“Heh. COCK of Barcelos.”
~Our Giggling Copy Editor
Last week, we wrote an article that basically centered on the premise of “a lot of countries have silly or unusual national animals, and a bunch of these national animals don’t even exist, let’s make fun of them.” We held ourselves to one penis joke (heh, phrasing) and we can assure you we will not be so restrained this time around. Here are more of…
“Oh…oh no. It’s another Russia-bordering country. This is going to be so sad.”
~AFFotD’s Resident Food Critic
We know America does food better than any other country, primarily because when other countries make good things, we just steal it ourselves and make it bigger and better. We didn’t invent pizza, but have you had pizza in Italy? Our staff has. t’s, like, fine. America does it much better, with a few notable exceptions. Now, there are other countries that have great food as well (Italy’s still got us beat in the pasta game , for example).
And there are countries that have bad food. But we don’t care about any of those countries. No, we take interest in countries whose food is not just generally bad, but wholeheartedly depressing in ways that cling to your soul. We don’t know what caused our fascination with nations whose recipe books come pre-streaked with tears, but we’re not going to stop now.
Our latest nation with food that makes us so, so sad? The small Russia-adjacent nation of Estonia. Strap in, this is going to be a doozy.
“Wait, so this is depressing even for RUSSIA? Jesus.”
~AFFotD’s Food Critic
We very clearly love food here, but we also love calling out other countries for how bad their food is. Granted, it’s not particularly noteworthy to have bad food (cough, sup England) or weird food (how you living, Japan). But we prefer to focus on depressing food cultures. Like, yes, Iceland eats rotted fermented shark, and that’s gross, but the fact that they ferment everything because they can’t afford to import salt, or that the shark has to be fermented so that it stops being poisonous is legitimately depressing.
So we are here to keep our proud tradition of looking at rich, steeped culinary histories and going, “Oh God, that’s so sad.” Now let’s hop on a plane to the federal subject of Russia, Mordvinia, where things get depressing, even for Russia.
“Were you born without goddamn taste buds?”
~AFFotD Staffers reading The Top Tens’ list of Countries With the Worst Food
Occasionally, we have been known to read websites other than our own. It goes against our general ego-centric, ignorance-embracing lifestyle that we’ve worked very hard to foster, but it happens. Granted, most of the time we wander to the other darker corners of the internet, we find horrific, un-American things, so we try to limit how often we stray out, because the doctors have been telling us for years that we gotta start watching our blood pressure.
Anyway, this brings us to the purpose of today’s article. In researching for our lovely borderline-xenophobic series, The World’s Saddest Cuisines, we stumbled across an article from thetoptens.com that claimed to list the 10 Countries with the worst food in the world.
We were interested. Would they include Armenia? Botswana? Oh, God, Latvia?
What we clicked was, very possibly, the most wrong a top 10 list has ever been about anything in the history of the internet.
Fuck you, thetoptens.com, we’re going to write an article about how shit you are now.
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Insulting Foreigners, The Rest of Them
Tagged America, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, The World’s Saddest Cuisines, Top 10 List, Ukraine, Wherein
“This is what you guys eat for dinner? Great, now I’m hungry AND sad.”
~Tourists in Latvia
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.
Posted in Insulting Foreigners, Strange Foods, The Rest of Them, The World’s Saddest Cuisines
Tagged "milk products", America, beetroot soup, biešu zupa, bread soup, buckwheat, Cheese, grey peas (?), Griķi, Latvia, Latvian food, maizes zupa, Milk, peasants, potatoes, Russia, serfs, Sklandrausis, skābais krējums, The World’s Saddest Cuisines
Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Strange America
Tagged America, Carl Sagan, Cold War, Davy Crockett, Fat Man, Insanity, LBJ, Little Boy, moon, Nuclear Bombs, Nuclear Plans, Nuclear Powered Cruise Missile, nuclear reactor, nuclear weapons, Operation Argus, Outer Space, Project A119, Project Orion, Project Pluto, Russia, Space
“Everything fine. Did you hear that North Korea now make all men have same cut hair? Very crazy. Ignore Crimea.”
~American Fun Facts of Day Website?
“I make my own mayonnaise. I do this either because I am pretentiously gourmet, or because I am technically too fat to fit out my door and run to the grocery store. You decide.”
~It’s the second one
Imagine a swimming pool filled with Mayonnaise. No, seriously, picture it. You can’t get it out of your head now, can you? And be honest with us- you’ve never once thought about that. You’ve never wondered to yourself, “I wonder what it would look like if you filled a swimming pool with Mayonnaise.” And now you can’t stop thinking about it. That is our gift to you.
Yes Mayo is an integral part of America’s culinary tradition. While it shockingly was not invented in America, it clearly was invented ahead of its time, since it’s a product clearly meant for America. Come on, it’s 85% fat, and has 700 calories for every 100 grams of it. Holy hell, that’s glorious. So we’re going to only touch on the European-y origins of this thing, and focus on…
The American History of Mayonnaise
“The only thing more terrifying than the Russian menace is the outward displays of homosexual behavior exhibited by my son.”
~The average American in 1957
America loves nostalgia, just so long as it only gets in the way of us making changes that cost a lot of money. The power grid is horribly inefficient? No need to spend hard earned booze-tax money to fix it, it reminds us of simpler times! We can make air bags that make cars much saver? Why do that, it’s needlessly costly and besides, we all love classic cars! Baseball tickets used to be a dollar? Fuck you, let’s gouge the shit out of everyone!
The point is, alcohol consumption is the leading cause of moments of nostalgia (as well as incorrectly informing people that you love them). And this is America, so we’re drunk always (always). And as we polished off our third keg of 20 year Pappy Van Winkle (special made just for our staff) we started to get bourbon nostalgic, which as you all know ages incredibly. So we began looking through our stack of 1950’s articles from back when we were known as “The Informative American.” We’ve previously shown you an example of our bi-weekly 1950’s publication, which pertained to parenting, but we were drawn specifically to a 1957 article we published regarding Communism. More astutely, it was an informative guide for spotting out Communists in your local community. Maybe it was the high priced liquor, but we felt like we needed to share with you this unique blend of paranoia, McCarthyism, and surprisingly blunt misogyny with you, the educated, inebriated 2011 reader. So, without further ado, we present …
The Informative American’s Guide to Spotting Dirty Communists (originally published November, 1957)
Posted in The Informative American
Tagged America, Communist, Nostalgia, Pappy Van Winkle, Russia, The Informative American
“Even when you start accepting Canadians, you won’t let ME in?”
~Joshua “Hey, remember Dawson’s Creek, eh?” Jackson
As we’ve seen previously, we at the AFFotD offices have a series of checks and tests to ensure that those working for us are properly American. And when our first American test was unable to detect the distinctive traces of maple syrup in Seth Rogan’s Canadian blood, we had to make an secondary “Are You American” quiz to root out the pretenders and, well, Canucks. And the combination of the two tests worked extremely well, as we were able to spot and turn away Hayden “Well, he was Darth Vader, but he also was the shitty one” Christensen, Ryan Gosling, and Ryan “We get him confused with Ryan Gosling more often than we’d like to admit” Reynolds. But then, we received a phone call that completely changed the hiring policies of the America Fun Fact of the Day in ways that still has the offices deeply divided.
Jason “Made sweet, grunty, outdoor love to Amy Smart in Crank” Statham called and asked if he could be an AFFotD foreign correspondent. We’re pretty sure that concept is an oxymoron, but then again we don’t know what oxymoron means (…someone too dumb to breath?), but it did lead to a series of lengthy meetings. And by meetings, we mean a 48 hour booze party. When we woke up, we had a series of voice mails from Angelina Jolie asking for us to stop calling or she’d file a restraining order, and Statham was in our offices to thank us for accepting his application. We don’t remember calling him, but apparently we did. An excerpt of the voice mail message he played for us is listed below.
“Heyyyyyy Transporter 2 guy! Hey, it’s the America Fun Fact…urp… of the Day offices here. Tittays! Wooo! Hahaha, dude dude stop it, I’m calling the bald dude from those Guy Ritchie movies. Hey, shhhhhh guys, I’m on the PHONE here, Christ. So, listen, like, you’re not American but you do kick ass, like, you know, Americans do, it’s how we doooooooooo. So you can’t be on the staff man, but you can be like, our British dude. Like, the resident British dude, or yeah, what you said, the four lane Coors despondent. Yeah. Yeah… I’m gonna, just, like, rest my eyes for a bit…”
Forty minutes of silence followed, but the evidence was clear. We had hired a foreign correspondent doohickey. And really, if anyone could have swayed us, it would have been Statham. We added Hugh Laurie to that category shortly thereafter because, dudes, Dr. House, seriously.
But in order to add the appropriate foreign correspondents, and make sure that, despite their “born in another damn country” handicaps, they still have enough American traits to at least keep us informed of the latest crazes in Deer Kickboxing, we needed to create a new, separate test. One that could determine the Americanness of an individual who was not technically American. It hurt our brains to think about it, but that might just be the hangover.
And here is the fruit of our labors, the “Are You American Enough To Be Called An Honorary American” Quiz. You can keep score at home. A– is worth 0 points, B- is worth 1 point, C- is worth 4 points, and D- is worth 5. Here we go again.
Posted in America Quizes
Tagged Africa, America, Amy Smart, Are You American Quiz, Australia, Booze, Canada, China, Chinese Double Agent, Cricket, Eastern Europe, England, France, Guy Ritchie, Hawaii, Hostel, Hugh Laurie, Ireland, Jason Stratham, Karl Marx, Mike Adams, Mike Adams is a Double Agent, Polo, Russia, Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, Seth Rogan, South America, The Health Ranger, The Transporter
America Fun Fact of the Day 