I don't know exactly why, but I have always been amused by the ad campaign: Pork – the Other White
Meat!
It could be because my slightly warped mind is usually working over time, hyperactively darting around in search of irony and word play at every opportunity. And that particular phrase seems rife with potential.
These thoughts occurred to me as I scanned one of my favorite parts of the NY Times Saturday paper, "Most Popular," from the business section. It shows the most popular blog posts and articles of the week.
My eyes quickly zeroed in on a story I had somehow missed in the Bits blog; Unicorns, the Other White Meat. This I had to see!
I found it, read it, and have to say that the post delivered on the promise of its juicy headline.
It is about the website ThinkGeek's tradition of April Fool's posts, and what happened with the latest:
As ThinkGeek needs to up the ante each year, in 2010 it decided to create a product called Canned Unicorn Meat. The tag line for this new delicacy? “Pâté is passé. Unicorn, the new white meat.”…
It was, of course, fake.
Although it is probably clear to most nerds and wildlife experts, the National Pork Board, an organization devoted to pork and related businesses and farms, saw a threat to the national brand of pork, otherwise known as “the other white meat.” So the organization sent ThinkGeek a cease-and-desist letter.
ThinkGeek published the letter and offered this apology on its Web site to the board: “We’d like to publicly apologize to the N.P.B. for the confusion over unicorn and pork — and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn’t actually exist.”
I know I am tempting fate and the ire of the National Pork Board by writing about this, but hey, you don't have a blog called Revenge without being willing to take some risks – that is the way I pork roll, baby.
