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A blog wherein a literary agent will sometimes discuss his business, sometimes discuss the movies he sees, the tennis he watches, or the world around him. In which he will often wish he could say more, but will be obliged by business necessity and basic politeness and simple civility to hold his tongue. Rankings are done on a scale of one to five Slithy Toads, where a 0 is a complete waste of time, a 2 is a completely innocuous way to spend your time, and a 4 is intended as a geas compelling you to make the time.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Geometrical Shapes

So I was noticing today at the local Pathmark that all of the Entenmann's cakes are now in a square box instead of a rectangular one.  But I just can't for the life of me say for certain if this is because they've just decided to make the cakes square for some reason while providing the same amount of cake, or because it seemed like a nice way to hide one of those stealth price increases.  The current Marshmallow Iced Devils Food Cake has 510 grams of cake, 8 260 gram servings, 260 calories each, and that looked to be the same for the Black and White Cake, the Fudge Iced, etc.  So if anyone out there has a 2 or 3 month old Entenmann's cake in their freezer in the "classic" rectangular box, can we get to the bottom of this?

And then moving from the squares and rectangles to the circles, orbs, spheres, ellipses and similar such things, there is more news on the Tim Hortons front.

As described here and elsewhere, the Riese Organization, a longtime purveyor of indescribable fast food to the NYC masses, is spending the weekend turning its Dunkin Donuts outlets into Tim Hortons outlets, giving Tims an instant beachhead in Manhattan several weeks ahead of the previously announced co-branding with Cold Stone Creamery.

Is this an example of "watch what you wish for, you might get it?"  The Riese Organization, its official corporate history aside, is just not known for its fine food and fine restaurants.  As is mentioned in the NYT article linked above, there is an infamous incident in which the NY Post took pictures of beloved animals enjoying the cuisine at a Riese Dunkin Donuts outlet.  OK, in fairness, I should do my first-ever blog link to the NY Post and its coverage of the donut war news.  I'm sure that kind of thing doesn't happen often.  Still, as much as I like my timbits, I'm not eager to get them at the Riese food courts that I've managed to avoid for many decades, just as I've managed to avoid their Fridays franchises.  And their Houlihans outlets.  And everything else.

1 comment:

Lynxswift said...

Let us know when these Tim Hortons are up and running, and what you thought of them. I'll try them out too as soon as a see a location. But, aren't you afraid they'll do what they did to Pizza Hut? How we don't have any more sit down locations and just have to settle for those horrible personal pan pizzas :(. I also hope they stick around longer than Krispy Kreme did in the city. I miss the one on 8th St. near the Games Workshop store I hang out at on occassion :(.

Maybe you can find some of the rectangle Entenmans at that company thrift shop along Queen's Blvd.