GUS’S WORLD-FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN – Austin, Texas

When I told my friend Carlos my Kim and I would be enjoying Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken during our trip to Austin, he quipped “when did Los Pollos Hermanos open a restaurant in Texas?”.  Wrong Gus.  Obviously Carlos was joking about Gus Fring, the stoic Argentinian entrepreneur on the Albuquerque-based Breaking Bad television series.  Gus Fring, as you might recall, used his fried chicken franchise Los Pollos Hermanos as a front for methamphetamine distribution throughout the American Southwest.  The Colonel may have had eleven herbs and spices, but Gus had blue-hued crystal meth. The Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken of which I spoke is a burgeoning franchise which got its start in Memphis, Tennessee.  While Nashville’s incendiary, cayenne-heavy, finger-dying…

Via 313 – Austin, Texas

It’s oft been said that among males (we’re such children), insults are a form of intimacy.  Perhaps because of societal expectations, many men aren’t comfortable expressing affection toward other males in physically demonstrative ways (even in the Age of Oprah).  In his book A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt – and Why They Shouldn’t, philosophy professor William Irvine contends “the closer the friend, the more teasing there is.”  If the sheer volume of insults is equal to how highly we esteem other men, Jim, my former boss at Intel was esteemed highly indeed. Because Jim was a pretty good guy (and because he was the boss), it was hard (and maybe career-limiting) to attack him on a personal level. …