I’ll echo the people do don’t want to eat food, thing. This is the only place I’ve seen where people have said they’d rather just eat a pill like some Jetsons-esque future, or they’d buy nothing but “bachelor chow” if it existed.
And I have actually asked this, since I am friends with a lot of people who are Futurama fans, so the idea of whether we’d buy and eat bachelor chow has come up. We all agreed that we’d only do it if it was cheap AND we became really poor, cause it wold probably be a little more nutritious than ramen.
But the idea that one woudln’t want to eat foods is so baffling. So many foods taste good, I just don’t get it.
To clarify, it’s not that Applebees or McDonalds is mundane or inauthentic, but that it tastes bad. The majority of people I associate with wouldn’t eat at McDonalds or Applebees.
I also know lots of vegetarians, though, so these places are pretty much off limits (last someone-I-know checked, Applebees had exactly 0 vegetarian options)
Now that you mention it, I’ve never met anybody who was angry at Olive Garden for fronting as authentic Italian. Yes, that’s part of their marketing, but if you’ve ever eaten there it’s clearly Italian American food.
So the reason you don’t eat there is because, at least in the North East, there’s always a small family owned Italian American restaurant that’s half the price and twice as good. But I’ve never even heard anyone suspect that it’s Italian food as opposed to Italian American, let alone be angry that it isn’t.
I’m not personally angry at the Olive Garden. I just wouldn’t consider it great eating and my reaction to someone who was all, “Let’s go to the Olive Garden!” (or Applebee’s or TGIFriday’s) would be to gently suggest another place. Someplace not so overpriced and bland, is all.
Oh yeah. About ten years ago- probably more- when gun laws were biting in Australia. I knew people who bought PVC pipe and buried their guns- the ones they should have handed in. I was astounded in that it took them “off the street” anyway.
Exactly. I don’t care if it’s authentic or not, I simply think the food is bad. I’ve also been to supposedly authentic Italian restuarants that served bad food, too. And inauthentic Mexican places with good food. And most people I know don’t regularly eat at fast food places or chain restaurants - those are for when you’re travelling and that’s what’s available, or you won’t have time to get anything else.
If I was with a bunch of other people who all wanted to go to one of these places, I’d go, and probably find something edible, but it wouldn’t be my choice to go - and no, I wouldn’t whine about it.
A spinoff: The only reason people don’t like X Chain Restaurants (or movie, or book, etc) is because they’re popular.
I’m sorry, but I simply cannot wrap my head around this restaurant business. I cannot believe people would not want to go out to eat at a restaurant, and if they did, would find it hard to pick ‘something’ off a menu they might find edible. (Maybe it’s because we at home, here, are a bunch of grazers and don’t sit down for big family meals. It’s some form of hamburger, or pasta, or sandwiches, or salad. Just plain old food to fill up the stomach. Eating out ANYWHERE is, sadly, a real, and rare, treat!) As for the quaint little family place with fabulous food at half the price - where? Where are these little treasures located? There is one famous little momma-stirring-a-vat-of-marinara-sauce-in-the-kitchen place, a grubby little dump in a bad part of town. It got famous, all right, and they charge $15 for a plate of spaghetti with two, yes, two meatballs!
Well, I mean if it were a free meal, then yeah, I’d go to a restaurant I didn’t love. But I don’t really see eating out at a restaurant to be a generic experience. You can go to all kinds of places–there’s super priced high end, there’s more dinerish food that’s still not bad, etc. Granted, I’m lucky living in New York City. There’s literally thousands of places, whether you want cheap but authentic Thai or high priced sea food. I just don’t see Applebee’s or Olive Garden as a treat when I can get food that’s cheaper and better anywhere else.
I don’t have a problem with most chains, like AppleBee’s or Olive Garden. If I want authentic Italian, I can go downtown to Little Italy and have my pick of good (but expensive) places. Otherwise? TGIFridays, Olive Garden, Bertucci’s - I think they’re pretty good.
The only one I would not go to willingly is Red Lobster. There are just so many good seafood places around here (Baltimore), I just don’t see the point. Why go someplace where all the food is shipped in frozen and then microwaved, when there are tons of mom-and-pop restaurants with fish or crabs or oysters that were caught that morning?
If you want to go there for the cheddar biscuits and fried shrimp, fine. If you want good fresh seafood, we’d have to go elsewhere.
I take a pass on going out to eat all the time if the restaurant is one I regard as lousy. Or, in the case of Olive Garden, I eat just the salad and breadsticks (which are right tasty, I’ll give them credit for that). as for the little places, well…check my location. We are not lacking in places to eat that aren’t chain ptomaine palaces.
Maybe you live in a crappy town? In Jersey City or New York City, you have a high probability of getting better food at any other place than McDonalds. There are lots of good and cheap local places to eat. There also aren’t a lot of weird suburban-chain places like AppleBee’s and TGIFuckface’s within walking/subway distance of me.
Also: see my previous post. Vegetarians can eat exactly zero items from an AppleBees menu.
I really think this is a matter of geography. People eat differently around here.
(I guess I’m the one Gala Matrix Fire mentioned - I would love a cure for sleep! The universe is 13 billion-odd years old, you only get to spend ~70 years in it, and you gotta spend 1/3 of that time asleep? Who’s the asshat who came up with that?)
As far as the OP is concerned, the SDMB is the first (and so far, only) place where I heard it argued that “cocksucker” isn’t a slur.
First of all, I fucking hate that dubious smiley with every fiber of my being.
Secondly, I realize ‘douchebag’ is supposed to be insulting, I just don’t really think it is. And I can’t figure out the connection from that to cocksucker.
Again, I am not playing dumb. I seriously am clueless on this. Believe it or not.
Words are insulting either because of their cultural context or because they’ve been used as an insult for so long that the word itself becomes a slur even if the cultural context has changed. Cocksucker is an example of the latter. Cocksucker is a slur because cocksucker has always been used as an insult because genitalia were/are considered dirty and nasty, and “cock” is a particularly vulgar way to refer to male genitalia, and oral sex was extra-specially dirty and nasty, and if a man was sucking cock, then he was gay, and being gay was a horrible, dirty and nasty thing to accuse a man of.
Ok. Sorry to double post. I just want to say that I really am dumb, it turns out. I thought slur always meant degrading to a particular group…like ethnic slurs. I just looked it up and realized that it only means insult. My mistake. I get it all now.
Thank you Weird One. I made this post before I saw yours. I just didn’t know what slur meant. I didn’t even realize that cocksucker was a ‘gay’ slur though. I thought is was used on women too.
“Meh” I’ve heard before, but “Og” I chalk up to the unique vocabulary every online community develops. From Usenet forums to IRC chat rooms to websites to message boards, each and every one of them have their own vocabulary, often fun (like “Og” is) with its own history of how it came to be.
I’m sorry, but I simply cannot wrap my head around this restaurant business. I cannot believe people would not want to go out to eat at a restaurant, and if they did, would find it hard to pick ‘something’ off a menu they might find edible. (Maybe it’s because we at home, here, are a bunch of grazers and don’t sit down for big family meals. It’s some form of hamburger, or pasta, or sandwiches, or salad. Just plain old food to fill up the stomach. Eating out ANYWHERE is, sadly, a real, and rare, treat!) As for the quaint little family place with fabulous food at half the price - where? Where are these little treasures located? There is one famous little momma-stirring-a-vat-of-marinara-sauce-in-the-kitchen place, a grubby little dump in a bad part of town. It got famous, all right, and they charge $15 for a plate of spaghetti with two, yes, two meatballs!