My chef friends have been buzzing all week over The 2015 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog. Drew Magary is best known as a snarktastic sportswriter but he’s also a Chopped champion, so he knows from kitchen tools. Here’s how he started his third annual piece:
I have terrible news for you, America. I know that you’ve already endured a harsh autumn of partisan politics and mass tragedies and inconsistent NFL officiating. I know you can’t handle one more goddamn piece of bad news right now. It’s too much. It may break your spirit entirely. But I have to do it. If I don’t tell you now, you may learn this from an enemy, or from Twitter, or from your rich asshole brother-in-law:
There are no chicken coops for sale in this year’s Williams-Sonoma Christmas catalog.
I know. I know. Stay strong. We’ll get through this TOGETHER. I know you feel lost now that you won’t be able to shell out $1,000 for a goddamn chicken coop made out of driftwood by celebrated Carroll Gardens wood visualist SAMUEL PINE. Between this and the collapse of that one Blake Lively catalog, your interminable compulsion to run up your credit limit on horrible crap may never find a proper outlet.
HOWEVER, I do have some good news to soften the blow, my friend. While the coops are gone, the Williams-Sonoma Christmas catalog is still here. And yes, it remains as hilariously tone-deaf as ever, ready to help you plan the PERFECT holiday entertaining season, because to experience anything otherwise would be COLD DEATH. You must have a flawlessly laid-out dinner spread. You must have coordinated china and stemware patterns. The lyrics to “Sleigh Ride” must literally BE your life. You must SING! Yes, you must join hands with your gorgeous WASP children and sing carols in perfect harmony aloud for all to hear, so that the rest of world knows the truth: that their lives are SHIT and you, good friend, live among the holiday gods, in an evergreen paradise scented with luscious peppermint oils and laden with soup tureens and festooned with garlands sewn from the skinned corpse of a dead swan.
Chicken coopless? I don’t know about you, but I’m desolate. It makes me want to chicken out and fly the coop or contemplate this Seeds of Decline float:
