YOU'RE YELLING ABOUT HAMBURGERS! JUST STEP BACK AND LET THAT SINK IN.

In the Bible, some Biblical person (probably Jesus, he’s allll up in that book) said, “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them." Similarly, when a new franchise expands into North Texas and a blog posts something about it, so too shall the trolls descend. I like to read D Magazine’s blog, FrontBurner. It breaks up the monotony of my work day and even though I’m not cool enough to play Words with Friends with the editors and I can’t afford anything they advertise on their site or in their print product, I’d like to think that I am still a loyal reader. So imagine my surprise when all attempts on my part yesterday to read FrontBurner were met with the dreaded “System Error” message. Oh well. I guess Words with Friends really was the death of them.

So I headed over to Unfair Park to catch up on their news. “Oh huh, they’re putting an In-n-Out Burger in Firewheel Mall in Garland? That’s right by my grandma’s house. Weird. Well, back to living life.” Imagine my surprise when FrontBurner returned to life this morning, adrenaline needle still dangling from its’ heart, and told me that it had briefly crossed over where dead pets and grandparents live because of their story about In-n-Out Burger. Really? To their credit, they appear to have broken the story. Rather they broke the story which appeared to return the favor quickly thereafter. I clicked on the story and saw that there were 106 comments. Wow. I rubbed my hands together, excited to jump headlong into a thread that was sure to touch on everything from the chain’s above-par treatment of their employees, how they would maintain their freshness standards so far outside their distribution area, their religious founders, maybe some new secret code words for ordering off-menu treats? Oh boy, this is gonna be good!

Fuck. I should have known. Because it’s the goddamned internet. So of course, I get 106 comments worth of suck. Let me break down the 106 comments left on the Great In-N-Out Burger Thread:

(These numbers are approximate)

“In-n-Out Burger isn’t that good/Whataburger is better” - 45 comments
“In-n-Out Burger is fucking awesome/Whataburger sucks/Sonic sucks/Red Robin sucks/I’m from California” – 74 comments
“I GO TO CALIFORNIA A LOT! IT’S FAR AND I TRAVEL!!!!! BUT I’M BEING CASUAL WHEN I MENTION THIS!” – 39 comments
“Garland sucks/Southlake is better” – 19 comments
“Nuh uh, Garland is awesome! Rich people live here!” – 3 comments
“Food, Inc.” – 1 comment


Let me first say that I’m happy for D Magazine that they got lots of hits and comments and traffic. It appears it was a crippling amount. Kind of like when so many people show up to your birthday party and buy you so many birthday drinks that you end up puking into a shoe of unknown ownership. But why can’t people handle their shit when given the ability to comment on a blog? It’s a story about an f’ing burger franchise opening and you people are yelling at each other and name calling? Alright, I’m going to draw a line with chalk. Anyone who likes hamburgers from In-n-Out, step over to the left. Anyone who doesn’t like them, step over to the right. Guess what, there’s good news and bad news. Taste is subjective which means neither one of you are right and neither one of you are wrong. It does, however, mean that any of you who made more than two comments about whether or not a particular chain makes good hamburgers are, pardon the phrase here, dillweeds of the highest order. Chillax. Seriously.

If you’ve never had an In-n-Out burger and therefore have no opinion, I have nothing but great news for you. You can form an opinion sometime in the near-ish future when the first In-n-Out in Texas opens in Firewheel Mall in Garland. You would have known that yesterday but people on the internet had to yell about hamburgers and immigrants and stuff so you had to wait until today. Sorry.