"Cheese Whatevers, City Has Them By The Handful," by Manny Fernandez, August 4, page A17:If you lined up, end to end, all the Cheez Doodles that Wise Foods produced in one year’s time, a thin crunchy row of bright orange, cheese-dusted corn puffs would stretch from Times Square to the Outback Steakhouse in Orange, Conn., just west of New Haven (about 72 miles).
(Fun Fact: NYT reporter Fernandez reported his "72 miles" statistic by copying it directly from the "Fun Facts" section of www.cheezdoodles.com!)
As an alternative, we recommend this earlier version from the author Dorothy Parker:
If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
10 comments:
Why did this story require "additional reporting from Rebecca White"? It looks like he did two interviews.
~Cheeze~ Doodles? Spelling wasn't copied, apparently. Or is that you.
Also, Cheetos "generates $4 billion in annual retail sales around the world for PepsiCo." Really, $4 billion? They cost 99 cents a bag, so that would mean 4 billion bags a year.
Um, no.
The question of whether it's $4 billion in sales is easy enough.
72 miles of Cheez Doodles? That works out to 4,561,920 Doodles (at one Doodle equaling one inch, it's 72 x 5280 feet/mile x 12 inches/foot). If they're longer than an inch, the number drops. I haven't had a Cheez Doodle in years, so an inch seems a safe estimate.
How many Doodles per bag? I have no idea. Say 30? That's about 150,000 bags a year of Doodles. Doesn't that seem incredibly, incredibly low? How many schoolchildren have a bag of these at least once a week? If just 3,000 schoolchildren ate one bag a week, that would be the entire production run.
This doesn't even touch on the notions of the supersize bags for parties.
Ever notice the corrections page on the Times is filled with stuff like this (the Cheez Doodle calculation was wrong) but never on stuff like how the unemployment stats they use aren't telling the whole picture? (Hands up anyone who thinks the unemployment rate is really only about 10 percent).
I hate to do this because I really like the NYT and I'm sure the writer is a good fellow but I really think the worst lede should go to James Barron's 22 July story that began: "Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in that famous sonnet — 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways' — did not count the ways she loved hot weather."
How many of those kids love stepping over the airtight bags to zap the crunchy cornpuffs like crinkling of autumn leaves!!
And let's not forget that vegans don't eat cheese, which really makes the quote from the personal trainer (and vegan) about preference of snackage just truly bizarre.
Um, I think the joke is that the name of the town is ORANGE, Connecticut. As in the color of Cheez Doodles.
Okay, maybe it's the worst lede, but here's the worst sentence of the week:
"Oland was a heavy drinker, Mr. Huang writes, and liked to take a nip before slipping into the Chan persona: it slowed down his speech and put a congenial, Chan-like grin on his face."
A real reporter would have checked it out -- by sending some poor wretched intern out to actually lay down the doodle one by one by one.
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