Double Down: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pulmonary Embolism

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Easier said than done. A respectable amount of the cheese hung outside the confines of the chicken strips, which apparently ended up melting and recoagulating with the wrapper. The end result was a glue-like situation that caused a large chunk of cheese to stay with the wrapper instead of the meatheap.

Thar she blows. It’s hard to describe exactly what this looks like. It bears the slightest resemblance to the asteroid that threatened to annihilate the world in “Armageddon,” although I’m not sure how this would react to a tiny Bruce Willis detonating an even tinier nuclear warhead inside its cheesy core.

As far as the size of the Double Down, the one served to me measured slightly under 5.5 inches. (That’s 13 centimeters for the rest of the world, or for the target demographic of this product, 0.001273148 football fields.) I only measured one of these, so there may well be some sort of dimorphism prevalent in these things that I’m not aware of. I’ll leave that question to the world of academia.

Incidentally, the staff at KFC will tolerate photography, visual inspections, and note-taking at their tables, but once you whip out the ruler, hoo boy. A cleaning man and the restaurant manager both came over to my table and asked me what I was doing with my pencils and cameras and implements of destruction. With a straight face, I told them simply, “I wanted to know how big the Double Down was. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?” The manager didn’t seem too swayed by my argument, and I could sense his uncertainty of what to do. I guess the KFC training manuals don’t cover this sort of situation. I added, “I’m not bothering anybody, I’m just sitting here trying to enjoy my food. Just give me fifteen minutes, then I’ll be gone.”

The manager thought for a moment, then smiled a little and said “Okay.” They walked away and left me alone for the rest of my visit. I would venture a guess that I was probably not the first person he had seen photographing the Double Down, although I may have been the first one to use a ruler on one. A rather dubious honor, but I’ll take it.

Having waited long enough, I decided there was nothing left to do but taste the sucker. I picked the wrapperless meatheap up with my bare hand, and was astonished at how hot it was. Even after agonizing minutes of analysis, plus the time spent smooth-talking the restaurant staff, the thing was still piping hot. It had a good weight to it, and it felt rather sturdy and not overly squishy. The aroma was roughly on par with the average KFC chicken product.

Part IV: The first bite.


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