...has become even more pretentious over here as prices have gone through the roof. Of course, "entertainment" isn't one of those things tracked when our government calculates and reports inflation purely to make themselves (at worst) not look bad, the lying bastards who I despise on a molecular level...Oooops! I've somehow gotten off track especially as to the humour one can find if one looks.

Anyway, my wife and I stopped in to a chain restaurant called Ruby Tuesday's the other day. Now, Ruby's has always been thinly disguised standard fare attempting to be cloaked in college-town culinary respectability, but it really is restaurant distributor food off the daily reefer truck served up by university students and cooked to highly repeatable recipe by a guy in a hairnet most likely named Brandon who really isn't paying the strictest attention because his mind is quite occupied praying the hostess isn't pregnant.

Anyway, their prices have become inexplicably eyewatering while the offerings remain pretty much unchanged, like many corporate-run chains. What has changed is they have apparently engaged some Jamie Oliver wannabe to write the new descriptions in the menu. Just ostentatious twaddle; my favourite being the use of the term "deconstructed". In the current menu they offer a "deconstructed" kabab, meaning the bits are plated without a stick.

It's bad enough they gouge you on prices whilst relentlessly pushing the tip-percentage in the public lexicon from what was the standard 15% to today's 20% norm, but to justify it with such descriptive meaningless oral vomit as "fair-trade ethically-sourced free-range organic farm-to-table" just insults the intelligence.

I'm happy to pay for quality, and I'm happy to support real local Mom and Pop hash-slinger joints with no pretentiousness and no corporate structure. This faux-Michelin-chef hipster bollocks really is unsustainable in today's economic environment as is the corporate chain model (even MacDonalds prices have gotten beyond obscene).

Perhaps they need deconstructed.

GRIN!