The Latest And The Greatest From The Mountain and Big Face Animal Shirts

Posted on August 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

“If you DON’T own the ‘Three Wolves Howling At The Moon’ shirt, you’re an awful person and I hate you.”

~Gandhi

 wolf shirt

The staffers of AFFotD have a soft spot in their heart for The Mountain, the geniuses behind the Big Face Animal shirts who still haven’t taken us up on our offer to graciously accept any free products they’d be willing to send our way, but that’s neither here nor there.  The Mountain is staffed by dedicated workers who, we assume, are a lot like us here in the America Fun Fact of the Day offices.  We imagine that they, like us, spend their weekdays recovering from the temporary blindness that inevitably occurs after swigging moonshine from a poorly maintained sill, whispering into the void “what now?” as the void whispers back “you need a T-shirt of a Gorilla in a spacesuit giving you a thumbs up.”  The void is wise.

The Mountain has perfected the art of T-shirts that are stylish, comfortable, and work surprisingly well as a makeshift pot handler in a mobile meth lab, but that doesn’t mean they’re content to rest on their laurels watching stacks of dollar dollar bills flood their P.O. boxes.  No, they are constantly striving to make new and exciting shirts because goddamn it, someone out there wants to wear a giant house fly face on their chest, and if The Mountain isn’t going to oblige them, who the fuck will?

So every now and then we like to bring up The Mountain catalog and list some shirts you need to be buying at this very moment.  It’s partially a public service announcement, partially a play to get free shit from The Mountain, and somehow the free publicity we offer actually counts towards our community service hours for some reason.  America!

The Latest And The Greatest From The Mountain and Big Face Animal Shirts

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America’s Craziest Fried Foods: 2013 Edition

Posted on July 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

“It’s been so long since we’ve talked about fried foods, my Cholesterol  levels have almost gone done to healthy levels.  Almost.”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

fried dollar

Fried food.  Crunchy goodness.  Grease’s children.  The culinary manifestation of a fat man punching himself in the heart.  Whatever you call it, battering food and dipping it in boiling oil is as American as apple pie, assuming that you battered the apple pie and immersed it in boiling oil beforehand.  We’ve documented the cutting edge of American fried foods six times before, but it’s been about a year since we’ve sat down and scoured the dumpsters of our nation’s state fairs to find the latest in delicious food that technically can be considered a murder weapon in several of our more obese states.   And that is far too long to go without terrifyingly complex fried foods.

So grab onto your nutritionist’s desperate letters urging you to, “Stop, for the love of God, do you have a death wish?” because things are about to get a little unhealthy.

America’s Craziest Fried Foods:  2013 Edition

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The Six Worst DIY Kits For Sale On The Internet

Posted on July 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

“OH GOD WHY DID I DECIDE TO ASSEMBLE THIS MYSELF IT IS INSIDE ME!”

~Step-dads everywhere

ladder fall

America is a nation filled with handymen, or so we kept telling ourselves when trying to explain the popularity of Home Improvement.  We’ve been building our own devices to make life quaint or awesome for years, but with the invention of the Internet came something terrifying.  Brooklyn Boundless Do-It-Yourself opportunities.  We used to see some wood, a hammer, and a handful of nails and say to ourselves, “You know, it’s Sunday and there’s no football on, I might as well come down with tetanus while making an rickety doghouse that’ll never be used.”  Now, we’re forced to embarrass ourselves as we spectacularly fail to make Precision Outback Savannah doghouses complete with a shaded porch because your wife saw all the lumber in the backyard and decided to spend the next three hours fucking around on Pinterest.

It’s a blessing and a curse, and by that we mean to say the internet is a blessing for master craftsmen with advanced engineering degrees who want to show off what they can do in a simple afternoon, and it’s a curse for the rest of us who usually have a hard time figuring out the diagrams on IKEA furniture instructions.  It’s also a boon for those of us who like to laugh at the latter group, but that’s neither here nor there.

Of course, with endless DIY products at our disposal, there are numerous helpful guides and kits that (usually for a cost just covering some of the basic supplies) can help you feel like a red-blooded, self-sustaining, uh, well let’s be honest, hipster.  Most of the people doing these projects are just hipsters.  When a woodworker makes an awesome bench, he doesn’t really spend his time posting about it online.  He’s probably outside.  Sitting on the bench.  And he’s definitely not making his own soap, because he’s not insufferable.

The people who buy, sell, or came up with the following projects, however?  Yes.  Absolutely insufferable.

The Six Worst DIY Kits For Sale On The Internet

 corona tv

This one’s actually not for sale, though you know you’d buy it if you could.

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Fast Food’s Most Insane Products Currently Being Tested

Posted on July 16, 2013 | 1 comment

“This is unholy.  This is an abomination.  I want ten of them right now.”

~You, with most of these menu items

fast food

Fast food holds a dear place in the hearts of all Americans.  No, we mean that literally, everyone reading this has a tiny chunk of a Big Mac lodged somewhere in their arteries, waiting patiently for the best time to stroke strike.  Do not fight it, and it won’t fight you.  Yes you want fries with that.

But as much as people have been focusing lately on how “unhealthy” and “disgusting behind the scenes” fast food places are, good old American gumption helps us stay strong by covering our ears and going, “La la la I’m not listening I’d like a Whopper with no onions please.”  And part of the reason why fast food is here to stay is that, like many Americans, they’re not satisfied with the status quo.  They’re constantly evolving their menu and testing out new products that can range from “surprisingly glorious” to “ah, look, a Double Down wrapper.  I think we’ve found our cause of death.”

Food items are not added to menus lightly (okay, sometimes they are, and it’s hilarious).  Honestly, did you think that this just fucking happened?  Of course not, you can’t roll out a Monster Thickburger to an unsuspecting nation without endangering the lives of the residents of, say, Columbus, Ohio first.  So we’re here to give you an inside glimpse into the minds of the fast food giants by letting you know what they’re currently testing in markets that you (statistically, probably) don’t live in.  Some of which you can’t wait to see on menus nationwide, and some of which will terrify you but you also can’t wait to see on menus nationwide.

Fast Food’s Most Insane Products Currently Being Tested

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Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

Posted on July 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

“I mean, sure, it’s good, but it’s BETTER when there’s booze inside of it.”

~American chocolate consumers

chocolate

America loves chocolate more than just about everyone.  Sure the Swiss might have us outgunned, but we still eat about 10 pounds of chocolate a year, per person.  We don’t want to look it up because we have a specific AFFotD search engine that locks your computer for two days if you try to search for anything about vegetables, but we’ll just assume that this means Americans eat more chocolate every year than they do salad.  You’d think chocolate is a relatively easy to acquire food item, but it’s actually surprisingly arduous to turn cacao beans into deliciousness—they’re naturally bitter, so they have to be fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted before their shell is removed and the remaining nibs are ground into pure chocolate in its “rough” form, which is then separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter, which is mixed in varying proportions, and often combined with sugar and milk.

If you stopped reading once you saw the word “fermented” while your mind drifted to visions of alcohol dancing in your head, well, it did for us too, so that’s totally understandable.  The key is, chocolate is everywhere, and mankind has been ingesting it in one form or another since about 1400 BC, and while America doesn’t lay claim to any particularly revolutionary adaptation of it (with the possible exception of Hershey’s) just about every straight man in America has bought chocolate to appease their stressed out girlfriends, and most of them have subsequently gotten in trouble for saying something along the lines of, “Hey babe, this should help with the PMSing, right?”

It shouldn’t be surprising that we have more types of chocolate than “dark, milk, and white.”  It’s not even surprising that some variations of chocolate might do a disservice to the original treat.  We’re not here to focus on that.  We’re here to tell you, the intrepid American who just finally finished the last of the base of your giant chocolate bunny you got for Easter, five of the strangest flavored chocolates in the world.  Because you’ll probably want to eat a few of them, and you’ll definitely want to purposely avoid at least one.

Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

keyboard chocolate

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America’s Grossest Soda Pops

Posted on June 25, 2013 | 4 comments

“*A constant horrifying stream of vomit*”

~American Soda drinkers

 the hell is this soda

America loves soft drinks so much that every region tries to call it something else.  Depending on your upbringing, you’ve spent your whole life drinking soda, pop, coke, soda pop, or fizzy drinks.  Some of you even grew up enjoying “plain flavored carbonated beverages” but that’s just because you were home schooled, and your parents were too embarrassed to tell you they had tricked you into liking seltzer water.  While carbonated water, the backbone of the soda industry, was first developed in 1767 by Joseph Priestley in, alas, England, America has long since used pop to fatten up our kids while keeping them obnoxiously hyperactive, with soda being available commercially stateside as early as 1806.

Pop is a part of our everyday life.  The average American drinks almost 45 gallons of soft drinks every year.  That sounds even more impressive when you realize that we only average 20 gallons of beer annually, so clearly someone must be doing something right in the R&D departments of old Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.  We love our colas, our lemon-lime pops, hell, we even drink Mountain Dew.  And while there are dozens, if not hundreds, of delicious sodas available at the nearest convenience to act as mixers for all sorts of deserving hard alcohols, there are some companies that, either on purpose or by terrible, terrible accident, make pop that is so repellant that even the Japanese have to take a step back and go, “Goddamn it America, you’re doing it wrong!”

Now’s the time to reflect and think about what you’ve done.  Because some of you out there have drank these sodas.  Willingly.  Ye Gods.

America’s Grossest Soda Pops

 crystal pepsi

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America’s 7 Craziest Doughnut Sandwiches

Posted on June 19, 2013 | 5 comments

“It’s magnificent.  It’s glorious.  I can see a beautiful shining light.  I’m heading towards it.”

~Every American With A Pre-Existing Heart Condition Eating Any Item On This List

donut sandwich

Doughnuts.  They’re so hot right now.  Doughnuts.  While doughnuts have been fattening Americans up under the guise of “Breakfast” for hundreds of years, they’ve recently experience a renaissance among those brave individuals who like to intake their sugary carbs in savory or alcoholic forms.  We now live in a world where any doughnut shop that doesn’t make a maple bacon doughnut is full of shit, and if you’ve never tried a doughnut covered in fruit loops you’re not legally allowed to vote in Oregon.

What once was just a simple fried dough confectionery for the masses has now evolved farther than it was ever intended, sort of like New Jersey.  But unlike New Jersey, the vast majority of the strange, bewildering doughnut products that we’re being exposed to are actually delicious, enjoyable, and something you’d consider taking home to your parents.  Your fat parents.  From the fat side of your family.  That you eat fatty foods with.  Just…fat…fat… JUST LISTEN THIS IS A LIST OF SANDWICHES MADE WITH DOUGHNUTS YOU KNOW YOU ARE GOING TO EAT THEM RIGHT NOW FAT FAT ALL AT ONCE FAT FAT FATTIE SOO-WEE SOO-WEE OINK OINK OINK!!!!! oh wow, Jesus Christ, we don’t know what happened there.  We started looking at our research for this article, and everything went red for a second, and when we woke up we were covered in jam somehow.  God, we hope it’s jam.

Anyway, the 2010s have been a revolutionary time for people who like doughnuts, but hate the fact that you can’t buy them with additionally unhealthy foods in the middle.  And they’ve gone out of their way to correct this oversight by making…

America’s 7 Craziest Doughnut Sandwiches

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Budweiser’s Five Worst “Beer Products”

Posted on June 12, 2013 | 30 comments

“More like Bud…WHYYYYYYY…uh, ser.”

~We’re not the best at puns

Bud Light- the worst

Budweiser is the number one selling beer in America.  Let that sink in, America, and think long and hard about what you did.  Do you do this just to make us upset?

Do you?

The reason doesn’t matter, all that we know is that Americans spend more of their money buying beer produced by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate than on beer that tastes like anything other than sadness.

We’re not joking, we’re pretty confident abject sorrow  is the active ingredient in Budweiser, and we got confirmation of this fact once we saw this Yahoo Answers post which is easily the most depressing thing we’ve ever read about beer.

While Budweiser is not exactly known for pushing the envelope past their “straw flavored spit water” standard, they do branch out on occasion and try to introduce new beers to an always-hungry-for-innovation market.

The most popular of these efforts tend to range from “Bad but people seem to like it” to “this beer is not actively awful.”  Even though they set a pretty low bar with all their products, they have managed to, time and time again, create terrifying concoctions.  Beverages that haunt all who drink them for the remainder of their days.

Here are five such monstrosities.

Budweiser’s Five Worst “Beer Products”

did you know that budweiser is german for shitty bear

Well, you know, apart from their actual beer products

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The Six Worst Marketing Gimmicks By Major Breweries

Posted on June 4, 2013 | 5 comments

“Sure it tastes like garbage, but it looks like a bow-tie so suddenly I want to drink it!”

~Americans according to Budweiser

budweiser can

You see that up there?  That’s the latest attempt by Budweiser to dangle shiny things in front of American beer drinkers in order to trick them into buying their watered down, rice-brewed beer.  The marketing strategy is simple—hey, people will buy any beer if the can looks all funny.  It’s a bow-tie guys!  The beer inside must taste like something other than wet cardboard and dirty barroom floors.

While there are craft beers that veer towards the “pointlessly novel” in order to entice novice drinkers (looking at you, Clown Shoes Brewery), they usually have a quality product they’re trying to introduce to the masses.  The largest domestic beer brewers, however, can’t make such claims.  They know they’re selling you cheap swill (that admittedly will get you drunk…eventually) but dammit, if the bottle is cool enough, maybe they can trick you to think otherwise.  That’s where we get…

The Six Worst Marketing Gimmicks By Major Breweries

 bud light lime

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The Five Worst Regional Pizzas In America

Posted on May 22, 2013 | 79 comments

“Pizza is a lot like sex.  When it’s good, it’s really good.  When it’s bad?  It’s still pretty good.  And when it’s God awful, you find you can’t stop screaming, and it takes years for the nightmares to finally stop.”

~You

 grossa

Previously, we showed you the five best regional pizza styles in America, with a hidden agenda of angering New Yorkers.  Today, we’re looking at the dark underbelly of pizza.  Because, as great as America is at making pizza, not everyone can get it right.  Hell, Brazil makes and eats 1.4 million pizzas every day, but even with all that practice they still do shit like put chocolate on it.  So as great as pizza is, it’s not always a winner.  The best pizzas?  Are glorious.

These pizzas?  Are terrifying.

The Five Worst Regional Pizzas In America

gross american flag pizza

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