Why are Dunkin’ Donuts muffins so impossible to eat?

I’ve probably spent close to a year’s wages on coffee and pastries in my short life. And I’ve had my share of shitty coffee and dried out, day-old pastries. Dunkin’ Donuts sells lawnmower swill mistaken by a majority of New Englanders as “coffee,” but the pastries do well in a pinch. So nothing is more confounding to me than the fact that Dunkin’ Donuts’ otherwise fresh, moist and (in general) satisfying muffins are unbelieveably difficult to eat.

Exhibit A, muffin before attempted consumption:

Now, imagine my frustration when, after removing just the wrapper and taking one quadrant of the top of the muffin in my hands, the muffin vomitted its insides out in a violent flinging of cranberry and orange undercooked dough:

Rainy Friday (twice in a row?)

Friday Mashup, or This rain is messing with my karma

 - In this week’s Tears in Heaven moment, Boston’s The Paradise Lounge, little brother to the beloved Paradise Rock Club, has closed and will be turned into an “irishoid” bar. This is regrettable. I hate shipping over to Cambridge to see small, small acts, and The Paradise Lounge had the right ratio of grime-to-charm for me. Check out my videos of Howie Day performing there about a month ago.

- Willpower is like a tank of gas: once you use it to go one place, you can’t go another. This according to a pseudo-op ed in this week’s New York Times. This is really interesting and perhaps a good thing to remember as we all face uphill battles, “…people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task. ” New York Times via kottke.

 - Yikes. Cell phones might be worse than cigarettes.

- Yikes. Diet Coke might be worse than cell phones.

- All hail. Apple is the #1 music retailer. Take that, FYE. Not that they were ever in the running. Speaking of, does anyone remember The Wall and their CD return guarantee? Pretty sure that’s why that place collapsed. Update: apparently not. The agency who conducted the study has recinded the results, and Ars Technica, a fantastic technology blog, was asked to remove their leaked internal Apple documents regarding the study. File under: shady.

- Apparently, a 3G iPhone is coming sooner than I thought, or else I wouldn’t have bought one, oh, about a month ago. Thanks, Apple! I will be upgrading.

- Ape-ricot or app-ricot? This was a debate I had with my friends Will and Pete during sophomore year of college. Back then, we didn’t have Forvo, which has the goal of one day offering correct pronunciations for every word in the world. An ambitious quest. Of course, they don’t have apricot. Yes - I win! I’m going to add it as ape-ricot. [thanks, Lifehacker]

- The folks over at uber-Boston blog/community b0st0n.livejournal.com have abbreviated the Globe’s new Food & Arts section “Farts.” Okay, its funny because I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old.

- The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog wondered, “Why was Rachel Ray at SXSW?” and questions her “indie rocker” status.

[image thanks to despair.com]

Best Superbowl Ads

A tie:

and….

iShoes: The ultimate gift for the lazy person in your life

Yeah!

Consumer misbehavior: Charge more, your wine will taste better

Researchers at CIT and Stanford have found that people enjoy the same wine more if they believe it’s more expensive. So does that mean that if Trader Joe’s three-buck-chuck was actually $15, I’d like it more? Because three-buck-chuck is pretty damn good as-is.

 We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks.

Further proof that all you need is a good $6 bottle of cab.  

Original post on the venerable Consumerist