Rice-a-Roni, The SanFrancisco Treat.

Rice. A tasty side dish, certainly, but a treat? I can't imagine getting a hankering for a treat and thinking "You know what would be a nifty little pick-me-up? A nice bowl of Rice-a-Roni. Yeah, that's the ticket." As far as treats go I have to rate Rice-a-Roni way down on the list. Well below traditional items like cookies and pastry. I'm thinking it would even fall below a medium rare steak on the old Treat-o-Meter. So what exactly is up with "The SanFrancisco Treat"?

G and I think we have it figured out. What is SanFrancisco well known for, besides the aforementioned rice treat? Yes, that's right. Homosexuals. It seems pretty clear that Quaker Oats (The company that makes Rice-a-Roni and it's non-treat cousin Pasta-Roni. And why exactly is rice a treat but pasta isn't?) is inferring that the preferred treat to the homosexual palate is a tasty dish of rice.

This is very interesting and raises several questions. Why do homosexuals prefer rice to more common "straight treats"? Is this seeming sensual oddity a side effect of homosexuality or a cause of it? And most importantly, can this preference for rice be used as a substitute or enhancement of a straight person's gaydar?

We quickly decided that the first two questions lacked sufficient humor potential would likely require federal funding to investigate fully so we concentrated on the last one. Could we develop a system that uses the knowledge of tasty rice being a preferred homosexual treat to assist homophobes the world over? And, more importantly, would there be any way to make money off of it? We believed that we could indeed develop such a system but there would be little profit potential. Any money we made would most likely be lost when we were sued by Quaker Oats. Therefore our system, known as the "Rice-a-Roni Homosexual Evaluation System", or more simply the "Rice-a-Roni Test" would be open source and free for use by any and all.

Our first step was to verify that tasty rice was not a preferred treat for heterosexuals. We took a poll of our straightt coworkers (male and female) and the unanimous decision was that they did not seek out Rice-a-Roni as a treat, or even as a snack. Some admitted to occasionally using the product as a meal instead of its intended use as a side dish but even that was done rarely and only when "there wasn't anything else in the house". We did not, of course, poll homosexuals as Quaker Oats already established the homosexual preference for tasty rice as a treat and we didn't want to get beat up or anything when said homosexuals found out what we were doing.

A second poll established that all straight respondents viewed chocolate chip cookies as an acceptable treat. For most it ranked quite high or at the top of their overall treat preferences. Even the ones that didn't have a particular love for chocolate chip cookies still preferred them to Rice-a-Roni as a treat source.

Our groundwork done we set about constructing the "Rice-a-Roni Homosexual Evaluation System". Being computer nerds this naturally fell into a flow chart. The beauty of this system is its simplicity. No training is needed to administer the test, simply follow along on the flow chart according to the responses of the subject. Note that although the original intent of this test was revelation of homosexuality for homophobes (gaydar enhancement) it can just as easily be used by sexually confused persons to determine their own sexuality or as a dating assistant for homosexuals. There's a much lower chance of an awkward situation developing when asking a prospective partner if they like cookies instead of grabbing his/her ass and jamming a tongue in an ear.

So without further ado, here is the "Rice-a-Roni Homosexual Evaluation System":