Previously on Halloween Wars: The writers got totally high and decided to have the teams create zombies vs. vampires cakes with edible gore. Yum. Bling Bats blew the competition away yet again while Skulls of the Abyss was sent home.
Well, this is it. Boo vs. Bling Bats for $50,000. Today’s guest judge is…Scout Taylor-Compton? Who the hell is that? Apparently she was in some Halloween movies? This was the best they could do for the finale?
Previously on Halloween Wars: Bling Bats got a new sugar artist and became a seriously kickass team as a result. Boo’s lousy cake decorator threw a tantrum, because this is just so hard! Bling Bats blew everyone away, and Something Wicked got sent home for their not-so-scary take on Hansel and Gretel.
The teams come out and line up to meet their guest judge: Rob Zombie, who’s living proof that middle-aged white people can’t pull off dreadlocks. In fact, neither can non-middle-aged white people. Karen still squeals like a fangirl, because she’s of an age to still think Rob Zombie’s cool. It’s probably how I’ll be about Chris Martin when I’m 40. Unsurprisingly, Andrea has stomped and pouted her way home, so Boo’s got a new cake person: Becky from the recently eliminated Something Wicked.
Previously on Halloween Wars: Team Tarantula lost, leaving us with Team Boo, Something Wicked, Bling Bats, and Skulls of the Abyss.
Today’s guest judge is R.L. Stine, favorite horror author of third graders everywhere. Except for me. I wasn’t really an elementary school fan of Stine’s work. I was a Laura Ingalls Wilder kid. He joins regular judges Shinmin Lee and Miles Teves.
I’m going to admit right up front that I hate Cupcake Wars. I hate the whole twee cupcake craze in general—the fact that frigging cupcakes are everywhere, and most of them are dreadful sugar bombs in the Magnolia Bakery mold. I think the show’s absurd and wasteful “quick! Make 1000 cupcakes in two hours!” premise is silly, and the judges are grating. Plus, I know for a fact that the producers on the show mess around with equipment to manufacture drama and essentially screw over competitors who have paid thousands of dollars just to get there. So I wasn’t expecting to like Halloween Wars, which seems to be a brainchild of the Cupcake Wars powers that be.
I’m happy to have been proven wrong. Partially. Halloween Wars is actually kind of cool, though it features the same teeth-gnashingly bad puns and annoying host as Cupcake Wars. The premise is this: teams consisting of a pumpkin carver, a cake decorator, and a sugar artist have to complete specific decorating tasks, and the lowest scorer goes home. It’s fun to see these three artists come together (or not) and find out what they come up with. I love watching imaginations at work. Let’s dive in, shall we?
I hate to say it, but this past weekend I had one of the worst tea-buying experiences of my life.
I love tea. LOVE it, so when I spotted a Teavana store during a recent trip to a mall in Buckhead, I got all excited and stopped in to see what was new. I hadn’t been to Teavana in ages, since there wasn’t one near where I lived in NJ, and I feel a certain fondness for them, since it was a Teavana store that first introduced me to the joys of high-quality, loose-leaf teas, way back in my college days.
In I went. And I wasn’t two seconds in the door before someone was trying to persuade me to buy one of their teapots. Their teapots are cast-iron, and they cost a lot of money. The cheapest one is almost $70. I already have a teapot that I love, and yes, I know the cast-iron ones are lovely and keep your tea hot, and if you spend an extra bundle you can get a stand that’ll prevent you from fracturing your wrist when you try to lift the damn thing. But I already have a teapot. And my job just ended, so I’m on a budget. I explained this repeatedly, only to be shown more teapots. I really should have turned around and left right then, but for some reason, I didn’t. I wanted some tea! Once I finally made that clear to the saleswoman (and this might have been part of the problem: there were about a dozen salespeople there, which seemed like far too many for that size store. It’s not Christmastime; it wasn’t packed or anything. So they were getting too competitive), she handed me off to someone else behind the counter. I guess she only does teapots.
Here’s where it started to get really bad. Tea Girl immediately started pushing some of their most expensive teas my way, also waving around a giant tin that holds a pound of tea, bleating about how it keeps the tea fresh for a year, and it’s marvelous tea that you can re-brew, etc. etc. Yes, thank you, I’m aware. I told her many times that I know the teas are good–I’ve tried them. And I know they can be re-brewed, I’ve done it. I do it almost every day. But even I can only drink so much tea in a day, and even the best tea goes pretty flat and flavorless after two brews. And there was absolutely no way I was ever going to buy a pound of tea. Especially not a pound of tea that costs $13 an ounce. She refused to listen, continuing to push Golden Imperial Lotus at me, when really all I wanted was the Taj Masala Chai (which cost a sixth of what the other one did). Once I managed to get through to her that I wanted the Chai, she still reached for the 1-lb tin and told me I should get that, even though I’d already said I didn’t want that much tea, and, in fact, I didn’t want any tin at all (they cost extra, of course), because I had plenty at home. This was a dance we repeated for each tea I got, so I cut off after three, too exhausted to keep going. I stumbled out of the store and rushed to the nearby tapas bar for a soothing glass of wine.
It was not a good experience, on any level. I felt bullied, and it got to the point where I actually felt like I needed to be rude to Tea Girl to get her to back off. I hate doing that–I’ve worked retail before, and I try to be extra nice to people who work it now, just like I try to be extra nice to waitstaff. I know they have sales goals to meet, but when a customer repeatedly makes it clear that they’re not interested in a pound of tea, and they’re definitely not interested in spending hundreds of dollars on a tea, it’s time to back off and give them what they want. Stop trying to convince them the math will work out in the end, because it won’t. I don’t care that the tea’s 10% off, if it costs $12 or more an ounce, you’ve still just spent almost $200 for frigging tea. I love my tea, but that’s absurd. I’d need to be able to rebrew it eight times a day for that to even start to make sense, and like I said, even I had my limits. And tea’s supposed to be soothing, so why isn’t the buying process soothing as well?
The teas I got were fine: I picked up a Moroccan Mint for evenings, a malty Copper Knot Hongcha, and a Thai blend, all of which have been quite enjoyable. But the experience of buying them was so awful I don’t think I’ll ever set foot in another Teavana store again. What this has done is encouraged me to stick to online buying, where you only get advice when you ask for it, and pushy salespeople are nowhere to be found.
Hungry In Atlanta 