iHop?

Given the last dozen of Apple‘s latest products, I’ve been wondering if a) Apple is going to try to patent the lower case “i” and b) if IHOP was going to sue Apple or if Apple would sue iHop for the use of their recognizable i-design. Don’t laugh, either. I think the only thing saving IHOP is the fact that they use all caps for their logo and commercials. If Apple can get a patent for something as simple as a “gum-drop close” button, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t win a patent for one letter of our 26-character alphabet. The patent office seems to have lost it’s perspective on what they’re supposed to be protecting in their offices; Apple is being the opportunistic company that it’s always been, keeping up with Microsoft in the ceaseless patent race of technology companies.

But this Rant isn’t about “the iHop” or Apple. It’s about IHOP. There’s always been a few IHOP’s in Connecticut, but they opened up a newer one about two years ago in Orange, CT, less than one half mile down the road from my happy house of coffee. IHOP – to me anyway – has always been a chain of diner-esque restaurants. They’re known for their pancakes, but they always seem to have some kind of marketing blitz running to prove that they serve regular food for lunch and dinner, even if they do serve breakfast all day – and more importantly to a diner crowd – all night. Don’t look at me – I’ve only ever had breakfast there.

About two years ago, I decided to start deleting some weight, mostly by cutting back my intake of food. I say “deleting” because I find the euphemism of “losing weight” to be stupid. You lose loose change. You lose dongle cables for PCMCIA LAN cards. You lose ugly and obnoxious women’s phone numbers when you meet them in bars. You don’t purposely get rid of something and call it “losing”. I call it deleting.

And even that’s not entirely accurate. After all, matter can never be destroyed, so how can you truly delete weight? It is matter after all, albeit unwanted matter and mass. Whenever you get rid of your own body fat, someone else should be gaining weight. Being the considerate person I am, I give my deleted weight to friends and family *evil grin*. Almost sounds like a problem for Washu-chan! So. If you can’t “lose” weight and you can’t destroy matter and you successfully shrink your own waist line, that means that it’s simply transfered to another mammal on the planet somewhere. If you ever want to know where it’s going, go to IHOP because there’s usually a cache of fat people there.

It’s IHOP’s own fault, really. I still go to IHOP myself every now and again, but it is usually for a “one meal a day” thing. There’s no other way to eat there. Everything they serve there comes with a minimum of two pancakes. Minimum. Get a glass of water and use the pisciadu? You get two pancakes. I used to get the “combo sampler” thingy which included eggs and bacon and some other stuff: three pancakes. I said “Hey, look at the new skillet platters – they come with a biscuit so there’s less food!” Yeah, a biscuit… and two pancakes. Order just pancakes? You get four on a plate.

See what I mean? And then during the last couple of visits, over the last eight months, I started looking around the place… I was one of the thinnest people in there! For the most part there is usually one burly guy with his bimbo girlfriend – she just picks at the bacon and plays with her boy’s hair because the have to sit in the same booth – and all of the staff is thin. Everyone else is huge. Well maybe not huge, but think of this way: these people are eating all this food in the morning at 8 o’clock… they’ll be stopping for lunch at McDonald’s by noon – I can promise you that – and that’s the problem. It’s just too much food! Just like the Hungry-Man breakfast thing that Swanson came out with. Even I balk at 1200 calories and 135% of the days saturated fat in one meal, and I’m not a healthy type of person when it comes to food selection.

I guess the Rant in all of this crap isn’t that there’s fat people at IHOP… it’s that the majority of the fat people at IHOP will buy Richard Simmons’ Deal-a-Meal and quote from the Atkins diet manual, while they have half a pancake still sticking out of their mouth and complaining that they can’t lose weight.

My only comment to that is simple: Know thy self, fool!


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