A very strange thing happened today. Things started out quite normally: We got our coffee, read our headlines, wrote some stuff, tackled the in-box — and then we got to Andrea Strong’s The Strong Buzz, a cheerful foodie e-mail filled with her musings about the usual food-blog fodder. But something was very wrong. Her latest newsletter was — and this is quite rare — angry. About swag, of all things:
This afternoon I received a box from UPS so large I thought it might contain one of those mini refrigerators I used in my college dorm room. It was so massive a box and so heavy that I had to get my brother to bring it upstairs for me. I had no idea what it was since I had not ordered a small refrigerator, or a compact car. Inside I discovered a ridiculous number of those Styrofoam “Esses,” (which stuck to me with static fervor) that concealed a large green wooden treasure chest (locked). When I figured out how to open it (the key was also secreted) I found that this massive blue wood box the size of a mini-fridge contained one bottle of tequila. I screamed. One bottle of tequila and all this waste? And that’s when I sat down to write.
After going on a bit more about the ecological evils of Styrofoam (birds choke on it, not biodegradable, etc.), Strong refuses to name the brand of the offending liquor and instead makes an earnest request: “I get these sorts of huge wasteful gifts all the time. And my plea to big brands, to PR firms, to marketing gurus is to please stop it.” Does that apply to all swag, or just the environmentally offensive stuff?
As for the liquor whose massive, Styrofoam-filled box came to symbolize all that is wrong with the world? Our spy informs us that it’s Jose Cuervo Platino, which, if consumed in large enough quantities, will make you forget all about the choking birds.
The Strong Buzz [Official site]
