Taco Bell’s new Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco is “not quite a sandwich, not quite a taco,” the Yum! Brands, Inc. subsidiary said. The taco features all-white meat crispy chicken marinated in jalapeño buttermilk, seasoned with Mexican spices and rolled in a crunchy tortilla chip coating. The chicken is served on a warm flatbread folded into a taco form and flavored with Taco Bell’s creamy chipotle sauce. The taco may be ordered regular or spicy with the addition of crunchy jalapeño slices.
This is what they are supposed to look like
I love chicken sandwiches, and I’ve long enjoyed Chick-fil-A’s offering but I’m not in favor of their social policies, so I’ve kept my antenna up for alternatives. Apparently Popeye’s has a relatively good one, but we live in the northeast so I’m out of luck until I can manage to get south of the Mason-Dixon line.
So when Taco Bell started offering these, I had to try one. We went twice, and my wife liked hers; then we went to another location and this is what happened:
Oops
I ordered from their online menu and customized the item with tomatoes and onions – but what I got was light-years from what they advertised. Instead of a puffy flatbread, they used a standard flour tortilla, and instead of three chicken tenders, there was only one, with a piddling amount of plain cheese sauce. Bitterly disappointed, to say the least.
Others had similar experiences, but at least theirs came in the advertised flatbread and looked a lot better than the one I was served.
Next time I swung past Taco Bell, I noticed that the item had vanished from the menu. If franchises were having difficulty consistently preparing this item in a satisfactory manner, it’s no wonder they pulled it. According to a Taco Bell spokesperson,
“The Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco was a limited time menu offering. Innovation is core to Taco Bell and offering some menu items as limited time offers allows room on menus for even more new, craveable creations for fans. Like all great limited time menu items from Taco Bell, there’s always a chance we can see it return to menus.”
If they bring it back, they are going to have to make sure their stores can get the right ingredients and know how to prepare it properly, or else this will happen with greater frequency, the result of a little feedback to Corporate Headquarters:
Don’t get me wrong, I know that fast food is a challenging business, and consistency and quality across franchises can be a bedeviling task – but it’s probably one of the most important thing any national chain can focus on.
I still love Taco Bell for a fast, cheap, filling, and tasty meal. And it’s not like they haven’t weathered storms before.
Edit: Another example encountered by a friend of mine has been added at the end. Related: Intellectual Property Theft.
Back in August of this year, I ordered something that looked very interesting from an ad that appeared on my facebook wall, by a company called acfantasy:
“The Grand Orrery model of the solar system depicts the correct relative orbital speeds of the planets plus relative orbital movement of Earth’s moon. Historically, a Grand Orrery showed only the “naked eye” planets out to Saturn, as they were developed in the early 18th century.”
Beautiful product advertised
It looked gorgeous and intricate, and I thought I would love to have this on my desk. The total charge to an outfit called “acfantasy” was $48.06.
What I received today, after a wait of two months (shipped, of course, from China) was this:
Fecal replica – nothing moves
To say that I was stunned by the duplicity would be an understatement. True, I actually got something – a lot of these Chinese wankstains will take your money and not bother to ship anything at all – but sending out a cheap piece of scrap metal like this, which is not worth 49¢ let alone $49.00 is stunning in its audacity.
The company has a website (acfantasy.vip) and a contact email; I sent multiple requests for replacement with the advertised product or a full refund, but never heard anything back.
I have ordered things from Facebook ads before and been pleasantly surprised by what I would consider adequate quality and value for the money; this one certainly falls into the “Chinese businesses with all the ethics of a starving honey badger” column.
Facebook needs to do much better in vetting its advertisers. There are far too many scammers out there, about which I have written elsewhere. Despite being careful, I got burned this time. These people can sit on a very fragile glass cactus.
Edit: Sadly, I got stung again by a company called scypg, shortly after writing this; something else I had ordered before the bogus orrery had come.
What I ordered.
What I received.
Cheap-ass bait and switch. Advice found on reddit is excellent; I will definitely not purchase directly from ads found on social media any longer.
Edit: I also emailed this company several times. They finally wrote back telling me that they were sorry I had ordered the wrong product (i.e. selected the wrong option or something). I told them I didn’t. They wrote back a couple of times offering me a 15% or a 5% discount to try to keep me happy. There was no response to my last email telling them that I still wanted the advertised product or a full refund.
From Reddit, confirmed by my own experiences:
“LPT: Never buy items advertised on social media newsfeeds. The majority are either scams, bait and switch, or “Wish” quality products.
Social media sites almost never provide resolution. Instead of following the link in the ad, search for the item independently and buy from legitimate vendors.”Social media advertisements are frequently bots or institutional scams.
It typically results in:
1. Paypal scam where they charge your card multiple times and you end up having to request a new card number. 2. Bait and switch, where you follow the link for one thing and end up ordering something completely different. 3. Low quality item to begin with.
Think “wish” quality products…. Social media sites almost never rectify the issue, and often if you check back later the comments section indicate several hundred other people were scammed (and some fake reviews left as well!).
If you see something you want, search for it independently outside of social media and purchase it on a legitimate vendor. Never follow the link directly from social media.”
“Unsold Amazon Pallet”
This was shared by a friend who got bitten by one of those between-post Facebook ads. He was supposed to get a 50-piece “Unsold Pallet from Amazon” for roughly $60.00 The implication was that there would be DeWalt, Makita or Milwaukee tools (as their photos show), and this is what came. Not a single DeWalt, Makita or Milwaukee tool to be seen.This post from Politifact and this post from Snopes highlight this kind of scam.
An example of this kind of advertisement:
Be very careful out there. A lot of highly disreputable people want your money, and don’t care how they get it.
This post is cobbled together from a couple of different entries at my Livejournal back in 2009
Leigh Callaway, wherever you are, I owe you dinner.¹
The year was 1965, I was 14, and it was my senior year at Camp Wildwood in Bridgton, Maine.²
In this my 4th year at camp, the pinnacle of the year was, prophetically, travel. I sucked at team sports – still do – but loved traveling, camping, the woods and individual challenges; in short, I lived for tripping. Not that kind. Shut up.
My yearbook blurb quoted, “However unorganized his body of knowledge may be, he still is a source of many bits of information and despite his mere 85 lb. bulk, was one of our most energetic and determined trippers.” By the dessicated skull of Mogg’s grandfather, how prophetic was that?
After a 5-day canoe trip to Rangeley Lake early in the summer, six of us, accompanied by several counselors, took another 5-day trip in canoes from Lobster Lake down the Penobscot River to Chesuncook Lake in Maine. It was a trip never to be forgotten.
The Rangeley Lakes complex in western Maine
What does all this have to do with Tabasco Sauce? Hush. We’ll get to that.
The year, as I mentioned, was 1965, and inland Maine was still pretty untouched in most places. It was five days of canoeing, camping, 20 miles of river, camping, 4 miles of rapids, camping, portages, camping, woods, camping, absolutely glacial pools and waterfalls which we reveled in as a test of manhood, more camping, and breathtaking scenery.
Are you starting to see a pattern?
When you camp, you cook whatever you have along. That means a lot of dehydrated chicken soup and noodles carbonara and canned stuff and interesting stuff and things you might never fix at home.
One of the counsellors that accompanied us on this trip was a young man named Leigh Callaway.
Now to a 14-year-old, all our counselors were ageless. If they were counselors, they were adults – so I can’t tell you how old he was at the time, but he was probably not much more than a kid himself. So all I can tell you about him was that he was extremely kind to me (huge points!) and had a BMW motorcycle (more huge points), and that I worshiped the ground he walked on. And he could cook.
One night, whether out of inventiveness or desperation, Leigh fried up a huge cast-iron skillet full of rice until the grains were golden brown, and then filled the pan with water. When the rice was cooked soft, he threw in a can of tuna or three, sauteed it up a bit longer, and then seasoned the whole thing with Tabasco™. Lots and lots of Tabasco™.
Now my mother, bless her soul, took me to many ethnic restaurants in New York while I was young, and one of our favorites was this little Aztec-Mexican hole in the wall called Xochitl.³ They had a hot sauce there that would rival much of what Blair offers (certainly not their 16-million scoville pure capsaicin insanity, but highly effective nonetheless.) I remember that a tiny drop of this stuff on a toothpick, applied to the tongue, was enough to bring tears to the eyes. So I was no stranger to odd and savory foods. (Hm. How that I’m thinking of it, perhaps I should give Mom some credit at my Banquet from Hell.) That said, cooking at home was pretty basic meat-and-potatoes fare, and there wasn’t a lot of exotic stuff around, so I had never used Tabasco™ before.
Well, anyway. When you’ve been paddling a canoe for 12 hours, and you’re exhausted and starving, it doesn’t matter much what’s on the fire. I think if Leigh had fried up a beaver tail, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. As it was, we had fried rice and tuna with Tabasco™ – and I tucked in like a trencherman. Mogg’s teeth – it was so good. It would be easy to say that my enjoyment was born of famine, but given that I have prepared this concoction and many others like it many times in my life thereafter, I can discount that theory. Simply put, I was hooked on Tabasco™.
Now, I like Frank’s Original Red Hot too – it’s got a nice flavor, and I always keep a bottle of it handy, but there’s something about Tabasco™ that just can’t be matched.⁴ Yes, I’m well and truly addicted.
So Leigh, wherever you are, know that you made a huge impression on me that summer, and your influence is still being felt *mops brow* 44 years later.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
PS – I still remember the taste of black coffee sweetened with maple syrup, too…
Footnotes
¹ Leigh, bless his heart, saw this post and actually responded with a bit of information about his subsequent experiences. He recommended that since I loved Tabasco I should try Sambal Oelek, an Indonesian chili paste that apparently puts Sriracha to shame. I was grateful for the recommendation, but would have loved some hint about how to contact him. Which he did not provide, the rascal. I would have loved to renew the acquaintance and catch up in person.
² Camp Wildwood is a superb boys’ camp run – at the time – by Leo Mayer and Ed Hartman, which is still operating in Bridgton, Maine, although it has passed through other owners since then.
³ Another one was “La Fonda del Sol”, a very upscale place which I loved eating at. Now gone. *snif* But there are some memories here.
⁴ In fact, as I was typing my earlier post at Livejournal and thinking about a nice dish of fettucine with tuna and hot sauce, my ears were burning and I was experiencing all the symptoms of a good solid capsaicin flush. Which confirmed my theory. I love hot food; there’s nothing like a good capsaicin burn. The last two times I had prepared spicy foods, though, I had a very unusual experience – the flush to the face began as soon as I had opened the bottle of hot sauce – and hadn’t even eaten it yet. The first time it happened, I thought I was “imagining things.” But it happened again… as I was liberally lacing some burritos with Tabasco, I started getting the burning and vascular dilation that I always experience with certain peppers – very much like a Niacin flush, if you’ve ever experienced that. And, what’s even stranger, I experienced a repeat as I typed this. Just thinking about it was sufficient to recall the physiological response.
Now that’s just weird. Maybe if I salivate enough, I can get my doorbell to ring.
I grew up in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s. Much has gone since that time, but my memories include hings I deeply miss about New York in my early days:
The myriad small businesses instead of brass-and-glass
Little Italy full of Italians, and the Feasts of San Antonio and San Gennaro
Yellow Cabs with huge back seats and those little jumpseats (Yes, unsafe, but they were so fun)
Air-conditioned movie theaters with giant screens and velvet curtains where you could stay all day for 50¢ and watch a cartoon, a short subject, a newsreel, and the main feature over and over again
the 42nd Street Subway Stations with Red and Blue lights guiding you to your line of choice, IRT, BMT, or IND, or the Shuttle
Underground OJ bars and other odd little shops in the subways such as Al Stevenson’s magic store (otherwise known as the Wizard’s Workshop)
Hole-in-the-wall pizza joints where you could order pizza by the “Slice!” for 15¢.
The Staten Island ferry for a nickel
Christmas trees up and down Park Avenue, and the stars that would twinkle on the 666 building
the Lord and Taylor Christmas windows
And so many more…
But one of my most indelible memories is from Chinatown, where my mother would take me on occasion. There were myriad stores and restaurants selling the ubiquitous Chinese back-scratchers, finger traps, and wonderful puzzle boxes, some of which I wish I still had.
Alamy stock photo of a Chinese puzzle box, very similar to one I once owned.
But the most wondrous thing to my young eyes was the Chinatown Fair.
Before it became an electronic game arcade, it featured dancing chickens, tic-tac-toe chickens (you can read about these at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York), and the amazing animatronic dragon.
Sadly, no photos of the latter wonder appear to have been saved to the Internet as of this moment, but who knows? Perhaps someone will come across a picture in their old archives and post it in the future. If you happen to stumble across this blog post and have such a photo, please let me know; I would love to feature it here.
At any rate, you would walk up to this row of little windows, each with a coin slot for quarters; drop one in and your window would open, and below you was this most amazing animated dragon which would move and roar at you. Commenter “Donald” at the website Scouting New York had this to say, which syncs with my own memories perfectly:
Yes!! The dragon peep show…. why doesn’t anybody ever mention the dragon peep show? I thought that was the most bizarre “game” I ever saw… you’d drop a quarter in and a sliding plastic window would rise, exposing a glass window underneath (similar to a peep show booth) and literally laying on the basement floor – you’d see this huge animatronic dragon moving it’s head and tail – and from a speaker would blare the soundtrack from an old Godzilla movie… that familiar Godzilla roar. Now the dragon you were looking at and the Godzilla you were hearing of course had nothing to do with each other – but that just added to the cheezy entertainment value of the whole thing. I thought it was great… but nobody ever mentions it. I ALWAYS hear about the Tic Tac Toe Chicken… but never my old dragon friend.
The Fair later became a video arcade, but closed in 2011. Some other great memories are archived at Scouting New York, The Gothamist, Ganker, and Huffpost; apparently the arcade featured in a 2015 documentary called The Lost Arcade; in its later years it “the arcade became a shelter to a community as diverse as the city surrounding it and changed lives in doing so.” (IMDB)
According to The Verge, the arcade re-opened in 2012, but the reviews were mixed. Apparently it’s still there, but without that amazing dragon it will never be the same for me.
I love Waze™ as a driving app. 99.5% of the time it gets me where I want to go without difficulty, and provides lots of useful information along the way.
But it has quirks.
Almost invariably, when I enter a destination from a position in a parking lot somewhere, Waze will calculate the route as though I want to go the direction I’m facing.
Example 1:
Here I’m facing north, parked at home – but to get to my destination, I need to drive 3 miles south to Route 1. Waze sends me six miles out of my way, just to make a U-turn.
Example 2:
If I were to head south to Route 1, the distance would be 6.8 miles instead of 13, and 10 minutes instead of 19. In short, Waze is doubling my distance and drive time simply because my nose is pointing north when I input the destination.
This happens far too often for comfort. If I’m in an unfamiliar location parked in a strip mall, for example, it seems like 4 times out of 5, Waze will have me turn the wrong way coming out of the parking lot, which will result in a ten-mile detour just to go back the other way or a longer, more convoluted route to my destination.
In the words of Columbo, “Oh, just one more thing:” I drive from Maine to Boston or New York often, and there’s a huge stretch of road along the way where Waze tells me “Searching for Network,” even though Google Maps has no problem in the same regions. I don’t get why this is an issue.
These are without question first-world problems, but I use this app so heavily – not having the inborn sense of direction that the Goodwoman of the House possesses – that it causes me a lot of stress. And I have not yet figured out how to get this kind of general feedback to anyone at Waze who cares. But on the plus side, for my own needs there’s no better directional guidance app out there.
The email above was in my spam folder, hence automatically suspicious. If you click on that “to cONTACT” button, you can see that the mail was not sent by Facebook but by someone at “beratinind.co.uk.” Maybe. That was probably spoofed as well.
Whether you “Report the user” or “Yes, me” (note the poor grammar), you will be sending email to this list of people:
And who knows what you will be sending? Or what they will do with whatever you send them? At the very least, you are confirming to all these people that you are a live, valid email address and will thus be guaranteed to receive an even greater flood of spam and scam emails.
Source: Unknown. Collected via Internet or email in 2004
HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a kind of divining rod to locate really expensive parts not far from the object we are trying to hit.
MECHANIC’S KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well on boxes containing seats and jackets
ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning steel Pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age, but it also works great for drilling mounting holes in fenders just above the brake line that goes to the rear wheel.
PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads.
HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.
VISE-GRIPS: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand.
OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting various flammable objects in your garage on fire. Also handy for igniting the grease inside a brake drum you’re trying to get the bearing race out of.
WHITWORTH SOCKETS: Once used for working on older British cars and motorcycles, they are now used mainly for impersonating that 9/16 or 1/2 socket you’ve been searching for the last 15 minutes.
DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, splattering it against that freshly painted part you were drying.
WIRE WHEEL: Cleans rust off old bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprint whorls and hard earned guitar calluses in about the time it takes you to say, “Ouc….”
HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering a vehicle to the ground after you have installed your new front disk brake setup, trapping the jack handle firmly under the front fender.
EIGHT-FOOT LONG DOUGLAS FIR 2X4: Used for levering a vehicle upward off a hydraulic jack.
TWEEZERS: A tool for removing Douglas Fir wood splinters.
PHONE: Tool for calling your neighbor to see if he has another hydraulic floor jack.
SNAP-ON GASKET SCRAPER: Theoretically useful as a sandwich tool for spreading mayonnaise; used mainly for getting dog-doo off your boot.
E-Z OUT BOLT AND STUD EXTRACTOR: A tool that snaps off in bolt holes and is ten times harder than any known drill bit.
TIMING LIGHT: A stroboscopic instrument for illuminating grease buildup.
TWO-TON HYDRAULIC ENGINE HOIST: A handy tool for testing the tensile strength of ground straps and brake lines you may have forgotten to disconnect.
CRAFTSMAN 1/2 x 16-INCH SCREWDRIVER: A large motor mount prying tool that inexplicably has an accurately machined screwdriver tip on the end without the handle.
BATTERY ELECTROLYTE TESTER: A handy tool for transferring sulfuric acid from a car battery to the inside of your toolbox after determining that your battery is dead as a doornail, just as you suspected.
AVIATION METAL SNIPS: See hacksaw.
TROUBLE LIGHT: The mechanic’s own tanning booth. Sometimes called a drop light, it is a good source of vitamin D, “the sunshine vitamin,” which is not otherwise found under a car or motorcycle at night. Health benefits aside, its main purpose is to consume 40-watt light bulbs at about the same rate that 105-mm howitzer shells might be used during, say, the first few hours of the Battle of the Bulge. More often dark than light, its name is somewhat misleading.
PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the lids of old-style paper-and-tin oil cans and splash oil on your shirt; can also be used, as the name implies, to round off Phillips screw heads.
AIR COMPRESSOR: A machine that takes energy produced in a coal-burning power plant 200 miles away and transforms it into compressed air that travels by hose to a Chicago Pneumatic impact wrench that grips rusty bolts last tightened 60 years ago by someone in Springfield, and rounds them off.
PRY BAR: A tool used to crumple the metal surrounding that clip or bracket you needed to remove in order to replace a 50 cent part.
HOSE CUTTER: A tool used to cut hoses 1/2 inch too short.
I had no idea there was such a thing, but I encountered this at Imgur and after using up a box of tissues I thought I’d like to share it, just in case others have too much Kleenex™ on hand.
A touching story with lovely artwork, credits in the first frame: Peter David, Colleen Doran, José Villarrubia, Todd Klein, and Stephen Wacker.
What can I say, except “You’re welcome”?
Edit: It turns out that Leah Adezio was a real person, and a friend to Peter David. Some backstory is here, which makes this lovely tribute all the more poignant. You can also visit her FindAGrave memorial.
Found this at a Facebook group dedicated to outstanding illustration.
The picture is beautiful. The colonialist sentiment, not so much. But that was Kipling’s day.
I recall with both amusement and horror browsing in a used bookstore somewhere (I think it was San Francisco), and coming across an English-Hindustani phrasebook written for British soldiers billeted in India. I swear on a stack of Bibles I’m not making this up: One of the phrases was, “You black bastard, you call these boots 𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑛?” I wish I had bought it, just so I could get past the “pix or it didn’t happen” crowd, but I remember being (even in the ’90s) rocked to my very core to find something like that.
We have come a long way. But we still have a very long way to go.
Critical Race Theory is very simple, but because of political (and prejudicial) undercurrents in certain segments of our society, it is widely misunderstood and misrepresented.
The Thermonuclear Bowel Evacuation Formerly Disgracing the Oval Office is quoted as having said,
“Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed.”
45’s Remarks at White House History Conference, September 17, 2020
This is not Critical Race Theory. It is pushback from a white supremacist world view, trying to make something important and human into something frightening and oppressive.
To teach that racism is still baked into our social system, and to serve as a catalyst for change toward a more equal and representative system (in other words, to make America the land of equality and equal opportunity that it has long trumpeted itself to be) is the most peaceful and human thing I could imagine.
Children – and adults – need to understand and see where and how racism operates to perpetuate the lie of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, to the effect that:
“Our new government[‘s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”[2]
For the most part, we have come past the days when black people could be lynched by white mobs with impunity. But if you read the news, it’s hard to ignore the fact that racism and outright homicide is still endemic in many of the police forces of our nation.
George Floyd’s homicide was widely publicized, but in terms of endemic racism, it’s only the most current tip of the iceberg.
This is not OK, and no amount of pearl-clutching and flag-wrapped pushback or “blue lives matter” wailing can make it so.
But it’s not just policing and inequity in incarceration and a failed drug war and an oppression campaign pushed by the Nixon administration. Racism touches almost everything in obvious and not so obvious ways.
Access to equal housing.
Access to equal financing.
Access to equal education.
Access to equal employment.
Access to equal relationships.
Access to equal voting privileges.
And the list goes on.
Racism taints it all. If you’re black, or brown, or yellow – you and your ancestry have certainly encountered this, and continue to do so, in myriad ways that would not even be evident to someone born and raised in white privilege unless they have made a concerted effort to be aware of history.
America is not a wicked country, or a Marxist country, and Critical Race Theory doesn’t make any attempt to paint it as such. America is a human country – filled with brave and noble men and women who strove to make it a great nation for all. But it’s also a country that made mistakes, some of which have echoes which continue to ripple down to the present day. And it’s those mistakes that people of good will seek to recognize, and enshrine in our official chronicles, and remediate in the fastest and best way possible.
I applaud the idea.
This is not a matter of debate. It’s a reality. Those who have eyes to see will see, and do their best to make a difference.
It’s been going on for a long time, and it continues to spread via social media. And today I’m looking directly at Facebook, which seems happy to take advertising money for all sorts of spurious enterprises (see my earlier post about Chinese bottom-feeders trying to sell counterfeit Morgan dollar collections).
Today this showed up as a “promoted post” in my Facebook feed (on my Android, it should be noted; I use FBP on the desktop and almost never see an ad there):
“After loosing temper” was my first red flag. Great Mogg’s titanium teeth, people, learn the difference between “loose” and “lose.” But it turns out that the page you get to has nothing to do with the stated headline.
(I don’t even know if Artsy On knows anything about this. They seem to be selling books, but I frankly don’t have the time or energy to do a deep dive into their website metadata. It’s possible someone added a malicious link to their website and is using it to redirect to the seller’s page.)
which is a farticle (fake article) implying that Whoopi is endorsing or promoting this garbage called Cheyenne Valley CBD Oil:
The advertisement is designed to look like a Time Magazine article. It’s not. And Ms. Goldberg does not promote or endorse this product. At all. In any way. The whole thing is made up out of whole cloth as an affiliate marketing scam to get you to the marketing page for this questionable product. ¹
The second paragraph in this scammy advertisement reads like this:
“When I started this whole thing back in 2020, it really was just a part-time passion project and a way for me to give back. After being given so much, I figured there was no better time to make Cheyenne Valley CBD Oil available to everyone, as it can help thousands of people experience life pain-free and live much happier lives.”
But in this article from healthmj, we see a very similar quote:
“This was a really, really difficult decision for me. When I started this whole thing back in 2015, it really was just a part-time passion project and a way for me to give back. Now here we are almost five years later, and Green CBD Oil has steadily grown into a full-fledged business that’s helped thousands of people become pain-free and much happier. My line gives me a chance to do something bigger than music, and I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life if I let that opportunity pass me by.”
Blake Shelton doesn’t endorse any sort of CBD Oil. Neither does Tom Hanks, for that matter, and he says so in no uncertain terms. These bottom-feeders will use anyone’s name to get people to their sales page. Once you get there, it’s the same tired old format that I’ve written about multiple times:
Of course, this is just the hook; buried deeply in the Terms and Conditions which almost nobody ever reads, is the catch:
Important Notes
Failure to cancel within the trial period will result in our subscription program and further charges.
The trial begins the same day you order. It doesn’t begin when you receive the trial in the mail.
Applicable sales tax may be applied to all charges.
We allow only 1 trial purchase per household.
As part of ordering a trial, you agree to join a recurring membership plan. You can modify your subscription anytime by contacting us.
This is not a free sample offer. We only offer as a trial, which turns into a subscription or individual bottles.
The most efficient method of contacting us is through care@buycheyennevalley.com. Please provide your name and phone number and we will get back to you as soon as possible
The trial period begins on day of order. To clarify, it does not begin when you receive the product.
By placing your order today you’ll be shipped a 30 day supply of Cheyenne Valley CBD Oil for only $6.89. This gives you the opportunity to try this remarkable product so you can come to a decision for yourself if this is the right product for you. If you are dissatisfied with the product, you must call 8774388714 within 14 days trial plus 3 days shipping (total of 17 days) from today to cancel your membership and avoid being charged of $99.89, which is the full price of the product. If you are satisfied with the product, you need do nothing else and upon the expiration of the trial period, you will be billed $99.89.The total monthly subscription charge of $99.89 includes shipping and handling for the full cost of the product. Thirty days after your trial period ends and every thirty days thereafter, we will send you a fresh monthly supply at the low price of $99.89 per until you cancel your membership. There’s no obligation and you may cancel your membership at any time by calling 8774388714 or by sending an email to care@buycheyennevalley.com. The trial period begins from the day of ordering the product.
Address the return package to: PO Box 15911, Tampa, FL 33684
Everything about these scammy, barely-legal offers is based on lies. The celebrity endorsement, publication by a major company (TIME magazine, in this case), the price of the offer, the claim of “extremely high demand” and “limited stock,” all of the supposed endorsements from “satisfied customers” – it’s all lies. All lies.
So even if you take the bait, bite the hook, get reeled in, and pay $100 a month(!) for a tiny bottle of who-knows-what, what kind of quality do you think you might be getting from a company that resorts to such reprehensible tricks to get your business? I wouldn’t use it if you paid me a Benjamin.
Protect yourself from scams and don’t give your money to any company that does business this way. And please educate your loved ones who may be vulnerable to such tactics.
And Facebook, take note. Stop accepting ads from this kind of scammer. It makes you look worse than you already do.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Footnotes
¹ In the interest of full clarity:
For several years, Ms. Goldberg was a partner in a website called Whoopi and Maya, which was focused on providing high-quality medical cannabis to women as a relief for menstrual cramps. When she and her partner came to a parting of the ways, the business was dissolved.
There are rumorsthat she may be involved in launching a new cannabis-related enterprise. Whether this comes to fruition remains to be seen. All that said, she does not endorse this scummy “Cheyenne Valley CBD Oil” and never has.
As for me, I’m looking forward to seeing her as Guinan in the 2nd Season of Star Trek: Picard.
Playing in the World Game 