Mark your calendars, because this Wednesday July 30th, the Cheesecake Factory is celebrating National Cheesecake day by offering $1.50 slices of cheesecake. Costumers will be able to choose from up to 30 varieties of the delectable desert, but purchases, cruelly, will be limited to one per customer.

The Providence Cheesecake Factory/94 Providence Place (i.e., the Mall)/Wed. Jul. 30/11:30am-11:00pm

I’ll see you at the mall!

When former Charlotte NC mayor Harvey Gantt ran (twice) against Jesse Helms, he sought the endorsment of former UNC star Michael Jordan. Jordan’s reply at the time: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

An endorsement from Jordan could have helped the popular black mayor unseat one of the senate’s most bigoted members, but Mike sat on the sidelines. Apparantly, Helms’ death prompted Jordan to expound on meeting the racist codger, and to finally endorse Gantt:

“A number of years back, I was in Raleigh at some function and I was introduced to the Senator. ‘Hello Senator Helms, nice to meet you,’ I say, offering my hand. He looks up at me, sizes up my hand, and smiles like he’s addressing the help back at the plantation: ‘Nice to meet you too, Fred.’ I’m like, Fred, huh? No, it’s Michael, Michael Jordan, the basketball player. He just goes, ‘Nice to meet you Fred.’ That’s one crazy mother (muffled).”

Someone later told Jordan that Helms had a “humorous habit” of calling all black people “Fred.”

“Yeah, humorous. Hilarious. It was then that I realized I made a mistake, I should have come out to support the brother. Let him know, if he runs again, give my office a call, we’ll hit the campaign up with all the Air Jordans and Jordan brand apparel they need. On the house. It would be my honor to be the official sponsor - along with Gatorade and Hanes — of Harvey Gantt’s next campaign.”

Let’s first note that calling Michael Jordan - one of the most universally respected people on the planet - “Fred” is just plain disgusting. Let’s also note that Gantt declined the endorsement, citing Jordan’s poor management of the Charlotte Bobcats.

So let’s say you’re walking down the street and you come across $190 lying in the gutter. What would you spend it on? Drugs? Some new sneakers? A donation to your favorite charity? Or would you do maybe make a couple of extra car insurance payments, buy a new vacuum, or just blow the whole thing on scratch tickets and a post-scratching manicure?

Well, if you live in London, you have another option now:

A burger. From Burger King.

Plop down your money at one West End BK location and be whisked away to a VIP area, full of tablecloths and Shiraz and custom Coke bottles. (You need to call ahead first, and the whole thing is so exclusive you can only luxuriate on Thursdays.) Then comes the real treat:

Made from Wagyu beef, topped with white truffles and Pata Negra ham (which owes its nutty flavor to the fact that the pigs are fed on acorns), the burger nestles in a bun spread with organic-white-wine-and-shallot-infused mayonnaise, plus pink Himalayan rock salt, and dusted on top with Iranian saffron. It is served with Cristal champagne onion straws (inspired by the “angry lobster” dish at David Burke & Donatella Manhattan restaurant) and a garnish of lamb’s lettuce.

And while I’d kill for some organic-white-wine-and-shallot-infused mayonnaise right now, the real question is WHO THE HELL WOULD EVER WANT THIS?! SERIOUSLY?! Especially since, as the article mentions later, food safety requirements in the UK require that pretty much all meat be dry and overcooked all the time.

[Source: Advertising Age]

What exactly is the nature of the relationship between the city of Providence and the owners of these boxes? I’m guessing host/parasite. What do we get out of these contraptions besides visual blight and exposure to liability? This is ugly crap that nobody needs and it’s spreading like a virus that makes you want to kill yourself. I like The Phoenix and The Dig as much as the next person, but they will have to find distribution methods that do not mar the aesthetics of the city and block the sidewalk for people in wheelchairs. They really seem to be metastasizing downtown, which is particularly sad because the Downtown Improvement District does a great job with clean-up, and the plantings are very cool.  The owners of these boxes should get a call from City Hall… ASAP.

We at the Providence Daily Dose do not like to boast, self-promote, or influence political opinion (or, wait, isn’t that all we do?), but contributor Ari Savitzky is famous.  You heard it here first unless you heard him on NPR this morning. 

Speaking for Fair Vote Rhode Island, Savitzky was sound bitten twice.  The first one I heard was about Rhode Island moving from the Electoral College system to a popular vote system.   The second sound bite was about pre-registering 16 and 17-year-olds to vote.  His voice can be described as velvety and smooth.

For one day only, Ari Savitzky’s fame is now slightly above Representative David Segal and one droplet below WRNI correspondent Megan Hall.

Signing off, this is Leslie Friedman, striving to be more famous than the dancing traffic cop.

80% take the gun. Wouldn’t you?

Liberal elf and Princeton economist Paul Krugman sez that almost 80 percent of us drive to work alone, thus stupidly hastening the demise of our planet and the collapse of our economy.

So where are all the WWII-referencing posterz about how driving alone is driving with Chavez, or OPEC? Not exactly the same thing, granted.

So what’s a better analogy? (more…)

Does it count as shameless self-promotion to promote my promotion of a friend’s event? Hopefully not. Scope my piece in this week’s Phoenix on the upcoming criminal justice reform festival, Justice or Just Us?, taking place at AS220 real soon.

Bob Whitcomb drops Ed Bernays’s name in his column today. Which has inspired me to post this:

It’s from an Adam Curtis film called The Century of the Self, all available online. Bernays basically invented the public relations industry, using the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. Among other things, he’s largely responsible for: it becoming cool for women to smoke cigarettes, our overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz government in Guatemala, and Freud’s existence as a pop-culture phenom.

He, and other dignified men of his day, thought active manipulation of the unconsciousnesses of the masses was somehow integral to democracy — and good for making a buck to boot. The concept of the “engineering of consent” — coined by New Republic founder Walter Lippmann — was once more widely used by elites, who thought it had positive connotations (and affirmed their standing in society).

Much of Chomsky’s popular work has entailed putting them in their place. You can check out the CBC film Manufacturing Consent over here.