The root cause is a combination of picky-eating kids and a (presumably) evil genius in the McDonald’s marketing department.  As a parent, there are times (long car ride) when a quietly-accepted McNugget is worth its weight in gold.  And when it’s time for lunch on a car ride, there is always a McDonald’s nearby.  It’s as if Ray Kroc himself conjured the interstate highway system for the sole purpose of linking his restaurants into a sentient matrix.

But recently I have begun to sense my family turning a fast-food corner.  We have yet to progress to any of your more exotic haute cuisine like, say, Taco Bell.  But lately we’re not getting nearly as strong a lobbying effort for McDonald’s from the back seat.

And that makes me happy.  Again, nothing personal against McDonald’s, but you must agree that there’s something unsettling about how McDonald’s food all smells the same in your car regardless of what you ordered.  And the way a lone wayward fry can make your car smell like a vat of oil for a week.

Let’s be clear.  I’m not some kind of gourmet snob.  Give me a sack of White Castles and a tub of Skyline chili to dip them in, and I’m a happy man. (As a distance runner, my theory is that one must consume a certain level of grease to keep one’s knees from seizing up).

But McDonald’s?  I’m just tired.

A couple weeks ago Laura had a Sunday School function after church so the kids and I were on our own.  (I would have cooked them a healthy, delicious lunch myself but Laura’s group was meeting at our house).  My plan was to go to Fazoli’s, which offers me the opportunity to feed pizza to happy children while enjoying some kind of pasta for myself.  I am a little ashamed at how much I was looking forward to my Fazoli’s.

But on the way I made a wrong turn and popped out on a main thoroughfare going away from Fazoli’s.  Do you know how sometimes when one little thing goes wrong, it spins off in unexpected directions?  Sort of like when you find yourself at work wearing blue socks with khaki pants because the phone rang while you were brushing your teeth that morning and interrupted your routine?

So as I looked for a place to turn, I noticed a new burger restaurant I’d heard good things about.  I’ve wanted to try it for a couple months.  It was right there in front of us, and since Jacob and I love burgers, and surely they offer a chicken nugget, ring, or finger for Shelby, this would be a great Plan B.  We pulled into the parking lot and I immediately became disoriented.  I should have called a timeout right there and immediately retreated to Fazoli’s.  But I forged on.

The parking lot was tiny and full, so I went around to the other side.  Here I encountered a dead-end and even fewer parking spaces (all full) with a sign telling me that there was additional parking in the rear, but on the side of the building from which I had just come.

And here is where things get fuzzy.  I think I saw open space off to the side and figured I’d just go over there and park, and drove out of the burger place’s lot.  I immediately encountered signs telling me I better doggone not park there if I was going to that burger place, since those spaces belonged to another business.  I turned to go back around one more time (my mind was reeling), and then something happened I still can hardly believe.

As I tried to work my way back out to the street, I realized I was literally driving through the outer reaches of a drive-thru lane of an adjacent McDonald’s.

All of the frustration of the last few minutes built into a wave that crashed upon our old Toyota Camry.  I gave up.  Sometimes not just electricity but electrical engineers seek the path of least resistance.  “Kids,” I asked dejectedly, “what do you want from McDonald’s?”  The sack was in my hand before I considered how easily I still could have just gone back down the road to Fazoli’s.

A man can do a lot of thinking as he marinates in fry fat fumes.  I wondered if possibly, just perhaps, the evil marketing genius sat in a meeting one day and proposed that if they just angled their drive-thru lanes just so, they could entrap some tiny percentage of customers who weren’t even trying to go to McDonald’s.

I’ll never look at a wretched fly struggling in a spider’s web the same way again.

I even have a home funnel cake kit which, while rarely used, promotes mental health by allowing me to know that theoretically, I am never more than thirty minutes from a funnel cake if so desired.  This is probably akin to a person who lives a half mile from the ocean but can’t see it from their house.  It’s just nice knowing it’s nearby.

This has been a satisfying funnel cake summer, meaning I got to eat more than one.  The first was a solid effort put forth by the fine folks operating concessions at the Lexington Legends’ minor league baseball stadium.  (Longtime readers may recall that this establishment won the first and thus far only funnel cake review competition from The Ark of Mark).  Their effort this year was once again a good one, but this year I want to review a new location I found.

“The Funnel Cake” is a small establishment tucked back into an inlet on the main strip in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  It’s about midway down the strip on the north side of the street.  It’s right next to a “Jerky Outlet” if that helps orient those of you familiar with Gatlinburg.

(And God help the circulatory system of any reader who can rely on an extensive knowledge of Jerky Outlets to find a funnel cake restaurant).

I patronized The Funnel Cake last week with my son, Jacob.  Let’s break this one down by categories.

Environment

While not necessarily great for visibility, the somewhat hidden location of The Funnel Cake was a plus for me, as we were the only customers on this mid-week afternoon.  The high countertops with old school stools and air conditioning were all a plus.  The inviting feel offered by an open front door was entirely offset by the flies it also welcomed.

Jacob and I decided not to try the machine that would answer any yes/no question for a quarter when we realized that the quarter could be flipped to answer such a question without forfeiting our possession of said quarter.

Presentation

The funnel cake was made quickly and efficiently by the pleasant, bustling lady behind the counter.  And when I say “bustling” I do not use the term flippantly.  This lady walked a quarter mile in the short time it took to prepare our cake and drinks.  She never stopped the whole time we were eating, either.  I’m not sure what all she had to do to the various cooking equipment back there, but she was fully engaged.

The paper plate on which the cake was served was adequate.

Menu

I am a funnel cake purist.  All I really need on the menu for a good funnel cake experience is the one line item.  Powdered sugar is the only topping that need apply.  However, The Ark of Mark strives to paint its funnel cake reviews with a vivid palette for your palate, so I should point out that The Funnel Cake boasts the most dizzying array of options I have ever seen.  You want a fruit topping?  How about strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, or peach?  You want something to sweeten things up besides powdered sugar?  How about sugar glaze (think glazed donut), caramel glaze, cinnamon, or peanut butter glaze?  Whipped cream?  Sure.

If so inclined, one could also order a deep-fried Twinkie, deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried Snickers, or a deep-fried wedding cake.  (I only made up that last one).

I stuck with the pure goodness of the plain cake with powdered sugar, but confess that if I had been in the area the next day, I might have had to try a sugar glazed cake with blackberries and whipped cream.  (Insert Homer Simpson gurgling sound).

Quality

Not much to say here.  It was perfectly cooked.  Bravo.

Cost

I don’t remember.  Four or five bucks.  I was days into a family vacation and had long sense stopped paying attention to the money flying out of my wallet.

Intangibles

Now this is where we run into an unexpected complication.  In the past I have lauded such intangibles as eating a funnel cake next to a decorative water fountain at an amusement park while thrilled patrons scream on distant roller coasters.

The Funnel Cake had one of those delightfully old school menu boards with the little black or red letters that have to be inserted by hand.  The kind where all the items are listed in black, and all the prices in red, except where maybe they ran out of a specific black letter and had to scatter in a few random red ones or use an upside-down E for a 3.  I was admiring the classic look and feel of the menu and then saw a random sentence down below all the food offerings:

Bow down to Cristinas boss toes

Now what in the world are we to make of this statement?  If I were a competent writer I would’ve simply asked the bustling lady if she were in fact Cristina, and regardless of the reply, could she explain this?  If I had legions of devoted readers I’d just dispatch one in the Gatlinburg area to follow-up for some answers.  Instead, because I simply wandered off in confusion, we are left to speculate.

1. Is this a good-natured ribbing of an employee named Cristina because she has weird toes?
2. Is this an inside joke among employees about some exhibit down the street at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Musem?
3. Are employees being implored to genuflect to the toes of Cristina’s boss but they did not have any little menu board apostrophes to indicate the possessive tense?

I think the most likely explanation is that the employees are a friendly bunch and are having some good-natured fun at Cristina’s expense.  While I am all in favor of camaraderie-building ribbing amongst co-workers, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, no part of a good funnel cake experience should invoke feet, no matter how boss they may be.

Conlcusion

First and foremost, this post would have been much improved if I had taken pictures to go with the review.  Sorry.  When considering the overall experience, I confidently give The Ark of Mark’s seal of approval to The Funnel Cake in Gatlinburg, TN.

I want to thank the person with the foresight to not simply use chocolate as an ingredient in a cookie, but to maintain the integrity of the chocolate within the cookie by including it as individual autonomous chips.

I especially want to thank the person who first eschewed the baking of chocolate chip cookie dough into a conventional cookie, and instead added the dough to ice cream, which is an otherwise competent stand-alone dessert.  This brilliant advancement not only resulted in a dessert greater than the sum of its parts, but I believe also greatly reduced any unfortunate enduring social stigma associated with eating cookie dough.

I had assumed that with advent of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, mankind had reached the point of diminishing returns on dessert.  We created chocolate, added chips of the chocolate to cookies, and then added blobs of the cookie dough to ice cream.  To that staggering achievement could there possibly be added yet another layer of goodness, and if theoretically possible, would we even have the wherewithal to try?  I was skeptical.

And then I saw footage of the first moon landing.  If we could put a man on the moon…

My first thought (after learning that nobody was injured) was whether the following appeared on the official police incident report:

Vehicle Type:  Wiener
Model:  Oscar Mayer

If I were the officer writing up such a report, I’m thinking a copy would be going in a frame.

One of these things is not like the other
One of these things just doesn’t belong
One of these guys is doing his own thing
And now it’s time for the end of our song

Or something to that effect.  The point is that I have a high level of awareness of ways that I am different.  (Although I suppose if I am mistaken about my level of self-awareness, by definition I would be incapable of realizing it).

I bring this up because I have learned that lo and behold, I am in the minority on yet a new issue.  One on which I previously believed without doubt that I sided with the majority.

I speak of my disdain for mint chocolate.

I know there are many sincere mint chocolate fans out there, including my wife.  But I always regarded them as a small, endearing subset of our society like left-handers or Libertarians.  I harbor nothing but fondness for you minty types out there.

I just don’t like mint messing up a good piece of chocolate.  Those are two worlds that, while perfectly fine on their own merits, should just not collide.  Think about those old Reese’s commercials where two nincompoops walk around with chocolate and peanut butter until they strategically run into each other so that the chocolate goes cleanly into the peanut butter jar instead of, say, one of their corneas.

Nincompoop 1:  Hey!  You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!
Nincompoop 2:  What kind of moron walks around in public with an open peanut butter jar?

Now imagine that same commercial but replace the peanut butter jar with a tube of Crest toothpaste.

Nincompoop 1:  Hey!  You just squirted toothpaste all over my Hershey’s Kiss!  And, boy howdy, does it ever taste good!
Nincompoop 2:  (Backs away slowly)

It just doesn’t work, does it?  Then why, I ask, would you deliberately mix that same taste of toothpaste in with chocolate?  I go so far as separating the non-mint Christmas candy so it doesn’t get ruined by marinating in the invisible fog emitted by the mint candy.

Anyway, to each his own.  No harm, no foul.  You in the mint minority can just knock yourselves out.

And then I heard a statistic I simply did not believe.  I even went online and looked it up myself.  According to the official website of the Girl Scouts, here is a breakdown of their top-selling cookies by percentage:

25% Thin Mints
19% Samoas®/Caramel deLites®
13% Peanut Butter Patties®/Tagalongs®
11% Peanut Butter Sandwich/Do-si-dos®
9% Shortbread/Trefoils

I was gobsmacked, assuming of course that I am thinking of the right definition of gobsmacked.

The engineer in me made a last-gasp effort to make sense of this.  I seized upon the fact that there were in fact TWO  entries for peanut butter related cookies.  Aha!  Thin Mints only won because peanut butter is so popular that it is the main ingredient in TWO cookies, thus splitting the peanut butter vote.  Then the engineer in me added up the peanut butter entries and realized that they still lost to Thin Mints by a score of 25% to 24%.  A close second for all-types peanut butter, but my worldview held that Thin Mints ranked somewhere behind even the simple but delightful Shortbread.

And also I thought “Trefoils” were some kind of Christmas decoration.

So I am resigned to admitting that perhaps you fans of mint chocolate outnumber the rest of us.  Then again, the Girl Scout statistics only add up to 77%, meaning there are a whopping 23% of total cookie sales unaccounted for.  If peanut-butter related flavors outsell mint-related flavors by a significant amount among all the cookies comprising the mystery 23%, then my worldview may yet still be sustainable, even if somewhat shaken.

Keep hope alive.  And keep your toothpaste off my Hershey’s.

The reason that health is on my mind is that this week I passed an important milestone.  In the form of a kidney stone.  Well, I’m pretty sure I passed a kidney stone.  You kidney stone veterans out there are no doubt yelling at your computer screen, “If you passed one you’d surely know about it!”

I’ve come to realize that kidney stone veterans are generally not shy about sharing their experiences.  Or in one extreme case the actual stones.

In the interest of personal modesty and general decorum, let’s not review any details.  Suffice to say that I was blessed with an extremely mild (and small) kidney stone, or am setting myself up for bitter disappointment when the stone, having now successfully faked me out, begins to move unexpectedly and renders me a quivering heap.

So today I celebrate.  I feel like an oyster that has completed a pearl.  Although considering oysters are supposed to produce pearls, maybe I’m celebrating like some other sea creature that has unnaturally delivered a pearl.  Maybe I’m celebrating like a clam.

And this is probably as good a time as any to mention that I think “Kidney Stone” sounds like a mysterious, wealthy, British heiress in a soap opera.

So here’s hoping that was the end of that and we will never speak of it again.  I should give thanks that besides the pain, I also avoided a second fear with this stone.  I recently mentioned the half-marathon that I ran in Louisville.  I feared that the stone would shake loose somewhere so close to the end that I’d feel compelled to try and finish anyway.  I imagined the crowd as I struggled toward the finish line:

“Mommy, why does that man sound like a can of spray paint?”

Disconcerting before I even mention that last Sunday on the way to church my family witnessed a squirrel chasing a rabbit across somebody’s front yard.  I have never seen a squirrel chase anything but another squirrel, but this one definitely had something against this particular rabbit.  I’m guessing that with Groundhog Day recently behind us and the Easter Bunny fast approaching, this squirrel finally snapped in a fit of jealous anger.  I can’t blame him for being bitter.  He got left out of the holiday rodent lineup.

(Wikipedia tells me that a rabbit is technically not a rodent, but I’m guessing such a distinction would be lost on reasonable squirrels, to say nothing of angry ones).

I want to close today with a product suggestion for the General Mills Company, the maker of Lucky Charms cereal.  Last year around Easter I was trying to round up a snack for our daughter Shelby.  As a joke, I offered to make her a bowl of croutons mixed with leftover marshmallow Peeps chicks.  Since then we have occasionally joked about having a bowl of croutons and Peeps.  A couple weeks ago I was getting out a box of Lucky Charms and a light bulb went off.  After I replaced the light bulb I had a really good idea.

General Mills should partner with the Peeps people and have an Easter themed Lucky Charms cereal every year.  Instead of the normal marshmallow bits they could have little Easter chicks, bunnies, eggs, lilies, etc.  (Of course they could also include little marshmallow crosses but no responsible modern company would mar the commercial veneer of Easter with a little meaning).

I hesitated sharing this idea in case General Mills runs with it and I thus contribute to the further commercialization of Easter.  Then I figured that, hey, at least it would help raise awareness of Easter and maybe some folks would at least ponder its meaning while enjoying a delightful bowl of limited edition Lucky Charms.  Plus also the Arbor Day Squirrel told me this was a great idea and I don’t want to make him mad.