Dear Kixeye,

I am writing you regarding your the advertisements that you have elected to put on the side of every BART and Muni car in the Bay Area. You know the one—the one with the wolf? And its mouth is open? And it's shouting “WORK AT KIXEYE / BE AWESOMER.” You know the ones.

Yes! Those.

First of all, congratulations. Congratulations on pioneering the exciting new frontier of memevertising. In this frantic and confusing age of holographic dead people and glasses that teach us to play ukelele, it's hard to break through to your average mama-grizzlybear consumer. BUT YOU DID IT! You said, “let's take jokes from the internet and use them to get people to come work at our startup!” A week and a half later, your very well-conceived ads were gracing every Muni bus, light rail train, and BART train in the city, extending an invitation to tens of thousands of commuters to seek employment at your startup.

But there are a few problems with your campaign, Kixeye. You see, when you exercise esoteric facets of internet culture to promote your recruitment campaign, you separate your potential applicants into two kinds groups of people:

• Those who understand the reference.
• Those who don't understand the reference.

The latter contingency are people who are just confused about why a wolf is shouting at them to work at your company and are nonplussed by your ploy to be “awesomer.” This ad is not for them. Clearly.

The former category, the small group of people that will have any idea what this joke is alluding to, will understand that you have very aggressively misappropriated this peculiar segment of internet humor. What you wanted to use was the “Courage Wolf” meme, where you do something that results in being successful by being courageous. But, Kixeye, the joke you made was created using the “Insanity Wolf” meme, where the joke is that you do something excessively insane or irrational (to quote, “Insanity wolf tells his viewers to rape, kill, and commit other acts of insanity”). What you basically ran is an ad telling people that they would have to be insane to work at Kixeye. I'm guessing that it's just a happy coincidence that anyone would have to be totally insane to want to work at a ding-dong startup that simultaneously boasts an obscure reference to something on every bus and light-rail in the city, but somehow misses the joke that nobody got in the first place. Maybe one would have to be insane to work at a company with whatever knuckleheads thought that it was acceptable to pollute the city with this ad.

Anyway, good luck in the coming business quarter!

Sincerely,

Sam Bartos

I love Taco Bell.  Not for their “food,” but because they are the gastronomical incarnation of America's greatest hopes and aspirations.  A food product resembling a burrito stuffed with Fritos?  Doritos tacos?  It's this very freedom—the freedom to take what we want to eat (MSG, imitation cheese product) and turn it into a bona fide meal that costs a buck—that makes America the best country on God's trash-littered Earth.

That said, I have my issues with Taco Bell.  Namely, Fritos and Doritos suck.  As anyone who has ever smoked pot and doesn't value their body can tell you, Cheetos are the superior bag-based snack food.  And there's also the issue that digesting Taco Bell feels a lot like dying.

But my hunger for Mexican fast food adulterated by American junk food remains unchecked.  And that's where Taqueria La Cumbre comes in.

Some four months ago, the Valencia Street taqueria (and claimed inventor of the Mission Burrito) began selling a “nacho burrito,” in which a regular burrito is stuffed full of tortilla chips.  SFist hailed it as “Mmmm, good,” noting, “while the chips did get a bit soggy, they provided a necessary buffer to the burrito's inherent one-dimensional flavor and greasiness factors.”

So why not a Cheeto Burrito?

This particular item isn't listed on their menu because of copyright issues (and because they don't actually sell it), but it's among the best veggie burritos I've downed in some time.  As SFist remarked in their review of the original, the texture of the cheese puff adds the necessary crunch to take the burrito to the next level.  But, unlike the tortilla chip, Cheetos don't get all limp and soggy; rather, they maintain their proud stick-like rigid munch throughout the entire ordeal.

Plus, the cheese product on Cheetos far surpasses any real cheese you could dump in a burrito.  When combined with grease, it begins to soak through your tortilla, giving you a pseudo-Taco Bell-style Cheetos-flavored exterior.  “Mmm, good,” indeed.

Perhaps my only regret was not getting the burrito stuffed with the Flamin' Hot variety, but you need not make that same mistake.  Just walk into the corner store at 16th and Valencia, put down $1.09 for your Cheetos bag of choice, then go two doors down to La Cumbre and order a Nacho Burrito made with your freshly acquired bag of Cheetos.  You won't regret it.

My new favorite artist Jeffree Dahmer is currently taking suggestions for what he (she?) should be drawing and this picture of my two primary food groups getting ready to bone down has already emerged.

This is a great day for the internet, my friends.

Not going to lie, I'm wicked disappointed in this ad.  Back in February, I was promised the Giants were filming their 2012 season commercial in the neighborhood, but it looks like much of it wound up on the cutting room floor:

Sure, Willy’s Barbershop, Nice & Clean Laundromat, Mission Ink, and Clarion Alley all make appearances.  But where's the promised shots of Giants fans scarffing down burrito in Taqueria Cancun?  Or perhaps Tim Lincecum chowing down with Ganja Treats? And isn't that Russian Hill in one of the shots? Gross.

At least they're incorporating the old Sparks branding into their 2012 artwork: