Los Angeles Times reporter Alana Semuels wins for the best story of the day. In the business section, Semuels reported on the increasingly comical burger wars in Southern California.
According to Semuels, CKE Restaurants Inc., owners of Carl's Jr. and Hardees, sued Jack in the Box on Friday in Orange County's Ronald Reagan federal court building.
Here's the Times:
The suit cites TV ads that tout Jack in the Box's sirloin burgers and lampoon those made with Angus beef, which happens to be what's in the Carl's Jr. Six Dollar Burger and the Hardee's Thickburger. In one ad, Jack–the mascot whose head looks like an upside down ice cream cone, is asked to point to a cow's 'angus area' on a diagram. He says sheepishly, 'I'd rather not.'”
In another Jack in the Box ad, “employees laugh hysterically when a colleague talks about rivals' 'Angus burgers,'” says Semuels.
The ads have infuriated Carls Jr. folks: While we may “find humorous the aural and phonetic similarities between the words 'Angus' and 'anus,' the link is made to create the erroneous notion that all cuts of Angus beef are derived from the anus of beef cattle.”
Nobody can let go of the butt jokes now.
In their lawsuit, Carls Jr. retaliated by claiming that Jack in the Box burgers are made from “frozen sirloin butt meat.”
I can't wait for the next Jack in the Box commercial. Their incredibly funny ads are made by Secret Weapon Marketing of Santa Monica. Here is an ad that's unnerved Carls Jr. owners:
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.