China Now Beset by Mr. Softee Jingle
The Chinese Mr. Softee on YouTube. We have no idea what they're saying, but the jingle is unmistakable.
Ah, sweet, sweet globalization! New Yorkers have been so busy carping about the Mister Softee jingle that we failed to notice that the soft-serve company has quietly expanded its reach to China. The New York Times reports that Mr. Softee began infiltrating the streets of the university city of Suzhou three years ago, under the name of Mr. Soft Heart (apparently, there is no Mandarin equivalent of "Softee"). The Chinese have become so enamored of flavors like "red bean blast" that the number of trucks has doubled each year, and the company is now considering expanding to other Asian countries like Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand. In a reverse of what New York allows, the trucks are permitted to play the jingle only when they're parked; there's no word yet on whether or not incidents of random violence have increased correspondingly.
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