Contributor

The New Domino's Pizza Recipe: An Extended Taste Test Review From Both Coasts (And an Appreciation of Domino's Exquisite Online User Experience)  2010-01-22


Mary HK Choi: Really quick background question: were you prompted to eat Domino's because of their new ad campaign?
David Cho: Oh for sure, I'd been watching those commercials for the last couple of weeks.
Mary: Me too.
David: They make a really compelling argument!
Mary: Agreed. There's something about contrition that makes me want to throw money at it.
Mary: Was the line "When they said our sauce tasted like ketchup it broke my heart" what got you?
Mary: Because it definitely did me.
David: Not to mention the guarantee.
David: What percentage of people ever actually follow through with something like that, to go to the trouble of saying, "I'M NOT SATISFIED WITH THIS PIZZA, GIMME MY MONEY BACK"?
Mary: So from a business standpoint you respect their G also?
David: Yeah, I just like when brands prey on people's laziness by making promises that seem to mean more than they actually do. (READ MORE) 96

 

Flicked Off, with Mary HK Choi and Alex Balk: 'Nine'  2009-12-17


Nine, directed by Rob Marshall, opens in limited release tomorrow. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren, and Stacy Ferguson. (READ MORE) 75

 

Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper on 'New Moon': 'Teenage Female Desire Manifest'  2009-11-20

Mary: Yo. Did you see that mess last night?
Natasha: OMG I saw the shit out of it!
Mary: AND…
Mary: Break it down.
Natasha: Ok, first reaction:
Natasha: SWOOOOOON
Mary: Oh, seriously. Like, we MISSED him.
Natasha: And here's what I figured out. That shit is ABOUT RACE! Earthy hill people with their bare feet versus pale Europeans in robes. IT'S A CULTURE CLASH.
Mary: Dude, velvet robes that OPEN. It's an age-old culture clash. BUT the "cold ones" do have that one dude with dreads.
Natasha: Blacula! (READ MORE) 42

 

Fashion's BORING  2009-09-09

Holy yuck, stories like this one about 27-year-old, former model/fashion designer Abigail Lorick—who's BESTIES with the 'Gossip Girl' costume designer and is Blair Waldorf's designer mom's "ghost designer" and overall muse to Blair's style—make me hate fashion. Lorick's aesthetic is described as "feminine… elegant but playful; retro silhouettes in modern prints; simple in the front… decorative in the back. Little Red Riding Hood meets Audrey Hepburn-or what she calls the Lorick Lady."

How is this a thing? So let me get this straight: Her "look" is "pleasing"? Or "tidy"? Or "tweed in fall; organdy microflorals in spring" a.k.a. "nice"? Lemme guess, is the "lady" "back" for fall? Are the '80s in again/always? What is going ON? Isn't Lorick's line basically any bridge-ish price point everybrand? It's like Tocca meets Anthropologie meets Rebecca Taylor. Just say it's all super "what an Abigail would wear." Somebody bring me Contempo Casuals for Clueless STAT. 26

 

DC And Warner Bros. Strike Back With "Restructuring"  2009-09-09

Oh snap! In the wake of the big HUGE Disney buys Marvel news, Warner Bros. has created DC Entertainment, a new division with Diane Nelson (who does all the Harry Potter stuff) serving as DCE president and Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, to "return to his roots as a writer for DC and become a contributing editor and overall consultant."

Wow. Is it me or does it sound like he got shafted in the mix? I guess that's how comics rank in the Hollywood of the DC Universe. Sorta like how Superman is incredibly strong, can fly, and turn back time on planet earth but on his home of Krypton was just some dude. Whatevs, alls I know is, I hope they make a Commissioner Gordon movie with Gary Oldman and no Christian Bale because this version of the Batman cowl always makes Bale's face look fat and his "masked" voice sounds like he's choking on oyster crackers. 8

 

Gluttony with Mary HK Choi: Pocky Men's  2009-09-09

Last week's terribly important discussion of the US junkfood industry's consistently laughable attempts at strawberry flavorings resulted in one or two name drops of Glico's Pocky in the comments section by people up on their game. Pocky, for those who don't know, is a really thin, long biscuit stick far spindlier in diameter than a Grissini (those prepackaged breadsticks) but not dissimilar in texture/pallor and dipped in chocolate. (READ MORE) 38

 

Samsung Cell Phones Will Kill You Least Fast  2009-09-09

The Environmental Working Group, which is totally a real place and not like when you tell people you're an "architect," checked out the radiation levels of over a 1,000 cell phone models and confirmed what I've always suspected-Koreans are awesome and everyone should be grateful. SoKo company Samsung captured 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th with LG nabbing 8th place for lowest radiation emission levels but I'm loathe to report the Motorola RAZR (hisssssss Japaneeeeese), that paragon of canny design that ensures thick layers of face sebum be all up on as much surface area as possible at all times while possessing the acoustics of two Siggi yogurt cups and a bit of butcher's twine, is in second place. (READ MORE) 15

 

Gluttony with Mary HK Choi: Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms  2009-09-01

Despite people in the Awl offices FRONTING on these hard, and the movie tie-in on the packaging (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) being demoralizingly bad, these were not nearly as abysmal as the U.S. snackfood industry typically does strawberry. Strawberry Whoppers? Garbage. Strawberry Milkshake Double Stuffed Oreos? Chalky horrorfest. Basically what Hello Kitty's bones would taste like if you ground them with a pestle and mortar. (READ MORE) 17

 

Weedheads Perturbed about Weedhead Icon Shilling for "The Hut"  2009-09-01

The "Hut" (remember they dropped the "Pizza"? So if the Sunglass Hut jumps onboard, seeing as "sunglasses" are "too seasonal," it's gonna get awesome) has enlisted Jim Breuer as its new face, airing TV spots about their stuffed crust pan pizza with a side of 3lbs of pastascaryscaryglugglugphlegm. (READ MORE) 11

 

Iconic 'i-D' Cover. All Black Models. All in Black. Maybe to Where We Can't Tell Them Apart.  2009-09-01

I am GAGGING I love this shoot so much and the inside shots are gorgeous and a careening whirligig of glee. It's a triumphant thing that is happening in the fashion industry and shine like this is long overdue. I mean, last year Jourdan Dunn was the FIRST black model to walk for Prada in a decade. For shame, Miuccia. These girls-Jourdan Dunn, Sessilee Lopez, Arlenis Sosa and Chanel Iman are beautiful and I root for them individually. I LOVE for example that on Sessilee's blog it says her site is maintained by her and "her momager, Janice Celeste," because Janice is such a momager name. And even though the House of Style reboot on MTV felt like a bad idea and I have mixed feelings about the 19-year-old Dunn being knocked up and due this December, these black/Dominican/blasian ladies rule. BUT, is it just me or is going the Robert Palmer music video wallpaper route and making these PYTs look like identical fembots for the cover just not the move? If I had all the money in the world I would've styled them differently and gone the gatefold route. And diecut something. And used a 5th color (metallic) and spent 1.4 squillion Euros and driven i-D to bankruptcy and made historians pinpoint putting four women of color on the cover as the beginning of the end. Nobody give me a magazine. 19

 

Cancer Hates Lonely People  2009-09-01

A study published by the Indiana University School of Medicine found that people separated from their spouses have the lowest life expectancy of all cancer patients. "Sixty-five percent of married patients survived at least five years after a cancer diagnosis, compared with 57 percent of those who had never been married, 52 percent of the divorced patients and 47 percent of widowed patients. But only 45 percent of patients who were separated at the time of diagnosis survived five years." Thus, it can be concluded that cancer hates people in an order: separated, singles, the divorced, and then the widowed. Which makes sense, because this is the order in which healthy people feel bad for cancer people, with people feeling worst for rumpled widowers with young sons to the point where we can't even look at them. A companion study however, should be conducted to find the affects on life expectancy of carcinogenic persons' partners, as it could very well be that the cancer is battling and zapping the life power juice of healthy spousal tissue. A companion to the companion study should be conducted to find out if by this original (and since totally bastardized) immunological logic, twins unknowingly separated at birth where one twin is just diagnosed with cancer as the other dies of cancer, has the lowest life expectancy of them all. 9

 

Are Fashion Magazines Especially Sadface at the Newsstand?  2009-09-01

Digging deeper into the numbers we mentioned earlier, and in keeping with the intolerable suckiness that is the year two thousand and swine A.D., the Audit Bureau of Circulations report for the first half of this ugly year shows that fashion magazines were hit extra hard on the newsstands, mostly because everyone thinks the new sculpted platform heels for fall are ugly and the industry is fraught with frail people. Or were they? (READ MORE) 4

 

A Haiku FanFic  2009-08-31

Disney owns Marvel
Changed logo to Verdana
Internet explodes!!!

None of this actually happened. Disney is too rich to use the same fug font that IKEA circa now uses. 1

 

Marvel and NyQuil: Everything is Bad, Go to Sleep  2009-08-31

In the wake of the Summer of Death and the colossally major news that Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion (a number that means "death" in Cantonese and is therefore avoided at all costs-not in enumerations of 4, obvs-in addresses, car license plates, cell phone numbers, etc., and, cue ominous, chongy music) and because Mr. Nasir "Nas" Jones says that sleep is the cousin of death, we must report the (in some circles, equally) important news that the soporific in Nyquil (doxylamine succinate) is found in much higher doses elsewhere. Namely Unisom (25 mg per pill vs. 6.25 mg in a 15 ml dose). (READ MORE) 20

 

Wikipedia: Citation Needed. Only Sorta.  2009-08-31

So everybody knows that Wikipedia is a fun tool not to be used for actual, real research but a widget that makes nouns and verbs do entertaining things like when you ask an 80-year-old, first-generation emigré of a non-English speaking country why a certain episode of Entourage should go before another episode of Entourage in the grand tapestry of narrative arcs that is this season. But apparently, the online encyclopedia that everyone can modify is trying to, you know, change things. First they locked certain pages to where you can't just go and declare that Barry Obama only eats with tiny, baby cutlery like it was one time written somewhere about Victoria Beckham and/or Melanie Brown and now they're trotting out something called WikiTrust, which highlights the background of certain information, kinda like how Men's Health does when they want you to pay real good attention to which cities have the fattest people (eat them; not them!). (READ MORE) 6

 

Gluttony: Wawa Brand Mesquite Smoked Beef Jerky Original Flavor  2009-05-18

Do not eat: SnackMaster All Natural Gourmet Ahi Tuna Jerky.
Because: Pescatarians are to bulimics what vegans are to anorexics.* Go hard or go home. Extreeeeeme!
Do eat: Wawa brand mesquite smoked Beef Jerky original flavor.
Because: This and that one rollercoaster Kingda Ka are the only two reasons to ever visit Jersey. (READ MORE) 35

 

Gluttony: Drinking Nuvo And Getting Faced  2009-04-21


Do not drink: Cîroc.
Because: Its spokesman, AKA Sean Combs, AKA Diddy, AKA King Combs, AKA Cîroc Obama*, AKA Ptwitty needs to dial it way down. Also, it's made from French white grapes and that just feels racial.
Do drink: Nuvo.
Because: It's hilarious. (READ MORE) 49

 

Gluttony: Smiths Bacon Flavour Fries  2009-04-09

Mary HK Choi, our guide to the world of consumer goods, explains which bacon-flavored treats are the right ones. (READ MORE) 1