessness. It's a natural attraction to the things in life we know are kinda, sorta not good for us. It's why the sweet, shy, virginal girl in math class with a crush on us for two semesters will never get a friend request from us but we'll try to get the number of the girl wearing a mesh tank top, high heels, smoking a clove cigarette and saying "fuck" a lot outside of Starbucks before her skim-milk strawberry frappucinno is even ready for her. We want somebody alluring, somebody who reminds us of our genetic impulse to cast our seed and regularly. We want somebody who draws us in like a magnet and beguiles us with a weird charm we just can't explain. 

And big girls do that way better than anybody on this planet. Guys know it, girls know it, and those big wigs in the fashion and entertainment industry certainly know it, too ... which, probably, is the reason why nobody ever talks about it out in the open like we should. 

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Little Caesars’ Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza!

A new benchmark in fast food excess may have been set…

As I have stated quite a few times before, pizza is probably my all-time favorite food. There’s just so much you can do with the template, and as the old maxim goes, I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a pizza that I would consider truly, irredeemably bad. And yes, I have had Domino’s before.

In the U.S., Little Caesars is the red-headed step-child of the “Big Four” pizza chains, which I guess would make them the Anthrax to Pizza Hut’s Metallica. I suppose that analogy also means Papa John's is Slayer, except instead of raining in blood, they rain in chili cheese and Fritos.

Here in the Atlanta metropolitan statistical area, the Little Caesars chains practically vanished overnight for a good decade or so, only to reemerge out of the blue, TCBY-style, a few years back. It's one of the great mysteries of life I've always pondered, I tell you what.

To put it bluntly, Little Caesars isn’t exactly known for its robust quality. In fact, the chain’s big claim to fame, I suppose, is their “hot and ready” gimmick, which basically means they make a whole shit load of one or two types of pizza and have them stockpiled for immediate pick-up at certain points of the day. If you want a gustatory experience, go elsewhere -- Little C, clearly, is all about filling up your stomach as quickly as humanly possible.

A few days ago, I received an e-mail from the chain, hailing the arrival of this thing called a “Bacon Wrapped Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza.” I almost never get e-mails of the like, and honestly, I was sort of surprised my spam filter didn’t catch it. Alas, I’m glad Gmail was taking that day off, apparently, because this newfangled product is a fast food event in every connotation of the term.

Yeah, it’s not quite the game-changer that Taco Bell’s national breakfast menu was last -year, but it’s clearly bigger industry news than Chipotle offering tofu, at least. I mean, just look at the ad below …

...an eight-corner, bacon-encrusted deep dish pie, for just $12 USD. According to the email I received, the pizza itself consisted of 36 diametric inches of crispy pork, all glued around the perimeter of the dish like a hickory-smoked bulwark. Yeah, that kind of shit would grab my attention, all right.

After cajoling convincing my girlfriend to give it a try, we recently took home a box. For our more frugal readers out there, we were able to score that, two other large pizzas plus a double order of cheese sticks and crazy bread for a little over $30 -- if DFCS is breathing down your neck to feed all the kids you can’t take care of, then yeah, you might want to locate your nearest Caesars’ pronto.

Admittedly, when I first saw the carryout box, I was a little concerned. First, the box itself was notably smaller than the boxes for the standard pizzas -- clearly, I didn't want to wind up with some underfed, malnourished looking bacon-wrapped abomination. Secondly, and much more concerning, I noticed the bright orange HAZMAT box had the word's "America's Favorite Detroit-Style Deep Dish" plastered on, and that set off tons of alarms in my head. I mean, fuck, when was the last time you saw any product brag about hailing from Detroit?

Alas, when I finally flipped open the cardboard lid, mine eyes were not disappointed...

Now that is a damn good-looking deep dish duo. The eight slice twin pie was shellacked with white cheese and greasier than a teenager's forehead -- the smell of scorched bacon wafted overhead as soon as the box flew open, and indeed, such is the sweetest of all possible smells.

Before I go on to praise the product for the next 1,200 words or so, I would like to begin my formal review with a bit of criticism. While the pizza itself is most certainly wrapped up in bacon (with additional bacon chunks spread out on top of the pie, for good measure) only three sides of each piece contains the promised bacon siding. Granted, it's not a deal breaker by any stretch, but I remained just mildly miffed that I wasn't given a pie with 360 degrees of bacony buffer. I mean, I'm sure there's some sort of baking engineering reason why that couldn't be done, but for the sake of an additional four inches of pork, I would gleefully accept a square pie that was really, really hard to disconnect from the other slices.

Alas, on the three sides that DO include bacon, you're not going to be disappointed. Golden brown, albeit somewhat thin, slivers of bacon encircle the entire dish, and on my pie at least, the bacon itself was very smoky and crispy. Of course, this being a traditional deep dish offering, you also get a couple of slices of pepperoni free of charge, which makes this thing an artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising adventure of a lifetime. And at 450 calories and 23 grams of fat per slice, odds are, that lifetime probably won't be for much longer.

As a card carrying member of the National Deep Dish Pizza Enthusiasts Club (if such a club existed, anyway) I have to say I was plum impressed with Little C's pie. This is actually a damn tasty pizza in its own right -- I mean, it's not on par with the real stuff by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, I really can't fathom another national chain having a pizza like this that's as holistically satisfying. Even if you removed all of the extra meat, the pie itself would be a worthy base all by itself -- methinks my next all night Netflix binge, I will probably have to experiment with a special-order jalapeno and pineapple mix, you know, for scientific reasons and all.

So, how does the product fare, you may be pondering? Well, in my humblest of opinions, this is a downright incredible product. It's so brazenly unhealthy and fatty, and I loved every second of digesting it and turning my blood cells into the cardiovascular equivalent of the really fat kids with asthma who can't run during gym class. You could literally taste the delicious unhealthiness dripping down your esophagus with every bite, as if the pie itself was some sort of Faustian forbidden fruit. Per ounce, it might just be the most extravagantly yummy thing available at any fast food pizza joint in the U.S., and hot Jesus, is this thing ever filling. Normally, I can down an entire pizza by myself in roughly the same amount of time it takes most normal folk to set up a DVD player, but after just five slices, I was ready to roll around in the carpet like a beached whale, moaning for my seafaring kin to continue on without me. And as we all know, there is only one kind of food that makes you feel you might actually die from eating it, and that's the absolute best kind of food there is.

A limited-time only product, the Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep! Deep! Dish pizza is expected to leave the official Little Caesars menu by late March. Like winter snow that will soon bleed back into the dirt, nourishing the daisies and posies of April, this dish is but a temporary wonder, a seasonal miracle that will soon give way to the next marvelous sights of spring. As a fan of deep dish pizza, novelty mass marketing and furtive attempts to poison the general public, I give Little Caesar's incredible new offering my highest recommendation, and I strongly encourage each and every person reading this to head out to their nearest chain and pick this one up as soon as they can.

Let's face it ... the FDA isn't going to let this thing stay on the market that much longer, anyway.

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My First Trip to Golden Corral!

Or, how a routine buffet stop turned into the most revealing socioeconomic experience of my life…

“Hey Jimbo, we’re all heading out to Golden Corral tonight, wanna’ join us?”

The above inquiry I’ve heard no less than 966 times over the last six months. When 98 percent of your daily contacts are cash-strapped media studies majors, I guess it’s sorta’ understandable why the local buffet is such a popular haunt among my acquaintances. The thing I couldn’t understand, however, is why that particular eatery had earned such a vaunted place in their hearts.

In a two mile radius, I think I live next to no less than a dozen restaurants that have at least part-time all you can eat buffet menus. That said, no one’s ever invited me to go eat out with them at that one seafood place next to Wal-Mart or the vegetarian-friendly soup-and-salad super-store right off the Interstate. It was always Golden Corral…breakfast, lunch, dinner, it made no difference. This place, for whatever reason, was the designated place for my geographical cohorts to get their fat on. Needless to say, that piqued my curiosity quite a bit.

But first; a quasi-political sidestep, which I promise while make contextual sense in about two or three paragraphs.

Back in my university days, I recall watching this frustratingly difficult to now-locate documentary on YouTube about a kid living in South Korea that was a refugee from one of Kim Jong-Il’s most hellish concentration camps. His family, his girlfriend, his neighbors, all of his friends…killed right before his very eyes. The North Korean regime stripped him of his political rights, his religious convictions and the very people he loved. But even after all of that was taken away from him, that’s not what prompted him to flee from the gulag -- an escape that almost assuredly would have cost him his life. No, this refugee decided to risk his very life because he was half-starved to death, and some dude in prison told him that there was food to the south. That was it. Political freedom, social rights, religion, even the love of friends and family - that’s not worth tempting virtually guaranteed existential catastrophe, but for this guy, being able to eat shrimp and noodles was. Not a lot of Americans can understand that. It’s a shame, too, because when you look at history -- from the Paleolithic era to right friggin’ now -- hunger has been the foremost driver for all of humanity. If there’s a social movement/epidemic going on somewhere, it’s almost certainly routed in starvation, somehow -- from the Arab uprisings of two years ago to increases in rural criminality right here in the U.S. of A.

I know a lot about food insecurity, because I lived in a perpetual state of it for about three years. With an aggregate income of about $11,000 for a better part of the last five years (of which an easy $9,000 went DIRECTLY to college tuition prices), I had to learn to live off infinitesimal food supplies. On a good weekday, I may have consumed about a third of the calories an actual human being needed to intake, and things got so financially dire for me at one point that I decided to save money by simply not eating at all for three days a week. Once college and the massive financial hemorrhaging associated with it came to an end, I was finally able to engage in eating habits that somewhat considered normal human patterns of consumption again, and in the three months after I earned my bachelor’s degree, I put on about 25 extra pounds.

So, all of that to say, I KNOW what hunger really feels like. Or at the very least, I KNOW what it feels like a whole lot better than most folks in these United States.

Now, that brings us back to Golden Corral, don’t it?

Architecturally, there’s not much to write about. If you’ve seen one steakhouse, you’ve pretty much seem them all. As soon as you walk in, there’s this huge queue, where people snake through the line like cows being ushered through a slaughterhouse. The processing here is rather quick, and completely impersonal. You throw down your 15 bucks, and they give you your first soda right at the cash register. After a guard waves you off, you get to pick your place to munch and crunch, and a god-goddamn, is the interior of the place simply massive.

There’s no wonder why my friends are always going on and on about hanging out there for hours. Simply put, the place has so many nooks, crannies, and cranooks that a human being could feasibly hide out there for half a day without anyone being able to find him. If you’re wondering why it took almost a decade for the FBI to find Eric Rudolph, it’s probably because he was hanging out at the local Golden Corral the entire time.

FACT: 98 percent of armed forces members enlist just so they can get reduced buffet prices. 

I thought my college buds were joking when they said they gathered there for 12 hours at a time, but trust me, it’s a feat that’s more than feasible. Last I checked, there’s no protocol in place that would kick you out after a set time limit, so you could very much stroll in there at eight on a Saturday morning, stuff your face until the menu shifts over at noon and the continue your all day glut-a-thon until the evening truckload of food gets there around 4 PM.

I visited the local Golden Corral at a time I thought would be fairly uncrowned - a Monday, at about 5 PM. And holy shit, was I wrong and then some. Even then, the place was just PACKED with human beings of EVERY single ethnicity and body type imaginable. Egyptians, Afro-Caribbeans, Hmongs, Guatemalans, you name it, they were there. I even saw an entire family…I shit you not, an entire family, for real…of albinos, wedged between your stereotypical NASCAR-loving Red-State Pure-D whiter-than-mayonnaise family of rat-tailed “trash” and a suspiciously Tyler Perry-esque family of seemingly richer-than-the-norm middle class Afro-Americans. It was if every single socioeconomically-repressed  peoples in America had been huddled under one roof. If there’s ever a true social democratic uprising in America, it’s almost 100 percent guaranteed to eminent from a Golden Corral somewhere in the country.

To be honest with you, the place felt more like a Nazi concentration camp than a family restaurant. For one thing, most of the infrastructure was cold metal; forget “friendly” looking tiles or other decorum, when it comes to Corralling, you’re dealing almost exclusively with steel, aluminum, or some other reflective service that would probably hurt like hell if someone slammed you face first into it.

I suppose the absolute best way to describe Golden Corral would be a “post-apocalyptic” food hole. I’m not sure if it’s a socialist negative utopia - the world’s largest, most diverse soup kitchen, ostensibly - or some sort of hyper-capitalistic nightmare made flesh. Watching waiters coordinate their moves like SWAT team members, I’m more inclined to the latter as opposed to the former. Forget service with a smile; at the Corral, you’re getting service with a firm boot up your guacamole and chili-engorged ass.

Suck on that, Huddle House Vidalia Onion Sauce!

When you’ve been in the buffet game as long as I have, you know when you’re dealing with a serious bidder and a low-rent, smorgasbord wannabe. Seeing as how they had their own proprietary steak house on tap, I knew right then and there that I was dealing with the illest and the realest at the Corral.

What happens when New Orleans, Beijing, Tuscany and Guadalajara fuse food cultures.

I recall having a conversation with my girlfriend recently, on why exactly buffet diners in our hometown seem to be the only kinds of restaurants that can stay in business for more than a few weeks at a time. At Golden Corral, that little enigma solved itself right before my very eyes; in today’s Sequestered, post(?)-recession society, what we want out of an eatin’ experience is one part Roman orgy, and one part “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” You give some girl wearing too much eye shadow twenty American dollars, you grab your always-vibrantly-colored ceramic plate, and you proceed to jam at least 13 different ethnic foods down your throat hole over the course of ten minutes. It’s a nightmare/dream-land where you CAN have pizza, egg rolls, burritos and Cajun battered shrimp impaled on ONE fork, and nobody in the building thinks anything peculiar about it. There could probably be a dude puke-eating his food like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” at the Corral, and I doubt anyone would take note of it.

I guess you folks want a walking tour, no? Well, I guess we could start with the salad bar, because it’s the most genteel (and not surprisingly, least occupied) food station in the restaurant.

I suppose there’s not too much to discuss here. You have a picture of the world’s largest mound of iceberg lettuce, a few cubby holes filled with spinach leafs, some uncooked mushrooms, and a few slivers of fruit -- blueberries, mangos, cantaloupes, etc. -- occupying the split side of the armament. Everything is either metallic or plastic-tong shaped; as side weaponry, you can load your salad with pepperonis and sugar-cured ham, because let’s face it -- too many antioxidants in one meal, and you could wind up in a body bag, Johnny.

If you are into grains and stuff, there was a rather small assortment of breaded stuff available -- mostly, some truly Italian-sounding junk, like buttered Garlic rolls and cheese knots. For whatever reason, these food items are extremely well-protected, buffered by at thick sheet of acrylic glass that means it’s kinda’ impossible for most people to yank a biscuit or two out of the control panels. I guess you just gotta’ protect those bread sticks, sometimes.

Hot pecan sauce goes with everything, apparently. EVERYTHING.

The dessert section -- which I didn’t partake of, because I enjoy having two legs -- was sheer, diabetic phantasmagoria. It’s pretty rare to encounter cotton candy machines at a buffet restaurant, but the Corral, clearly, ain’t your everyday mega-food-stuffin’ locale. You also had your usual stuff at arms’ length -- ice cream, cookies, sugary baked goods, etc. Nothing too fancy, really, until you stumble upon THIS behemoth…

No, that isn’t Lord Stanley’s Cup in pudding form; it’s actually a gigantic hot chocolate fondue fountain. You know those afore-mentioned baked goods I was talking about a paragraph ago? Well, here, you can hand your cookies over on a ka-bob, and one of the bakery-people will poke it into the geyser of cocoa, and you can have an instant-flash-congealed choco-stick right then and there. I gained thirty pounds just looking at this contraption, honestly.

At a certain point in my pit stop, I realized that I may have been living in some sort of dystopian, political-sci-fi fan-fiction story. There I was, standing in line, with about three dozen morbidly obese people, all anxiously clutching their periwinkle plates, with a dead-eyed stare that you usually only encounter in photographs of shell-shocked World War I veterans. I look to my side, and some dude is just sitting there, reading a Clive Cussler book, while a gaggle of Middle-Eastern children in Guadalajara Chivas youth soccer jerseys ran around him, playing tag. And as before? Nobody in the building seems to be smiling. Not even a smug smirk or a faint twinkle. Buffets, apparently, are serious business, and there is no patience for jokesters of any delineation here. For a minute there, I had to keep pinching myself, just to make sure what was happening before my very eyes was real, and not just some disjointed recollections of watching “Rollerball” and “Soylent Green” back-to-back when I was 13.

This sight here was probably my favorite vision from the entire trip. You see, there’s actually two or three guys hanging out inside this metal and bullet-proof glass aviary, constantly re-stocking the food terminals with fries and meatloaf. Inside, a hairy-armed dude in a pink shirt, with an FFA headset on, barked orders through a thick Athenian brogue while helming literally a HUNDRED steaks on this massive, industrial grill, like he was a DJ spinning records or something.

I kept wondering if there was something akin to a Dewey Decimal system going on here, but I don’t think I could really pinpoint a thorough arrangement of systemized foodstuffs. On one side of the aviary, you had some sorta’ Italian stuff like pizza and ravioli which was stuffed side-by-side with a ton of fish and fried mollusks. Once you ambled past the steak container, you were greeted by a collection of super-greasy fries, onion rings and popcorn shrimp. From there, it seemed to transition to a “soul food” kind of itinerary (mashed potatoes, fried green stuff, etc.) before culminating with the taco bar.

The taco bar -- not that I have any traceable inclinations toward burritos and pseudo-authentic Tex-Mex or anything -- was probably my favorite thing about the entire trip. You had tortillas, shells, nacho cheese, fried rice, corn chips, several different kinds of beans and even some throwing-star shaped quesadillas, if you needed ‘em. I’ve always secretly fantasized about owning my own all-you-can-eat Taco Bar, so this sight was a mini-vision of paradise to me.

So, back to that North Korean refugee I mentioned about three years ago, when this article originally began. As I sat there in a state of sublime food satiation -- you know, that feeling you get when you are literally in a food-induced stupor, with your intestines so overloaded with fried gunk that you can only communicate in utterances that sound like Frankenstein noises -- I realized that, holy shit, this is EXACTLY what this dude was willing to get killed for. In a world where about one-sixth of the planet is in some phase of starvation, I live in a social system where even the poorest people in the country can still partake of food-overdoses on a semi-regular basis; if you’re wondering why America is the greatest empire in history, that’s it. Forget your constitutional safeguards and laissez faire economics, the fact that people in this nation can be both impoverished AND obese at the same time is a feat never accomplished by any peoples in history, and in my humble opinion, our greatest contribution to humanity as a whole. Thanks to hyper-food production and mass-urban commercialization, there will never, EVER have to be a hungry, tired or poor mass contingency in the U.S. -- just really tired, really poor people, that are even more tired and more poor because they just spent half their paycheck on an all-you-can-absorb-into-your-colon-lining mashed potato feast.

Introducing my OWN take on the Taco Bell Loaded Griller! Warning: Requires Pepto-Bismol Immediately After Consuming. 

I think my first trip to the Corral lasted for about three hours. Around the two hour mark, you go into this altered state of existence where all of the surrounding noises and lights coalesce with the food chemicals being oxygenated in your blood stream, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say the ultimate result is a temporary coma. After awhile, time stops, and all you can do is stare vacantly at the ocean of people stumbling to and fro while holding their plates and mugs filled with various food and beverage bric-a-brac. Your spirit seems to momentarily leave your body, while your liver goes into quadruple overtime to process all of the salsa, jumbo shrimp and refried beans assailing your lower extremities like the intestinal version of Pearl Harbor. All of a sudden, you’ll swear you begin to hear Twisted Sister’s “Burn in Hell” start playing, and all you can think about then is finding the nearest abyss with a diameter wide enough for you to cram your head into and start vomiting. If you don’t feel like you’re about to give birth to a metal pineapple after your stay at GC, I think they owe you a free meal next time around.

At the Corral, even the vending machines are considerably overweight...

The exit anteroom is pretty low key, but then again, all you can probably think about after stuffing your stomach with all seven continents’ worth of comestibles is finding a cool place to lay down for awhile…not whether or not you can win a stuffed animal via claw machine. Some of the capsule toy dispensers were sorta’ peculiar; there was one that offered patrons Spongebob-themed Nintendo DS screen wiping cloths, which has to be a new cottage industry if there ever was one. I think there may have been a gumball machine or two as well, but let’s get real; after leaving the Corral, you don’t want to think about chewing anything for at least six or seven days afterward.

...and that's JUST the appetizer!

Leaving Golden Corral was sort of like escaping from a Black Hole, or flying a plane safely out of the Bermuda triangle. You just as feel as if you’ve survived some sort of supernatural phenomenon that you probably shouldn’t have, not so much a dude that just had a meal as you are someone that survived driving into the Grand Canyon in a forklift. To be honest, I’m not really sure if I enjoyed the experience, in the traditional sense of the term; yeah, I may have left the place cradling my belly like an eighth month pregnant walrus, and it left me in a good post-food stupor, but I don’t think anything I ate was really “good” using any sort of qualitative measurement. If you want a LOT of food, however, and you really want to see what the neighborhood proletariat class actually looks like, and you don’t mind waiting in line for corn bread like some sort of Ukrainian prisoner in the 1940s, then a visit to the nearest Golden Corral is an absolute necessity.

Just don’t be surprised if you do not emerge from the place a good two or three days after entering it, though…

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