Dear Readers,
As all of you know—assuming you have ever done things like read a word of this blog or heard me speak a word in public—I unabashedly love everything about my hometown. I love our processed cheese (although all cheese is processed, but whatevs). I love our macroly brewed beer. I love the late, great, undead rapper Nelly more than I love my yet to be conceived children. Basically, what I am trying to say is that, in my completely unbiased opinion, St. Louis is the greatest city on Earth. If you disagree in even the subtlest of ways, I am going to be forced to throw down in verbal fisticuffs against you. You give my city shit, and I am going to come right back at you with everything my limited intellectual capacity has to offer in what will certainly be a just semi-articulate attempt to tear your undeniably inaccurate opinion to shreds.
As all of you know—assuming you have ever done things like read a word of this blog or heard me speak a word in public—I unabashedly love everything about my hometown. I love our processed cheese (although all cheese is processed, but whatevs). I love our macroly brewed beer. I love the late, great, undead rapper Nelly more than I love my yet to be conceived children. Basically, what I am trying to say is that, in my completely unbiased opinion, St. Louis is the greatest city on Earth. If you disagree in even the subtlest of ways, I am going to be forced to throw down in verbal fisticuffs against you. You give my city shit, and I am going to come right back at you with everything my limited intellectual capacity has to offer in what will certainly be a just semi-articulate attempt to tear your undeniably inaccurate opinion to shreds.
Which brings me, of course, to the bagels. You know what I am talking about, the picture of bread sliced or “St. Louis Style” bagels which lit the Internet on fire earlier this week, and created a not unamusing series of memes about how we in St. Louis eat our hot dogs, ice cream cones or PB & J’s. First, let me just say that I reject the notion that this bagel slicing technique is in any way a “St. Louis” style. If you walked into any bakery or cafe here in town and ordered a bagel it would come halved, like it would anywhere else. Bagels are sliced like this at one chain of NATIONWIDE restaurants known as Bread Co, or Panera if you are some out of town yuppie nerd, and only when specifically requested by the customer.
Second, and more importantly, who cares how a bagel is cut (I mean besides me. But I only care that you care, so ha!)? It’s a shittier version of a doughnut, a circle of non-fried bread with a hole in it. I mean bagels are fine, they aren’t a vegetable so I will obviously eat them, but if you are ranking the best foods in the world, the only way a bagel cracks the top 100 is if it is covered by several mass produced eggs and a steak patty from your local McDonald’s. Since when is it sacrilege to cut bread like, you know, bread? Not to mention this method of slicing makes bagels easier to share amongst a large group, and ensures that everyone is getting a piece of the flavor (who wants the bottom half of a cinnamon crunch bagel?). I am not saying that “bread-slicing” a bagel has to be your thing. But is cutting a bagel this way really so crazy? Or are you, Internet, lazily trolling the city of my birth for the 19-billionth time due to your own mix of boredom, faux outrage and unjustified arrogance?
The answer is clearly the latter. I get that doggin’ all things St. Louis is so neat and hip nowadays that we even do it to ourselves. I just have too big a chip on my shoulder to have a sense of humor about it. As the embodiment of the St. Louis stereotype that the Internet loves to hate, I feel like I am the one who must stand up and tell all the tech-savvy “cool kids” out there that are once again dragging my city’s good name through the digital mud, primarily on a platform invented by St. Louis native Jack Dorsey BTW, to buzz the hell off. Like any place we have our problems (the occasional murder or act of police malfeasance, duplicitous douchebags who move our football team halfway across the country), but we do a lot of things right too. As I just mentioned, we gave you Twitter. You may not know this, but we gave you the hot dog, the ice cream cone and peanut butter as well. So try cracking a history book for once ya uneducated yet ironically pompous jabronis. Then you'd know what kind impact our region has had on your own uppity existence. Then you'd know that all of the aforementioned foods you sarcastically claim we don't know how to eat were created in our city at the 1904 World's Fair.
Then maybe, just maybe, you coastal elites would stop giving us grief over something so banal and insignificant as the manner in which we seldomly decide to cleave up our cream-cheese soaked breakfast breads. But if you don't, just know that this dude is ready to scrap. Because I am far too irrationally invested in my hometown's reputation to take your St. Louis-based criticism as anything but personal. I LIVE to have this argument. Me and my town are both fueled by your hate.
Now excuse me as a I go cut a bagel into tiny arches to commemorate the best manmade monument the world has ever known and put a picture of it on the internet. Just to see if anyone is still watching. Just to see if anyone else out there still has anything left to say.
Second, and more importantly, who cares how a bagel is cut (I mean besides me. But I only care that you care, so ha!)? It’s a shittier version of a doughnut, a circle of non-fried bread with a hole in it. I mean bagels are fine, they aren’t a vegetable so I will obviously eat them, but if you are ranking the best foods in the world, the only way a bagel cracks the top 100 is if it is covered by several mass produced eggs and a steak patty from your local McDonald’s. Since when is it sacrilege to cut bread like, you know, bread? Not to mention this method of slicing makes bagels easier to share amongst a large group, and ensures that everyone is getting a piece of the flavor (who wants the bottom half of a cinnamon crunch bagel?). I am not saying that “bread-slicing” a bagel has to be your thing. But is cutting a bagel this way really so crazy? Or are you, Internet, lazily trolling the city of my birth for the 19-billionth time due to your own mix of boredom, faux outrage and unjustified arrogance?
The answer is clearly the latter. I get that doggin’ all things St. Louis is so neat and hip nowadays that we even do it to ourselves. I just have too big a chip on my shoulder to have a sense of humor about it. As the embodiment of the St. Louis stereotype that the Internet loves to hate, I feel like I am the one who must stand up and tell all the tech-savvy “cool kids” out there that are once again dragging my city’s good name through the digital mud, primarily on a platform invented by St. Louis native Jack Dorsey BTW, to buzz the hell off. Like any place we have our problems (the occasional murder or act of police malfeasance, duplicitous douchebags who move our football team halfway across the country), but we do a lot of things right too. As I just mentioned, we gave you Twitter. You may not know this, but we gave you the hot dog, the ice cream cone and peanut butter as well. So try cracking a history book for once ya uneducated yet ironically pompous jabronis. Then you'd know what kind impact our region has had on your own uppity existence. Then you'd know that all of the aforementioned foods you sarcastically claim we don't know how to eat were created in our city at the 1904 World's Fair.
Then maybe, just maybe, you coastal elites would stop giving us grief over something so banal and insignificant as the manner in which we seldomly decide to cleave up our cream-cheese soaked breakfast breads. But if you don't, just know that this dude is ready to scrap. Because I am far too irrationally invested in my hometown's reputation to take your St. Louis-based criticism as anything but personal. I LIVE to have this argument. Me and my town are both fueled by your hate.
Now excuse me as a I go cut a bagel into tiny arches to commemorate the best manmade monument the world has ever known and put a picture of it on the internet. Just to see if anyone is still watching. Just to see if anyone else out there still has anything left to say.
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