~You

We here at AFFotD have a hard time shutting up about pizza, probably because it’s delicious and incredible and if you don’t like pizza you’re a bad person and you should feel bad.  However, in our rush to point out things like “Pizza with toppings put in the crust” or “Goddamn it Japan you’re doing it wrong” we’ve overlooked one of the most important aspects of pizza’s culinary life—its European beginnings, and America’s impressive ability to adapt it for its own heart-clogging purposes.  Pizza as a dish originated in Naples, Italy, much more recently than you would assume—while variations of bread baked with cheese have been around since the ancient Greeks, and Italians were eating some combination of baked bread, cheese, and tomato called “pizza” since the 17^th century, the “modern” pizza likely wasn’t invented until 1889, using red tomato, green basil, and white mozzarella so as to cover the pie in the three colors of the Italian flag.  It’s basically the same logic that America applied when inventing red, white, and blue jello shots.

Despite being such a famously “Italian” food staple, America wasn’t particularly far behind the curve in the pizza department.  The first American pizza establishment opened up in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York by 1905.  Once pizza reached our shores, we went to work on perfecting it, and we’ve since gone on to develop countless regional forms of the dish, some of them barely resembling the original Italian creation.  Usually that’s for the best.  Sometimes, not so much.

But we are a land of experimentation, and we’re here to embrace that quality, so join us for the first part of a two part pizza spectacular where we show you the best and worst of America’s regional pizzas, starting with the best because we know you’re hungry right now and we do so love to torture you.

The Five Best Regional Pizzas In America

America isn’t the only country to put their own unique twist on the deliciousness that is pizza.  Brazil uses less tomato sauce, occasionally removing the sauce entirely and using sliced tomatoes instead.  Israeli pizza, not surprisingly, doesn’t use meat as a topping.  Japan is, as always, terrifying.  Yes, pizza is a universal food, but we all know that America does it better than anyone else.  America embraced pizza with such passion that we didn’t settle on just one single national pizza style—there are arguably more regional American styles of pizza than you can find in all of Europe combined.

Not all of these are particularly tasty (we’ll get to that tomorrow) but when they work, man, do they work.  Here are, in our biased opinion, the five best regional pizza styles in America.  As you surely know, New York and Chicago are going to be the first and second slot, but we’re not sure which way it’s going to go yet (we put a “New York” and “Chicago” shirt on two of our interns and are having them fight to the death while we cheer them on like that one scene in Django, which admittedly seems like a weird criteria to judge pizza, but that’s just how we do things around these parts, and we suspect that New Yorkers would feel better about losing out if they found out someone died in the process).

Well let’s get started, shall we?

5:  Providence-Style Grilled Pizza

In 1980, the Al Forno restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island made the first Providence-style grilled pizza after owners Johanne Killeen and George Germon basically failed to realize the difference between “wood-burning ovens” and “wood-fired grills”.  As a general rule, whenever the words “surprised” and “invented” are used as modifiers in the same sentence you’re expecting something useful but gross, like Penicillin or Jose Canseco.  That wasn’t the case with grilled pizza, as instead of falling through the grate as expected,  the crust’s dough immediately hardened when exposed to the heat of the grill’s open flame, resulting in delicious and unique style of thin-crust pizza.

Grilled pizza is cooked relatively quickly, since the speed at which the thin crust hardens means it also can be easy to overcook.  The dough is placed directly over the fire of a grill, and turned over once the bottom has baked (which normally takes about a minute) at which point the toppings are placed in a very thin layer on the recently-baked side.  Since the pizza is cooked for such a short period of time, the thinness of the toppings ensure that they will heat throughout.  Topping such as peppers or sausage are usually precooked and placed on the pizza later, as they wouldn’t have enough time to cook fully, and as much as we like pizza, people apparently get their panties in a knot about salmonella being introduced to their stomach.  We know, weird.

Garlic and herbs can be added to the crust for flavor, because if someone ever turns down the addition of garlic and herbs to pizza that’s pretty much irrefutable evidence that you’re dealing with a vampire. We’re honestly surprised that it took until 1980 for us to start putting pizzas on the grill, since as much as we as a nation love pizza, we love grilling even more, and it was just a matter of time before we had a Reese’s moment like this.

4:  New Haven-Style Pizza

In New Haven, Connecticut, they call pizza “Apizza” because the fuck if we know.  Maybe they’re bored and the extra syllable helps the time go by?  Whatever.  Either way, the Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana was the first to make this unique take on Neapolitan pizza that now can be found throughout the area.  New Haven-style pizza is known for its unusually thin crust, cooked in high temperature ovens to ensure a crispy shell, often resulting in burnt black spots called “the char”, with a chewy and soft inside.  The main difference between normal pizza and a-beets (no, seriously, they pronounce “apizza” as “a-beets” because they failed to realize we’re trying to compliment them in this article but that naming their pizza stupid things does not help us do that) is that a “plain” New Haven pizza consists of a crust, oregano, tomato sauce, and a small amount of grated pecorino romano cheese sprinkled on top.  Mozzarella is not a core part of the pizza as it is elsewhere, but instead is a topping, which is locally referred to as “mootz” because we went through a good fifty year period in the first half of the century where Italian immigrants weren’t allowed to nickname things without them sounding like they came from one of the mobster characters in The Simpsons.

Of course, there’s more to New Haven pizzas (we’re not calling them apizzas, you’re not going to make us do that) than “a deliciously thin crust where you have to pay extra for mozzarella”.  For any Americans finding themselves on the East Coast with a desire to trek down to Bar or Sally’s Apizza (your best two options) you’re also left with a regional-specific, and delicious sounding white clam pie, a white pizza that combines the famous New Haven crust with olive oil, oregano, grated cheese, chopped garlic, and freshly shucked littleneck clams.  People who order this particular pizza are generally politely discouraged from adding mozzarella to it, because that sounds horrible, you just paid $12 for clams why would you not want to taste them, what the hell is wrong with you, you goddamn tourist.  No, stop it.  You’re embarrassing us.

Anyway, this approach to pizza apparently has built up a little bit of a following, and you can even find New Haven pizza out in Oregon, because trust us that little plug is the only time the West Coast is going to make our list of good pizzas.

3:  Detroit-Style Pizza

Detroit has given us (the motherfucking) Robocop, a alternatively impressive and depressing auto industry, and a state of decline that literally remains the only thing Cleveland has left to hold onto, so it’s fitting that they’d be responsible for the first entry that says, “Hey, pizza’s supposed to be greasy as sex and twice as dirty, none of this dainty fancy-oven-crispy-thin-crust shit.”  Yeah!  You tell them, hypothetical Detroiter who either is doing sex wrong or is someone we’d never want to accept a slice of pizza from!

Enter the Detroit-style pizza.  If you’re thinking that pizza looks incredibly unhealthy and delicious, you’d be correct.  You might also say, “Heh, but if it’s from Detroit, they probably cook it in something super-stereotypical like automotive manufacturing parts trays or holy shit, I’m right aren’t I, you’re using me as the hypothetical reader because they actually bake them in leftover parts trays?  Seriously?”

This more-common-than-you-might-think style of pizza is cooked square because of the previously mentioned well-oiled square tray the pizza has been baked in ever since its inception at Buddy’s Rendezvous (which started off as a “blind pig” tavern, which is a fancy way of saying “speakeasy”) in the 1930s.  Wet dough makes a thick crust that is airy on the inside, yet crispy on the outside.  Originally, pepperoni would be layered directly on the dough, covered by cheese (typically Wisconsin Brick) that touches all sides of the pan in order to caramelize at the corners, because there are few more beautiful combinations of words than “caramelized cheese crust.”  Additional toppings, and a thick Sicilian tomato sauce are added to the top.  The end result is greasy, without any crust that’s not covered in either cheese, sauce, or toppings, because we all know that the crust at the end of the pizza is the most boring part, so why not just get rid of it.

This type of pizza has been made widely available through various Michigan based national pizza chains (such as Domino’s, Jet’s, and Little Caesars), and if you’ve ever had a thick crust pizza in a square you’ve likely had it without realizing, as these chains tend to put the sauce underneath the cheese to slightly differentiate it from the original style.

Of course, as good as Detroit pizza might be, it can’t compete with the two pizza heavyweights of a nation full of, well, heavy-weighing-people.  That leads us to…

2:  New York-Style Pizza

Anarchy!  Fight!  Fight!  Every New Yorker right now is ignoring the fact that they’re being listed as the second-best pizza in America (and thus, in the world) and are probably instead talking about how New York City tap water has minerals that make their pizza crust the best in the world, and hey, you’d be a sucker if you didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on New York tap water for when you make your own pizza!  In the time it took for us to write that sentence, our tires were already slashed and someone wrote “Chicago doesn’t make pizza they make casseroles” in shaving cream on our windows.

New York versus Chicago is a debate that will never be resolved, and ultimately goes down to either personal preference, your upbringing, or the fact that our intern gladiator representing the Chicago style was just a step faster and wanted it more.  We’re not going to get into that murky debate.  Instead, let’s extol the virtues of the often mimicked, but never duplicated, New York pizza pie.

Pizza in America started in New York, of course, when Gennaro Lombardi started the first pizzeria, simply called Lombardi’s Pizza (which still operates today).  Originally a small grocery store in Little Italy, Lombardi’s employee, Antonio Totonno Pero, started making pizza to sell, using mozzarella fior di latte (we  think that’s Italian for “cow cheese”) as opposed to the more expensive buffalo’s milk mozzarella used in Italy.

The first pizza pies in New York cost five cents, which many people could not afford, since five cents in 1900s money was probably, we don’t know, ten bucks?  Maybe?  Oh God, really, it was just a buck and change?  God, people were poor back then.  Anyway, they would offer to pay what they could, and would get a slice of pizza corresponding to the amount they paid.  More than anything else, this would prove to be the true legacy of New York pizzas, as the floppy thin crust New York slice grabbed on the go was culturally iconic even before Louis C.K. had a successful TV show.

There are over 400 pizza joints in New York, and while many restaurants make high end, delicious New York style-pizzas, we best know New York pizza as a 1/8 slice of an 18-inch pie that ends up being a little bit more food than you’d need as a snack, but not quite enough for a meal.  Basically, the New York-style pizza is the perfect amount of food for anyone drunk at two in the morning.  And delicious drunk food it must be, as New Yorkers and former New Yorkers alike swear that no finer pizza has ever been conceived.  They did it first, they did it best.  That might be their opinion, but as the twitching body of our New-York-shirt-clad intern might attest, we’ve gone a different route with…

1:  Chicago Style-Pizza

This is no mere drunken snack eaten over a white paper plate soaked through with delicious grease and giving you the fuel to stumble to the nearest subway stop.  No, Chicago pizza takes “obesity” and turns it into an art form.  This pizza you’re trying to lick up there is the true champion of American pizza, the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.  We’ve covered the virtues of this pizza before, so we can save you some of the jargon on who invented it, and where you can eat it, and why this pizza looks so good you’ve become hungry enough to gnaw at your own arm.

Chicago-style pizza comes in three forms.  There’s thin crust, which differs from the New York slice in that it’s cut into squares as opposed to wedges, the crust is crispy instead of floppy, and as much as die-hard Chicago pizza fans might try to trick you otherwise, it’s not nearly as good.  Sorry, Chicago, if we wanted to see your impression of something New York is known for we’d watch a Broadway musical a year and a half after it’s opened without all the famous actors in the cast.

No, deep-dish and stuffed pizzas are where it’s at in Chicago, two delicious and radical takes on the pizza pie where a slice is enough for a whole meal and someone wearing a Frank Thomas jersey will call you a pussy if you don’t eat three.  This is a dozen pizzas crammed into one, something that the inventors of the medium would shudder to even contemplate.  New Yorkers might get jealous and call this a soggy bowl of cheese and sauce.  The rest of America likes to call it…perfection.

Stay tuned for tomorrow when we write about the worst pizza styles in America.  While reading this article likely made you want to pick up your phone and order a pie, tomorrow’s will probably make you want to pick up a bottle of bourbon and drink until pizza looks good again.  Enjoy.

~American Males Watching Cheerleaders at a Sporting Event

Nothing celebrates the flower of American womanhood quite like cheerleading.  We take athletic, energetic, scantily clad women, and have them hypnotize predominantly male audiences at sporting events into learning how to spell team names.  We also decided to create a bitter, occasionally violent, rivalry between them and girl volleyball players, because hey, cat fight.  It’s a beautiful tradition that our nation embraces wholeheartedly, and it’s what separates us from the goddamn Europeans. However, the names of most of these teams are so embarrassing that those of us with a weak stomach for poorly misplaced puns sometimes question if it’s even worth it.  That’s why we’re here, with the help of some outside research from an intrepid AFFotD supporter who felt that “the people HAVE to know” to run down the best and worst of the Cheer Squad names in America.  Well, it’s more like the so-so and the worst.  Okay most of them are just plain awful.  Let’s move on and post some pictures of women not wearing a lot of clothing to skyrocket the page views for this sucker then, shall we?

America’s Best (And Worst) Cheer Squad Team Names

As you can see above, cheerleading is everywhere.  These lovely ladies are cheerleaders from the 2012 Olympics, apparently for beach volleyball, because if there’s one sport that needs attractive, toned women showing off their bodies to entertain spectators, it’s the one where Amazonian women in the peak of their athletic prowess jump around slamming balls for an hour while wearing bikinis.  In America, we know that cheerleading, much like bacon or that fourth beer of the night, makes everything better, as evident by the fact that every major sport (and most minor leagues of those sports) in this nation have their own cheer squads.  And, we cannot stress this enough, most of them have the most awful squad names.  So now it’s time for us to break it down, sport-by-sport, because…you’re totally not reading this right now, are you?  You’re just looking through all the pictures discretely trying to make sure no one else in your office is checking to see what you have up on your monitor?  Okay then.  Let’s just get on with it.

The NFL

Effectively the best of the best when it comes to cheerleading, NFL squads are unconcerned with things like “dancing” and “class” and instead are America’s leading experts in thigh-high boots and exposing one’s midriff in the dead of winter.  Such is the mesmerizing power of a professional cheerleading squad—if you ever saw someone wearing next to nothing in 30 degree weather, you might say “Oh God, someone get that poor woman a coat” but when a troop of cheerleaders decide against wearing pants in weather cold enough to freeze their legs off, it’s something that “the football Gods applaud.”  Unfortunately, their squad names usually don’t match up their dedication to freezing their ass off for fifty bucks a game.

The Good:  The Buffalo Jills, The Cincinnati Ben-Gals, The Jets Flight Crew

America loves puns, as anyone who has ever walked by a pet store in a hip urban area can attest.  Cheerleading gives us ample opportunity to take a team name, and turn it into a female-based pun, and these three squads take that to heart.  First, you have the Buffalo Bills squad, the Buffalo Jills.  We can’t go on enough on how much we love this name, but then again given the depressing history of the Buffalo Bills franchise, we figured having a good squad name was the least that they could do.

The Cincinnati Ben-Gals made the news recently, but not for their admirable ability to put a hyphen in the middle of the Bengals name to turn it into the perfect cheerleading pun (hint, it involved getting arrested for sex with a minor).  Finally, we have the Jets Flight Crew, which isn’t so much a lady-pun as it is that last clue you needed to realize “Oh shit, they’re called the Jets because they’re right next to the airport.  I’ve lived in New York for seven years and I never figured that out until now.”

The So-Close: The Carolina TopCats, The Chicago Honey Bears, The Seattle SeaGals

Why would the female version of a Panther be a TopCat?  Is that supposed to be cute or sexy?  Because to us, it sounds like a character that belongs in the Tim Burton remake of Alice in Wonderland.  The Chicago Honey Bears tried, bless them, they really did try, but they ended up coming off as a bit creepy, which is no doubt part of the reason why they were disbanded after the Bears won Super Bowl XX, and why the Bears are one of the few teams currently without cheerleaders.  As for the Seattle SeaGals, our intrepid researcher who provided us with the information for the article sent us that name simply with the note of “No.”  We’re inclined to agree with her.

The You Weren’t Even Trying:  Too many to name

Listen, copywriters can be expensive.  We get it.  Hell, do you know how much we paid to finally come up with the name of “America Fun Fact of the Day”?  Well, nothing actually, our staff got drunk and when we woke up someone had scrawled those words on the fridge in sharpie, but the point remains—when you’re dealing with cheerleading teams, you might assume people won’t care what they’re named, since they’re too focused watching giant man-beasts smash into each other while improbably attractive women gyrate for your amusement.  Unfortunately, in what feels more like sabotage than anything else, we end up with teams that used to have great names and now have completely pointless, boring names.  Below is a the complete list.

The Atlanta Falcons Cheerleaders, formerly the Falconettes. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, formerly the CowBelles. The Denver Broncos Cheerleaders, formerly the Pony Express. (That one was so majestic we’re actively upset that they changed the name.) The Minnesota Vikings Cheerleaders, formerly the Vi-Queens (GET IT???). The Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders, formerly the Liberty Belles. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers Cheerleaders, formerly the SwashBucklers.

Of course, an honorable sad-ass mention to the Jacksonville ROAR, who are named the Jacksonville ROAR.  We’ll leave you alone with your thoughts on that one.

The You Have Lost Team Naming Privileges:  The Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders (formerly the Dolfin Star Brites), The New Orleans Saintsations, The St. Louis Rams Cheerleaders (formerly the Embraceable Ewes)

Every once and a while you read or hear about something that so destroys your world outlook your brain has to disengage and view it as a fiction.  That Amanda Berry story was horrid when it came out, but each and every one of you made a mental note to take a step back so you didn’t have to deal with the weight of the moral implications that such a thing was allowed to exist in this world.  We’re not saying that these names are nearly as awful as women being kidnapped and held captive for 10 years by a Cleveland psychopath, we’re just saying that what the fuck is a Dofin?  Or a Star Brite?  Yeah, we get it, it used to be way more socially acceptable to do coke before work, and the squad has been the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders thankfully since 1983, but there was a period in this nation where a P.A. announcer had to say to thousands of people, “Put your hands together for your very own Dofin Star Brites!”  The shit is that?

The New Orleans Saintsations are empirical proof that as much as we love puns, they can be a double edged sword.  When a pun treats you right, it’s easy to love, and when it’s awful…well, you have to just look at that picture above and try to convince yourself they’re called anything other than the Saintsations, which sadly enough was an upgrade from their previous names, “the Bonnes Aimees” and “the Mam’selles”.  We’re pretty sure one of those names is French, and we’re so angry right now.

Finally, we’re left with the Rams Cheerleaders, who spent twenty years dancing under the moniker of “The Embraceable Ewes” which is just proof that St. Louis shouldn’t be trusted with nice things.  At this point, they might as well just dissolve the franchise and start over.  It’s the only way, really.

The NBA

In an attempt to class up the joint and because valuable sideline cheer space has been taken up by Jack Nicholson in a folding chair, the NBA instead has Dance Teams.  These Dance Teams take the floor to entertain you during that obnoxious stretch during the last minute of a close game where a timeout is called after every fifteen seconds of play, and when they’re not moving in a synchronized fashion to the C&C Music Factory, they’re usually sitting cross legged at the ends of the court holding onto pompoms which they will insist is different than cheerleading because, you know, sitting.  Of course, calling them “Dance Teams” instead of “Cheer Squads” doesn’t do much to improve the quality of their names.

The Good:  The Detroit Automotion, The New Orleans Honeybees

Before you say anything, the tops and shorts of that dance team up there say “Hornets” as in “The New Orleans Hornets” even though you initially read that as a completely different word while in the middle of a hilarious Freudian slip.  And while the Honeybees is an alright name for a squad cheering for the Hornets, it’s pretty telling how dry the well is with NBA names when the best we can come up with is that and a Detroit Automotion uses a word that our spell-check keeps angrily underlining.  It’s a bad sign that these are the cream of the crop (if you see a pun there we are so sorry and also you are gross) of the NBA dance team names, because it’s all downhill from here.

The I See What You Were Going For: The Brooklynettes, The Indiana Pacemates

We’ll give the Brooklynettes some time to improve their name since the Nets have only been a Brooklyn team for about a season at this point.  Yes, it is sort of cute that they melded “Brooklyn Nets” into a Rockettes kitsch direction, but one look at the outfits they wear during games can tell you that they’re apparently going less for “cute” and more for “trashy.”  Meanwhile, the Indiana Pacemates tried to go in a fun direction for the Indiana Pacers, but…seriously, the Pacemakers.  It’s right there.  How do you not go with that as your name?  Come on, Indiana, don’t make us do all the work for you.

The Stop, Please, No:  Too Many to Name.   

The vast majority of the NBA dance teams seem to operate under the assumption that women as a gender are unable to spell or discern what a pun is.  That’s why we have such teams as the Chicago Luvabulls, the Toronto Dance Pak, and the HEAT Dancers (we only included that third one because there is no reason why Heat should be capitalized there).  Those first two legitimately hurt our brains to type.  While “Luvabulls” is clearly an attempt to make the pun “love-a-bulls sounds like loveable” they decided to spell “love” like a fucking Care Bear popping ecstasy after finding out they failed their G.E.D.  And we can’t for the life of us figure out what a “pak” is, other than maybe a derogatory slur for a Pakistani individual, and even if that’s the case that doesn’t seem to have much in common with the Toronto Raptors.

The rest of this list isn’t much better.  The Charlotte Lady Cats would be an unoriginal name for a high school squad, and the same goes for the Clippers Spirit Dance Team.  The Rockets Power Dancers is the laziest space-related name of literally dozens of better ones out there (Sure, the “Rockettes” is probably trademarked, but the comets?  The Orbits?  Come on guys).  Then, there are the names that are the definition of missed opportunities—The Sacramento Kings have the “Kings Royal Court” instead of the Queens?  The Washington Wizards went with Wizard Girls over Witches?  Dammit NBA, this is why we can’t have nice things!

The rest of the major sports leagues aren’t so easy to compartmentalize, so it’s better to just muscle through these sports and give you more pictures that you feel strange about having open in your browser.

The NHL

Many of you might not realize that hockey has its own version of cheerleaders, but that’s because your instincts to watch people crush into each other at dizzying speeds has been overrode by your instinct to avoid things invented in Canada.  Don’t let that slow you down though, because since America has made Canada our bitch in the sport since about 1993 it’s okay for you to like it, and to learn about ice crews, which takes the logic of “if you’re hot, you can’t get cold” and puts it to use by making scantily clad women skate around the ice with brooms and shovels to clear out shaved ice.

As far as the squad names, there’s only one that’s moderately acceptable (The Anaheim Power Players).  Calgary’s Big Country Ice Crew might have some sort of hidden meaning for Canadians?  If so, fuck off Canada stop trying to force your culture on us!  If it’s not…then we don’t get it.  The rest of them are forgettable, but the Atlanta Blue Crew and the Washington Red Rockers can fuck right off.

The MLB

Wait a minute, baseball teams have cheerleaders?  When did this happen?  We know that we were about eight the last time we went to a baseball game sober, but normally alcohol makes you more likely to notice attractive women.  Obviously many teams haven’t adopted baseball cheer teams, but at this point why the fuck not?  When was the last time you sat down and watched an entire baseball game, uninterrupted, front to back?  It felt like it took forever didn’t it?  That’s why we use baseball as an excuse to day drink while we stare at the ESPN gamecast app on our smart phones when we go to games.  If someone said they were going to take the period between innings—you know, that five minute gap where nothing of interest happens that occurs literally 17 times a game—and put some dancing girls on the field to distract you, that’s a win for America, baseball spectators, and at least a dozen of kids going to their first baseball game while mired in the throes of puberty.

The team names are about as good as you’d expect from a subset of cheerleaders that most people wouldn’t realize exists.  The only decent name in the whole league is the Florida Marlins Mermaids. That makes sense. The Philadelphia Phillies’ Ball Girls almost works? But mostly sounds dirty. The Angels Strike Force is a fine, generic baseball cheer name, but they started with The Angels and made it less girly from there. Arizona’s Diamondbacks are cheered by the Rally-Backs, so they kept the least feminine part of the name.

The NBA D-League

Did you think we were done? So did we, then we stumbled over the Fort Wayne Madame Ants and knew there was more work to be done. See, the team, the Mad Ants, is named for Mad Anthony Wayne, who you might remember as fucking batman, and also John Wayne, which makes sense since Fort Wayne was named after Anthony Wayne.  Now, their attempt to name the group after Anthony Wayne led to them being called “Madame Ants” because we’re guessing it was the 1980’s and cocaine makes you feel fucking alive.  We also found that The Springfield Armor is repped by the Springfield Armorettes, which seems excessively stupid, until you realize that they’re the development team for the Brooklyn Nets. Then it seems stupid and derivative.

Minor League Baseball

And further down the rabbit hole we go.  The Schaumburg Flyers are cheered by the FireFlys, which is the kind of girly twist we should all be aiming for. Salt Lake’s Bees are cheered by the Honeybees, which, well, they tried.  The Quebec Capitales have named their squad La Team, which is French for “We could give a shit about cheerleading” though it might also mean “Oh God we just pretended to translate French, we’re sad now, time to move on to our final category.”

Other Footballs

You might think that lesser footballs, like arena and indoor, which are effectively the same thing, would have lesser cheerleaders. And you’d be right.  The only decent name in any of these leagues belong to the team cheering The Lincoln Haymakers:  The Lincoln Knockouts. That might be the best name in this whole damn roundup.  However, to balance that out, The Oklahoma City Yard Dawgz (terrible name) are cheered by the Dawgz (so they’re unattractive?), the Milwaukee Iron is repped by the Platinum (are they even trying?), and the San Jose SaberCats are cheered by the SaberKittens (which is at least moderately respectable, but come on, they’ve got nothing on the knockouts).

Anyway, we’re gonna end this with a picture of some cheerleaders wearing American flag colors because we’re so pandering right now.

Bam.

~No, guy…it isn’t

Most Americans buy their goods in the typical fashion—on sale from a Wal-Mart while fending off ghosts summoned from the Indian Burial Ground the store was built on top of.  One-stop shopping.  Of course some people have copious amounts of money and the strange obsessive ticks that you only see in inbred European nobility and coke-addled money men who struck it big in the 80’s, and they prefer to buy their items from auctions.  Not useful items, like food, clothes, or cheap DVDs that trick you into thinking they’re blockbuster films, of course.  No, these intrepid individuals like to throw money at things like Bonnie and Clyde’s guns, or a Brazilian girl’s virginity (oh how we wish we were making that one up).

When you think about the fact that millionaires literally competed with each other to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these following items, you can rest comfortably in your futon knowing that you can never be happy without money.  Wait, that doesn’t sound right…

Five Strange Auction Items

People who have too much money tend to spend it in stupid, occasionally psychotic ways.  We all know this.  Sure, you could look at all the times that people have spent millions of dollars on obscure modern art, but when you’re spending over a million dollars on something, it’s pretty clear money isn’t a factor.  That’s why we’re going to focus on items that cost more than $100,000 (or the amount many people pay for an actual house) but less than seven figures, because it’s not like we want to get gaudy with it.  Let’s leave that to Russian yacht owners.

A Fossilized Egg:  $101,813

Several weeks ago, Christie’s Auction in London auctioned off a giant egg of an extinct elephant bird.  Now, before you try to justify this as a fairly cool use of a hundred grand (and admittedly, it’s better than the other entries on this list) keep in mind that this is not a dinosaur egg, nor is it a fossilized egg from the dinosaur era.  The elephant bird went extinct only in the 18^th century, “for reasons unclear” which is a nice way of saying that we totally killed them all to death.

But okay, let’s say for argument’s sake that you want to carry around a fragile, breakable giant orb that, hundreds of years ago, came out of a 1,000 pound now-extinct bird’s butt (we don’t know how egg-laying works).  And you must have this egg, so it’s totally worth the money you were going to spend on two corvettes instead.  What we can’t get our head around is why this guy at the auction house is holding up a regular egg as comparison.  If you’re going to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a giant 400-year-old egg, do you really need to be shown how much bigger it is than an egg?  Isn’t the fact that this egg is monstrous compared to the human hand holding it enough?  When will you giant egg fetishists be satisfied!?

Either way, someone spent a lot of money for a very large item that they’re going to spend the rest of their life going “BE CAREFUL DON’T LET IT FALL” to their guests about.

Tress of Elvis Presley’s Hair:  $115,000

People buy famous people’s hair.  You probably knew that already and just chose to ignore that fact so you could feel at peace with the world you live in, but if this is a revelation for you, we are so sorry.  Here’s a cha-cha-ing puppy to distract you from this new knowledge.

Anyway, yes, people buy celebrity hair, and someone shelled out 115 grand to…honestly we don’t know.  What do you do with a famous dead person’s hair?  Pet it and then repent?  Get recognized by Guinness for having the largest celebrity hair collection, get reported as a con man, and somehow end up not in jail?  Either way, this is just a deeply unsettling thing to own.  The only time “I have Elvis Presley’s hair” was able to get anyone laid, it was when it was said by Elvis, about his hair, because he was Elvis.  Everyone else trying to pass that line is just ensuring they learn how to get mace out of their eyes really well.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Cheap Peace Poster:  $154,000

In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a “Bed-in for Peace,” where they spent two weeks in bed to protest the Vietnam War.  It was held during their honeymoon, which means that their bed-in for peace was pretty much exactly the same as, you know, a honeymoon for boning.  Either way, they made a sign for this historic occasion, which basically looks like a piece of cardboard where they hastily scribbled “BED PEACE” in poorly-filled-in Sharpie and signed their names.  While we can admit that having John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s autograph is valuable, is it really that much more valuable to have it on something that they hung up on a wall while they banged for two straight weeks?

Oh, you’re right, it probably is.  Moving on then.

The Phone Number 867-5309:  $186,853.09

Did you know that the song “867-5309/Jenny” was never the most popular song in America?  That’s right, it peaked at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, meaning that whoever spent nearly $200K to get a phone number that’ll allow them to get prank called hundreds of times a day is doing it to represent a song that even at its apex was less popular than three other songs that we’ve likely since forgotten.

This particular 867-5309 had a New Jersey area code, meaning that whoever ended up buying this number gets to spend all their time wading through the kind of people in New Jersey who like to pass their time by calling a number sung by a one-hit wonder in 1982.

Let’s take a moment to really delve into this, to mourn the accidental tragedy of the life of the winner of this ebay user.  He had enough money for a nice house in the burbs just burning in his pocket, but he stumbled across a news article about a 28 year old who decided to sell his phone number in the hopes of a Caribbean cruise.  Yeah, $40,000 didn’t seem unreasonable (okay this section is the one you have to suspend some disbelief).  But the price keeps going up.  Damn, you hate getting that email saying you’ve been outbid, don’t you?  Of course you do.  Fuck those emails.

You only kind of wanted this number before.  Now it’s the only thing you want.  You must have it.  The final bid is entered, and there you have it.  867-5309.  You can hear the song as clearly as if it was playing from your computer speakers.  Which it is.  In fact, you’ve been listening to nothing but that song while locked in a room in front of your computer, frantically bidding again, and again, and again.  But you’ve done it.  You contact the seller, get him his money, and transfer the number to your phone.  The world is your oyster.

And then, it starts.  The calls.  The calls just keep coming in.  Sure, some of them are just pranks, but most of the time it’s just a small voice going, “Oh shit, someone picked up” before hanging up.  When you try to give your number to people they just say, “Oh come on asshole, if you’re gonna give me a fake number, try being less obvious.”

This number hasn’t ruined your life.  It has become your life.  You are the number.

Or, you know, some asshole just bought the number, put it on a random phone, and forgot about it.  Either, or.

Gold Kate Moss Sculpture:  $900,000

There really isn’t a more accurate way to describe someone than, “Oh him?  Yeah, he once spent nearly a million dollars to buy a gold statue of Kate Moss in a weirdly sexual yoga pose.”  There really isn’t.

~New Yorkers

At its heart, pizza is just cheese, dough, and tomato sauce, topped with whatever additional ingredient you want.  Inherently, pizza exists to breed creativity and adaptivity.  In the hands of madmen and foreigners, this culinary freedom can be disastrous, but in the hands of true Americans, this can create an unhealthy, delicious American meal glorious enough to single-handedly keep additional-belt-hole-punchers in business.  One of the most glorious examples of this, of course, is the Chicago-style pizza.  Less of a pizza pie, and more of a pizza cake, Chicago’s deep dish pizza gives you as much fat, grease, and cheese as you’d expect to find from a city that’s primary gift to the realm of fine cooking involves hot dogs and roast beef dipped in its own juices.

So with a casual, “Get over it, yes, we get it, you guys are proud of your pizza, and you have good pizza places, but stop acting like you’ve done anything original to the style just because you use special tap water to make the crust” to our now-livid readers in New York, AFFotD is proud to present you with…

The History of Chicago-Style Pizza

For those readers who have never been fortunate enough to taste Chicago’s take on pizza, you might look at a single slice of pizza and consider it more of a “snack” than a “meal.”  Sure, if you eat enough slices you’ll get full, but you can say the same thing about Kraft singles or thin mints.  Chicago-style pizza (we’re going to ignore Chicago-style thin crust, because meh) as you know it is a deep dish “stuffed” pizza pie, with crust up to three inches tall at the edge, and ingredients piled up to a similar height.  While most pizzas are layered with the cheese on top, Chicago-style pizza makes a thin-to-medium-thick dough crust before putting ample amounts of cheese and ingredients in the middle, dousing the whole thing with chunky tomato sauce at the top.  We don’t have the nutritional information on hand for how many calories each slice has, primarily because when you search for, “How many calories are in a slice of Chicago-style pizza?” google comes back with a youtube video of George Wendt laughing at you.

The Chicago-style deep-dish pizza was invented at Pizzeria Uno in 1943, and most accounts claim that Uno’s founder, Ike Sewell, came up with the recipe.  Pizzeria Uno was able to turn the deep-dish pizza into such an important staple that the restaurant had to open up a second location, Pizzeria Due, a block away to manage the overflow.  Since then, Uno’s has become a national franchise, which just means “You can go to a place called ‘Uno Chicago Grill’ in Colorado or Texas but they’re not the same at all, and if you’re going to eat there you’re doing yourself a disservice not eating at one of the Chicago locations.”

Strike one: this looks like an Applebee’s.  Strike two: it’s in New Jersey.

While it is widely known that Uno’s originated the deep-dish Chicago-style pizza, a 1956 Chicago Daily News asserted that the actual inventor was Uno’s original pizza chef, Rudy Malnati, the father of Lou Malnati (more on him later).  In the 1970’s, an second Chicago-style of deep dish pizza was invented, the stuffed pizza.  An American interpretation of a recipe for an Italian Easter pie called scarciedda, tends to be deeper than deep-dish pizza, with several layers of dough encircling the cheese and ingredients, all covered with a thinner layer of tomato sauce covering it.  This style tends to use a more bready crust as opposed to the oiled-and-fried crust seen on many other deep-dish pizzas.  While the preference between deep-dish and stuffed Chicago-style pizzas is a hotly debated topic, it’s still widely accepted that both styles are delicious, and each slice is the equivalent of eating four thin-crusted pizzas worth of cheese and topping goodness.

Yes, drooling is the proper response.

Of course, Chicago has a handful of deep-dish and stuffed pizza pioneers, and so we’re here to break down the “iconic” pizza locations of Chicago, in no particular order, with a list chosen by one of our Chicago writers who has probably not been to your favorite pizza place, and who is exceedingly hungover right now.

PIZZERIA UNO

As mentioned above, this is the one that started it all.  Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo (no relation to Ricky) opened the restaurant in 1943 in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, originally wanting to open a Mexican restaurant (Sewell eventually did, albeit 17 years later).  In response to demand, Pizzeria Due (pronounced do-eh) was opened in 1955 just down the block to take overflow customers, and both locations take focus on their bars, which follow the tradition of Chicago’s speakeasies.

Uno’s pizza uses a cornmeal crust that sets it apart from many deep dish pizzas that have since come, but the primary reason it’s on this list is its role in the creation of this glorious pizza style.  Like the Sex Pistols and punk music, they did it first, and while many since have done it better, they still deserve credit where credit is due.

LOU MALNATI’S

Of the Chicago-style pizza chains that base all of their stores in Illinois (we’re looking at you, Uno’s), Lou Malnati’s is the one most commonly listed as a “favorite” of Chicago pizza fans.  Originally founded in Lincolnwood on March 17^th, 1971, Lou Malnati’s has expanded to more than 20 locations in the Chicagoland area.  Lou Malnati worked with his father to co-manage Pizzeria Uno in the 1950s before he decided to open his own restaurant.  The pizza style mirrors that of Pizzeria Uno’s, with the cornmeal crust of the former replaced by a thin, flaky butter crust.  Instead of using crumbled sausage, Lou’s places whole sausage patties throughout an entire layer of the pizza, ensuring each fork-and-knife-necessitating bite will have a healthy hunk of meat in there.

Lou’s is also the best pizza to send to Chicago expats who are desperate for a taste of home, since they will actually freeze their pizzas and mail it to you for what is sure to be not at all obscenely expensive.

GINO’S EAST

Gino’s East was founded in 1966 by two taxi drivers, Sam Levine and Fred Bartoli, with their friend George Loverde, who worked in the grocery and meat business.  It’s since established itself as one of the best places to get a pie in the city of Chicago, despite having moved from its original location before re-opening the same location in 2007, much like the Oakland Raiders.  Gino’s is known for their more bready crust, as well as their tendency to encourage people to write or carve their names or other messages onto the wooden interior walls.  While we question the thought process behind “making vandalism a part of your brand” we have to admit they make a pretty damn good pizza, with ten locations in Chicago and its suburbs, and one in Wisconsin because fuck you people from Illinois we know you will totally overpay for familiar food if you’re on vacation at Lake Geneva.

GIORDANO’S

Giordano’s is perhaps the most popular of the stuffed Chicago-style pizzas, and it definitely is the Derrick Rosiest.  Because it’s a stuffed pizza, as opposed to a deep-dish, their pizza has more cheese and toppings, and while it’s sacrilegious to eat a pizza without a protein, Giordano’s mushroom-and-spinach stuffed pizza is actually one of the few pizza orders without meat that doesn’t enrage AFFotD staffers.  They claim that they invented the stuffed pizza, but their origin story was suspiciously familiar to the story of Nancy’s Pizza, which opened the same year.  Of course, Nancy’s doesn’t get a spot on this list, because most people who live in Chicago usually don’t go all the way to Harwood Heights to get good Chicago-style pizza.  Listen Nancy’s, if you want to be on a list of go-to Chicago-style pizza chains, try opening more than one restaurant inside the actual city, okay?

Giordano’s has 13 locations in Chicago, and another 30 in its surrounding suburbs, meaning you’re about as likely to find a Giordano’s in Chicago as you are to find a Wendy’s.  By the way, one of the reason our staff loves Chicago so much is that you can say “it’s easier to find a deep dish pizza in this city than a fast food restaurant.”  Beautiful.

PEQUOD’S

Pequod’s Pizza is one of those pizza places that hasn’t reached the same heights as the chains listed above, but it does add its own unique twist that makes it a Chicago mainstay.   Pequod’s is best known for “the famous caramelized crust” which is made by spreading a thin layer of cheese along the outside of the crust before baking it, giving a burnt appearance that adds a chewiness to the crust of the pizza.  The crust is thicker than most deep-dish pizzas, which limits the amount of toppings you can cram into your arteries in your quest to do your best impression of a Chris Farley heart attack, but anytime you can get rid of any cheese-less spots on your pizza, we have to give you credit for it.

OVEN GRINDERS

Oven Grinders primarily makes this list because it was the name-dropped pizza place of choice in The Chicago Code, which was one of the more underrated crime dramas of the past decade.  Operating in the basement of an old house, after a fire the building was rehabilitated in 1972, with Oven Grinders opening under the name “The Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company.”  While they advertise themselves through their oven grinders (giant Italian sandwiches baked in their ovens) they’re perhaps most famous for their Pizza Pot Pie, an upside down pizza concoction that is part Calzone and part stuffed pizza. A bowl is lined with cheese, sausage, sauce, and whole mushrooms before being topped by a dome of dough, where it’s baked.  The pot pie is then flipped over, the bowl is removed, and what’s left is a filling, cheese-filled pizza that’s shaped in a half-sphere, making it by far the best non-flat pizza the city has to offer.

Of course, there are dozens of other authentic and delicious (read as, gloriously unhealthy) pizza places, and our Chicago readers no doubt are upset that their favorite isn’t on the list.  Well, let us know if that’s the case.  It’s not like Americans would ever turn down incredibly unhealthy pizza being offered to them.

~Michael Bolton

Ever since first reading Treasure Island as a child or, more likely, seeing Hook, Americans spend their childhood surrounded by pirates.  While today piracy seems like an ignoble, cowardly profession, we still are drawn to the classic pirates of yore; the Blackbeards and Black Barts we heard wildly exaggerated stories about.  Hand-in-hand with this romanticized image of people who actually were often very brutal murderers is the Jolly Roger, or the skull-and-crossbones flag that they would fly to identify themselves as pirates.

Since that point, the skull-and-crossbones have become an iconic part of our history, and putting a skull on a product has become a widespread way to tell Americans that something is either badass, poisoned, or was purchased at a Hot Topic.

Today, we’re going to go into the products that Americans consume that have incorporated the skull into their packaging.  Because nothing tells you to put something inside your body better than a bleached human skull and the words “DEATH,” right?

This Isn’t Poison: Food and Drinks With Skull Designs

Typically, putting a skull on the label of your product is a pretty efficient way to say, “This is poison, do not drink the ammonia, please for the love of God.”  Apparently the FDA prefers to keep things that way, so some of these products either aren’t from America (don’t worry, it’s only one, and it’s British, so it at least speaks American) or cannot be sold in the states legally (sorry, Black Death vodka).  Either way, we’re going to take some time to honor these products, because some marketing genius decided, “You know what would be a great way to sell this product?  To remind our customers of their eventual demise that this product likely is hastening!”

Yum, we’re getting hungry.

DEATH CIGARETTES

It’s not surprising that American tobacco companies haven’t decided to adopt the “Let’s put a skull-and-crossbones on our products” approach, since this packaging gets uncomfortably, well, real.  Death Cigarettes were debuted in England in 1991, touting themselves as free of chemical additives, while also making a point that “No, seriously, what we’re selling you is going to kill you.”  While it’s meant to be a little tongue-and-cheek, you’d have to think people who are trying to quite for health reasons, but are having a hard time of it, might feel a little uncomfortable with promotional material saying things like “Let Us Be The Nail In Your Coffin”, “The Grim Reaper Don’t Come Cheaper”, or “Ha Ha You’re Addicted To This And No Matter How Hard You Try Cigarettes Will Be What Takes You From Your Family.”  We made up that last one.  We think.

This is the most awkwardly literal use of a skull in food/beverage packaging on this list, but it’s also the one that no longer exists.  By 1995, sales started to decline, and the Enlightened Tobacco Company, which manufactured these awkward sin sticks, went out of business in 1999.  We have no idea how that could have happened.

DEATH WISH COFFEE

Whereas cigarettes more likely than not will eventually end up, you know, killing you, naming your self described “World’s Strongest Coffee” “Death Wish” at least comes off cloyingly tongue-and-cheek.  Death Wish decided to combine their gimmick of “our coffee is twice as strong as normal brews” with “BEHOLD YOUR EVENTUAL DEMISE SOME DAY ALL THAT IS LEFT OF YOU WILL BE WHAT YOU SEE STARING THROUGH THE HOLLOW SOCKETS OF OUR LABEL.”  Or, you know.  Something like that.

We sort of get it.  Coffee’s black.  You drink it when you’re feeling like death.  And there are dozens of skull mugs and pictures of skulls made out of coffee foam out there, so it’s not exactly something that’ll scare off your daily coffee drinker.  Plus, it’s coffee.  It’s literally the one product we use regularly when we’re not people.  The list of products that we use when we’re so out of it we don’t give a shit what the label says is pretty much coffee, shampoo, and shaving cream.

Either way, this product isn’t one that you’d actually confuse with poison.  Unless there’s a poison out there that’s just seeds that you have to grind up into a powder before you administer.  What’s that?  That’s pretty much how cyanide works?  Well shit.

SKULL SHAPED CANDIES

These products are both innocuous and confusing.  On one hand, it’s not surprising that you can find candy corn and lollipops shaped like skulls without too much difficulty—we’ve been shaping candy like strange things ever since bachelorette parties started demanding penis-shaped-everythings.  On the other, teaching kids to suckle on human skulls seems more like future-zombie-training than anything else.

Also, if you look at the bones and skulls candies in the picture above, you might be surprised at what you see on the nutritional label.

Is it that there’s no fat in these?  That’s it, isn’t it.

It’s probably safe to assume this is some attempt by Disney to cash in on Pirates of the Caribbean, because it’s not like everyone in the world has paid more money to watch those movies than we did to send Curiosity to Mars or anything.  Oh right.

SKULL HOT SAUCES

American hot sauce packaging pretty much can be summed up with the phrase, “Come on, I dare you.  What are you, some sort of fucking pussy?”  That’s how you end up with hot sauces with such classy names as “Ass Reaper”, “Beyond Death”, and “Satan’s Blood.”  That being said, having a skull-and-bones based logo is downright fancy when you have a competitor called “Wet Fart.”

Also, if you’ll humor us for just a moment.  Heh…ass reaper.  Tee hee.

BLACK DEATH AND CRYSTAL HEAD VODKA

When it comes to liquor, there are two different vodkas on the market that have decided to embrace the edginess of a neutral spirit that wasn’t readily available in America before 1940 by incorporating a skull into their design.  The “can’t be legally sold in America” one is Black Death Vodka, with a label that has a charming skull wearing a top hat since just because you don’t have any skin or muscle or tendons doesn’t mean you can’t be fancy.  The addition of the hat is probably why they’re hinting at “resurrecting” themselves after they were banned by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in 1992, either for being made out of gunpowder, or for looking too much like poison by having a skull on their label.

Crystal Head Vodka takes a much more artistic (or terrifying) route, as you can see in the picture above, by pouring their high proof liquor into a crystal skull.  While it likely is a gimmick to sell a mediocre vodka at a premium price because of unique packaging (we’re looking at you, vodka in a bottle shaped like a gun) it’s at least much less distressing than drinking vodka poured into an actual human’s skull, preferably in a graveyard while a family is paying respects to a nearby grave.

Oh God.  Why did our minds even go there.  This topic has taken us…into some dark places.  Let us never talk of it again.

~American beer drinkers

America is a nation of innovation, nurturing the minds that eventually came to bring us DVDs, the Internet, and probably some other things that we don’t even use to watch pornography.  Nowhere is this enterprising spirit more apparent than our constant efforts to improve upon perfection (read as: beer).  Each year brewers go out of their way to give us new and interesting ways to get drunk on liquid bliss, ranging from the strange to the “are you sure that’s not whiskey?”

As purveyors of all things American, we constantly find ourselves inundated with a plethora insane sounding beers that we absolutely have to try at this moment.  So for tax write-off purposes, we’re going to list the five newest, most exciting, and strangest beers that have hit the market this past year so we can try them without having to buy them.  Because this is America goddamn it, and if we can find a way to get the government to pay us to get drunk, we’re going to move heaven and Earth to make that happen.

Or just write 1,500 words on weird beers.  Tomato to-mah-to.

The Five Newest, Strangest Beers in America

HONORABLE MENTION:  SPRECHER HARD ROOT BEER

This is only an honorable mention because it’s technically not beer, but it deserves your attention nonetheless.  Root beer was most successfully mass produced during the prohibition, because Americans were so desperate that any product that even had the word “beer” in its name was good enough for them.  It remains a popular soft drink, though the key ingredient for early versions of root beer, the sassafras root, apparently is a carcinogen that causes liver damage.  Nice going, Temperance Movement.  Of course, the root beer we drink and enjoy now replaces sassafras oils with good old fashion chemicals, so there’s no reason to be suspicious of the samples of root beer your kids are given at the end of the brewery tour while you pound enough beer samples that you have to meander for an hour until you’re good to drive again.

However, Sprecher Brewing Company (who of course hail from Wisconsin) might want your kid stumbling around too.  Sprecher makes their own beer, but they’re best known for their high-end pop, from regular standbys like Root Beer and Cream Soda to more inventive carbonated drinks like Ravin’ Red (cheery, cranberry, honey, and ginseng) and Orange Dream (honey, orange, and vanilla).

Sprecher decided to change the game when they created “Hard Root Beer,” a fermented root beer with five percent alcohol that takes their root beer and adds oak and bourbon flavors.  We cannot stress enough how happy we are this exists.  They’re basically taking the soft drink that’s main purpose is to be a non-alcoholic replacement for beer, and getting rid of every reason that it’s a non-alcoholic replacement for beer.  At only $5 a four pack, we might have to take a trip to pick up a case of the stuff.

But enough about boozy soda, it’s beer time.

ROGUE VOODOO CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER BANANA ALE

Rogue Ales is an Oregon brewery known for its large selection of unique and varied beers.  They also apparently like doughnuts.  Or at least using doughnuts as an excuse to make a beer with a longer name than most college essays.  The brewery has created multiple beers with the owners of Voodoo Doughnuts, an Oregon bakery that does wonderful, terrifying things to buttery dough.  Yes, you just clicked their link, and yes you immediately noticed the bacon maple doughnut, so you can see why we’d get behind them.

Do you remember the first time you encountered a fully stocked ice cream Sunday bar as a kid?  In theory, you should have felt overwhelmed with the sheer amount of sugary options to choose from, but you had a sort of manic calm about you.  You then proceeded to put every fucking thing you could on top of your ice cream and douse the fucker in chocolate sauce, right?  Of course you did.  And it was delicious.  That same basic approach was taken Rouge’s latest collaboration with Voodoo—the Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Ale.  Not content to just make a beer with chocolate, or even a Reese’s Peanut Butter Beer, they added bananas to the whole thing because fuck you, don’t question genius, it sounds delicious and you absolutely want to try it, don’t you?  That’s what we thought.  The fact that the intense amount of sugars in this beer will also make it more alcoholic is just a hidden bonus.  However, there are even more American ingredients that you can use for beer, like…

ROUGE VOODOO BACON MAPLE ALE

Is it a little lazy to use a second beer from the same brewery/doughnut shop collaboration?  Maybe, but this is the most widely available bacon beer we found that wasn’t from Canada.  It also includes maple syrup as a polite way to say to the aforementioned Canadians, “Anything you can do, we can do better.”  So while chocolate, banana, and peanut butter sounds delicious (we’d be lying if we said some of our staff members aren’t strongly considering paying $13 bucks to get a 750 ml bottle of it sent to their homes) bacon and maple just sound American.

Yes, we’ve mentioned the existence of bacon beer previously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t point out that a brewery and a doughnut company made a beer using maple flavoring and actual bacon.  You can smoke a beer to give it a “bacon taste” or you can man up and actually put sliced up delicious pig meat into a giant vat of beer that you actively turn into mind-numbing booze.  Beer isn’t supposed to have a fat content, but we’d absolutely drink one that does.

SHORT’S S’MORES STOUT

Short’s Brewing Company in Bellaire, Michigan didn’t need any outside help when they decided to brew a beer with graham cracker, milk chocolate, marshmallow, and smoked malt because… oh goddamn it guys you clicked the link already to try to buy it didn’t you?  Stop it, come back here.  Yes, Short’s decided to take all the best things about camping and combine them into one easy-to-get-you-drunk package.  We’re going to save you the future disappointment by letting you know in advance that this is the last beer on this list that you’re going to be actually interested in drinking, as the next two are fairly…unique.

But, enough about that, let’s focus on the S’mores beer, goddamnit!  According to the brewery, you are encouraged to add a flaming marshmallow garnish to this beer when drinking it from a mug, and we’re so upset we didn’t come up with that idea independently.  Seriously, just look at that thing.  Holy hell.

While we’ve not had many beers that have, you know, marshmallows in them, any time you can put American cubes of horse hoof and sugar into a beer, we’re going to pay attention.  And we’re going to road trip to your brewpub to get a pint.  No amount of distance can stop us.  Don’t ever underestimate us, northern Michigan.

KIMCHI BEER

Theoretically, combining kimchi and beer sort of makes sense.  After all, kimchi’s just fermented cabbage.  Beer’s fermented too, right?  Except that saying these two ingredients should be combined because they share the word “fermented” is like saying that John and Joan Cusack should make a baby because they share the same initials—you might go in with good intentions, but you’re going to end up with a deformed, unholy monstrosity.

That said, there has been a mini-boom of sorts of homebrewers using kimchi in their beer ingredients, because hell, the internet exists.  So that’s why you can find numerous examples of people adding kimchi to their beer, and topping it off with a little Sriracha hot sauce, because apparently American homebrewers like to hand their beers to someone, wait to see what look registers on their face, and then start cracking up saying, “Hah, you just drank spicy cabbage beer!  WEIRDO!”

Of course, if you really want to go full-on crazy with your beer ingredients, look no further than Colorado.

WYNKOOP ROCKY MOUNTAIN OYSTER STOUT

While most of you are familiar with this term, some of you might not know what a Rocky Mountain oyster is.  But as you find yourself staring at the two fleshy, squiggly-veined lumps placed randomly in front of this phallic can of beer a shadow of fear has just crossed your face.  Yes, Rocky Mountain oysters are bull testicles.  For eating!  Considered a delicacy in Colorado, Rocky Mountain oysters are technically deep fried testicles of a bull calf.

As it is a popular regional dish, Wynkoop made video as an April Fool’s joke about taking bull balls, and instead of frying them, tossing them into a beer.  Because this is the internet, the general response was not, “Haha, oh man, could you imagine?  Bull balls in a beer?  What a riot!  Lulz!” but instead, a distressing amount of people exclaimed, “Oh sweet!  When can I buy a bottle?”

And with a true, “Fuck it” American attitude, Wynkoop shrugged and said, “Well, they’re asking for bull ball beer, so let’s make some bull ball beer.”  And now, Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout is a real fucking thing.

Just let that sink in for a second… and trust us, we are using every bone in our bodies to stop ourselves from making easy ball puns here, but let’s just say that it’s apparently a well-rounded stout (oh God, we’re so sorry), even though you’d have to be pretty ballsy to try it (It’s a sickness, really, we can’t help ourselves).  While, granted, we’d want to test (ugh, that wasn’t even that good) the beer out of sheer curiosity, we see men (Oh God, that one was borderline criminally bad) shrink (is someone listening?  Can you just submit the article now before we keep doing more of these?) at the idea of consuming beer brewed with the testicles of a bull.

Oh God.

Anyway.  Beer made out of balls.  Well done, America.  We think.

~The owners of the world’s most expensive yachts

It takes a certain kind of person to own a boat.  Unless you’re a mountain man with a hand-fashioned canoe, boat ownership tends to require a specific combination of “disposable income”, “access to a large water mass”, and “possessing a desire to spend your time bobbing on said water mass.”  That said, among those who meet these criteria, there are still a myriad of reasons that we buy boats.  Some like to go fishing, or just appreciate the calmness of the sea.  Still others like adventure, and use their boats to compete in thousand-league-long races, or travel the globe.  Every one of these individuals feels a deep seated passion for the sea (or their nearest lake) and a sense of oneness with these bodies of water that harkens the very spirit of those who sailed across the endless ocean to find America in the first place.  It’s an admirable hobby (or obsession, depending on the level of commitment).

And then, of course, there are the douchebags that buy floating mansions to flaunt their wealth.  These people like to spend a few million dollars to buy a boat that they can anchor within view of the nearest beach while surrounded with bikini-clad women who are 30 years younger than them.  It’s not exactly the best subset of American culture, but…well, yeah, on the scale of “positive examples of American culture” it’s right between “people who cook meth in 20-ounce plastic soda bottles” and “people who go to fancy restaurants and order a bottle of ‘ka-ber-net sah-vig-none’ unironically.”

Pictured above:  could be either group, actually

Thankfully, America tends to stay out of the “trying to prove that you’re totally not impotent by making the largest, most expensive yacht in the nation” race (with one exception) but some people (cough, Saudi princes and Russian billionaires) can’t seem to be satisfied with a measly ten million dollar yacht requiring a permanent crew.  So we decided to pool together a semi-definitive list of the most expensive boats to ever grace our oceans (God, we hope they’re at least going on the ocean.  A giant multi-million dollar taking up an entire lake seems like the ultimate “fuck you” to poor people).  It’s free to look, because you’ll never be able to afford a single one of them.

The World’s Most Expensive Yachts

See that boat up there?  The one with a fucking helipad at its front-boat-part (we might not be the best people to write this article as our staffers literally don’t know a single nautical term outside of a handful of buzz words that filtered in while we were watching Speed 2)?  That’s the Prince Abdulaziz, and it was the longest and tallest motor yacht in the world when it was made in 1984.  And it won’t even make this list because no one seems to know how much it’s worth.

That’s right, there are so many absurdly expensive boats out there that we have to disqualify some boats that literally cost more to make than Iron Man 2.  And that’s after we discovered that the story about a $4.5 billion dollar yacht made out of gold and meteor was fake (though it made sense once we finally say it out loud).  That also means we can’t include the Streets of Monaco, which is going to cost about $1.1 billion because, despite being a floating replica of a city street, complete with racing track, it hasn’t been made yet.  So though some frivolous displays of debauched wealth won’t make this list, we still want you to know that someone out there is going to spend more money on a big-ass boat than Micronesia’s Gross Domestic Product in 2011.  While American billionaires like to spend a billion dollars on charity, these assholes are going to make a floating city where they can watch Formula 1 cars go “Vroom” because fuck you.

Seriously, fuck all of these yacht owners.  Erm, we mean, below is our completely unbiased look at the ten most expensive yachts in the world.

10.  Rising Sun- $200 Million

Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep Americans off this list entirely.  Listen, we’re all for blindly spending money just because you’re rich, but there’s something especially douchey about spending twice as much money on a boat than Michael Jordan made in his entire basketball career on a giant boat you’ll use for maybe a few weeks every year. So yeah, you’re not going to exactly see us tripping over ourselves to compliment Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison for buying the 10^th largest boat in the world at a reported cost of over $200 million dollars.  And you’re definitely not going to see us giving props to David Geffen for deciding that this was something he absolutely had to buy.  Granted, it seems that Geffen, who has a net worth of $6 billion and does donate a fair amount to charities and medical research, can afford it without too much difficulty, so we’re going to try to take it easy on him…

Wait what’s that?  He owns number seven on our list too?  Goddamn it, Geffen, what the fuck are you going to do with two yachts that cost over $200 million!?  Stop that, you’re making us look like Russians!

9.  Lady Moura- $210 Million

For the rest of this list, the owners of the yachts in question tend to belong to one of two groups.  They’re either Russian businessmen who likely did some shady shit during the fall of the Soviet Union to monopolize their own little corner of the economy, or they’re billionaires from Arab states that like to flaunt their wealth.  However, Dr. Nasser al Rasheed, the owner of the $210 million Lady Moura, is the one exception to that rule.  While many of the following yachts are owned by princes and sultans, al Rasheed is a Saudi Arabian owner of an Engineering company with degrees from the University of Texas and the University of Miami, which means he might very well be one of the few owners on this list to have, you know, earned his fortune somewhat honestly.

This boat has the standard “holy shit keep in mind this is a boat owned by a single person for the hell of it” features like a helipad, a 344-foot length, and a crew of 61, but we’d have to assume that a lot of the cost went into the unnecessarily gaudy detail work, like having the ships name spelled out on three sides of the ship in massive 24 carat gold letters.  Of all the boats on this list, this is the only one that has actually gotten into a crash.  You’d think $210 million would at least afford a captain who knows the difference between “sea” and “land.”  Didn’t we learn anything from the Titanic?

8.  Al Mirqab- $250 Million

Pardon us for our ignorance, but is there a viable reason why so many of these fucking things have helipads on them?  Apart from making them look like they belong to a villain in a James Bond movie?  Because yes, we assume that the billionaires who buy such large fancy toys own helicopters too, but wouldn’t it be a pain in the ass to helicopter onto your boat?  You can just…go to where it’s docked, right?  Or do these boats stay out in the ocean at all times and are only accessible via helicopter, like some sort of rich person Noah’s ark filled with contracted escorts and mercenary crewmen instead of two of every animal?

Anyway, this is Al Mirqab.  It cost about $250 million and is owned by Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, which just rolls off the tongue once you’ve spent five minutes practicing saying it in a mirror.  Earlier this year it was in Gibraltar, a fact that we bring up only as an excuse to point out that there are totally websites that track that shit.  This boat can accommodate 24 guests and has a crew of 55, which to us seems like it’s just begging for its crew to snap, mutiny, take over the entire yacht, and leave the boat’s guests stranded on some godforsaken island.  Not that any of our staff members has applied for a position on the boat with that specific intention.  That’d be ridiculous.  It’s not like you could clear $100 million with ransom demands alone in such a situation.  Nonsense.  Let us not speak of this anymore.  Moving on.

7.  Dilbar- $256 Million

Glad to see the Ruskies have finally come out to play.   The Dilbar, owned by Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, cost about $256 million (depending on currency rates).  It was launched in 2008, and is 110 meters long, which, converting from Metric to America, means the boat is roughly one football field plus about sixty feet.  We’re not sure what it is about this boat in particular that reminds us of an episode of Miami Vice but we have to imagine that at some point all of the coke and women under the age of 25 skinnier than 115 pounds in Russia were on this boat.  Which is actually a terrifying thought, since it’s owner looks like this.

“My milkshake brings all the girls to the yacht.”

While some might look at this man and go, “this person owns a boat larger than most houses, more expensive than most luxury hotels, and is worth over 17 billion dollars, I am envious of him and his wealth” most of us know better and say, “Well, if you’re going to look like a squat toad with glasses that are most commonly found on grandmothers who shop at Wal-Mart, you’d better have a giant boat and 17 billion dollars to make up for that fact.  And besides, at least I’ve spent roughly eight years less of my life in Russian jail than this guy has.”  Because as nice as that boat looks, it doesn’t strike us as “eight years in a Russian prison” nice.  But maybe we’re just spoiled like that.

6.  Pelorus- $300 Million

As we mentioned before, this particular boat is also owned by the lone American to grace this list, David Geffin, who apparently has spent at least 5% of his total wealth to acquire giant boats that require a year-round crew.  This one at least owes its existence to a combination of Saudis trying too hard to impress people, Russians overcompensating for the lack of capitalism before the fall of the Soviet Union, and, well, divorce.  Originally commissioned by a Saudi businessman, it was sold after one year to Roman Abramovich, who we’ll talk about later on in this list, who lost it to his ex-wife as part of their divorce settlement.  Irina Abromavich proceeded to sell it for $300 million to David Geffen in 2011, who probably forgot that he had just finished his last payment on his other $200 million plus yacht.

The Pelorus boasts two helipads, because if you have only one helicopter to go with your 9-figure boat, you’re a plebeian.  There are also two separate swimming pools on the main deck, since it’s not like there’s any water nearby that you can swim in, SARCASM RIGHT GUYS!? (ha ha, but seriously if you ever decided to go swimming in the ocean off the side of a 50 foot tall, 375 foot long super yacht,  you’d probably end up doing a very convincing impression of Natalie Wood.)  That all being said, the simple fact remains that David Geffen owns two giant boats with a full service staff, and landing spaces for at least three personal helicopters.  It might be a bit alarmist to make a claim that he’s starting his own naval force in a plan to take over a small country, but did you know that Costa Rica doesn’t have a standing military and is accessible from the sea?

5.  Al Said- $300 Million (or so we can best tell)

We’ll admit that the $300 million price tag is fairly speculative, as we’ve found at least one site declaring that it costs a mysterious “Nobody’s Talking.”  However, we’re inclined to go with the realistic-seeming “$200 million to $300 million” estimate, considering that, at 500 feet in length and 78 feet in height, this is the foruth largest yacht in the world, and, oh right, it has its own fucking concert hall large enough to fit a 50 person orchestra.  Sultan Qaboos of Oman, who sounds like he’s a member of the Trade Federation of the Star Wars prequels, owns the boat, which houses a crew of 154 while having accommodations for up to 70 “pampered” guests (and considering the price tag of this little vessel, you’d damn well hope the guests would all be pampered).

And for those of you wondering, we’re almost certain that Al Said was not in fact named after the character from Lost.  Wait, what’s that?  Oh okay so we’ve officially crossed the line into full-fledged cultural insensitivity?  Yeah, you probably have a fair point.  Sorry about that.  We’ll try to back off.

4.  A- $323 Million

This particular yacht looks deceptively small, and also sort of submarine-y.  It is neither, since the boat is over 390 feet long, 61 feet tall, and probably incredibly sinkable if you tried to submerge the fucker.  The sleek, stealthy design, combined with the cryptic name of A makes this boat look less a cruise liner like the other entries on this list, and more like the mobile headquarters of a Saturday morning cartoon supervillain.

Speaking of former enemies, this is a German built yacht owned by a Russian billionaire.  It has a surprisingly unsecured-looking helipad at its front (are we the only ones who are looking at that and imagining a helicopter sliding off as soon as this thing’s hit by a moderately big wave?) and two swimming areas, including a giant hot tub taking up the open space in the back of the ship.  Since the design minimizes the amount of non-interior space on the yacht, it does seem surprising that this is so much more expensive than the vessels listed above.  Of course, the $40,000 bath faucets and $60,000 stair banisters in the interior make us think that a lot of the cost went into making everything inside the damn ship unnecessarily expensive.

For whatever reason (cough, the owners want to brag, cough) a lot of information regarding the costs of this boat are readily available, so we know that it costs $500,000 just to fill the gas tank.  We also know that with a 37 person crew with a passenger capacity of 14, it costs roughly $20 million a year just to run this boat.  So the next time you have to scrape together the insurance payment to cover your 1996 Buick, just take solace in knowing that these Russian assholes sneeze away $20 million dollars a year on a boat just because they can.  Ha ha!  Get a job!  Or, you know, have the means and timing to take advantage of an economic vacuum in Russia directly after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Loser.                                 

3.  Dubai (Previously Platinum 525)- $350 Million

Here we have the Dubai, which at 524 feet long, was the largest yacht in the world when it was constructed.  If not for the helicopter in the picture, you wouldn’t be particularly out of place for confusing it with a Carnival cruise ship, but no, this is a boat owned entirely by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is the ruler of the Emirate of Dubai and the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, which some of you might remember as the setting for Sex in the City 2.

Easily our favorite thing about this boat is this website we’ve found flaunting it.  Someone spent $350 million to make this yacht, and this website spent, what appears to be, 35 cents to set up a geocities account to talk about it.  Even better, the site has pictures of the interior of Dubai, and while A’s interior shots prove it to be expensive, but understated, Dubai has rooms that look like Pee-Wee Herman’s hookah lounge.

Today’s secret word is:  Excessive Opulence!  AHHHHHH!

Granted, this might be just a difference in cultures, but we’d have to think a smorgasbord-looking combination of brightly colored carpets doesn’t exactly scream “I have billions of dollars of disposable wealth at my fingertips.”  However, the giant 500 foot boat probably does, so it’s a bit of a wash.

2.  Azzam- $620 Million

Okay, to get the boring details out of the way.  This boat is 590 feet long, making it the longest boat ever made.  It just recently made its inaugural trip out to sea.  No one knows who the owner is, but they all speculate it belongs to Saudi royalty.  All of that is well and good, but by far our favorite thing about this book is the sentence from this article that it inspired when TheYachtPhoto’s Peter Seyfferth said, “I have never seen an Arab-owned yacht with big parties and girls round the pool like the Russians have.”

We don’t have anything more to add to that.  Apparently rich Russians and rich Arabs titter behind each other’s backs about who uses their multi-million dollar yachts correctly or not.  You know, like gossiping girls in Junior High School.  We don’t know why we love the schadenfreude of that so much, but we absolutely do.

1.  Eclipse- $1.5 Billion  (Yes.  Billion)

Roman Abramovich, who you might remember as “the guy you just read about who lost one of his super yachts in a divorce settlement” likes his yachts like he likes his women.  Divorcing him White, over-sized, and intimidatingly secure.  At one time both the largest and most expensive yacht in existence, it’s something of a celebrity in the douchebag yacht world.  It also is the one boat that absolutely confirms that its owner is up to no good.  Along with its two helipads, it has a mini-submarine, three landing boats, a crew of 70, and the whole thing is rigged with security cameras and sensors.  No word on if there’s a shark tank for dissidents, but since Abromovich has been notoriously tight lipped about the interior of his floating fortress due to “security concerns” we can safely assume he does.

Oh that’s right, it also has a fucking missile defense system!  And an anti-paparazzi shield that prevents you from being able to take a picture of people on it!  Okay, seriously, is Roman Abramovich the bad guy from “The World Is Not Enough”?

Since Abramovich is so obsessed with security, a lot of details remain unknown about this boat, which is why it is valued anywhere between $800 million and $1.5 billion, both of which make easily make it the most expensive yacht in the world.  But if you’re dealing with a man who put a goddamn missile defense system on his boat, do you think he’d stop before he could say “this boat coast one billion dollars” doing his best Russian Dr. Evil impression?  Of course not.  If Roman Abramovich was told his boat only cost $800 million, we can guarantee he’d put in a $200 million dungeon filled with caviar and sharks or something.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse us, we got an email saying that if we wrap ourselves in tin foil and pretend we’re a burrito we get free tacos from Chipotle.  Fingers crossed that’ll save us enough money to afford rent this month.

~You

Ingenuity often comes from the most obvious places.  People have liked meth, wolves, and oversized T-shirts for years, but it wasn’t until someone sat down and said, “Hey, let’s put three wolves on a KFC-stained T-shirt” that we collectively said, “Oh, of course” and bought a million shirts from The Mountain.  We didn’t know that chocolate could be put into peanut butter, and vice versa, without a combination of divine intervention and mercy killings.  So when we were told that Heroes in Action Toys made action figures of American presidents, we weren’t particularly impressed…until they clarified that the presidents were also monsters.

And we immediately wanted to buy all of them.

Yes, it seems so simple in retrospect, but it took a true genius to come up with monster versions of each American president, and it would be a disservice if we didn’t take you through each and every item on the catalog to show you how incredibly American this idea is.  You’re welcome.

Heroes in Action Toys Presents:  Presidential Monsters

Just looking at those toys up there makes us want to be kids again so we can hold something our parents love very dear hostage until they take us to Toys-R-Us and buy us the whole set.  That’s right, dad, one wrong move and your precious golf clubs go right into the smelter.  Don’t fuck with us.

Simply staring at them and appreciating their majesty is totally acceptable, but we don’t get the big bucks (read as, crossing our fingers hoping the company reads this and sends us some free product) for just that.  We’ve got to go deeper.

BARACULA:  The Barack Obama Vampire

We understand that there’s always a fine line you have to walk when representing the current president as a monster.  People either will be obsessively vigilant to ensure that the highest power in the land is treated with respect, or they’re going to go Ted Nugent on you.  Either way, you’ll either piss off people who like the president, or piss off people who are mad you didn’t turn the president into, we don’t know, Hellboy.

That’s why making Barack Obama a vampire works so well.  It’ll appease the Obama haters (he sucks blood) but not in a particularly egregious or treacherous manner (so do all politicians.  And Lawyers.  And CEOs.  And hair lice).  But it’s also Dracula, and we’ve been told between obnoxious shrieks from teenagers that vampires are apparently sexy now?  Maybe?  Either way, historically, Dracula has always been referred to with the romantic descriptor of “a suave motherfucker.”  If you’re going to turn the president into a vampire?  At least make him a boss vampire.

ZOMBUSH:  The George W. Bush Zombie

Listen, we know that Dubya was a bit of a hot topic as far as presidents go, and we get the joke behind this monster choice (“Need braaaains”) but we’re still going on the record to say this looks pretty badass.  It’s only fair that Zombies and Vampires represent the most recent Republican and Democratic presidents, since statistically when the Right tends to “fear” vampires, while the Left tends to “fear” zombies.  When Republicans are in power, Zombie films rule the day, while Vampire movies are all during Democratic regimes.

But that doesn’t matter.  What matters is, no matter how you look at it, this toy would be so fun to play with.  If The Walking Dead has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need likable characters or an actual driving plot or particularly good writing to be a successful show everyone wants to be a zombie, so long as they’re just pretending.  Don’t believe us?  If a Super Bowl winner would go out of his way to be a Zombie, why wouldn’t a former president?

WOLF BILL:  The Wolfman Bill Clinton

Okay so since Clinton was the biggest horn dog to take the office of President since LBJ, so we get why you’d make him into a Wolf Man.  That’s pretty clever.  But we love the fact that this comes with an accessory, and that it’s a saxophone.  None of the other president action figures so far have gotten a toy to play with, but apparently you play one sax solo on one Arsenio Hall Show episode, and suddenly it’s part of your identity to the point that you’re even using it when you’re turned into a monster action figure that people initially mistake for “Wolf Blitzer.”

There’s a lot about this toy that confuses us, actually.  First of all, is there any particular reason why his suit is tattered almost the exact same ways as the George Bush zombie? Also, why does Clinton have wolf legs, wolf tail, but perfectly human hands, and the only additional hair on his face are glorious Wolverine-style sideburns?  Plus, is it just us or does it look like they gave him vampire teeth just like Baracula?  Additionally baffling but totally awesome is the fact that, for whatever reason, Wolf Man Bill Clinton is still wearing his tie, but just chose to unbutton the top button like he’s a 13 year old kid who just got out of church service.  Because Clinton totally was that kid.

THE RONMY:  The Ronald Reagan Mummy

When Lenin died, the Soviets actually mummified him and put him on display. Motionless and impotent.  So while it’s strange to give similar treatment to the man who was running the country when we groin punched the Soviets into a bunch of fragmented rapidly shrinking economies, we at least made him a Mummy that doesn’t take any shit from anyone, and spends his time haunting you with his pet cobra in tow.

We’d actually love to see a movie with Ron as The Mummy.  And by that, we mean to say, we just had some of our staffers sit down and write a screenplay for a movie with Ronald Reagan as a mummy.  Here’s a brief synopsis—Abbot and Costello go into a pyramid where they see Reagan, make a trickle-down economics joke, and he comes to life, chases them, and the whole thing ends with him taking apart the Berlin Wall piece-by-piece.  Yeah.  That’s be pretty sweet, actually.  We’d totally watch that movie, even if it was in black and white.

MONSTER FROM THE WATERGATE LAGOON:  The Richard Nixon Swamp Thing with a forced not-even-quite-a-pun

Yeah, yeah, we’ll get to the actual monster here in a second, but let’s start with the name.  Really?  The Monster from the Watergate Lagoon?  You know puns are supposed to actually sound like the words, right?  “Black” and “Watergate” have about as much in common as “Mormon” and “Kegger.”  No, that’s not actually fair, because “Mormon” and “Kegger” at least have the same amount of syllables.  Goddamn it.  We were super stoked about this series, and we really like this action figure, but we’re having a really hard getting past the name.  Ugh.  Hire a goddamn copywriter.  Jesus.

As for the figure itself, Nixon here’s got the same tattered suit design as all the rest.  Honestly we’re pretty sure they just take the same tattered suit, change the color for each president, and then change the length of them (except for Obama of course, that sumbitch be dapper).  Dubya and Clinton have regular length, Reagan looks like he’s rolling one pant leg up so it doesn’t get caught in the gear shift of his mummy bike, and Nixon here looks like someone trying on a pair of pants they used to wear in grade school.  This is also both the least and most recognizable of all of the presidents, as they really left nothing human about Nixon in his features, yet it still looks 100% like Nixon.  As far as that goes, well done, though it’s sort of cheating since Nixon has always sort of looked like a fish anyway.

Unrelated, but are we crazy for thinking this toy be the best toy in the world if it came with a panda bear as its accessory? That can’t just be us, right?

PHANTOM OF THE WHITE HOUSE:  A, uh, whatever the Phantom of the Opera was version of JFK, only with a full face, a full mask, and another bad pun

This one confuses the hell out of us.  Can’t you find a famous monster who just, bones chicks left and right?  The Phantom of the White House is by far the laziest, because it’s pretty clear that they either don’t know what the Phantom of the Opera looks like, or they’re actively trying to avoid some specific copyright issue.  They made JFK pale, put him in a cape (hey, no frayed suit this time though) and gave him what looks like a Loki mask.  That’s it. Listen, we don’t know much about the Phantom of the Opera, because it’s a musical written by a British dude based off a French novel, but we’re pretty sure that the Phantom of the Opera was supposed to be disfigured, and tends to have, you know, half a mask.  And also has nothing to do with JFK.

Now you might say, “Well, it would be borderline criminal to mar the face of one of our more handsome presidents.”  That’s true.  That’s also yet another reason why it makes no sense to make JFK the Phantom of the fucking Opera!

Okay.  We’re done venting.  But this one kinda pisses us off.  Don’t buy this one, it’s stupid.

LINCOLNSTEIN:  The Abraham Lincoln Frankenstein

A nice little touch about this one is that, instead of having bolts in his neck, they put the bolts in Lincoln’s top hat, which is crumpled for good effect.  This one might actually be our favorites, because it gives us the mental image of some mad scientist piecing Lincoln back together and turning him to life, only for Linconstein (which is a better pun than the alternate “Frankenlincoln”) to freak out upon seeing fire, hunt after John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, and then accidentally throw a girl into the pond and drown her (woah there, shit just got dark).

Aesthetically, this one just looks the coolest, partially because Lincoln sort of looked like a monster compared to everyone else anyway.  He was a giant (for the time) lanky guy who was widely considered to be ugly but mesmerizing.  Sort of like a living monster made out of parts of dead people.  Either way, if the good folks at Heroes in Action Toys are reading this, feel free to send one over.  We want to put this on the desk of every member of our staff.

~American Brewers

For some time now, Media sources have been discussing how “Macro” beers such as Budweiser, Coors, and piss Miller have been losing ground to the niche market of craft breweries.  There has been a lot of speculation as to the reason for this—microbrews tend to use better ingredients to make creative, delicious, flavorful beers that blow their much more watered down counterparts out of the water.  They are a new, thriving addition to an alcohol producing landscape that until recently has been remarkably stagnant.  Hell, microbrews even offer a wide variety of complex beer styles that can be paired with any meal, as opposed to Bud Light, which is only paired with Solo Cups and roofies.

Yes, all of those can explain the surge of craft beers, but if we had to guess, the main reason behind their success rests with the fact that we’re all American, and craft beers just tend to get you drunk faster.  You can doll it up all you want, but most Americans would rather spend a few more bucks on a tasty beer as opposed to a domestic brew that’s got half the alcohol.  That’s just simple economics.

So in order to celebrate America’s contributions to getting you drunk while drinking as little liquid as possible, we at AFFotD are here to present you with…

America’s 10 Most Alcoholic Beers

When we looked up the strongest beer we could find, we were a little dismayed when we discovered that, though there is a beer that is 65% alcohol, it’s brewed in Scotland.  We suspect that it’s colloquially known as “Gin” but we can’t be sure.  Either way, it was disheartening to find that America doesn’t brew the most alcoholic beer, and that our best attempt is only one-third the strength of that beer.

But then we thought, “wait a minute, we have beer that’s about that strong.  We call it bourbon and it’s delicious.”  That made us feel a lot better.  We also appreciated the fact that, while the following beers brewed in America might not be able to combust when they touch an open flame, they are a healthy combination of “delicious” and “drinking one bottle is like drinking a six pack of most other beers.”

So let’s make less with the talking and more with the helping you get drunk.

10 (tie)—DOGFISH HEAD WORLD WIDE STOUT/DOGFISH HEAD 120 MINUTE IPA:  15-20% ABV

While these beers are released seasonally, with a range of 15-20% alcohol by volume generally being rounded out to 18%, Dogfish Head isn’t exactly a stranger to making beers that push the envelope a little bit.  So while it’s strange to put an India Pale Ale and a Stout into the same categories, both of these beers from Dogfish Head are examples of some of the easier to find strong beers on this list.  Sure, you won’t find this on your local grocery store’s shelves (and God forbid if you’re stuck in one of those states with archaic laws limiting the sale of strong beers), but if you want a 120 Minute IPA or a World Wide Stout, you can probably find one without too much difficulty.

But let’s just get to the nitty gritty.  These beers are each brewed a special way (the 120 Minute IPA finds the beer continuously hopped for two hours during the boil, and then dry hopped every day for the next month, giving it an insane hoppy bitterness that has to be balanced out with malts, which in turn converts to sugars, which in turn becomes alcohol, while the World Wide Stout pretty much does the same with approach with barley to amp up the booziness) and we could write a professional, in-depth look at the brewing styles implemented to make these delicious beers.

But this is AFFotD and we’re already drunk, so we’ll just point out that when World Wide Stout was released, it was the most potent beer on the planet.  This was in 1999.  We can only assume that our tireless efforts to get Americans drunk has ensured that eight of the other beers on this list have since been made with higher ABV, because we like taking credit for things you have no way of refuting.  We also are the reason more girls where tank tops during the summer, and we were largely responsible for the development of the KFC Double Down.  You’re welcome, America.

9—THE BRUERY CHOCOLATE RAIN:  19.5% ABV

While the brewery’s (Bruery the brewery…get it?  GET IT!?) website seems to indicate that the beer has been replaced by a similar and equally-alcoholic “Black Tuesday” (both are imperial stouts aged in bourbon barrels with 19.5% alcohol by volume) we’re going to stick with Chocolate Rain as our representative from this Orange County, California brewery because we like the fact that it reminds us of Tay Zonday, and we think it’s hilarious that the label for Chocolate Rain, a beer that’ll get you drunk faster than wine and some liquors, has to warn you that it “contains alcohol.”  That’s like buying a box of armor-piercing bullets and having the label say, “WARNING:  CONTAINS BULLETS.”  Chocolate Rain takes the Black Tuesday and adds cocoa nibs and vanilla beans, which we suspect they use to both add a unique flavor to the dark beer, while also saying that their beer has “nibs and beans” in it, which we think is hilarious because most of us never graduated from the fourth grade.  Hehe.  Nibs and beans.  Penis and balls.

8—BIG BUCK IMPERIAL PORTER:  20% ABV

Okay, Big Buck Brewery, we’ve got a bit of an issue here.  Here we are, all ready to say, “Hey, if you find yourself in Gaylord, Michigan, and you can stop giggling at the name of the town you’re in, you should go to this brewery and steakhouse because they brew a beer that’s 20% alcohol, and holy shit we didn’t realize it was a steakhouse as well until now” and give you some free advertising that likely will get you so much business you’d see no other recourse than to sell us a case of your finest strong stout.

But then we do a little digging, and while we see a 17.65% beer, it looks like you don’t bother to sell your 20% beer anymore.  In fact, that specific beer seems to have been an extremely small batch that you only did once.  Listen, we appreciate that you at least seasonally offer a Coffee Stout with such high alcohol content, but if you make a 20% beer once, why would you ever not sell it?  If you ever do something so wonderful, why only do it once?  Could you imagine a world with only one Robocop film?  Or only one Die Hard?  God forbid, only one Rocky movie?  That’d be borderline criminal!  A world without Sylvester Stallone defeating communism through the proxy of Ivan Drago is not a world in which we want to live.

What we’re saying, Big Buck Brewery, is do the right thing.  Make the Big Buck Imperial Porter and never take it off your menu.  It’s your American duty.

7—GRAND LAKE HOLY GRAIL:  20% ABV

Based in Grand Lake, Colorado at an altitude of 8,369 feet above sea level, The Grand Lake Brewing Company doesn’t generally make overly strong beers.  Does it disappoint us that they only offer three beers with a higher ABV than Bud Light Platinum?  Yes.  Does the explanation that, at higher altitudes, it takes less alcohol to get you drunk do anything to make us feel better about that fact?  Not really, that just seems like a missed opportunity.

The Grand Lake Holy Grail, however, is not a missed opportunity.  Or at least, for a glorious moment in 2003, it wasn’t.  That’s because two brewers at Grand Lake decided they wanted to punch your liver in the face, so they brewed a beer made entirely out of pale malt before aging it for eight months in rum barrels, eventually coming out with a one-time batch of beer that was 20% alcohol.  To put that in perspective, drinking a bottle of Grand Lake Holy Grail will get you about as drunk as drinking a bottle of Baileys.  Combine that with the effects of being over a mile and a half above sea level, this beer probably was the responsible for some of the most efficient drunk nights for those who consumed it than any other beer on this list.

6—SAMUEL ADAMS MILLENIUM:  20% ABV

Samuel Adams has been around since 1984, and by most accounts was the first “craft” brewery to make a splash on the national market.  They are largely credited with starting the craft beer movement that is responsible for all of these fine beers that you see listed in this article.  While it is hard to find a beer snob who says that Samuel Adams makes their favorite beer, they all at least respect the hell out of the brewery, if for no other reason than the fact that, if there was no Samuel Adams , we’d probably still be forced to choose between Bud, Miller, and Coors when looking for a drink at a bar.  That said, while they’re known for their Boston Lager, which was only novel at the time it came out because it has “flavor” and “tastes like something other than water and straw, cough cough looking at you Budweiser” their lesser known forays into experimental brewing deserves tends to produce their finest work.  These experimental beers range from “Chocolate Cherry Bocks” to “Deconstructed IPA variety packs” but back in 1999, to celebrate the upcoming new millennium, Sam Adams made 3,000 bottles of Millennium, a $200 dollar beer (yes, we didn’t accidentally add an extra zero there) that was 20% alcohol.  And the first bottle of it sold for over $4,000.

Here’s a dirty little secret about Americans who are really into craft beer—after a certain point, beer enthusiasts have tried so many different beers, and have so much disposable income after that second divorce, that they will spend anything for a beer if it’s purported to be super rare, or one-time-only.  The idea of paying so much for a single bottle of beer, albeit a tasty, alcoholic beer, is foreign to those of us who live near a liquor store that supplies vodka in plastic bottles.  Most of you who are that American mix of “alcoholic” and “appreciative of finely crafted alcoholic beverages” would rather just spend twenty bucks for a bottle of St. Bernardus chased with a Mad Dog 20/20, after all.

5—DUCLAW COLOSSUS:  21% ABV

This beer from the DuClaw Brewing Company actually clocks in at 21.92% alcohol by volume, but we’re not rounding up because we don’t want to understand how math works.  While most of us would approach drinking a bottle of this beer the same way we’d approach our first acid trip (make sure you have a friend to spot you, lock all the doors to ensure you don’t do anything you regret once you get out of your right mind, drink a lot of water afterwards) this Maryland brewing company decided that when you’re drinking one of the most potent beers available in America, you should try it, often, at different temperatures.  They tell you to try it at a 105 degrees to experience “new flavors and aromas.”  We’re not entirely sure how we feel about this.  We like our beer like we like our women—cool, intoxicating, and leaving us the next day.  Warming up a heavily alcoholic beer to “hot tub” levels seems…a bit strange to us.  Call us paranoid, but anytime someone has to put an alcoholic drink of ours in a microwave, we’re going to automatically assumed it’s either spiked hot chocolate, or it’s roofies.  Though, considering how most of these high gravity beers tend to taste like they have a lot less alcohol in them than they actually do, the roofie concept might not be so far off…

4—LAGERHAUS .44 MAGNUM ALE:  22% ABV

This one is pretty impossible to find…unless you actually go to the Lagerhaus Brewery & Grill down in Palm Harbor, Florida.  The beer is extremely regional, and seems to have been made by a place that doesn’t care to go into too much detail of what you should expect from their beer  (“It will give you an experience similar to a port”) but what does that matter?  It’s a beer that’s almost ¼ pure alcohol.  If you made someone a mixed drink with that much alcohol in it they’d assume you were trying to get them drunk so you could take advantage of their diminished inhibitions, and who are you fooling, that’s exactly what you were doing.

This beer is a Barley Wine, which despite the name is actually a style of beer, and it tends to be pretty high gravity.  We know it’s confusing, just trust us on this.  It’s like when people call a melon a “honeydew” or a Carrot Top a “comedian.”  Now, most Barley Wines tend to not be 22% alcohol by volume, but do you see us complaining?  No.  Well, you see us complaining that we have to go to Palm Harbor to drink this one, but otherwise, we are not complaining.

3—HERKIMER TORIPURU TRIPLE BOCK:  23% ABV

Individual brewpubs tend to be largely responsible for a lot of the items on this list, and while we’re frankly touched that individual restaurants would take the American initiative to make beers that can double as paint remover, we wish we could have an easier time finding these beers just so we can find a way to get our teetotaler friends who say “Okay, I’ll have just one drink” wasted due to semantic loopholes.  What we do know is that if we end up at the Herkimer Pub & Brewery in Uptown Minneapolis, we’re going to try our best to get this Strong Bock, which likely isn’t available as it was released last year in a limited quantity.  If they don’t have it, we’ll beg, bribe, and eventually resort to blackmail to make sure they make more of it.

Regardless of its current availability, this beer with “sweet dark fruit and rich cocoa tones” uses Japanese Sake yeast to create a beer that has an ABV figure that happens to be the same number as that of a certain basketball player.  Have you heard of Michael Jordan.  You might say this is the Michael Jordan of Bocks.  You know, one of a kind, impossible to replicate, addicted to gambling, and kind of an entitled dick.  Um.  That analogy sort of got away from us there.  Either way, this sounds delicious, and we want four of them, two of which will then be introduced in violent fashion to our toilet bowl.

2—SAMUEL ADAMS UTOPIAS: 27% ABV

After making their Millennium beer at 20% ABV, Sam Adams decided they might as well continue brewing high gravity beers in fancy bottles that they can sell for hundreds of dollars.  So in 2002, they released Utopias at 24% ABV, making a Triple Bock aged in scotch, cognac, and port barrels for a year, and sold it in shiny ceramic bottles for $100 a pop.  In 2007 they released their most recent variation of the beer, which came in at a whopping 27% alcohol because when you’re selling a beer on a semi-open market that’s twice as strong as just about anything else you can find, you might as well try to make it stronger the next go-round.  12,000 bottles were made in 2007, and another 9,000 were released in 2009, so while this beer isn’t always available, they do make a point to sell it on occasion (the price is now $150 because, you know, beer snobs will still pay for that).

While we appreciate a complex, super alcoholic beer from a pioneering large-scale brewery, our favorite thing about this product is easily the fact that this beer is illegal in 12 states.  Seriously.  When you make a beer so strong that almost a quarter of the states in America have to throw up their hands and go “easy there buddy, let’s not get ahead of ourselves” you know you’re doing something right.

1—HAIR OF THE DOG DAVE:  29% ABV

First of all, we want to go on the record as saying that Hair of the Dog from Portland, Oregon is one of our favorite names for a brewery.  Just, well done you guys.  Hair of the Dog Dave was first produced in 1994, and was a Barley Wine that was made incredibly alcoholic (29%!) by taking 300 gallons of a Barley Wine called Adam and freezing it three times.  Each time, the pure ice (extra, boring, non-alcoholic water) that formed would be removed, and eventually only 100 gallons of incredibly alcoholic beer remained.  It’s since been retired, but every once and a while a bottle appears.  Granted, it usually involves someone spending $4,500 for two of them, but our point is still technically valid.

Despite having a pretty awful name (seriously, you can’t tell where the beer name begins and the brewery name ends.  Giving a beer a name that’s just a normal, human first name is like naming a dog “Jennifer.”  There’s something slightly unsettling about it) we’re sad that we can’t find this beer without, you know, kidnapping family members.  We’re not saying we’d kidnap family members to get one of the last bottles of this 29% ABV beer, but we are saying we’d probably be more likely to do that then shell out $4,000 for it.  Do you know how much bourbon we can buy with $4,000?  We’re no mathmagicians or anything, but if you put us on the spot, we’d say infinity.  Infinity bourbons.  That’s a lot of bourbons.

Either way, even if the process of “freeze out all the non-alcoholic water in the beer” makes this beer seem more like a vanilla extract version of beer, we salute you, Hair of the Dog, for making a beer stronger than any other American has before or since.  Have a drink on us.

~American Media

A lot of our readers were born in the late 1980s and 1990s have never lived in actual fear of nuclear weapons.  Sure, we’ve all seen the 1950s cartoons that say you can survive a nuclear blast if you hide under a desk and also are a turtle, but for those readers who didn’t live through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and early chunk of the 80s, the concept of “actively fearing nuclear annihilation” seems less like “real life” and more like “Wow, 24 finally jumped the shark didn’t they.”

Of course, for those of our readers that did live through that period…that was pretty freaky, right?  Shit almost got real a few times there.  While not exactly paralyzing America with fear, the nuclear threat was always in the back of our minds.  Russia was a powerful and terrifying foe, and they really didn’t like us.  They only reason they didn’t slaughter us outright is that they knew we’d probably do the same in kind, and even with that mutually assured destruction in place, they were still considering it.

This is relevant because, for the first time in decades, America has actively been threatened with nuclear attack.  As in, “the moment of explosion is approaching fast” and “we have actually approved the use of nuclear weapons against your country.”  And no one gives a shit.  We’re literally talking “page four news.”  Why?

Because it’s North Korea, and North Korea is a bunch of clowns.  Does that sound a bit harsh?  Yes.  Are we a little pissed off at their hijacking of our website last week?  Well, sure.  But there are also numerous well documented reasons why no one is scared of North Korea.  Don’t believe us?  Here are five, just off the top of our head.

Five Reasons Why No One Is Afraid Of North Korea

While most people speculate that North Korea has largely been posturing for a variety of internal reasons, no one has been quaking in fear of North Korea, primarily because their recent history has largely been hilarious so long as you’re not a resident of South Korea living with 12,000 pieces of artillery pointed at you by an entitled psychopath, or are, you know, a North Korean “dissident.”  While most North Koreans live in abject poverty, and that sucks, the public face of North Korea is nothing but hilarious.  So human rights groups can hem and haw about the dire condition of some 23 million souls unfortunate enough to be born in that rat’s nest all they want, but the fact remains that prominent not-wanting-to-get-nuked activists all at least agree that we are in no way afraid of North Korea for a variety of reasons.  These include…

North Korea’s Propaganda Videos Are Accidentally HILARIOUS

When you’re making a video that tries make to your efforts seem heroic, and your enemies seem feeble and weak, you should at least focus on getting someone with a community college degree’s worth of film editing experience.  North Korea hasn’t learned that lesson, but boy do they love trying.  That’s why every time they release a new video, the response from the international community is a combination of “oh that’s cute” and “ha ha ha, oh man, hilarious.”

When someone threatens you, and you’re not even remotely scared, that person clearly lacks an intimidating presence.  If that same person spends money and time to make a video saying, “I will kill you, and this is how” and you’re still not scared?  That person is the most comically nonthreatening person in existence.  North Korea is that kid.

North Korea, in the past year, has released multiple videos where they talk about how they will destroy America.  The image above is from “Three-Day War” which shows Korean troops storming America, with the most impressive special effects consisting of stock footage of paratroopers jumping in the 70s overlaid on top of a picture of an American city.  Other videos showing America’s defeat include…

This is from “Firestorms” which has a narrator who sounds like a 13 year old boy trying to make his voice artificially deep talking  about, presumably, killing America with all the impressive weapons that Korea is seen using, which we might remember from back when C-SPAN showed footage from the first Gulf War on TV back in the 90’s.  While most of the video consists of actual footage, or stock photos, the fact that they chose to open with a painting of tanks shooting fire seems extremely depressing.  That’d be like one of our staffers making a youtube video at how great we are and starting it with a caricature artist’s depiction of us having sex with Kate Upton.  Which, come to think of it, is a picture we’re going to go and pay to commission right now.

This is a music video that’s basically saying “Hey, we will die for Kim Jong-Un.”  Which is a great sentiment to let your people know that, as hungry and cold as you might be, there’s a fat guy with a bullhorn and a cape who looks suspiciously like he’s made out of stone who is willing to let you die for him.

Aww, North Korea.  Even when you’re nuking us from space, you’re just so comically inept.

Their Diplomats Sell Drugs And Their Citizens Smoke Weed Erryday.

If there’s one thing that pot users and drug dealers have in common it’s that they tend to be poor at planning international military engagements.  Oh, and they tend to have access to drugs.  That one is probably an easier association to make.  The reason why we point that out is that North Korea likes to dip their toes in the drug dealing and pot smoking game so much that it’s hard to imagine them actually motivating themselves to start an armed conflict.  Say what you will about their tactics, or the size of their standing army, but it’s kind of hard to be afraid of the military of a country so hard up for cash they send their diplomats overseas with drugs with the task of raising funds for the national coffers.  Adding to this is the fact that the citizens and officials of North Korea supposedly smoke weed the same way Americans in the 50’s smoked cigarettes.  North Koreans are constantly getting high, and while it seems particularly cruel to give so many hungry people the munchies with nothing to munch, when you’re told that a country likes the gange that much you’d be within your rights to get the impression that they’re not exactly going to be that motivated as far as the “nuclear proliferation” department goes.

Listen, there are certain types of people who scare you when they’re on drugs.  If a country with nukes had a meth problem, yeah, we’d be terrified.  But doesn’t ever “don’t smoke pot” ad center on the fact that weed makes you lazy and unmotivated?  Have you ever heard of someone high marijuana biting a dude’s face off?  Have you ever heard a sob story about how someone had to blow a dude to get that next joint?  Of course not, so you’ll forgive us for not jumping at the threat of a nuclear armed nation full of Snoop Doggs.  Honestly, hearing that North Korea smokes so much weed just makes us think that they secretly spend their free time sitting in front of a TV laughing at videos of synchronized marches.

Their Idea of An Exciting Video Game Is Driving A Car Through An Empty Street

North Korea has a small but fledgling tourism industry, because if you’re a white office manager with some disposable income the only way you can make yourself seem interesting to people you meet at parties is if you can tell some jovial anecdotes about that time you spent a delightful week in a totalitarian nation while enjoying simple luxuries not afforded to the millions of starving people around you.  What’s that, you say?  They took away your cell phones for the week?  And there were some crazy large statues!  Wow, Frank, you’re so worldly!

Anyway, as a way to show how the unique and interesting qualities of Pyongyang, they decided to release a video game where you can drive through the barren, depressing streets of the city, picking up barrels of fuel and being constantly told to stop ogling the female police officer.  Watching an 8-minute video, the rules seem pretty simple.  The game ends if you run out of fuel, or if you hit three cars.  The latter would be pretty difficult to pull off, since if this video game is trying to let you know what Pyongyang looks like, then they’re succeeding (assuming Pyongyang is a desolated ghost town where there are only five taxis and one van in the entire city).

No matter what, North Korea has decided that this is what a “video game” should be.  So America, a country that’s favorite driving game involves carjacking and beating up hookers, should be worried about the actions of a country that makes you drive around picking up empty gas canisters and ignoring lady cops?  We didn’t think so.

Their Memorials Range From Crazy To Depressing

While many of you might think that this is a monument about the history of brutal penile torture, it’s actually how North Korea chose to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of their workers party.  While that seems like a semi-normal reason for a Communist country to build a monument, it’s pretty telling that this is one of the more sensible reasons that they’ve build a monument.  And one of the more normal-looking ones.

For example, there’s a monument that was made for the spot where Kim Jong-Il’s mom turned around when she realized she had forgotten to make lunch for Kim Il-Sung.   Let that sink in for a second.  They made a monument for someone going, “Oh crap, I forgot to make a sandwich for my husband.”  Even looking at a list of the more impressive looking monuments, it’s clear that North Korea builds things sort of like a seven year-old given an infinite supply of Legos.  Nothing here gives us a sense of “impending dread at the powerful infrastructure of our enemy.”  Instead it just feels like North Korea is that schizophrenic  trying to make the tallest sand castle at the beach.  Even when it ends up being impressive, it’s still sort of sad to watch.

BECAUSE UNICORNS GODDAMMIT

No, seriously.  Because unicorns.  Back in 2012, North Korea’s state media released a story about how they had discovered a secret hideaway that was the burial site of a unicorn that was ridden by one of the founding fathers of the Korean Goguryeo kingdom.  Of course, North Korea claims that this king, Tongmyeong, is an ancestor of Kim Jong-Un, but we fail to see how “our historic rulers used to ride unicorns” would really register as “badass” for anyone outside of the Brony subculture.

They can’t even do mythical steeds right.  Granted, if you’re going to make up a fake archeological dig (and to those of you saying “well, maybe it really is a unicorn skeleton from the past” you need to turn off your computer right now, sit in the corner, and think about what you’ve done) it’s not like you could have gone ahead and said you found, like, dragon bones or something…but they absolutely should have gone ahead and said they found dragon bones.  The long and short of it is, you gave your ancient king a sissy animal to ride.  So if the most badass fictional animal you can think of is a unicorn why should we be afraid of your equally fictional “nuclear weapons that can reach Washington D.C.”?

(but seriously don’t nuke anyone, you crazy people)