The "six dollar burger"...$3.95 is still too much

I don't, as a rule, eat fast food hamburgers anymore. Not since reading the article in Salon Magazine about a book that went into detail on the American meatpacking industry and McDonalds' practices. Most fast food beef is no longer terribly palatable to me; hamburgers especially so. But I happened to see a commercial the other day for what Hardee's called their new "six dollar burger"--a burger that is "just like the burger I had for $6 in a sit-down restaurant!" according to their advertisements--and for which they charge a "paltry" $3.95. It definitely looked appetizing on TV, so I figured why not try it out?

I needn't have bothered. It was a big ol' burger, all right, probably about a half pound or so...with lettuce, tomato, sweet pickles, that red kind of onion whose name I forget, and a slice of cheese...a decent burger for what it is. But the quality is still standard fast food--cardboard meat on styrofoam bun. At a cost of four whole dollars. Bleah. For about half that, I could get a much better burger of about the same size at Backyard Burgers, a "gourmet" fast food burger joint across town. And for about one and a half times that, I could get a more than decent real hamburger at the Springfield Brewing Company, with excellent fries included besides.

At least my curiosity was satisfied, and I don't ever have to buy it again.

"Like a rhinestone cowboy, getting cards and letters from people I don't even know"

Last night, I noticed a comment left on one of my posts by someone I didn't know. I checked, and noticed I'm on his Friends list. Well, neat--thanks for the links, modernangel and suppafly! I'm not going to be snippy about it like I've heard some people are. If someone wants to call me a friend, that's fine with me. I have few enough of them in real life as it is. :)

It's a little startling to look at your friends list one day and notice a couple of people have decided to list you, though. It's not too surprising, as after all I do plug my LJ in my email/USENET .signature, my Slashdot .signature, and my entry for LiveJournal on Everything2. I'm guessing, from things within their journal prefs or journal posts, that modernangel followed my link from E2, and suppafly clicked over from Slashdot.

I'm really quite flattered that folks think I'm worth regular reading enough to include me in their friends groups. I'll try not to disappoint. :)

---

Well, I just got a mass of coupons in the mailbox. I'll pitch most of them, of course, but there are a few that have potential. In fact, I'm considering a short drive to try one of them out now. As I haven't eaten yet today, and there's a restaurant I haven't yet tried not far from me...I think I'll eat lunch at Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits today.

Over the last couple of days, I've found one of my old computer game loves calling me back again--the variant of multiplayer Half-Life called Opposing Force Capture-the-Flag. I'm not the best at it, but I can usually manage a pretty decent score. The game appeals to me, I suppose, because it combines the free-form rough-and-tumble respawn-if-you-die nature of Half-Life with a goal/team oriented strategy, and adds a bunch of really nifty powerup items to boot. And it's got a server that usually has a large number of players around to play with. I only wish more of my friends played it. It's free if you have OpFor or Blue Shift, after all...

The mad personality tester strikes again...

Boromir If I were a character in The Lord of the Rings, I would be Boromir, Man of Gondor, proud heir to the Steward Denethor II, and elder brother of Faramir. In the movie, I am played by Sean Bean. Who would you be? Zovakware Lord of the Rings Test with Perseus Web Survey Power

(no subject)

You know what would be neat? A LJ Baconizer function, which would find the shortest link in terms of friends from an arbitrary LJ user A to an arbitrary LJ user B. Put, say, suppafly in one end and zamiel in the other, and see what the minimum number of hops required to link them both together is.

Of course, that would probably require a bit of processing time...but still, I think it'd be kind of neat. (If LJ already has something like that, let me know? :)

Grrr

What a day this is turning out to be. So I drive all the way down to Kansas and Sunshine, in the bitter cold, and find...no Popeye's there. The local business owner I checked with there said he'd heard a rumor of one being built there, but not seen anything about it. I can only guess that coupon sheet that claimed a "new location" there was printed back when they had intended to have one in place by the time it was distributed...or else perhaps I misread the sheet and there was meant to be a "coming soon" appended to the end of it.

I ate lunch at Subway instead, and drove back to my apartment, taking a quick moment to change into thermal underwear. It's getting to be that time of year again, when the wind slices right through ordinary clothes, especially if you're on a bicycle at the time. Was about ten minutes late to class--but fortunately, they were doing teacher evaluations that day. So I got in right as the fellow was leaving, and didn't disrupt the class by coming in late when he was trying to lecture. (Dr. Satzinger hates that.)

Now I'm sitting here in the next classroom; the class for the database project group is meeting today. The other two group members are in the classroom now, and since the projection screen is on, they could even read what I'm typing up here if they cared to. I had better be careful what I say. :)

At the moment, we're the only people in the classroom. And they just left, to go to the computer lab to do some work. At least, I think that's what they're doing; I hope they're not going to talk about me behind my back. I feel a little bad; they're doing most of the actual work for the project. I hope they aren't angry at me about that.