Artisanal Toast?

I missed this when it came out last summer, but C.A. Pinkham gets quite a rant on about artisanal toast:

You've got to be shitting me. Artisanal Toast? "Artisanal" goddamn TOAST is a trend now. There's officially no reason to try to save our species. Let's just send the Earth crashing into the sun and be done with it.

...

The most rage-inducing part about Artisanal ferretbuggering Toast has to be the price: The Mill sells theirs for $4 a slice, and I think a blood vessel just popped in my brain. Apparently, there are places in LA and New York which sell pieces of toasted fucking bread with ricotta and jam on them for upwards of $7. Like you do for toast.

...

This is a step too far, Hipsters. This is a step too goddamn far.

Also, “Artisinal Kool-Aid” is on a page referenced in comments.

Also this:

ETA: Yes, guys. I'm now aware that there was an NPR/This American Life/other media outlet story about the lady who invented Artisanal Toast, and that it was inspirational and uplifting and incredible and that it brings unicorns back to life and travels through time to go kill Hitler. You can stop linking me to it now, please.

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Finally, I found this from Hannah Goldfield in The New Yorker:

In the case of artisanal toast, the backlash seems directed more at the societal phenomenon it evinces than at the food itself. Who doesn’t like toast? The economic and moral objections to it could be used against many of the things we consume in restaurants—coffee, for instance—and Clement admits that the toast she sampled at Tallulah’s, a café in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, was excellent. Artisanal toast is hardly the first harbinger of our food obsession, or even necessarily the most egregious, but it’s become a scapegoat for a growing, broader cultural backlash; the toast that broke the camel’s back.

Bitstamp reports $5 million hack, suspends operations.

Izabella Kaminska continues her coverage of Bitcoinmania in the Financial Times with a piece on Monday's troubles at Bitstamp, one of the remaining Bitcoin exchanges.

She makes this observation: "[H]ow nuts are the markets when the most objective and reasonable analysis of a new asset class pumped by the great and the good in the tech world comes by way of a parody sub-Reddit entitled Buttcoin?"

(http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/ has a slogan: "Powered by gold. Comedy gold.")

One of the best bits of snark today:

What I find most interesting about bitcoin is how libertarians are relearning hundreds of years of economics the hard way.

to which Ms. Kaminska replies:

It's like instead of going to university to learn about finance from books, they've decided to learn all about it by running their own fantasy finance market. You know, the same way we teach politics to some young folk by having them operate a mini United Nations and what not.