Tag Archives: England

British Sandwiches, Ranked From Best to Worst

“Oh God, we have to talk about British food again?”

~AFFotD’s Resident Food Critic

food spread

We all know the stereotypes about the English when it comes to food. British food is bland, boring, weird, bad, and their teeth are snaggled as fuck. Granted, the teeth thing has nothing to do with their cuisine, but any time you have the opportunity to make a British dentistry joke, you make it, ‘cause that country’s got some broke-ass grills.

Now, it’s never good to encourage or propagate stereotypes…except for the fact that, as we’ve previously established, British food absolutely adheres to these stereotypes.

That isn’t to say that all British food is bad, or that they haven’t contributed some important culinary traditions to America. On the contrary, they’re responsible for one of the best portable meal options that Americans have at their disposal—the sandwich.

Yes, referred to by some as the Britain’s most noteworthy creation, Americans have the English to thank for all their best bread-laden treats. Jimmy Johns, Jersey Mikes, yes, even Subway for those among us lost their taste buds in a fireworks accident, none of these lunch and sometimes sad, lonely dinner options would be available to us if not for the motherland to our east.

Truly, the existence of sandwiches (for America to, naturally, improve upon) is a gift, and to return the favor, we are here to list an extensive list of British sandwiches, ranked from their best offerings to their saddest, most pathetic. Because if we wanted to write an article just about good British food, well, that article would have to be real fucking short, wouldn’t it?

British Sandwiches, Ranked From Best to Worst

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The Six Most Expensive Cheeses in the World

“Oh wow, I’m sure that is very delicious.  *continues eating a string cheese*”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

wheel of cheese

Money is a weird thing.  People slave for it, they kill for it, they fight wars for it, but as soon as you get it you turn around and you’re that asshole who’s spending $12,000 to have a chef make a pizza topped with caviar and lobster in your house.  That dichotomy might be why we here at AFFotD are so perversely fascinated at the kinds of people who spend ungodly sums of money for particular items.  Sure, we’ve covered expensive yachts, which are inherently a waste of money, but it’s also incredible how much people have wasted on vodka, hamburgers, hell, even beer.

Normally (with the exception of our beer article) these products are expensive for pointless “look how big my dick is” reasons.  Anything can be expensive if you fill it with diamonds or cover it in shaved gold, that’s just pretentious and obnoxious.  However, sometimes, people spend more money than they should on items because they actually believe it to be top quality.  We’ve seen this, for example, in our discussion of expensive whiskeys—while there are some bottle gimmicks at play, these six figure bottles of alcohol at least represent some of the best whiskey in the world.

With that in mind, we’ve put our focus towards a food that we love but that can also manage to be expensive for a variety of fairly unpretentious reasons—cheese.  Cheese is wonderful in general, but there are huge swings in qualities between varieties.  You can have cheap American cheese for a few nickels per slice, or you can fancy decadent cheeses that’ll set you back twenty dollars for a small wedge, and you’ll be fully aware of the difference.  A lot of cheese comes down to preference, but there isn’t a lot of pretension here.  So that’s why we decided to look into the most expensive cheeses in the world, to look at something that’s expensive due to its quality and scarcity, and not because some asshole decided to toss gold and truffles in there.

Okay, well, two assholes on the list did that, but the rest are legit.

The Six Most Expensive Cheeses in the World

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AFFotd Presents: America’s Attempt to Understand Cricket

“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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The Greatest Culinary Crimes Perpetrated by the British

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

“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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The 1778 American Invasion of Whitehaven, England

“Yeah I’ll invade England, whatever, I do what I want, you ain’t the boss of me.”

~John Paul Jones

whitehaven

Considering that we wouldn’t have ended up becoming a country if the end result had gone a different way, it’s surprising how little about the Revolutionary War the average American is aware of.  We know about the Declaration of Independence, and Concord and Lexington at the start of things.  We know Bunker Hill.  We know that Benedict Arnold was an asshole, and that Nathanael Greene was a badass, and that Yorktown pretty much sealed the whole deal for us.  But apart from the founding fathers, and some iconic imagery of George Washington, when we think of the American Revolution we think of the early battles up until, say, Saratoga…and then, us eventually winning.

There were four years of war between Saratoga and Yorktown, and in general our history books kind of gloss over that period.  Pretty much the only people talking about that time period were, say, the screenwriters for The Patriot, and even with that you’d not immediately recall that the climax of that movie was 1781’s Battle of Cowpens.  We bring this up not to shame our history teachers—we get it, there’s a lot of important stuff to get through, and you might as well focus on the greatest hits—but rather to remind America that there was a lot of badassery going down in the American Revolution that gets swept under the rug.  We’re here to lift up that rug and show you those awesome, awesome dustballs.

Let’s talk about the time America invaded England.

The 1778 American Invasion of Whitehaven, England

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Wherein AFFotD Scoffs at the Attempts of British Tabloids to Critique America’s Culinary Practices

“Guys, we need to be better.  We need to do better.  We should have jumped on these limey bastards the moment this garbage was published!  I know it was around the Fourth of the July, and I know we spent the next three months blackout drunk, NO EXCUSES!”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt

 union jack

Listen here, faithful readers.  When we started this website, we had one very important goal—find a way to get free alcohol sent us to while breaking a few financial laws by listing ourselves as a tax-exempt non-profit.  But once you make a name for yourself, and it’s all, “Oh, Johnny Roosevelt, start a newsletter” this and “you know the internet is a thing now, people need to hear from you” that, and we have to deal with mission statements and being sober enough to press a button that says “Publish.”  It’s all very hard work, and we blame our Editor-in-Chief—we wouldn’t even exist today if he hadn’t stuck his nose where it didn’t belong.

watergate johnny roosevelt

Um, if anyone asks, we were, uh…doing some undercover investigations.  Yeah.  That’s it.

We mention this because, lately, we’ve been focusing a lot on “this alcohol is crazy” or “woahhh easy there, M&M flavors!” but we’ve been ignoring one of our founding principles.  Making fun of foreigners.  And in these increasingly divisive times, shouldn’t we be focusing less on what makes all of us different, and focusing more on making fun of what makes people in like, goddamn Europe different?  Have you ever seen lederhosen?  Ridiculous!

And while we were examining our past with an eye fixed firmly on the future (read as—a night where you sorta end up in one of those melancholy drunk moods) we stumbled across this little article from the British tabloid/reason-for-hundreds-of-lies-your-facebook-feed-has-told-you, Metro.  The article in question?

metro title

Oh you cheeky buggers.  Wait, no, that’s the quaint British way of saying what we really think.  Let’s Americanize up our reaction to this article just a tad.

You motherfucking sons of cockrashes.

There we go.  That’s much better.  Anyway, it’s been a while, so time to take apart this argument, one by one.  Because, Jesus, if we wanted to take food advice from the Brits, we don’t have a way to finish that analogy because no one in the history of cuisine, since the dawn of man where we as a species realized that cooking food makes it less likely to carry disease, has anyone ever wanted to take food advice from the Brits.

gordon fucking ramsey

Well, sure, okay, but yelling doesn’t count as advice.

Anyway, let’s take this article to pieces.

Wherein AFFotD Scoffs at the Attempts of British Tabloids to Critique America’s Culinary Practices

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The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

“I think my heart attack is having a heart attack.”

~Oh God, Ordering Seconds Was A Horrible Idea

thats a giant burger

Many foreigners visiting America find themselves surprised at the amount of relatively fit and attractive people they can see on the street.  In their mind, the typical American is fat, trudging around in clogs with grease stains on their shirt, probably eating a whole pizza right out of the box while they’re walking to the gun store.  Instead, they find that Americans come in all shapes and sizes, and as much as restaurant portions seem larger than they’re used to, and the bread tastes much sweeter than anticipated, America’s culture of excess is largely confined to a very small but visible minority of people and restaurateurs who are fucking insane and are hellbent on cramming as many calories into your maw as is humanly possible before your heart explodes and showers the room with bacon bits like some Lovecraftian horror version of a piñata.

Naturally, our job is to help spread the gospel of this brave minority, these innovators who find ways to put a week’s worth of calories on a plate in front of you, these soldiers of fortune who push us to new limits, pushing our faces down into greasy heaps saying “eat your slop little piggies eat your slop!”  And while we do our best to make each meal as unhealthy as possible using a variety of methods, one of the most time-honored and respected approaches involves the creation of hamburgers so excessive and absurd that the mere sight of them is enough to drive nutritionists to commit hara-kiri.

But we’re no amateurs.  Sure, we could tell you about people who go to fast food restaurants and construct their own caloric monstrosities, or we could point out various chain restaurants’ burgers that double your daily allotment of fat,  but that’s child’s play.  If you really want to grab our attention, you’ve got to make something so obscene that even our own staff would have to take pause before diving in.  But dive in we shall, because this is America, and we’ve always wondered if heart attacks really are as painful as they make it look on TV.

The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

bacon-cheese-pizza-burger

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The Ten Longest Films Ever Made

“Man, and I thought Lord of the Rings was too long…”

~American Film Critics

lady clock

We like our movies like we like our sexual encounters—brief, anonymous, and preferably ending with you sobbing uncontrollably while watching Ryan Gosling kiss another woman.  Whether we’re watching Nicholas Sparks play out his latest sexual fantasy of star-crossed lovers being separated for 50 years by dire circumstances only to die of cancer the day they’re supposed to meet again, or someone gave Michael Bay $150 million to be the pyrotechnic version of Bamm-Bamm Rubble, American films are the world’s primary source for laughter, entertainment, and taking a brief respite from our bleak, miserable lives to watch Brad Pitt casually eat something while pretending we’re his friend.

There was a time when epic sagas were the norm in Hollywood, which is why Ben-Hur is over three-and-a-half hours long, and also why most of us never saw Ben-Hur once we were informed that the film was 212 boobless minutes.  Nowadays, we like our movies shorter, more action-packed, and Anne Hathaway naked-ier.  Yes, we’ll sit through the occasional three hour opus, but that’s about as long as we’re able to physically sit still without our ADD kicking oh hey look there’s a bird.  Besides, we can’t waste all our free time watching a single movie.  We have things to do.  There are bars literally just outside the theater, taunting us.

Yes, we know how to squeeze $200 million into a handy 90-minute package, but we’re America.  We invented, perfected, and then perverted everything you know and love about modern cinema.  Other countries don’t quite get the hint, which is why you see places like China making 14-hour films.

And that’s not even one of the ten longest films ever created.  Since we at AFFotD are public servants, we’re going to save you the trouble of knowing which impossibly long films to avoid by listing off the ten films with the longest running time.  And since we can’t imagine a world where people make day-long movies without something terrible and dark having happened in their childhood, we will also inform you what life-ruining tragedy must have happened to the countries of the world that would actually sit through these exercises in torture.

The Ten Longest Films Ever Made

 Die hard

Because if you’re going to stare at a movie screen for 14 hours, you’d better damn well be watching all the Die Hard movies.

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AFFotD Summer Olympics Viewing Guide

“J-I-N-G-O and Jingo was his name-o!”

~Olympics!

Every two years, Americans gather around their television sets to root for a bunch of sports that are either stupid but fun (Winter) or largely stupid (Summer) with the single goal of flipping the bird to every other country while saying, “We’re better than you in every possible way.”  The Olympics are beautiful, and the closest we can come to Manifest Destiny without the ACLU being all up on our asses.  It also helps remind us why China is a terrifying force who we have to defeat, lest they get cocky and we find ourselves in a Red Dawn situation.

As the Summer Olympics come and pass, and everyone spends two weeks pretending to care about gymnastics, running, and swimming, we are here to give you a handy guide of what American sports you should enjoy during the Olympics, and which sports you should avoid at all costs.

AFFotD’s Official Summer Olympics Guide

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