The Four Pillars of Bad Business Names

The above photo isn't one of the Four Pillars, but it's pretty funny. I actually ate at this place once when I had a real bad hangover. Not just a regular hangover, but a compound hangover, the one you get when you get real drunk two nights in a row. I ordered an omelet and I ate about two bites of it and left. Isn't a "waistaff" one of those belt-mounted swords?

So anyhoo, in the space of the past two days, I've seen an example of each of the Four Pillars of Bad Business and Product Nomeclature. I don't know if you know this, but I get all upset when I see such retardation going on with product and business names.

Here are the names I saw:

1. Assignments: This is a restaurant in a culinary school. You go in and eat the food that the culinary students make. This is a perfect example of this New Economy bullshit style of naming. Other Denver-area examples of similarly named restaurants: Details, Palettes, Smacks.

2. Gumbo's: This is, as you may have guessed, a Cajun restaurant. See, Americans are very important and don't have time to dick around experimenting with different restaurants, and they sure as hell don't like to have to spend valuable time determining what kind of fare are restaurant serves. So this place makes it real nice and simple. This is similar to how ethnic restaurants are named after the capital of the country of origin, e.g. Kathmandu's, Berlin, Seoul Food, etc. Of course, this method presupposes that you know the capital of the country. Or, more likely, plays on the fact that the capital is the only thing you know about the country.

3. BK Back Porch Grillers: Easily the most reprehensible of the latest product naming schemes is the "-ers" trend. Arby's has Sidekickers. Jack Daniels has the Country Teasers. You got Jalapeno Poppers (a hilarious variant I saw recently is the Jalapeno Howlers) and Gushers candy. This kind of baby-talk naming of products is making us even more of a nation of crybaby flabby assholes. I hate America.

4. The Quilted Teddy This is just one in a miasma &emdash;a fucking turgid miasma, folks&emdash; of the Somethinged Something naming trend for bauble and knick-knack stores that cater to wealthy housewives who spend all day shopping. In fact, these types of stores are typically owned by a bored wealthy housewife with altogether too much dispensable income. If one drives around the effete Cherry Creek shopping district in Denver, one sees no less than five similarly named businesses: The Gilded Lily, The Potted Plant, The Wilted Fern, etc., etc, ad nauseam, ad astra.

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In other news, after ten months of job searching that can only be described as really fucking agonizing, I finally got a job. I actually got two jobs in one day, but one was volunteering at a museum, so I think I'll have to give that up. Yeah, I got a job at this big avionics company called Jeppesen. I'll be scrutinizing digital map data, making sure that people don't land their airplanes in the Universal Polygon, or "ocean," to use a more familiar term.

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