Tell It Like It Really Is, Ronald.

Why don't McDonalds ads tell it like it really is?

It has been a long time since anyone that has served me at a McDonalds has been genuinely pleased to see me or been able to transpond my order into the till without stuffing it up at least once.

Despite being purveyors of 'fast food' the delivery of my food is anything but and I will eventually be directed by the kid behind the counter to stand in some non existent queue which will confuse everybody, just so that he can stuff up the order of the lady behind me.

There I'll wait till the other guy who is not smart enough to operate the magical till only read it, figures out the bag getting cold in his hand is for me. When I do finally get to sit down you can bet that I'm going to be disappointed that my food doesn't look anything like it did on the posters. Because it always looks so good on the posters.

Once seated I'm more likely to be pissed that my order is missing something than I am to be orgasmicly ecstatic at the thought of taking my first bite, which, despite my eternal hoping otherwise, will be decidedly average.

Ill be tempted to go and get the item my order is missing but the sight of several densely packed queues and the very prospect of confusing the members of Mensa behind the counter once more means that I won't.

I'll just finish my cold chips, but not my Coke which after just five minutes is ninety percent water thanks to either the way they mix it or the mountain of ice that goes in each cup. Possibly both. I would usually ask for no ice in places like this but again, I don't want to challenege the gifted behind the counter.

I’ll lament the apple pie I won't taste this visit and wonder just why it is that I wasted ten dollars on this rubbish. Again.

Now that is the McDonalds we know and love.

Someone should have them up for false advertising.

The Blue Thunder Root

Now, I love my wife, but if she were to up and tell me one day that we would be spending some family time standing around the local roundabout waving placards with her name on it just so she could get elected to parliament like the local National candidate did this past weekend, then I suspect Mr Jug Cord would have to pay a visit.

There are just some places you don’t expect to see advertising hoardings and a manic roundabout is just one of those places. How many votes is she going to get by distracting people there anyway? She might get the odd pity vote given that she has wheeled out everyone in the immediate family even dear old Dad who had to prop himself against the ‘Remember to Indicate’ sign, but I think, on the whole, no one is going to give a flying fuck.

KFC have learnt that lesson. Their six foot ‘Now Hiring’ window erection has failed to attract the ‘eligible for the minimum wage’ audience it targeted. Granted it’s big and bright enough for the text generation to see it, but they’re too busy texting whilst navigating the roundabout to see it.

My neighbour’s son is just such a genius. He starts his rotary turbo up several hours before he plans to depart and leaves it rumbling in the garage whilst he nips back in to have a quick jimmy over how sweet it sounds. I had a mate who used to do the same thing with his motorbike. He reckoned the manufacturers recommended it. Fuck me it does.

Now it’s not like we're talking about Granddad’s old black and white telly that actually needed half an hour for the cathode ray tube to warm up before you actually saw anything; no a motorbike or car for that matter is a highly engineered piece of kit – it’s made to go as soon as you turn the fricken key. Quite frankly if the guy who was selling me a motorbike told me it needed half an hour warm up time then alarm bells would be ringing my friend.

Did you see the doco on Mechaphilia the other night? Fantastic stuff. Mechaphilia is the sexual attraction to machines. There are only 12 known sufferers in the world, or at least bold enough to admit publicly that they like sticking their willy up the exhaust pipe of their motor. Not that there seems to be much suffering going on either, it looked like they were quite enjoying it given the blurred out images that these guys post on the world wide intraweb every day.

The programme focused mainly on one guy in The States (where else aye?) who likes to jizz all over his 1970s VW Beetle, or any car for that matter. His claim to fame was that he had given the original Blue Thunder helicopter a quick shafting the day he was left alone with it on a sightseeing trip. Unfortunately the Blue Thunder chopper no longer exists as it crashed in the early nineties, quite possibly because the avionics were filled with mans milk, who knows? Needless to say it was only a matter of hours before the British film crew had footage of him whacking one out over their four wheel drive.

Perhaps as a wind up they took this guy to a huge car show to gauge his reaction, needless to say he cracked one the whole time and proceeded to perform some pretty heavy frottage on anything with four wheels. How his old corduroys contained his excitement I’ll never know but it was certainly there on show for all to see.

I suspect my neighbour is a closet Mechaphiliac. In fact most boy racers would have to be wouldn’t they? Deep down I can imagine they’d all like to jam the ‘ol chopper between the seats and lube their ride. Both my neighbours – mother and son – like to toot as they leave, every farken time and they come and go and they come and go a lot. Perhaps it’s a signal that they have infact left. Perhaps they don’t actually talk to each other and thus communication is by car horn only. Perhaps it’s a sign that the streaming porn can start and / or the Mechaphilia postings can begin?

Perhaps they’re just annoying bastards.

Mr Angry Checks In

My son’s school is peddling lipstick as its latest fundraiser. No seriously. Why? Because every woman uses lippy – or so says the pamphlet that came with it. Now I think we all know that isn’t the case but what an interesting train of thought to use when deciding what to use as your next fundraiser. All women poop too, so how bout fundraiser two ply?

It’ll never catch on but I’m wondering just how far they’ll go to get their hands on our money. Back in my day our fundraising consisted of selling calendars, school ones at that, which every relative would buy so that no matter where you went whilst on your holidays, you’d be reminder of school whilst you took a slash in Aunty or Grandmas carzie. Now it’s chocolates, hot cross buns, pastries and cosmetics. Next week it will be strap-ons and anal beads. Engraved with the school logo for your pleasure!

And I’m sure we only did the fundraiser thing once a year. Now it’s every other week. But then that’s the financial situation that most public schools find themselves in these days – in the red. They literally have to raise tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own accord just to keep running. Now this is election year and we’ve already started getting fired up about just how big a tax cut we should all get but I reckon there is a more important question to be asked; What’s happening to the taxes that we pay because they sure as fuck don’t seem to be getting through to the places we expect them to go?! Like schools, cops and hospitals.

Don’t start me on hospitals. My week long gestation on the couch at home came to an end this week when I finally got the call up to return to Ward 17, the ward with the higher mortality rate than Ward 16, the ward where they put the people on deaths door. Go figure. Now I realise this place isn’t a hotel, but I can’t help but feel that when you’ve been given a time and date to show up the least the buggers could do is have a bed ready for you. They knew I was coming dammit; it was hardly a surprise admission! Terribly selfish of me to think that I know but that’s just how I roll.

Now four hours is a long time. It’s even longer when you have to spend half of it sitting alone in an empty triage room waiting for a bed to become available. Those rooms always look cool on TV, like in ER and shit, but there are exceptionally boring in real life. Even I was to open all the bagged up tubing and start a colonic irrigation on myself it would still be boring. Cleansing, but boring.

I spent the other two hours in the TV room where I was able to share in the delightful presence that was Andre. Andre is one of those guys that got himself heavily tattooed up and down the arms as soon as he was legally allowed to because it made him look like a hard bastard. Then he shaved his head and spent the next 20 years listening to Judas Priest to remind himself of just how hard a hard bastard he was. Now pushing 50, he still shaves his head, wears a puffy vest over a small boys tee-shirt despite it being freezing outside just so you know that he’s still a hard bastard. He no longer looks hard mind you, he looks like a scrotum, only with tattoos.

He likes to use the words ‘shit’ and ‘its fucked’ a lot, mainly when referring to the state of his cellphone and especially when in the presence of his mother who has to be pushing 70 just to remind her how hard he is. She didn’t seem to mind that young Andre has developed a bit of a potty mouth and infact promised to take him out for a roast dinner at the local takeaway. It doesn’t get much more hard than mum taking you out for a roast tea that’s for sure. Andre – as you may now have deduced – is a Mummy’s boy and is not at all hard. He does manage to succeed in pulling of a look though, the look of a fuckwit.

So needless to say the first day back was not a good one and any troubles I might have had in firing up the Mr Angry persona I was hoping to bring with me were gone in the first five minutes. Since then – and I write this on day two – I’ve even managed to piss off some hoighty toighty theatre staff by not being on the premises when they called for me. I had left the building and was actually on the sideline coaching my sons soccer team because personally and this might just be me, but I find stuff like that a tad more intrinsically rewarding than sitting around waiting to have a tube shoved up my arm.

I had four hours free yesterday in which they could have done that!

Cheese or Sky TV?

I’ll be the first to admit that one of my weaknesses is that on the odd occasion, I have been known to jump to the wrong conclusion about someone and misjudged them unfairly.

My wife thinks this and is always reminding me that it’s an ‘area I can improve on’ which is a polite way of saying it’s high on the list of ‘things I hate about you’. She might have a point, but I doubt it. There have only been two recorded instances of me misjudging someone and with a margin of error of plus or minus two even that number is in question.

Like the couple I watched lay it on nice and thick on the news the other night. They were talking about how the cost of living and shit has made it hard for them to raise their young family. Man it was emotional TV I can tell you. At least it would have been had I not spent the entire two minutes staring at the big fuck off shiny wide screen TV they had behind them in their lounge. I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt at this stage until I noticed the mega stereo draped alongside it, the Sky decoder and both the Xbox and PS consoles they had strewn across the lounge floor. You know – the necessities of life.

Both smoked, another accidental caught-on-camera revelation that they obviously neglected to think would reflect badly on them prior to letting the news crew inside and yet here they were, lips quivering over the price of a block of cheese! Now I’m not an unsympathetic man but this is the classic example of a couple having absolutely no idea of how to prioritise 'need' over 'want' and then trying to blame their shortcomings on someone else. Who knows, maybe they won the lot in a meat raffle some where but I’m guessing the prize that day was a tray of meat, not some $7000 home entertainment system. I’ve run a few dodgy raffles in my time but I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

I’m all for helping out people who actually struggle to make ends meet because their needs exceed the income they have. If they’re making every possible sacrifice and still struggling to make ends meet than society should help them out, that’s what our taxes are for, but when you struggle to make the connection that the difference between having two litres of milk, a loaf of bread and a block of cheese each week lies in you giving up your Sky subscription, or not, then alarm bells are ringing I reckon. When you can’t pay the power bill that shot up the very day after you bought that LCD flat screen on lay-by, then I’m willing to bet that the advice you need is more than financial.

And who’s going to top up Mr & Mrs Fiscal Responsibility so that they can have cheese and Sky? That’s right, you and I. Mr & Mrs Taxpayer.

I’ve also got no time for first time home buyers who are now crying that they now can’t pay their mortgage because the big bad bank put its interest rates up. These are the noddy’s who got caught up in the whole Mitre 10 Dream Home type wave of bullshit that had people buying the worst house in the best street that they couldn’t really afford to impress folk who didn’t really care.

They followed the advice of the highly paid property guru on the show who’s been in the ‘biz’ for 30 years and has allegedly made shitloads as a result, when he told them to buy high and sell higher. The show didn’t actually mention that he’s probably been bankrupt twice in that time but who needs details at a time when ridiculously easy money is just gagging to be made huh? Mitre 10 sure weren’t going to tell them, they wanted the suckers to buy all the DIY crap from them that they were going to need after buying the worst house in the worst street. Funny that.

Trade Me, the housing market is not. There’s no buying it at the Warehouse for a fiver and flogging it off for $50 in housing, contrary to what you might see on TV. You would think that the small matter of there being 6 figures in the price tag would make people a bit wary, but apparently here in NZ there’s a sucker born every minute. Buying a house means entering into a world where market forces can shaft you quicker than a sneaky one with the missus while the kids are playing next door and it’s not like hard times in housing is new phenomenon either, infact it’s frighteningly frequent in its regularity. Something Mum and Dad probably could have attested to if Mr & Mrs SuckedInBigTime had taken the time to ask them.

But they didn’t and they too are looking for someone else to blame and anyone will do really; The Government, Graham Henry for not winning the World Cup, Al-Qaeda, perhaps even the 47 Asians living in the one house next door. Whatever. We all know there's only one group controlling the worlds finances anyway; Ninjas. Blaming someone else isn’t going to change the fact that you’re in up to your balls in mortgage nor is it going to make it go away, so get over it. As Tana Umaga once said “we’re not playing tiddlywinks here’.

Looks like the worst house in the best street just got a whole lot cheaper.

Real Men Eat Jaffas.

There are some seriously disturbing trends with young men these days and for once it’s got nothing to do with porn, drugs or sex. Why is it that just about every adolescent boy is trying their best to look like a girl?

Every time I'm anywhere I’m struck by just how many long fringed, long sided, long mulleted bouffant hairdos there are being worn by fellas. Throw in some daggy sunnies – present company excluded Big Al – skin tight jeans and you have something that’s neither hetro nor metro sexual, but asexual. It’s not even grunge or alternative, which in my day was about as asexual as a fella could get but even then everyone knew Kurt Cobain, who we were all trying to mimic, was a fella. But now our young men are dressing more and more like the Hanson boys and look where it got them.

‘Freedom of expression’ this looking like a girl might be, but its also making them look a lot like a waster. How do they see exactly with their long fringes pasted over their eyes? If it’s impaired vision you want why not just whack a pair of testes on the forehead as well and complete the look? It can only be described as not wanting to look like anything but trying to look like something. Make up your minds I say and either choose to look like a man or tuck it between the legs and go girl. And don’t get me started on the lady boys who then want to look hard by wearing their hoodie up whilst in the mall, thus removing their last bit of sensory perception. I’ve decided that to combat this I’m going to start giving a downtrou to anyone wearing a hoodie inside. We'll see how long the hoodies stay up when the tweeds start a comin down.

It’s a sad indictment on society today that mothers are happy for their boys to look like shaggy dogs rather than make them cut their hair and risk having little Tarquin resent them for it. Fathers are too scared to be real men in case they get done for abuse and are not dragging their sons down to the barbers every six weeks like our Dads did with us. And lets get one thing straight right now - a barber shop is not to be confused with a hair salon either. You don’t get a wash, a shampoo and a pair of boobies in the face like you do at Rodney ‘Titty’ Wayne when you visit a real barbers, which is a good thing because frankly, teats have no place near a real haircut. That's why these haircuts exist todays because these wasters go to the salon and have some chick boob bag them rather than using a bowl on the head as a guide like Mum used too.

My step father was like clock work when it came to haircuts. We’d be down at the Naenae barbers five minutes after it opened at 7am to wait in line with all the retired guys who were there for three things only; a cut, some tobacco and to get the hell out of the house and away from their wives. Old Les was my favourite barber, he’d been doing in so long that he had a permanent hunchback which meant you could never quite tell if he was looking at you or not due to the height of his head and his inability to raise it. He knew everybody by name and their favourite cut but then that was easy because there’s only one cut at a real barbers shop; short back and sides.

There’s nothing quite exhilarating as walking to school with a new haircut on a cold morning that still stings around the neck because Les ran the clippers a little too close. Recently my wife gave me an unexpected blast back to my past when she gave me a number one all over whilst cutting my hair. It’s really quite something to see a man in his thirties with an ADHD kids cut but I’ll tell you what, I never got mistaken for a girl.

To top all this madness off, Reading Cinemas – the arsehole of cinemas – apparently no longer sell Jaffas, Snifters or Pineapple Lumps. Well fuck me, what else is there to eat at the movies? And it’s typical really of a company like Reading, who charge exorbitant prices for movies that if you haven’t already downloaded it off the Net you can buy on DVD in a week’s time anyway, to deny you your favourite sweet. Reading's like to think that their big chairs and big screens make the difference when compared with other cinemas but when they’ve run all the other theatres – whose seats and screens are fine by the way – out of business then I’ll tell you what will be even bigger at Readings; the prices! The pricks.

I’m going to go to Readings every weekend now just for the hell of it and conceal on my persons, quite possibly in my cavities, one of those catering sized bags of Jaffas that you get from Moore Wilson’s. I’m not going to eat them mind you; I’m just going to roll them around the theatre so that when they’re cleaning up they’ll think “Shit. Jaffas. We don’t sell those how the hell did they get in here! Someone’s bringing in food they bought elsewhere…”. The ultimate mindfuck. Then they’ll want to start searching everybody who goes in to see a movie from that point on and my work there will be done, because no one is gonna put up with that shit, no matter how big the seats are.

Because you see real men eat Jaffas. And get their hair cut at a barbers and not Titty Waynes. That’s just how we roll.

Cheer Up Emo

The world is full of arseholes, figuratively speaking, but that shouldn’t mean folk have to act like one. Take for instance the foreskin in Nebraska who took an AK47 to the shopping mall because life got a little bit tough for him. What a cocksucker.

You know that it is we the people promote this kind of bullshit. That’s right, you and I. Not because we allow video game companies to make first person shooter games, or Hollywood to glorify violence on the big and small screen. No, that stuff has always been there and always will. We do so by buying the newspapers, the magazines and the pay TV news channels that run endless post massacre articles on the waste of space that ultimately immortalise him in the eyes of other wasters who long to be adored.

These are gonads that aren't satisified being just like all the other freaks and geeks on YouTube, stapling their genitals to a piece of wood and farting near an open flame. No they want to be news worthy and fuck me if there isn’t a world waiting to appease them. Just like the popularity of the link to the story about some cooze shagging in a public place, we’re all gagging to hear about the next Emo who goes postal because his boyfriend dumped him.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Emos, I think everyone should own one. But it does strike me that Emos are just Goths who think they’re too depressed to be called Goth. Back in my day, when gay meant happy, kids went Goth for the same reason kids today go Emo – they didn’t want to have their hair cut when their Mum said so, they didn’t want to bathe and they needed an excuse to listen to crap music that noone else listened to like the Cure. Emos could actually save themselves the money they spend on eyeliner by presenting themselves to the nearest heterosexual man who would be more than happy to give them two black eyes each morning. Cheer up Emo, for fucks sake.

Now I may not be the sharpest dildo in the draw but I can’t help but think there’s something retarded in not wanting to conform but yet still aligning yourself with a group of folk who all, wait for it, conform. How does that work?! If you wanna be out there, then walk round in the buff, not many folk are out there doing that right at this moment in time.

I tried playing the ‘too cool for school’ card myself once, or rather twice actually by not going to either of my two school formals. I made out like I didn’t want to go because everyone else actually was, but in truth it was down to my mother being tighter than a nuns nasty with money and not wanting to shell out for the suit hire. The bitch. But I can’t complain, we had the necessities of life like a 12 seated mahogany dinner table that cost more than the house and we weren’t actually allowed to ever sit at. There was only the four of us mind you so maybe that’s why. We made it look empty.

No there’s only one sure fire way to deal with these wannabe martyrs. Ignore them. Don’t publicise, analyse or glorify their actions. Obviously its news but lets stick to the bare facts and report something along the lines of “Loser Kid Fucks Up Mass Murder By Only Shooting Seven”. Belittle the guy even in death by taking the piss out of him because he only shot seven in a crowded mall with an automatic rifle, which is a poor effort really. Prove to all that want to be like him that even in death, society will still see you as a loser.

At the end of the day it’s up to us, you and me, to not buy this shit when it sees print. Because like it or not, we all play a part. Just like as in the death of Princess Diana, our hands inadvertently have blood on them for creating the demand that drove the paparazzi to chase her through the streets of Paris. You personally may not have bought the mag that ran the photos, but you can bet your Mum, sister or slightly effeminate mate helped the cause by buying the latest Womans Day whilst waiting in the queue at Woolies.

Incidentally, sealed sections in chick mags have become decidedly lame these days. If I’m getting my wife to buy the mag for the sealed section I want to see full on bush, milkers and hell why not, cock. If all I’m getting is animated diagrams and raunchy forums all written, one handed, by the same fat guy then I’m going to start stapling that fucker back up and returning it under the pretence of false advertising. I might even include several polaroids of myself depicting the type of imagery one expects to find in a sealed section. And don’t give me the ‘10 best positions’ rubbish again because we all know there’s only two – the one where your partner does all the work and the one where you just need to lie there.

I wonder if Emos have their own positions? I doubt it. I can only imagine depression sex begins and probably never ends in the missionary mode. Cheer up Emo, for fucks sake.

Fast Food Nation?

My local KFC is looking to hire new staff.

I know this - not because I've been crimping with my homies again and got the low down - but because they've printed it in four foot high bright yellow lettering in their front window. A good piece of free advertising I suppose, but not the smartest move to pull outside the two busiest roundabouts in J Town. The locals live a charmed existence getting round the two of them as it is without The Colonel putting them off with his eight foot erection.

Incidentally - ever notice how The Colonel has mysteriously started to fade away on all the KFC signage and packaging? Oh he's still there - if you look close enough - but you really have to look. I'm not surprised though, the guy looks like a member of the KKK, only without the hood. He's even got a militaristic title. I guess 'Arch Deacon' was a little too much of a giveaway so they went with 'Colonel'. That, or he looks like a paedophile, which I've personally suspected for quite some time. Finger licken good anyone?

Anyhoo, the sign in the front window is nice and big and I guess it has to be when your target workforce is more akin to focusing on the tiny text of mobile phones. Either that or the urban myth about the 'something extra' in the coleslaw is actually true and the occupational hazard to that kind of carry on - as your mother always told you - is that you will eventually go blind. So best make the letters nice and big for all them adolescent boys who will have had plenty of practise by now aye?

I should point out at this point that I don't class every teenager as a stoner, for there are some incredibly bright kids out there, but it seems that the weaker link in their generation all work in fast food restaurants these days. There are however some hard working, thoughtful kids holding down these types of jobs too, so I exclude them also from my remaining unscientific generalisations.

KFC and all of the other fast food joints are on a real hiding to nothing these days. They've almost become the persona non grata of the eating world. Not that I'm distraught by this, because as a parent I have now come to see them as the kiddiefiddlers they all are (I'm still talking to you, Colonel!). They should be made by the Commerce Commission to remove the 'fast' from their advertising too, especially McDonalds who perversely, are now making all their burgers only as you order them. Not in advance, but while you wait. Kinda defeats the purpose of fast food doesn't it? But more on McDees later...

Once clean restaurants (and I lose that term loosely) are now no cleaner than picnic tables. When it's a struggle to get barely enough conscious staff to front the counter, you can bet you'll be cleaning your own table.

But it wasn't always this way. I remember as a child visiting places like KFC, Homestead Chicken, McDonalds etc and it was standing room only. Places staffed by a motivated, happy bunch of teenagers who were prepared to do whatever it took to make your experience a memorable one. Pay rates were even worse for teenagers back then, but these were places that gave opportunity and not just easy money. Working in a fast food place back then was a real teenage status symbol too. It didn't get much cooler than working at the Golden Tits.

I remember applying in person one Saturday for a handful of vacancies offered at the local McDees - there were so many kids my age there that had the Internet been around back then, I suspect it would have stopped that day because all the nerds were lining up together. I didn't get the job incidentally, possibly because my acne count was not as high as some around me that day.

It all changed in the early nineties though, when we started cottoning on to the fact that fatty food in large quantities would pretty much kill us. Thus we started to shy away from the hand that had fed us for so long.

Kentucky Fried Chicken - as it was known back then - decided to drop the 'fried' bit from it's name as a result. I actually met the guy who was in charge of KFC at that time and claims he was the brains behind the name drop. He was an inspiring man - one of those half is glass full types and when asked 'hows it going' would reply something along the lines of 'Brilliant' or 'Marvelous'. I've got a feeling he was also as bent as a row of tents though. Which is okay, if you like that sort of thing.

It wasn't long before all the established fast food joints started changing their menus, their advertising and their image. All in a desperate attempt to convince us that they had changed and that although they still cook everything in a bathtub full of fat - it was now good fat. We weren't buying it - literally.

McDonalds have even now introduced salads and rubbery pasta meals for kids too(ever wondered what happened to all the left over Happy Meal toys? They melt them down to make the pasta meals I reckon). None of it has worked though. The only thing that has gotten me back into a McDees after reading books like Fast Food Nation and watching Supersize Me, was the life size cutouts of Sarah Ulmer in her cycling gear. Alas, some bugger had beaten me to it though and had pinched the one from our local before I got the chance.

My advice to all the fast food companies in NZ like Restaurant Brands (who own KFC & Pizza Hut) is to forget fighting it, flaunt what you've got. People who want fatty fast food are still going to come through the door, because it's addictive. So don't pretend to be something you're not, go back to doing what you were best at.

Take all the money you put into feel good advertising and spend it on staff and improving the eating areas of your establishments. Don't worry about developing product ranges that don't match the rest of your menu. Let Subway sell subways - they're crap anyway and someone looking for a quarter pounder is not going to be happy with six inches. If it's worked for the local fish and chip shop for all these years - by far the busiest 'fast food' places any night of the week - it can work again for you.

Not McDonalds though. The anti-Christ of the fast food nation. My advice does not apply to you. For no other fast food company deliberately targets children like you bastards do. You have marketing strategies that begin with emotionally locking in children at the youngest possible age. It's a strategy that would make Adolf Eichmann proud. Don't know who he was? Google him, he had a master plan too.

True story - an employee of McDonalds was fired in the States because he couldn't in good conscience follow the marketing plan he was tasked with. What was his job at the company? He got to dress up as Ronald McDonald - the real paedophile in this story.

Never trust a clown, at least not one peddling a Happy Meal.