For those of you living in this splendiferous City Of Angels, there are vast amounts of places for you to spend your hard earned cash in return for some foodstuff: such as vaguely popular Philipino establishment Jollibee. It's the kind of place that – driving around the city – you pass a hundred times before noticing and another hundred times before you pluck up enough courage to enter.

Today was the day I drove up to Jollibee. I have Filipino roommates who have themselves never been, so I was dying to figure out what the fuck they were trying to sell. I pulled up in my trusty non recalled Prius and balked at the choices: spaghetti and fried chicken, and even more chicken sandwiches of various indifference.

I asked the lady “what's good?” and she too had a hard tine answering. “The… Uh… Number 8?”, she said, her voice halfway between indifference and her own questioning. I ordered the number 8 and sat in line for five minutes. NPR was trying to tell me something about foreign affairs. I twiddled my thumbs. Finally, the car ahead rolled away and there I was, faced with the window and the kind lady who had taken my order. I handed her money, and proceeded to wait another 5 minutes as my order of: spaghetti and a fried chicken drumstick – was being made.

After receiving it I pulled into a parking spot and dug in. The meal had cost $10 with an additional Ube shake which in itself would have made a great purchase, and I was shaken to discover that the order quite literally was a dollop of spaghetti covering the whole chicken drumstick. The spaghetti sauce was sweet and threw me off, while the chicken was not bad but covered in what tasted like tomato ketchup and sugar. Not a fun thing. Not a fun thing at all. Indeed, I found no
jolly in the Jollibee, no fun in their so wrongly named Funburger. It was abysmal prison food. Maybe I just got a bad batch, but eating spaghetti in the car just seemed strange. While I understand this is a taste and menu specific to the culture, my roommate Frank, a 2nd generation Filipino gallery curator, even said that Jollibee was a bastardized version of their cuisine. That's why Frank had never been, and it made sense now.

In short, I wouldn't recommend it to an enemy. Maybe it's your thing, maybe you can eat spaghetti in your car, but this was just bad food -and there's much better places and near equal prices that you should go to first. This was nothing more than a sad novelty. Sorry, Jollibee.

Article courtesy of Los Angeles | Guest of a Guest – Los Angeles People, Places, Parties & Nightlife

A.K. Barnett-Hart says check yourselves.

A word of advice to any asshats currently hard at work figuring out how to cause the next financial crisis: AK Barnett-Hart is watching you. In fact, you’re the reason the second year investment bank analyst, who wrote her senior thesis about the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs (which Michael Lewis called “more interesting than any piece of Wall Street research on the subject”), got into this line of work. To police you fuckers, and clean this place up. From Deal Journal:

Barnett-Hart’s thesis is highly critical of Wall Street and “their irresponsible underwriting practices.” So how is it that she can work for the very institutions that helped create the notorious CDOs she wrote about?

“After writing my thesis, it became clear to me that the culture at these investment banks needed to change and that incentives needed to be realigned to reward more than just short-term profit seeking,” she wrote in an email. “And how would Wall Street ever change, I thought, if the people that work there do not change? What these banks needed is for outsiders to come in with a fresh perspective, question the way business was done, and bring a new appreciation for the true purpose of an investment bank – providing necessary financial services, not creating unnecessary products to bolster their own profits.”

Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead! [Deal Journal via BI]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker