Why Tim Hortons Totally Blacked Out This Location in a Small Quebec Town

Who turned out the lights?

Tim Hortons and JWT Toronto plunged customers at one of the coffee and donut chain’s Quebec locations into inky darkness for a prank introducing a new dark roast coffee blend.

When unwitting patrons arrived, they found the L’Île-Perrot store completely covered in black-out material, even the windows. Dark vehicles were parked out front to heighten the mystery. Those who ventured inside bumped into a dude wearing night-vision goggles, who led them to a counter where dark roast was served and the gag revealed.

Goggles Guy looks pretty creepy, and unlike the hammy, self-aware fright reactions we’ve seen in some “scary” ad pranks, the squeals of shock and surprise at Tim Hortons seem genuine. This is the client’s second large-scale, Twilight Zone-ish effort of late. In May, it meticulously recreated its first shop from 1964, interior and exterior, in minute detail (see below)—even bringing back the original employees as servers.

Both the time machine and darkness stunts have generated lots of attention (the latter is approaching 700,000 YouTube views in four days). Still, such shenanigans seem like an awful lot to digest before you’ve had your morning joe.



It Looks Like Pizza Hut in Japan Is Now Totally Being Run by Cats

If there are two things that go together on the Internet like cats and pizza—it’s cats and friggin’ pizza! 

The latest treat from Japan is a website announcing the grand opening of Pizza Cat!, a Pizza Hut restaurant apparently run entirely by cats. The campaign is rolling out as tiny “episodes” of each “employee” cat doing jobs like delivering pizzas, cleaning the floors and managing the money. The results are pretty hilarious, bordering on totally absurd. 

We’re not quite sure of the actual point of it all, but according to the translation of the YouTube page, “Pizza Cat! Store is a fictional store.” Shocking, I know, but it’s great anyway. 

Check out the official Pizza Cats! grand opening announcement, followed by the many episodes of feline frivolity.



Everyone in This Ad (and Who Worked on This Ad) Was Paid in Meat

Ah, the barter system, humanity’s oldest economy. And it’s alive and well in the modern marketplace—at least if you’re using slow-cooked meat as currency.

Canadian restaurant chain Montana’s Cookhouse & Bar has created an entire ad paid for with meat to promote its Best of BBQ Sampler. The crew offered Montana’s smoked meat spread to a wide range of merchants in exchange for goods and services ranging from massage and yoga lessons to a manicure and permanent tattoo.

Even the ad agency (One Twenty Three West) and production company (OPC Family Style) agreed to work on the project in exchange for barbecue. 

When the crew went door to door, not everyone said yes. But they seemed to have a pretty good success rate, and it’s good to know that if I’m ever strapped for cash and need an MMA lesson, I can always bring a billfold full of brisket.

CREDITS:

Agency: One Twenty Three West
Client: Montana’s Cookhouse & Bar, Cara Operations
Creative Directors: Rob Sweetman, Bryan Collins
Art Directors: Rob Sweetman, Paul Riss
Copywriter: Bryan Collins
Account Services: Christina Tan, Scot Keith
Production Company: OPC Family Style
Director: Max Sherman
Director of Photography: Kiel Milligan
Executive Producers: Harland Weiss, Donovan Boden, Liz Dussault
Producer: Dwight Phipps
Editor: Oleg Jiliba
Sound Design, Music: Six Degrees



Advertising: A TGI Fridays Makeover to Recapture the Social Crowd

The restaurant is trying to burnish its image in an bid to draw younger revelers, who may dismiss the chain as a place where their parents ordered potato skins in the 1980s.



Eating Alone? Chipotle Cups Now Come With Original Writings From Literary Giants

Apparently Jonathan Safran Foer is just like us. He eats at Chipotle and he curses the heavens when he neglects to bring something to entertain him while he crams rice, beans and guacamole (he's a vegetarian) into his piehole.

But since he's a famous author, he was able to e-mail the chain's CEO, Steve Ells, and pitch him a neat idea: "I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn't have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text," Foer recalled to Vanity Fair as a summary of his e-mail.

This is all to say that, starting today, original long-form text by Foer—along with fellow scribes Judd Apatow, Sheri Fink, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Hader, Michael Lewis, Toni Morrison, Steve Pinker, George Saunders and Sarah Silverman—will festoon Chipotle's cups and bags. Chipotle deemed the initiative "Cultivating Thought." Foer selected the writers, and any edits were made by him.

Check out two of the writeups below and see them all here.

Via Vanity Fair.

The Two-Minute Minute
By Michael Lewis 

I spend too much time trying to spend less time. Before trips to the grocery store, I’ll waste minutes debating whether it is more efficient to make a list, or simply race up and down the aisles grabbing things. I spend what feels like decades in airport security lines trying to figure out how to get through most quickly: should I put the plastic bin containing my belt and shoes through the bomb detector before my carry-on bag, or after? And why sit patiently waiting for the light to turn green when I might email on my phone? I’ve become more worried about using time efficiently than using it well. But in saner moments I’m able to approach the fourth dimension not as a thing to be ruthlessly managed, but whose basic nature might be altered to enrich my experience of life. I even have tricks for slowing time—or at least my perception of it. At night I sometimes write down things that happened that day.

For example: This morning Walker (my 5-year-old son) asks me if I had a pet when I was a kid. “Yes,” I say, “I had a Siamese cat that I loved named Ding How, but he got run over by a car.” Walker: “It’s lucky that it got killed by a car.” Me: “Why?” Walker: “Because then you could get a new cat that isn’t named Ding How.”

Recording the quotidian details of my day seems to add hours a day to my life: I’m not sure why. Another trick is to focus on some ordinary thing—the faintly geological strata of the insides of a burrito, for instance—and try to describe what I see. Another: pick a task I’d normally do quickly and thoughtlessly—writing words for the side of a cup, say—and do it as slowly as possible. Forcing my life into slow-motion, I notice a lot that I miss at game speed. The one thing I don’t notice is the passage of time.

Two-Minute Seduction
By Toni Morrison

I took my heart out and gave it to a writer made heartless by fame, someone who needed it to pump blood into veins desiccated by the suck and roar of crowds slobbering or poisoning or licking up the red froth they mistake for happiness because happiness looks just like a heart painted on a valentine cup or tattooed on an arm that has never held a victim or comforted a hurt friend. I took it out and the space it left in my chest was sutured tight like the skin of a drum.

As my own pulse failed, I fell along with a soft shower of rain typical in this place.

Lying there, collapsed under trees bordering the mansion of the famous one I saw a butterfly broken by the slam of a single raindrop on its wings fold and flutter as it hit a pool of water still fighting for the lift that is its nature. I closed my eyes expecting to dissolve into stars or lava or a brutal sequoia when the famous writer appeared and leaned down over me. Lifting my head he put his lips on mine and breathed into my mouth one word and then another, and another, words upon words then numbers, then notes. I swallowed it all while my mind filled with language, measure, music, knowledge.

These gifts from the famous writer were so seductive, so all encompassing they seemed to make a heart irrelevant.




Man Actually Cooks Entire Disgusting Meal Described in Patton Oswalt’s Fake Ad for Black Angus

When Patton Oswalt described a grotesquely gluttonous meal in his fake ad for Black Angus Steakhouse way back in 2004, the up-and-coming comedian surely didn't intend for it to ever be made. But this week, one of Oswalt's fans stepped up to the challenge and posted a photo gallery of his creation—a full feast of Oswalt's own design.

It was an accomplishment worthy of note by Oswalt himself. "This psycho cooked—in reality—EVERY SINGLE ITEM from my 'Black Angus' bit for his friend's bachelor party," the comedian posted yesterday on Facebook. While the photos aren't exactly well-lit or appetizing, they seem just about as appealing as Oswalt probably intended them to be.

The video below contains the audio of Oswalt's original ad. After the jump, check out the photos and how they compare with Oswalt's original description.

Warning: The video clip is probably NSFW. (But the photos below are fine.)

"At Black Angus, we’ll start you off with our appetizer platter, featuring five jumbo deep-fried Gulf shrimp, served on a disc of salted butter, with 15 of our potato-bacon bombs and a big bowl of pork cracklins with our cheese-and-butter dippin’ sauce."

“Then we'll take you to our mile-long soup and salad bar featuring bacon-and-cheese cream soup and our five head of iceberg lettuce He-Man salad served in a punch bowl with 18 pounds of ranch dressing, pork-stuffed deep fried croutons and, what the hell, a couple of corn dogs!”

“Then we’ll wheel out our bottomless trough of fried dough.”

"Then we’ll bring out our 55-ounce Los Mesa He-Man steak slab, served with a deep-fried pumpkin, stuffed with buttered scallops and 53 of our potato-bacon bombs.”

“And then bend over, Abigail Mae, cause here comes the gravy pipe!”

“At Black Angus, your name is Peaches.”

Hat tip to my friend Sherri Ross Walters for sharing this on Facebook.


    

Paula Deen’s Cook Tells of Slights, Steeped in History

Dora Charles, who lives in an aging trailer home on the outskirts of Savannah, said Paula Deen held out the promise that together, they might get rich one day.