Day: February 20, 2008

The Subprime Primer in Stick Figures

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Two email forwards tonight as posts.  My apologies.

This one will appeal to you finance fanboys out there.

The Subprime Primer

This is a 2.4MB PowerPoint presentation that walks through the basics of the Subprime crisis.  It’s extremely funny, if you are into stick figures that use foul language.  It definitely wins the award for best use of a Norwegian stick figure swearing in a PowerPoint document.  (I will consider others for the award, if you post links.)

Yes, please don’t download if you are offended by any of the seven word banned by the FCC on radio.  And yes, if you watch Deadwood on HBO, you will be more than OK with this deck.

The Worst Appetizer: The Chili’s Awesome Blossom

/ Adam Nash

My wife forwarded a really fun article:

Divine Caroline: The Worst Artery Cloggers in America

It’s a sick type of voyerism, I know.  Dietary rubbernecking.  You look at the nutritional stats and you go, “How could anyone eat one of these things?!?”

Well, in all fairness, I do believe that in younger days I did actually eat one of these: The Chili’s Awesome Blossom.  Check it out:

Worst Appetizer: Chili’s Awesome Blossom
2,710 calories, 203 grams fat

Chili’s is all sorts of wrong. The one and only time I ate there, I almost dove over the table and made the waitress give me my money back, it was so bad. It’s clear now I was just in a salt and sugar-induced rage. Even with their crappy food laden with sodium, fat, and emulsifiers, you’ve got to admire them. How they turned a simple onion into a day’s worth of calories and three days worth of fat is a miracle of food science.

Come on, that’s fairly amazing.  It’s not easy to hide 2710 calories in an appetizer.  Really, it isn’t.  Sure, you could serve someone a bowl of 203g of lard, but would they really eat it (that’s 40.6 teaspoons of Crisco, for those of you counting out there.)  I think it’s a fairly impressive achievement.  Given that it has been on the menu for over 10 years, it must be fairly successful.

I was somewhat suprised to see a Chipotle item on the menu.  Yes, I know anything called a Super Burrito is unlikely to appear on the Weight Watchers guide to Tex-Mex, but this was a little scathing:

Worst Meal in Tin Foil: Chipotle Barbacoa Super Burrito
1493 calories, 68 grams fat (22.5 saturated), 3,644mg sodium, 151 grams carbohydrates, 144 mg cholesterol

The other day my coworkers and I went to Chipotle. It was all shits and giggles while we were eating—“hey, pass the guac!” “want some more chips?!”—but then about an hour later, things went terribly wrong. Our stomachs hurt. Our mouths puckered. I drank about a gallon of water but couldn’t seem to quench my thirst. The bathroom stunk.

I think it’s ironic that Chipotle sponsors a biking team. No athlete would ever eat there.

You should check out the full article.  Lots of fun.