Attention Fox News interns: Here are the emails we received last week from some of your clueless viewers who can't tell us apart. As always, the names and other identifying information have been redacted to protect the ignorant. Grammar, spelling and punctuation have been left intact.
Received 8/20/13
Subject: Judgement
Shep,
Take a deep breath, get a grip. The hype on the “Oreo Double Stuf” is a) teacher seeking publicity, b) poor item selection, c) grandiose overkill by likening it to governmental veracity, and d)nonsense. Anybody can clearly see that there is only one “f” in “stuff.” Why don’t you, in your spare time, prove that the “stuff” in “double stuf” isn’t twice that of the height, depth, weight, ingredients of the original. If you “double” someone’s charitable offering, you only give the same amount, not “double” it. Will you now go after Doublemint gum?
Received 8/22/13
Subject: Appalled
Did I just see an ad for Al Jazeera on Fox and Friends? Don't want to see Al Jazeera on my TV EVER!!!!
Received 8/22/13
Subject: Happening Now (FOX) anchor banter UGH
PLEASE stop with the “cheesy” banter between the two hosts. It is embarrassing!!
Too bad they don’t give their age. We would forward it to the ad agencies across the nation.
Coming down the pipe at this fraudulent “news” outlet:
1. Big changes coming in the next two to three weeks.
2. Hannocchio revamps himself
As to the whole “DoubleStuf” story, it turns out that Nabisco (which makes Oreos) is NOT actually “doubling” the “stuff” (ie, the cream center glop). Now, it’s true that “doubling” can be accomplished in several ways. First would be by measuring the thickness of the “stuff.” If a regular Oreo contains a “cream” layer that’s 5mm thick, a DoubleStuf should have a layer that’s 10mm thick (for the metrically-impaired, that’s about 13/64 of an inch and about 25/64 of an inch—note that the English measure isn’t actually double but that’s because the fractions are NOT precise; 13/64 of an inch is actually a bit larger than 5mm while 25/64 of an inch is just a touch smaller than 10mm but that’s one reason why scientists tend to use metric). Now assuming that the cookie parts are the same size (diametrically and thickness), the visual probably wouldn’t look to be twice as thick but, then again, that’s NOT what Oreo is selling—it’s selling the “stuff” as “double.” The second way would be by measuring volume of “stuff.” If a regular Oreo “stuffing” is 5mL or 5cc (just a little bit over 1 tsp—both essentially describe the same volume; the mL is typically liquid while cc tends to describe solids or viscous substances), then a DoubleStuf should have 10mL or 10cc (or just a bit over 2 tsp). Now, because the “cream” would spread out as it’s applied to the cookie, it is entirely possible that a 10mL volume of cream might not produce double the thickness in terms of height (this is easy to replicate on your own—take a cup of milk and put it in a 12" pie pan and take another cup of milk and put it a 16oz glass; you’ve got the same volume in both but because the pan has more surface area than the glass and the glass will typically have a greater height than the pan, you’d think—from just looking at the two containers—that each container has a different amount of milk).
But the story (found at Time.com) shows that Nabisco is only putting 1.86 times as much “cream” in the DoubleStuf’s as it does in the regular Oreos. (Now, in all fairness, when Nabisco first started making the cookies, they probably did use “double” the “stuff,” but, as we all know, companies are cutting back everywhere.)
