Here are three stories you might have missed due to the 24/7 coverage of the South Carolina Republican primary and Newt Gingrich’s marital peccadilloes last week. We start with Zingers and Ding Dongs:
Over the last few years, the crummy economy has made most of us feel like Job, that Old Testament guy the Creator heaped all those torments on to see how much he could take before he cracked. Job never cried uncle, but I’m not the man he was, and there was a story in the Wall Street Journal recently that finally made me say, “No mas! I give up already!”
Hostess Brands Inc. — the maker of such iconic American foodstuffs (notice I didn’t say food) as Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, CupCakes, Zingers, and those delicious, deep-fat-fried, sugar-coated fruit pies — has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
It seems the company is $1.4 billion in debt and needs to find $75 million from lenders so it can keep squirting that wonderful filling into cupcakes and Sno Balls while it restructures and wangles some concessions from its unions. It also needs to find a way to get people to buy more goodies, since sales have been flat or declining in the last couple of years. Industry watchers and experts say the weak sales are due to competition in the snack foods market, and so far nobody has suggested it’s because thousands of loyal customers have actually died from ingesting too much chemically enhanced goodness.
(Interesting factoid: According to the Hostess website, a woman named Suzanne Rutland, who lives in Florida, says she loves Hostess CupCakes so much she’s eaten at least four a day since she was a little girl — more than 50,000 in total. “We all have things that we love and can’t live without,” she said. “Some people need their coffee each morning. I need my Hostess CupCakes!” Sadly, there was no photograph of Rutland to accompany the story, so there was no way to tell what the ingestion of 50,000 cupcakes does to a human body.)
The story about the company’s financial woes hit me in the gut like a whole box of Ho Hos. I’m sure this Chapter 11 filing will keep Hostess Brands in business for the immediate future, but long term — failing a bailout by theObama administration— I’mworried, and the fear that Ding Dongs will go the way of the dodo is giving me agita. No Wonder Bread? How will the upcoming generations survive, and remain healthy? That bread “builds strong bodies 12 ways” as the ads promised when I was a kid, and if you don’t believe it worked, I’ll send you a photo of me showing off my body in my underwear to prove it. On second thought, maybe not. That sort of thing ended badly for former Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Still, as a longtime fan of everything Hostess (I once lost 10 pounds on a diet that limited me to one Hostess cherry pie and a Diet Coke for lunch over a six-week period), that’s a world I’m not sure we want to live in. So next week, I’m going to buy 1,000 boxes of Twinkies, about 10 pallets of Hostess Cup- Cakes (chocolate, not that awful orange), a pickup load of pies (cherry), and as many SuzyQ’s as I can store in the basement. I suggest you do the same. We might not save the company (unless Suzanne Rutland gets involved), but at least we’ll have a stockpile if the unthinkable happens.
Those things have so many preservatives they’ll keep forever.
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Also almost lost in the news last week was the amazingly bizarre story out of Draper, Utah, about the controversy over the team name for a new high school.
The Canyon County High School is scheduled to open in 2013, so the school board sent ballots to potential future students in the district asking what they’d like for a mascot. Popular choices were the Chargers, Diamondbacks, Falcons, Raptors, Broncos, Bears and Cavaliers. But the most popular name, with 23 percent of the vote, was the Cougars — which the board rejected because they were afraid it might be offensive to middle-aged women!
In the last few years, the term cougar has been applied to ladies of a certain age who date, and sometimes marry, younger men, and the prospect of angry, offended droves of them descending on the Draper school board meeting was too horrible to contemplate. Instead, the new team will be called the Chargers — apparently on the theory that people who abuse their credit cards will be too embarrassed to complain.
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Completely lost in last week’s coverage was the story of the property developers in China who built a huge vacation resort in Hebei Province, and named it Jackson Hole, even though none of them had ever been to the actual place in Wyoming. Still, banking on the theory that Chinese people love much about American history and culture — particularly when it deals with the Old West — they built an 850-home development (most of them already sold) with log structures designed by an architect in Oregon, and gave each house a theme name like Billy the Kid and Geronimo. After that, they hired someone to go to theAmerican West and buy a lot of kitsch, ship it back and decorate the homes, shops and stores. The finished development boasts a downtown, lots of opportunities to buy stuff, and “colorful festivals,” including the Thanksgiving shindig that comes with this explanation, and I quote verbatim: “Similar with Chinese Double Ninth Festival, Thanksgiving Day is a union day for family. The characteristic food is turkey. Americans having turkey is just like Chinese people eating laba porridge, which let people New Year will begin. Thanksgiving Day is the start of New Year atmosphere, and end till at the end of Christmas Day.”
The website, http://www.yxmlj.com, is a real hoot (click the button for English). Greg says check it out.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor ofGreaterMedia Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].