IKEA Monkey

A 2-year-old boy hospitalized after a small octopus became wedged in his throat showed signs of improvement Thursday as the investigation pressed on, Wichita police said. The boy, who was brought in to the hospital on Tuesday night, has been upgraded to good condition, is in "a very delicate situation"...

Though it’s being marketed as a thriller, 11 Minutes has more in common with the horror genre—specifically, with the Final Destination franchise and its elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style deaths. That makes this Polish import sound far more interesting than it actually is, however. Imagine a gore-free Final Destination entry that kills off a bunch of people in a single climactic set piece lasting two or three minutes (thanks to slo-mo), with the preceding hour-plus devoted entirely to setting that catastrophe in motion. Then imagine that the series of improbable events that dooms everyone isn’t even clever or ghoulish—just a matter of moving random characters around, slooooowly, so that they’re all in the same general area when one thing goes awry. Now further imagine that said characters are so singularly tiresome that one’s reaction to their obliteration is not horror, nor even relief, but merely indifference ...

The quickest way to improve your cooking—besides throwing a stick of butter into everything—is to throw onions into everything. Onions work with every cuisine, they’re versatile, and they taste amazing. However much onion a recipe calls for should be doubled, at least, no matter the recipe.

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Burger King's new Angriest Whopper features a flame-grilled beef patty, thick-cut bacon, American cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, angry onion petals, jalapenos, mayo, and spicy angry sauce on a red bun that had hot sauce baked into it.

I bought one for $5.49.

If you've had an Angry Whopper before, the Angriest Whopper contains the same ingredients (save for the habanero cheese) but with the addition of the bun.

The bun was a bright red that reminded me of a mushroom in Super Mario. Inside, the crumb was almost neon red. In texture, it seemed softer and moister at the surface than the standard Whopper bun. There's a definite heat to it but no added flavor otherwise.

The Angry sauce came across quite strongly with a substantial spicy kick paired with a sweet and tangy base. Unlike a lot of fast food spicy sauces, there doesn't appear to be a mayo base to it but there is mayo in the burger separately.

The pickled jalapenos similarly packed a solid kick along with a sharp sour bite.

The batter on the onion petals was thoroughly soft but I liked the slightly seasoned fried batter and onion combination. There was just a touch of heat to the petals.

The lettuce quality was marginal with mostly wilted leaves that offered little in the way of crispness. The tomato fared a little better but wasn't great either. The jalapenos actually offered the most watery crispness here (at least on this occasion).

The beef patty was moist enough and delivered a steady beefiness throughout the burger despite its relative thinness. The cheese also came through well.

The bacon was very nicely crispy but was light on smoke and flavor.

Overall, Burger King's Angriest Whopper turned out pretty well for me with a lot of punch in the heat department. That being said, in terms of spiciness, I'm not even sure it's an Angrier Whopper let alone the Angriest one. I guess the Reddest Whopper wouldn't have been as catchy... The Red Whopper has a nice ring to it though.

Nutritional Info - Burger King Angriest Whopper (315g)
Calories - 830 (from Fat - 460)
Fat - 51g (Saturated Fat - 17g)
Sodium - 1530mg
Carbs - 59g (Sugar - 17g)
Protein - 34g

While we take all forms of food theft very seriously, when someone commits a cheese-related crime, we get very annoyed. We’re none too pleased right now with the jerk who pilfered almost $2,000 worth of provolone from a Colorado eatery, a jerk whose crime is depriving potential customers of the enjoyment of eating cheese.

Police are looking for the provolone poacher who swiped the cheese — which the restaurant uses to make pizza — the overnight Tuesday, reports The Pueblo Chieftain.

According to police, the cheese thievery went down sometime on Tuesday night when the suspect broke into the restaurant, damaging doors in the process. A manager said the thief also broke through padlocks on a restaurant freezer to get to the cheese. Again, I can’t condone such actions, but that is some serious dedication to dairy.

All told, the thief boosted 19 cases of provolone cheese worth about $1,900. Cheese was the only item taken.

This isn’t the first time the restaurant’s provolone has been targeted recently, the manager says — it’s the third or fourth time in the last month and a half.

So far, 30 cases of cheese worth around $3,000 has been stolen. The manager believes one thief is responsible for all the recent thefts, and that he or she is trying to sell off the stolen products.

The manager says he and other restaurant folks think it’s the actions of a single suspect. But this time, the suspect was caught on security cameras the inn recently installed. Officials are now hoping the video images will help police track down the person responsible.

“It’s strange to us. This has never happened to us,” the manager says. “We’ve had some things in the past but never food items, you know? We’ve never had to worry about that and we’ve never had that problem. This guy has started looking at us and monitoring us.”

Provolone poacher hits Pueblo eatery [The Pueblo Chieftain]

Even after his most convincing victory yet over Donald Trump, Ted Cruz faced a lukewarm reception from many establishment Republicans.

There are no Canadian hockey teams in this year’s NHL playoffs , and I’m sure a lot of Canadian hockey fans are very sad about that. The good news is that I have a special message for my bummed-out friends in the north:

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Cuteness has been a major selling point of many successful mobile games, but Hit-Point’s Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector may just out-cute them all. With its roly-poly, smiling cartoon cats in need of care and attention, the popular game represents nothing less than an apocalypse of adorableness. Only the most jaded and callous of gamers could resist the charms of these frisky felines. Their X-shaped buttholes are practically a license to print money. The loading screen says “Meow Loading,” for Christ’s sake. That’s not even fair. But, as with many things that seem too good to be true, Neko Atsume is harboring a horrible secret. As revealed in a scathing new Funny Or Die video written by Hannah Levy and Adriana Robles, the cats are basically self-centered dicks who don’t give two shits about the people playing their game. Ten years ago, The Onion presented readers with ...

After decades on the air, the Simpsons' character Smithers comes out as gay. A writer on the show said he had a personal family influence on the episode.

Self-confessed cheese connoisseur Ted Cruz made two dairy-related campaign stops on Monday.

Just days after an airplane’s emergency slide came hurtling to the ground, landing in an Arizona yard, the emergency device is once again the center of an unusual story: a United Airlines’ flight attendant allegedly deployed a slide, rode it down, and walked away from her job after her plane landed in Houston on Monday.

ABC13 News reports that the ordeal began around noon when United flight 1246 arrived at Bush International Airport in Houston from Sacramento.

According to video footage of the incident, posted by Click2 Houston, the plane comes to a full stop once it reaches the gate. At that point, you can see the slide deploy, a woman throws her bag to the ground, and then slides down.

Passengers on the flight say they were unaware of the flight attendant’s unusual exit strategy, as they were distracted by a medical emergency taking place in the back of the plane.

“When we landed we were told to stay in our seats as deplaning would take a bit longer,” one passenger tells Click2Houston. “Everything seemed to be pretty standard.”

Passengers were able to exit the plane normally and the aircraft was taken out of service to be inspected again to meet safety standards, ABC13 reports, noting that the plane has since been returned to service.

While a spokesperson for United Airlines says the carrier is investigating the incident, the company believes the flight attendant’s action was intentional.

“We hold all of our employees to the highest standard,” the airline said in a statement. “The unsafe behavior is unacceptable and does not represent the more than 20,000 flight attendants who ensure the safety of our customers. United is reviewing the matter and they have removed the employee from her flying duties.”

This incident is reminiscent of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater. In Aug. 2010, Slater got fed up with a passenger, cursed him out, then deployed the emergency slide to make his infamous exit onto the tarmac.

Flight Attendant Pulls Emergency Slide On Plane At IAH [ABC13 News]
United flight attendant deploys slide on plane at IAH [Click2Houston]

Charlize Theron, an Oscar-winning hot actress, lamented her burdensome beauty in a conversation with British GQ, saying it’s hard for her to get good roles because she looks so dang good on camera.

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The bankruptcy rumor mill has been turning yet again, with a new report in the wind that says Pacific Sunwear — commonly known as PacSun — is preparing a Chapter 11 filing.

The casual California-style clothing retailer and mall staple has not been doing so hot lately, and is getting ready to file for bankruptcy, Bloomberg reports, citing sources with knowledge of the situation.

Bankruptcy proceedings could be set into motion as early as next week, one of the insiders said, but everything is still up in the air.

PacSun’s struggles echo the lackluster sales reported by fellow clothing retailers American Apparel and Quiksilver, both of which wound up in bankruptcy court in 2015.

Shares of the California company have dropped by 90% in the last 12 months, Bloomberg notes, with reported losses every year since 2008.

Pacific Sunwear Said to Prepare Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing [Bloomberg]

A bouncer at a Northwest Side bar has died after being hit by a bullet fired through a window, the only fatality among the 35 people wounded by gunfire in Chicago over the weekend.The 51-year-old man, whom officials have not yet publicly identified, was working at Brudder’s Bar & Grill at 3600...

On this day back in 1978, Annie Hall beat out Star Wars for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, proving that audiences still had a taste for highbrow jokes over lightsabers. The clever, and often heartbreaking, film contains some of Allen’s best writing.

“Woody Allen’s Annie Hall explores new dimensions of the persona Allen has constructed in movies, on the stage, and even in a comic strip,” Roger Ebert wrote in his 1977 review. “We’re all familiar by now with ‘Woody,’ the overanxious, underachieving intellectual with the inept social life. We’ve watched him develop from bits in a stand-up comedy routine to a fully developed comic character in the tradition of Chaplin’s tramp or Fields’s drunk. We know how ‘Woody’ will act in so many situations that we’re already laughing before the punch line. Maybe nobody since Jack Benny has been so hilariously predictable.”

Here are ten other highbrow comedies on film in the vein of Allen’s movie.

DeLon, week 3. Really liking how he’s developing.

Sure, there are times when I'm in the mood to spend all day on a pasta dish. But more often, pasta is my go-to for a quick weeknight dinner. Fortunately for me, it's just as at home in a 15-minute recipe as it is in a six-hour one, and in dishes both sophisticated and humble. These 17 recipes for pasta dishes in 30 minutes or less will keep you sated and stress-free. Read More

Photo by Flickr user Lyza, via

If you define yourself as an "average human," you'll eat around 35 tons of food in your lifetime. However, before much of it reaches your mouth, somebody somewhere will have had to test it first. In the kitchens of the country's biggest supermarkets and mega chains, a food tester will be eating huge amounts of the same product again and again, in an attempt to provide the perfect bite for your flimsy, fickle tastes.

I spoke to a few of those testers—experts in ice cream, pies, noodles, and pizza—to see what it's like to eat exactly the same food over and over again, every working day, for years on end.

THE ICE CREAM TESTER

Louise Bamber, 40, has been a product manager for ASDA for nine years. She is responsible for its 270 different types of ice cream.

VICE: How much ice cream do you eat in one day?
Louise Bamber: In a testing week, I can be tasting up to two hundred fifty ice creams from eight in the morning to eight at night. As summer starts, I buy every single product from Walls, Unilever, and other supermarkets and try them all to measure them up against ASDA. That can be a long day, though we do have breaks because, eating all that sugar, you get cravings for crisps or a nice piece of fruit.

How do you keep all of that down?
I'm known for being hardcore. I make all my traders taste all of the brands. Vanilla alone can be dozens of flavors, from value range to decadent styles. As unsavory as it sounds, I spit most of them out, like a wine taster would. It would be awful to consume all that sugar. It's a sign of a good ice cream if I swallow, put it that way.

Do you ever get brain freeze?
Ice pops are actually the worst, as your teeth become hyper sensitive to the cold. Therefore, you break a chunk off and suck it rather than repeatedly biting into the tops of different ones.

What foods do you eat outside of work?
After big tasting sessions, I always crave cheese and crackers or a big bowl of buttery mashed potato. I do a lot of walking to stave off the ice cream pounds, and I go to the dentist at least four times a year to check my teeth. But look, I'm not eating like that all the time.

What's the key to great ice cream?
Regardless of how much you pay for an ice cream the fundamentals are the same. If you can freeze it very quickly you have tiny crystals that aren't felt on the tongue, leaving a lovely smooth, melty finish. If you re-freeze ice cream or freeze it slowly, there are larger crystals, which taste jagged and sharp.

Why does fresh soft serve taste so good compared to tub ice cream?
If you have a Mr. Whippy from the van, that ice cream isn't ever one hundred percent frozen, and that's why it feels so creamy and rich—it's actually only about seventy percent frozen at any point. As a supermarket, we can't create that because we have to freeze it to transport it.

What's the future of ice cream?
Retro childhood dessert flavors, so jam roly-poly or Battenberg flavor ice cream. We did try a chicken korma ice cream; the coconut worked really well, but the rest would be way too much for our customers.

THE PIE TESTER

Peter Nickson, 33, is chief pie taster at Morrison's HQ in Bradford. He road-tests the quality of some 500,000 pies and 1 million sausage rolls every week.

Peter, what have you eaten today?
Peter Nickson: At eight in the morning, I have around five different cooked meats. Then, half an hour later, I have a taste of fifteen different quiches. Then nine thirty in the morning is the "pie hour," where I taste ten different pies—all of our chicken and steak varieties, plus all the fruits. That's my day every day. Then, at ten on the dot, I have a bacon butty, and I also have a proper lunch at one and dinner when I get home.

Do you not worry about putting on weight?
As yet, in nine years, I don't seem to have piled it on. I definitely don't go home and do fifty sit-ups.

Is it just a tiny taste of each one?
No, it's about being thorough. You aren't eating a whole pie, but you've got to take in the lid, pastry, filling, and the meat content of each one.

How do you stomach doing this every day?
You're always looking to revolutionize. We've just added malt extract to our steak pies to make the gravy thicker and darker. I've also developed a fish and chip pie and a "full English" pie with a fried breakfast and everything else in it. We put through seven thousand five hundred pies every hour and use ten tons of pastry a day.

Serious question, does a shepherd's pie really count as a pie?
For me, you should be able to eat a pie with your hands, on the go. Unless you hold it in a tray, you can't do that with a shepherd's pie.

NOODLE TASTER

Crispin Busk, 41, is the founder of Kabuto Noodles. He can taste up to 600 noodle broths in a month.

Is your product basically an upmarket Cup Noodles?
Crispin Busk: It's basically "Posh Noodle," or Wagamama in a pot. Pot Noodle is awesome, but there isn't a smarter one out there, so I created one. Selling a luxury food is always more fun. No one likes saying: "My noodles taste crap, but at least they're the cheapest."

How many noodles did you eat to launch the product?
We tasted every instant noodle on the market, from supermarkets to obscure Asian food stores. That's possibly two hundred noodle types. Then, in our own testing, you often need to eat the whole pot, as a few mouthfuls can be really enjoyable, but you only really know what it's like if you eat all of it. Then, if we got a mixed response on a flavor, we taste them all again the next day. You do find they taste completely different if you've had a boozy night out.

What was the most disgusting noodle you ever ate?
Crushed fish head flavor? Fish intestine flavor rice porridge?

How do you consume that much noodle?
We have a lot of rules. We try to do the spitting thing and then drink lime cordial, which neutralizes your taste buds. We also only do tastings first thing in the morning, as your taste buds are much more receptive, and ban smoking and coffee, as that wrecks your taste buds.

How serious can it get tasting noodles all day?
Your taste buds get saturated, and you can't taste anything. I have burned through several kettles—I was probably boiling the kettle for noodles fifty times per week. We spent months creating a product that rehydrated with boiled water within a five minute period. Then you look at how densely they sit inside the cup and where the water fill line needs to be. We had charts. Taking a pinch of the powder out, then putting it back in. I thought it was fun at the time, but really my friends and family must have hated it.

Do you ever eat a noodle for pleasure?
I still eat noodles at home. We make food we'd happily eat ourselves and would happily give to our kids. Noodles get unfair press—if you made a curry from scratch at home using dried herbs and spices with rice from a packet, that wouldn't be a lot different.

THE PIZZA TASTER

Lawrence Agar, 30, is chef technician for Pizza Hut. He has to eat every item on the menu before you ever see it.

So eating all that pizza, do you spit or swallow?
I swallow, definitely! Spitting is down to whoever is tasting it. I eat pizza every day. I'm not being really gluttonous, eating whole pizzas, but you are endlessly tasting. I still have my lunch. I still have my porridge when I come into work.

What's the hardest pizza you've had to create?
Probably our gluten free range. To be able to to make a base out of those ingredients that tastes like a pizza and not sawdust is really hard. Then there's the five hundred calorie pizza, which is super healthy. So you're up against bread that's quite calorific, then cheeses, and everything else. Thankfully our own mozzarella is pretty healthy and tasty.

What pizza is still on the drawing board?
We did a pizza with a caramelized onion base with no tomato, then we topped it with roasted butternut squash, smoked garlic, and no cheese, just a feta crumb and a wild rocket pesto. It tasted incredible, but we didn't think it was right for us—it needs to sell well across hundreds of stores.

How off-road can you get? Are your weird hot dog crust pizzas as wild as you can go?
We're always adding new stuff. Frickles—fried pickles—are a big American thing we were the first to adopt here. That's a deep fried pickle with crispy edges. I will make up hundreds each batch. That's fry, fry, fry, test, test, test. How big are the pickles? How fried are they? That's a lot of pickle eating.

How much exercise do you do so you don't keel over?
I do go to the gym, but that's a lifestyle choice; I go because I like it, not because I feel I have to.

What's the best part about eating pizza for a job?
The best day is when a new menu launches. I get anxious, excited, nervous. To be able to sit in a restaurant and anonymously watch people eat what you've spent months working on is the biggest win for me. Honestly, I go and sit in any restaurant and watch people eat their pizza, see what they enjoy and how they react. I can't go past a Pizza Hut without going in it and seeing the customers. I need my finger on the pulse on what people like.

Is pizza better hot or cold the next day?
Our pizza is always the best the next day. They're as good cold as hot. It's not a good pizza if it isn't, and any chef will tell you the same.

Follow Andy on Twitter.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Do you want to hear a joke? So do I. I can appreciate the artistry involved in an elaborate yarn or a sharp one-liner. I enjoy having my knocks knocked. After a childhood aversion, I've even come around on the beauty of a well-placed pratfall. Like most people, I think I have a pretty good sense of humor.

However, I do not like pranks.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, akin to saying you believe grandmas are overrated. Upon hearing it, well-meaning people barrage me with stories from middle school and clips of Nathan for You. Sometimes I'll even laugh, and they take that as proof that I do not truly dislike pranks. They're wrong. My issue is not that I don't think pranks work (though I do think that most pranks are unfunny); I just think pranks are bad. If someone were to force you to watch a stolen nudie vid of my sister, you may become aroused, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are in favor of stolen nudie vids.

Pranks exploit a balance of power. You might prank your co-worker, but you probably wouldn't prank your boss. Between friends, it's usually the dominant members of the group who play a trick on the weaker ones. Would a prank by any other name sound as harmless? Hazing is essentially a vicious form of pranking that results in multiple deaths per year.

I was recently told a story about a traveling college sports team who secretly stuck a Ziplock bag containing a bottle of lotion and a large double-sided dildo into their coach's luggage. At the airport, when asked if he was carrying any liquids, the coach said "no," forcing the TSA agent to rummage around in his bag and pull out the dildo-lotion bag and ask "Is this yours?" in full view of the security line, howling athletes included. I think it was also the coach's birthday.

I laughed, of course, but I was immediately plagued with uncomfortable questions. For starters, isn't this a gay joke? Maybe the players didn't mean it that way—they probably just spent ten seconds debating, "What's the funniest thing to put in Coach's luggage?" But why is a big double-sided dildo the go-to funniest thing to be caught with? There's nothing wrong with involving a big fake dick in your sex life. Isn't it plausible that someone in the vicinity might have seen this incident as just another instance of society mocking gay people? Might this person have felt personally wounded? But also: Maybe secretly having a giant penis statue in your duffel is just funny. Surely it's possible to acknowledge that some sex acts are humorous without saying that the people who like them are bad? In finding this troubling, am I being the kind of bore who compliments your new engagement ring by noting that I recently read an article about how there's no such thing as a non-blood diamond?

The point here is not to decide if this joke is OK, but to say that thoughts like these go through my head every time I witness a prank. They make me physically uncomfortable. Think about the infamous Jackass prank where a man leaves a car seat with a (fake) baby on top of his SUV and then starts to drive. You are supposed to laugh at Home Depot shoppers who desperately try to tell a man there's a kid on his car. Do we really want to live in a world where we worry about being punk'd before warning a stranger about their child's imminent death? Not to mention how weird it is that TV prank shows feature celebrities putting civilians into situations where they humiliate themselves so that we, the knowing audience, can mock them.

Ultimately, pranks ignore the fundamental truth that living can be hard, and most people are trying to do their best. Our lives are a series of relative victories and minor defeats, with occasional eruptions of love, life, and loss. It's impossible to know what someone's going through. So today, before you put up that irreverent lost pet dragon flyer, ask yourself how it might affect someone whose cat recently died. Before you put your co-worker's Jello-encased stapler back on her desk, consider that she might be going through a horrible breakup. What I'm saying is that, as a prank happens, this person with aspirations and bills is thrown into temporary crisis. Why would you want to add more bad moments to someone else's life?

There's a pretty simple way to tell if a joke is offensive: If the punchline is the victim, the joke is probably bad. Pranks take this one step further. They not only laugh at the victim, pranks create a victim for the sole purpose of laughing at them. If that's your idea of a good time, maybe you're the April Fool.

Follow Hanson on Twitter.

In today’s Tweet Beat, I’m going to show you some Samoyeds. That’s it.

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Anyone who has walked through the intersection knows how confusing and dangerous it can be. [ more › ]

BOSTON—Identifying a significant factor contributing to the development of the mental health disorder, researchers from Harvard Medical School published a groundbreaking study Thursday that reportedly links clinical depression to getting dunked on. “Over our five years of observations, we consistently found that test subjects exhibited low self-esteem, despair, and lost interest in normal activities after being dunked on with a devastating monster jam,” said head researcher Randolph Murray, adding that study participants were at far higher risk of experiencing mood swings, social isolation, and the inability to concentrate on tasks when the dunking party then swung from the rim above them and screamed “This is my house.” “These findings apply to individuals from every demographic group, all of whom displayed behaviors such as angry outbursts and persistent feelings of sadness after getting totally schooled with a windmill, double-pump, reverse, or tomahawk jam. Furthermore, when a participant was dunked on ...

This is what a $700 juicer looks like. Photo via Juicero

I want to understand the $700 juicer. I mean, I understand the $700 juicer as far as the mechanics of it go: You buy the thing, it sits on your counter, you get pre-made packets of fruit and vegetables in the mail, you stick those in your $700 juicer, out comes eight ounces of juice.

What I want to understand is why everyone loves the $700 juicer. The company behind it, Juicero, just got $70 million in venture capital cash from the usual Silicon Valley suspects; in total, it's raised $120 million in funds from investors including GV (a.k.a. Google Ventures), according to the New York Times. Gwyneth Paltrow and Dr. Oz reportedly love the $700 juicer. A Vogue writer said that watching the Juicero machine in action was a moment "when I've felt, with palpable certainty, that time has slipped into the future." She went on to say that the juicer was right up there with "the advent of the Hoverboard, the invention of the Venmo payment, the first time my fingerprint unlocked an iPhone." That article's headline, by the way, promised that the $700 Juicero would "change life." I just want to understand that statement, as it relates to a $700 juicer.

Is it the way the $700 juicer looks? It looks, basically, like a big iPod that pees juice into a glass, which makes sense as Apple design dude Jony Ive reportedly had a hand in it. Is it the way the juice tastes? Everyone says that it tastes better than normal juice, and I'm sure it does, because in addition to the $700 juicer you have to pay $4 to $10 for individual packets of fruits and vegetables, and when you pay a shitload for something, it usually is pretty nice.

Is it the way the $700 juicer is being sold? Juicero isn't just going around saying, "Hey, here is a $700 juicer, everyone!" Instead, it's doing that thing Silicon Valley people do, throwing out terms like "disruption" and "farm-to-glass philosophy"; on its website, it describes the $700 juicer as a "personal cold-press juicer that's engineered to press nutrient-dense, raw produce into a glass in minutes." In other words: a juicer. It also touts the complicated system behind the $700 juicer: The company buys produce, hires workers to wash and chop it, and sends it out in those pre-made packets, which also come with QR codes so the Juicero, which is WiFi enabled, can check to make sure the produce is fresh. If the produce inside the packet is not fresh, the $700 juicer will not turn it into juice. It's a complicated way to make juicing as convenient and mess-free as possible, but that's apparently the point. Investors are not excited by a $700 juicer. They are excited by combining a bunch of techno trends in a way that results in a new philosophy in juice-making, even if the end result appears, to the naked eye, to be nothing more than a $700 juicer.

Maybe people are excited by the story of Juicero founder Doug Evans? He is the kind of company founder who starts out a Medium post about his company (titled "Journey to Juicero") by saying, "I believe there are no chances in life — only choices." He then goes into the story of his life, which involves graffitiing subway cars in New York in the 80s, working for famed designer Paul Rand for seven years without getting paid, and starting a juice shop that was later sold to investors who fired him. That is exactly the kind of guy who you want selling a $700 juicer, I guess.

I know that people can't be excited about this YouTube ad from Juicero. For a disruptive company, this is oddly like a traditional informercial, complete with people confounded by something as simple as bringing a tote bag to a farmer's market. Making juice with an ordinary juicer, in Juicero's reckoning, is a series of unpleasant, almost impossible tasks:

Maybe the secret of the $700 juicer is that the people looking at it don't see a $700 juicer, they see the future, a time when the ordinary functions of living are stripped of complications and mess. Juice, in the future, doesn't involve interacting with actual fruits or vegetables or even going to the juice store and clumsily asking a worker what you want with your mouth like some kind of primate. Instead, a packet is delivered to your door—ideally by drone—and you pop it into one of your many machines, and out comes your desired juice. There's an app that tells you when you're out of packets, and even suggests juices that you might want to try.

There are other humans in this vision of the future who have to do the unpleasant behind-the-scenes work to produce those packets—the agriculture and the processing and the packaging and so on—but you, $700 juice machine owner, don't have to think about them, and they recede into the background. That is what is so exciting, presumably: The idea that things are getting easier and more streamlined and just all-around better for humanity, or at least the bits of humanity who can afford to live in the future.

Follow Harry on Twitter.