Muslim-Chicago Secret Government Just Making Up These Jobs Numbers Now, Alleges White Man. (That white man being Jack Welch.)

YOU get a weekend and YOU get a weekend and YOU get a weekend. Also there are still some New Yorker Festival tickets! (On Craigslist.)

by Emily Carson

While recently you were treated to a taste test of British candies — a celebration of the ways these quality chocolate goods can tap into the pleasure centers of taste and nostalgia — this exploration is of an entirely different sort. Irish junk food comes in many weird and marvelous forms. Generally put, these foods lack the decorum you’ll find in their more conservative British competitors. Collected here are seven of the most appealing and startling of the snack follies past and present that grace the shelves of our convenience stores. Should you have the chance to visit the Emerald Isle, in this mix you’ll find some guaranteed teeth-rotters to try and some to avoid (looking at you, Jedward Bar).

TK RED LEMONADE

TK Red Lemonade, a phenomenon that exists only in Ireland, is synonymous with farmer’s lunches and dodgy drinks mixers. It tastes just like normal lemonade but with an extra kick of enigmatic artificial sweetener that leaves you confused more than quenched (“is that lemonade mixed with… some decaying cola candies?”). It’s a taste that harkens back to childhood birthday parties or that night you drank ‘Jameson and Red’ and ended up at a rave in a garden center.

There’s an urban myth that Red Lemonade was banned in the European Union due to its color additive being carcinogenic, and in the weeks leading up to Halloween it’s sometimes relabeled as ‘Witches Brew.’ And yet this drink is often listed as one of the things Irish ex-pats miss the most about Ireland, and to them I would say: exactly how poor was your diet?

HUNKY DORYS BUFFALO FLAVOR

While British crisp companies might prefer to crowd source possible future flavors, over in Ireland the lads at Hunky Dorys had the courage to pluck a crisp flavor out of thin air, nevermind if it had little to no relevance to the modern consumer. ‘Buffalo’ flavor, according to the packaging, is for those of you who aren’t afraid to ‘get your hands dirty, to graze the occasional knee. You laugh in the face of indoor plumbing.’ Which is possibly a clever marketing way of getting around the fact that there is no possible way to discern what exactly ‘Buffalo’ flavor is beyond the taste of Potassium Chloride mixed with arcane ‘spices.’ The allergy information helpfully informs you that ‘Buffalo’ crisps ‘don’t contain Kryptonite.’ All that said, I did just consume an entire packet from the comfort of my own bed, and I would highly recommend it.

THE JEDWARD BAR

The Jedward Bar is essentially the perfect chocolate-based embodiment of the absurd. It combines two of the most incompatible candy-elements: chocolate and popping candy. The packaging makes use of the non-word ‘Jeadly,’ a cruel misappropriation of the Irish slang ‘Deadly,’ meaning something that is awesome. And yet when you get the first pernicious crackle at the back of your throat as you try one, you’ll realize that there’s nothing awesome about this bar.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Jedward, they are identical twin performers of questionable talent who have represented Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest for two years running. They are responsible for tweets such as this:

And videos such as this one. I would liken them to a cross between troll dolls, Aaron Carter in the 90s, and unlicensed brain experiments. The fact that they have been honored with a chocolate bar is mind-boggling.

MEANIES

Meanies are what children would eat in a dystopian vision of the future penned by Roald Dahl. Have you ever seen a mascot more terrifying? Meanies used to be readily available throughout the UK, but now their sales are confined mostly to Ireland, due, one imagines, to their lack of aesthetic appeal and unpopular choice of flavor: pickled onion. Nevertheless, terrible appearance and taste aside, you’ll often see Irish people happily chowing down on these malformed monster claws. Wikipedia describes Meanies as attempting to “fill the same niche as products such as crisps,” as if they’d been created as part of some sort of post-apocalyptic food substitute effort. These corn gargoyles remain popular for a reason though and that is because pickled onion is the flavor you never knew you loved, trust me on this one.

WILTON’S MINT CRISP

Wilton’s Candy is the wonderful company responsible for Macaroon Bars, Klipso Bars, and, my own personal favorite, the Mint Crisp. Far from the flashy packaging of the snack food giants, I like to think that the humble Mint Crisp is probably molded, packaged and distributed by one extended family from their house in the Irish Midlands. Wilton’s enjoyed their heyday as a stalwart on the treat scene back in the 80s, and it appears that they never quite got back their dominance in the sweet rat race. This is unfortunate as they offer the ideal mix of chocolate and minty freshness in a fun size. The wrapper might be a bit like using Comic Sans in an important business presentation, but, like every moral fable taught you, it’s what’s inside that counts and that is no doubt what is keeping these guys in business.

TAYTO

Tayto crisps, one of the most pined-after snacks of ex pats, are so popular that their mystical ambassador Mr. Tayto has run a false presidential campaign, released his own autobiography, and has been honored with a theme park. This particular packet features a resplendent Mr. Tayto alongside a promotion for the Irish Football Team. The names of some of the players appear to have been shoehorned into the text of the packet at various intervals, which is one of the most bizarre marketing strategies I’ve ever seen. Sour Cream and Dunne’ion? Sunflower Doyle? I bet the marketing team is reclining in Tayto Towers right now, laughing to themselves saying, “I think we really nailed that one boys, really nailed it.” Lucky for them their cheese-and-onion variety is unparalleled in the Irish crisp market, allowing them to pull ludicrous marketing stunts like these without repercussions.

THE LANGER BAR

Last but not least is the most recent addition to Ireland’s roll-call of curious confections: The Langer Bar. This chocolate treat hails from Cork, in the south of Ireland, where, in the vernacular, a langer is either a disagreeable person — or a penis. The bar has already garnered lots of attention, in part for its name, in part for its rich taste. As these photos show (one is above), the bar has been spotted all over the world. However, retailing at €3.25 you’re really paying for the name. Only in Ireland would you find a chocolate bar that essentially goes by the title “The Penis Bar” receiving mass acceptance. If you ever meet someone from Cork be sure to cite this slang for instant ingratiation.

And so ends your guide to the exciting and unnerving world of Irish treats. Your first port of call upon setting foot in Ireland might naturally be a pint of Guinness, but why not try a packet of Meanies or a Wilton’s Mint Crisp. If possible skip the Jedward bar lest they continue to offend our sensibilities with their branding schemes. These products and our dedication to them are testament to both our unrefined palate and unhinged national psyche. Just follow Jedward on Twitter for proof.

Related: Six British Candies: Which Tastes Best?

Emily Carson is an attempted full-time working person and part-time writer living in Dublin. You can read more from her @ESCarson. Langer Bar photo courtesy of WorldIrish.

★ The morning fog lifted but the spirit of the fog remained: grayness, dampness, heaviness. Opacity or its absence was the least of it. The sidewalk along the construction site was smeared with wet grit. The thick air held smells in pockets and concentrated them, one amplified odor up against the next like bright colors on the map of Europe. Even inside, even at night, the air was stifling.

Thursday, October 4

Arizona -1.5 At St. Louis

The Cardinals still are
Undefeated but seem ripe
For a huge letdown. PICK: RAMS

Sunday, October 7

Atlanta -3 At Washington

Matty Ryan used
to bull’s-eye womp rats in his
T-16 back home. PICK: FALCONS

At Pittsburgh -3.5 Philadelphia

Michael Vick is one
Sack away from becoming
A McRib Sandwich. PICK: STEELERS

Green Bay -7 At Indianapolis

Colts coming off a
Bye week rested and ready
To keep this game close. PICK: COLTS

At NY Giants -8.5 Cleveland

If the Giants lose
To the Cleveland Browns fans might
Start a Tebow chant. PICK: BROWNS

At Minnesota -5.5 Tennessee

Christian Ponder sounds
like the part of sex where you
stop a while and pray. PICK: VIKINGS

At Cincinnati -3.5 Miami

Miami plays well
enough to lose each game at
the very last minute. PICK: BENGALS

Baltimore -6 At Kansas City

“It’s a Trap!” says the
Great Admiral Akbar. Bad
week to be Big Bird. PICK: CHIEFS

At Carolina -3 Seattle

Admire Seahawks’
pass rush, but Cam Newton gets
to third on first dates. PICK: PANTHERS

Chicago -6 At Jacksonville

Chicago’s defense
Will get tired catching all
Those interceptions. PICK: BEARS

At New England -6.5 Denver

Peyton Manning shows
up naked in Tom Brady’s
Giselleless nightmares. PICK: BRONCOS

At San Francisco -10 Buffalo

Take the points, bettors!
Niners won’t shut out the
Hirsute Harvard Hucker. PICK: BILLS

At New Orleans -3.5 San Diego

Winless Saints welcome
The only coach in the league
Who’s worse than their coach. PICK: SAINTS

Monday, October 8

Houston -8 At NY Jets

When you boo or chant
“We Want Tebow,” Jets’ fans, the
whole world shrugs at you. PICK: TEXANS

Haiku Picks went 8–7 last week. That’s 28–34–1. Not good enough! All of this week’s picks were drawn at random from a cap!

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

“The Universe is getting bigger!”

“Mitt Romney could very easily become our next Ronald Reagan, a president who cobbles together an immediate recovery while inflicting incalculable, long-term damage on us all. And that’s why the performance President Obama handed in last night was unforgivable. He was not just representing himself. He was supposed to be out there for all of us, especially for those of us who desperately need things like a monthly check to live on when we’re too old to work anymore and a hospital bed to lie down in. He was supposed to be a president.”

“From the promotion of eugenics to justify genocide in Nazi Germany, to the mass-produced and homogenous population of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian future in the novel ‘Brave New World’, to ‘Frankenfood’, genetic engineering has amassed a reputation as a treacherous pursuit. However, a recent development appears to have slipped under the public radar: human pre-natal diagnosis. Screening foetal genomes to eliminate genetic ‘defects’ may lead to incremental changes in the human genetic reservoir, a permanent shift in our characteristics and eventually, self-domestication.”
 — Scientific American’s Zaria Gorvett makes a strong argument against the increasingly easy and common practice of pre-natal screening. The counter-argument is difficult to avoid, though: prospective parents have the ability to learn something — something important that will hugely affect their lives. And then, of course, the ability to avert what they may believe to be a more painful and difficult future. (By aborting a fetus with the genetic code for Down syndrome, let’s say.) Are we to make it against the law to access such information? Or to act upon it? Man, that stuff in the Bible about the Tree of Knowledge was no joke!

“The plot thickened Wednesday in the heist of a big dollop of Quebec’s strategic maple-syrup reserve.”

The Terrible, Fascinating World Of Hate-Blogs

by Jessica Grose and Adrian Chen

Jessica Grose: We’re here to talk about hate-blogs. In my novel, Sad Desk Salad (shameless self promotion alert), the heroine and her coworkers at a women’s website called Chick Habit are plagued by a hate-blogger who reblogs their posts and puts up incriminating, embarrassing personal information about them.

For those who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, hate-blogs are an actual thing. I based the hate-blog in my book (Breaking the Chick Habit, or BTCH) on the hate-blogs I had read up till then: The ones about Jezebel, the Pioneer Woman, and Julia Allison.

I asked you to join me in this chat because you’ve covered sites like this for Gawker, and you’re an expert in the darkest recesses of Internet culture. To start off, I have one question for you: Whyyyyy?! That is, what is it that possesses people to start blogs where every post is basically just ad hominem attacks of a person or a website? (I have an explanation for the hate blogger in my book but it’s a spoiler to discuss it.)

Adrian Chen: Well, what posses someone to make a fan site, where they slavishly gush over everything a person or entity does? It’s passion. To me the hate-blog phenomenon is basically anti-fandom: someone is totally obsessed with something but instead of expressing their passion through love, it’s hate. It’s a totally different product but comes from that same root, irrational fixation on the thing in question.

Jessica: But the people they’re fixating on don’t seem like a big enough deal, in most cases, to encourage such an obsession. Have you observed a particular quality in the Internet types who end up having hate-blogs dedicated to them?

Adrian: Yeah, I think the more someone’s Internet persona depends on them being a “real person,” the more they attract these kinds of crazy obsessive hate-bloggers. The logic is almost the opposite of what you’d think, where the fact they’re small-time means it’s more appropriate to hate on them like you would a real-life enemy. What’s the point in dedicating a hate-blog to, like, Lindsay Lohan when you know she’ll never read it?

Jessica: That seems right. When the commenters convene in these blogs, I’ve noticed two common responses to the reason for their obsession. 1. They claim they actually want the person they’re blogging about to change (be less narcissistic, write about things that are less frivolous, etc.); or 2. They are projecting some major personal baggage — comparing the person blogging to someone they hate in their actual life.

Adrian: Yeah, I think all hate-bloggers are either secret fans or disillusioned fans. I sent you those links about Kotakoti, the American model in Japan who’s attracted a huge community of hate-bloggers.

Jessica: Yes! The community that hates her is both enormous AND international! Why do they care so much if she Photoshops her pics? I don’t understand!

I was seeing it rise more with Tumblr, where reblogging was such an innate feature that it made just saying something nasty about someone else’s posts 100 times easier.

Adrian: Well, that’s the thing, their hate basically boils down to the fact that she’s phony because she ‘shops her pics to look cuter and more like a real-life anime doll. But then they have huge threads on their forums where they post pictures of themselves Photoshopped the EXACT same way, only it’s like, “Ha ha, look at me, I’m lame like Kotakoti.” But clearly these girls have spent enormous amounts of time learning how to do exactly what they rip on her about.

Jessica: Ahhh, what?

Adrian: Yeah, it’s weird. This is what teens do these days I guess.

Jessica: The youth! Speaking of which, you had mentioned to me earlier that there’s been somewhat of an evolution in hate-blogging since I first noticed the phenomenon (which was probably like, 08 or 09?). I was seeing it rise more with Tumblr, where reblogging was such an innate feature that it made just saying something nasty about someone else’s posts 100 times easier. But how would you describe the way the genre has changed over the past three or four years?

Adrian: It’s weirdly mirrored regular media. Hate-blogs are on the decline. It’s all about hate-social media accounts. I think some of the craziest stuff is going on on Twitter, where people make dozens of troll accounts or whatever and really try to destroy someone’s online life.

Jessica: Does the motivation seem to be the same?

Adrian: Yeah. I mean it’s always about getting a reaction from the person, and Twitter makes it way more satisfying because it’s in real time.

Jessica: What is the success rate of a Twitter hater? Like do they usually push the person offline? The object d’hatred that is.

Adrian: Hmm, I don’t know. Twitter is such a trollful medium that it’s almost like they get lost in the shuffle. Although there was that guy who just wrote about how he got driven off twitter by his troll. Leo Traynor.

Jessica: He was the guy who discovered that his friend’s son was the troll, right? That story was terrifying.

Adrian: Yeah. Really crazy. I don’t know if that’s exactly a hate-blogger, more like a crazy stalker, although the lines sometimes blur.

Jessica: In most cases, it seems like the hate-blogger doesn’t personally know his or her target, though. That’s been my impression. Any time they get someone who actually does know the target in the comments or via email, it’s like they’re investigative journalists all of the sudden.

Adrian: Yeah, there this definitely this idea of pulling back the curtain on whoever they’re hating on, with that kind of stuff. But again it’s like, are they actually trying to expose them or just really want to know more?

Jessica: Ah, I don’t know! Has any hate blog ever done anything “good” or worthwhile? Like, has any true muckracking ever occurred because of a hate-blogger’s dedication?

Adrian: Hmmm. I wrote a while ago about this horrible website Stickydrama, which was basically a gossip blog for tween e-celebrities. There were a couple hate-blogs dedicated to that site, I think run by parents of the girls that they’d write about, and I actually got some good tips from them. There was also this whole Livejournal community dedicated to e-celebs that sort of rallied together to expose Christopher Stone, the founder of Stickydrama; they were really nasty themselves, but knew so much about the site that they were a good resource.

Jessica: So the torch-wielding Internet mobs can occasionally be a force for semi-good. That is almost heartening? Not really.

Adrian: It’s all about channeling the hate to something more hateful than the hate.

Jessica: Okay, time to get servicey: If you were giving advice to someone who was plagued by a hate-blog, what would you tell them. Ignore? Engage? Bring in blog authorities? Or actual legal authorities?

Adrian: I guess it would depend on what level you’re getting it at. If it’s manageable, it might actually be a good thing. Haters make you famous, etc. It’s amazing how much the hater narrative has been incorporated into the entertainment industry, you know? It seems like every young female act, some storyline about how she’s dealing with her haters is pushed, and you see a lot of people sort of blowing up like base-level hate and making it part of their story. So maybe you can hate-judo it.

Jessica: HATE-JUDO!

Adrian: That’s my new self-help concept.

Jessica: TM. Brand that shit now.

Adrian: “Hate-Judo your way to e-fame and fortune. Just try to attract as much hate as you can and good things will happen.” (Kidding…)

It seems like every young female act, some storyline about how she’s dealing with her haters is pushed, and you see a lot of people sort of blowing up like base-level hate and making it part of their story.

But I’m not actually a huge fan of the “don’t feed the trolls” approach, because it’s sort of blaming the victim. Why should everyone have to deal with horrible people with saintly composure? I think if you can sort of shame them in a non-hysterical way, that’s more effective than just ignoring it and also it gets rid of the fantasy that you’re not actually reading the hate-blogs, because everyone knows you are so don’t even pretend.

Jessica: That is sound advice. Anything else we’re neglecting to mention about the terrible yet vaguely fascinating world of hate-blogging?

Adrian: How did you deal with the hate-blogging when you were at Jezebel? I don’t think Gawker has a dedicated hate-blog.

Jessica: Jezebel didn’t really have a hate-blog per se when I was there (they got them after I left). But what they did have was several fringe blogs started by disgruntled commenters who had been, like, core, obsessive Jez fans who became disappointed with the direction of the site for reasons that were never entirely clear?

Adrian: Oh yeah, Gawker has those too!

Jessica: So yeah, then those people would start their own sites, most of which petered out after a year or two.

Adrian: This is the latest one of Gawker’s.

Jessica: What was funny about that was always the feeling they had like, THIS SITE SHOULD CATER TO ME AND ME SPECIFICALLY! Like you could… just stop reading the site if you didn’t like it anymore? It didn’t betray you deliberately.

Adrian: Haha, yeah, it’s such a fraught relationship people have with websites.

Jessica: Right? I mean, I always thought those websites were slightly sweet too, because they had created their own little communities, which I admired, and they seemed really psyched about that.

Adrian: Were there any Jez commenter weddings? There were at least two Gawker commenter weddings.

Jessica: What!? That is amazing! I have never heard of a Jez commenter wedding, but it’s possible.

Adrian: Yeah, I’ve been trying to get someone to do a story about it because I think it’s the funniest/coolest thing, but in a roundabout way that brings us back to the topic at hand. I think a lot of what drives these hate-blogs is the community that grows up around them. Like people are THRILLED that they found a bunch of other people who hate something as passionately as they do. A lot of Internet culture, I think, boils down to the bond between people who find other people who are into very specific, very strange things, and hating on a semi-famous person or blog definitely fits into that

Related: Why We Hate-Search

Jessica Grose is the author of the novel Sad Desk Salad (buy it now!) and co-author of

Love, Mom. She is also a freelance writer and editor who lives (where else) in Brooklyn. Adrian Chen is a staff writer at Gawker. Here is his Twitter.