Is this what they mean when they say carbs are evil?

Remember the Atkins diet? Gawd, what a drag that was. I think I tried it for, like, 28 hours once. I recall being especially perplexed by what my breakfast options were. There are many non-carb breakfast foods, obviously, but I experiemented with this in the days where I only used my stove for making coffee and my oven served as storage for my shoes. Seriously, I was a *total* cliche in my 20s. So making eggs first thing in the morning simply wasn't going to happen. I quickly learned that I wasn't a very pleasant person without carbs, anyway, and ditched Atkins in favour of the coffee-and-cigarettes diet. Because I'm smrt.

I'm glad to announce that nearly a decade later, I'm still happily consuming carbs. And I will never apologize for it, either. I've never met a pizza I couldn't pulverize, I've never pooh-poohed a potato and I've certainly never passed up a bowl of pasta. Until now. Last week Barilla chairman and resident fascist Guido Barilla said in an interview with Radio 24: "I would never do [a commercial] with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don't agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role." He went on to say that he doesn't support adoption by gay couples, but does support gay marriage, which has a whiff of the daddy-hits-me-because-he-loves-me about it.

After a boycott was called on all Barilla products, the chairman clarified his comments and apologized cryptically by saying simply that "the woman plays a central role in a family." I don't really know what's worse, that Mr. Barilla has completely cut lesbians out of the equation, that he doesn't think the gays are worthy of his products, or that he believes that a woman's place is in the kitchen. You'd think that as one of the world's leaders in pasta production the guy would have had some media training by now, or that he'd have a PR team that knew to keep him away from reporters. As far as gastronomic gaffes go, this is like Tom Cruise on Oprah's couch: we didn't see it coming, we can't believe it happened, and it has made us pretty nauseous.