Category Archives: Insulting Foreigners

Because apparently things happen to countries that aren’t America, and we occasionally write about them. Doesn’t mean we have to like it, though sometimes we do begrudgingly offer our approval. Only sometimes though. Goddamn it, Japan, you’re doing it wrong!

Goddamn It…France? You’re Doing It Wrong: The France Five Mini-Series

Posted on February 11, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Wait, it’s a weird low budget version of Power Rangers and it’s NOT made by Japan? Oh, but they air it in Japan, okay that makes sense at least.”

~AFFotD’s Television Critic

 france five

We talk about Japan a lot on this site. The simple truth of the matter is, we fear what we don’t understand, and we don’t understand raw horse meat ice cream.

So when we did bath salts with one of those homeless people that sells bootleg DVDs off an old rug in Chinatown and we woke up to find the Wikipedia page for Shin Kenjushi France Five on our tabs, we were frankly shocked that this was not an instance of “Goddamn it, Japan.”

Because the show is French and it is mindfuckingly insane.

It’s technically a mini-series of six episodes but, in what is frankly only middle-of-the-road in terms of the insanity behind this project, it was aired over the course of 13 years.

That’s right, they had a single episode a year in 2000, 2001, and 2002 before taking a year off until 2004 and releasing the last two in 2012 and 2013, because clearly the French public was clamoring for a French Five Power Rangers spoof revival. There’s so much to take on here, and we don’t even trust ourselves to give you every delicious morsel of insanity, but we’ll do our best. Here goes nothing.

Goddamn It…France?  You’re Doing It Wrong:  The France Five Mini-Series

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Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, France, Insulting Foreigners, Japan

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The World’s Saddest Cuisines: Armenia

Posted on December 1, 2015 | 22 comments

“Oh, sweet mother of…”

~The average American looking at an Armenian restaurant menu

armenian food

We recently began a new article series where we described to you some of the most terrifying and, well, depressing national cuisines around the world. We started things off with Latvia, because we felt like you hadn’t had a good cry in a long time.

This time around, we’re going to take our xenophobic discussion of gross food that is weird and wrong compared to American food all the way to Armenia, where everything is soup, and everything is awful.

We’ll also be going pretty hard out of our way to avoid making jokes about that whole “Armenian genocide” thing because, as a general rule of thumb, genocide jokes are not funny and they never will be funny until douchebags who aggressively hit on their bartenders become their own ethnic group.

The World’s Saddest Cuisines:  Armenia

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Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Insulting Foreigners, The Rest of Them, The World’s Saddest Cuisines

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The World’s Saddest Cuisines: Latvia

Posted on October 27, 2015 | 68 comments

“This is what you guys eat for dinner?  Great, now I’m hungry AND sad.”

~Tourists in Latvia

 latvian food

America, in case you didn’t get the memo, is better than all the rest of you wannabe country motherfuckers out there. That’s just a basic truth, and if you disagree with it you’re either French or one of those jerkwads that writes those magazine articles about “happiness indexes.”

Why is America great? Our education and health care system? Okay, don’t be a sarcastic asshole, we’re asking a serious question here.

Well, many of you shouted all sorts of great things, like freedom, whiskey, and we’re pretty sure we heard someone shout “the world’s largest charcoal grill in Magnolia, Arkansas” which, um, that’s definitely unique but hey we’ll give it to you.

But if you ask us, of the many, many aspects of America we truly love, there’s one that tends to take a special place in our heart. Well, yes, booze, but we’re talking about something that has a special place in our heart because it’s physically lodged there.

That’s right, America’s tradition of culinary excellence. We make amazing food! Horrifically unhealthy, sure, but amazing nonetheless.

Which is what brings us to our latest series here at AFFotD. While America is clearly the pinnacle of the food world (sit down and shut up, France) there are other countries whose national cuisines, the food they grew up eating out of a sense of identity and history, are…well, pretty depressing.

So we’re going to take some time to tell you about countries who don’t just do food worse than us, they do food worse in us in a way that we don’t even want to make fun of them for it, we just feel kind of bad for the poor guys. Plus, we’re totally going to make fun of them.

The World’s Saddest Cuisines:  Latvia

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Posted in Insulting Foreigners, Strange Foods, The Rest of Them, The World’s Saddest Cuisines

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AFFotd Presents: America’s Attempt to Understand Cricket

Posted on July 16, 2015 | 1 comment

“The shit is this?”

~AFFotD’s Sports Ambassadors

cricket

We all know there are only four sports that really count—football, basketball, baseball when you’re drunk, and hockey when your team is in the playoffs.  Many try to convince America otherwise, but they’re misguided people who get excited about sitting down for two hours to watch 22 people run around without scoring a single goal, so you can cram your “soccer is the most popular sport in the world” shit right where the sun don’t shine.

Now, sure, every once and a while we pretend we like soccer, usually when our team is doing good, or when we randomly decide to expose FIFA corruption for reasons totally unrelated to them not giving us a World Cup since 1996, so we can at least sympathize with the people who have been brainwashed since birth into thinking that people kicking a ball to each other repeatedly on a giant field is entertaining, but we can’t say the same for what is apparently the second most popular sport in the world—cricket.

Cricket is bullshit.  But we don’t know anything about it.  So we’ve decided to try something new—we will comb through the Wikipedia page for the sport, and try to explain to you the rules, as far as we can understand, so you can learn how truly stupid the sport is.

AFFotd Presents:  America’s Attempt to Understand Cricket

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Posted in England, Insulting Foreigners, The Rest of Them

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William Walker: Not THAT Kind of Filibuster

Posted on July 7, 2015 | 4 comments

“Wait, who’s our president?  What?”

~Residents of Nicaragua in the 1850s

 william walker

Not all Americans were heroes, and not all Americans who did things that initially come off as badass were actually badass.  What we’re trying to say is, there’s a lot of Manifest Destiny stuff that went down in the 1800s that doesn’t exactly sit well with history that many of us might not be aware of, but it is possible to at least talk about the impressive brazenness behind certain actions without condoning them.

For example—did you know that an American was briefly president of Nicaragua for about a year in the 1850s?  That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?  Oh, what’s that?  Uh, why did that happen?  Oh, well….heeeeeee sort of wanted to take over most of Central America and turn it into a slave state affiliated with the American South.  So.  Yeah.  Not the greatest reason.  But still, interesting!  Let’s talk about it!

William Walker:  Not THAT Kind of Filibuster

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Posted in The Best of the Rest, The Rest of Them

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The Most Surprising Hard Rock Café Locations in the World

Posted on June 23, 2015 | 1 comment

“I will get a Hard Rock Café shirt from EVERY location!”

~The Saddest World Traveler in the World

hard rock cafe

Hard Rock Café is a music theme restaurant chain founded in London by two Americans, which was then purchased by the Seminole Tribe of Florida in 2007 and is currently headquartered in Orlando, Florida.  It’s a relatively friendly and tourist-dominated place that you’ve very probably visited at some point in your life, though if you said you could remember what kind of food they had there you’d be lying.  It’s known for having a shitload of music memorabilia (all together, they’re responsible for the largest collection of that in the world) and for the fact that old people seem to love to buy shirts to show what cities with a Hard Rock they’ve been to.

We think that Hard Rock Café is fascinating, but not for the reasons you’d suspect.  Tricking people into overpaying for decent generic food through gimmicks is, while extremely American, not something that we find particularly novel or new.  We’ve all eaten at a TGI Fridays, after all.  No, the fascinating part of Hard Rock is that, though it was founded in England, it’s really an American export that’s happened to establish locations in a frankly surprising number of countries.  No, seriously, there are 191 Hard Rock locations (if you include hotels and casinos) in over 59 countries.  That’s insane!  So, we figured we should go through the list of locations and tell you about some of the weirdest one, because we know that when you go to exotic and strange locations, you really want to sit down and eat a whatever the fuck Hard Rock sells while looking at a guitar Elvis played for a few weeks during some practice session in 1962.

The Most Surprising Hard Rock Café Locations in the World

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The Greatest Culinary Crimes Perpetrated by the British

Posted on June 9, 2015 | 14 comments

“I’m sorry, there’s no one here with that job title.”

~AFFotD’s Cultural Sensitivity Officer

british flag

America has always had an uncomfortable relationship with England, sort of like a second husband trying to be polite to his wife’s ex when he comes by to take his kid for the weekend.  Like, we’re friendly enough, but deep down we kind of suspect they resent us for taking what they once had.  We don’t say this to make any larger point about England and America, or even their alliance and history throughout the years, because nothing about this post is going to be diplomatic, smart, or even particularly well-informed.  We’re here to make fun of British food.

We talk about food a lot here, and for good reason—America is a land of delicious and largely unhealthy delicacies, and frankly we think it’s a little rude for you to respond to our eager descriptions of insane fried foods with something like, “Dear God, according to your cholesterol levels you should be dead,” Doctor Fredricks.  And we make fun of other countries a lot here, because we think America is the greatest and we kind of get defensive when people imply otherwise.  Oh that’s great, Switzerland, your country is the happiest in the world, well fuck off we have nukes and guns we’re better than you FOOTBALLLLLL.

Ahem.

More to the point, considering how often we talk about American food in all its wondrous incarnations, it’s important to remind ourselves that light cannot exist without darkness.  American food is the light.  British food is…well there’s a reason we make fun of British food.  This is the reason.  These foods are the reasons.

The Greatest Culinary Crimes Perpetrated by the British

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, England, Insulting Foreigners

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Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: Japanese McDonald’s

Posted on April 14, 2015 | 2 comments

“It’s not the worst we’ve seen…in fact it’s the best.  That’s why it’s so troubling.”

~Internal Memo to AFFotD’s ‘Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong’ Staff

Its actually from Richie Rich guys, trust us on this one okay

We’re going to be honest here.  When we decided to do our latest “Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong” segment on McDonald’s in Japan, we were really worried.  Hell, we’ve already told you about McDonald’s in Japan was only so happy to follow Burger King off into the “black-burger-buns” abyss last year, so we anticipated a lot of terrifying concoctions.  Google’s translation of the official Japanese McDonald’s website didn’t do much more to instill any confidence in us.

what

Um.  What?

And we went through the menu items, and the limited time items, and all that Japan McDonald’s has to offer, and what we found was…strangely not as terrifying as we feared.  The Cheese Tsukimi Burger is a chicken patty, which is boring but whatever, with two slices of bacon, a fried egg, cheddar cheese, and a ketchup/mayo sauce that we’d actually eat!  Japan manage to avoid every bad impulse they had to put pineapple on their Hawaiian Burger, and instead went with a ¼ pound burger with egg, bacon, cheese, and a bun topped with grated cheese, which sounds kind of great!  In fact, Japanese McDonald’s manages to create a surprisingly varied menu where most items look pretty tasty, and with most only going into “sorta weird, but not gross weird” territories of like, a hamburger with pastrami on it, or a savory version of the apple pie filled with bacon and potato.  We’d try those out of hesitant curiosity, as opposed to what we normally cover in our articles on Japan, which is foods we’d try out of masochistic fear.

But this is Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong, goddamn it.  And we have a reputation to maintain.  So yes, McDonald’s in Japan is largely interesting, and seems to be slightly more upscale than what we’re used to here in America, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have terrifying, horrific duds in their expansive menu.

Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong:  Japanese McDonald’s

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The (Terrifying) Black-Bun Burgers of the World

Posted on March 19, 2015 | 3 comments

“Nope nope nope nope nope nope.”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

black burgers oh no

Depending on what non-affotd corners of the internet you choose to spend your free time perusing, you might have heard recently about Burger King ramping up the gross factor on their food by offering a black bun, black cheese burger called the Kuro, or Black burger.  This burger re-issue (yes, they tried it before, more on that later) used squid ink and bamboo charcoal to create an all-black burger.  Black cheese, black ketchup, black soul are combined for fast food connoisseurs in Japan (because of course this is happening in Japan), leading to a whole slew of internet chatter of “lol, Japan is crazy” (which, duh) and “ew, this looks gross so I tried it oh by the way I’m also a white 24-year-old living in Japan currently while maintaining a blog about my travels.”

What we find most surprising about this burger has nothing to do with its mere existence.  When talking about Japan, nothing surprises us anymore.  No, upon doing some digging, we discovered that Japan’s Burger King does not have a monopoly on this particular brand of culinary insanity.  So, get ready to see a lot of unappetizing pictures of a type of food you once loved, because we’re going to delve into…

The (Terrifying) Black-Bun Burgers of the World

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Posted in China, Japan, Strange Foods, The Rest of Them

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The Fenian Brotherhood: Invading Canada, From America, For Ireland

Posted on January 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Ha ha, guys, what are you doing?  Come on, stop that.”

~American and Canadian Forces, 1866

fenian

For years, we’ve treated Canada like our polite, little brother to the North.  They’re friendly, they send over some comedians we like, and excluding the time they killed the Baldwin family in the South Park movie, they’ve been an adequate ally and neighbor.  We tend to forget that they’re technically still a Commonwealth of England, with the Queen on their currency and everything, but we don’t really care about that, since we’ve not really had a beef with England since they burned down our White House and we were forced to replace it with a much more kickass presidential residence.

Now, while Canada has never really done anything wrong by us, England does have its fair share of people pissed off at them.  Like, say, the Irish.  Oh yeah, the Irish have a very sticky history with England and, well, there’s no nuanced way to say this so we’ll just spit it out—a bunch of Irish Americans invaded Canada as a “fuck you” to England, which is just about the closest we as a nation has come to invading Canada since the early 1800s.  So that’s a thing, a thing that happened, in history.  Let’s talk about it.

That One Time the Fenian Brotherhood Kept Invading Canada From America

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Posted in 19th Century Factoids, England, Strange America, The Rest of Them

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