Memo to Subway and Quizno's: GIRLS, YOU'RE BOTH PRETTY.

Or, at least, equally ugly. Look, the world is full of enough conflict and strife. North Korea has a wiffle bomb. Planes are crashing into buildings. Habeas corpus is hiding under a table with Salman Rushdie. So for fuck's sake, can't two purveyors of mediocre subs get along?

SUBWAY:

No, I don't want my fucking sandwich toasted. That's why I'm in Subway. If I'd wanted my sub toasted, I'd have gone to Quizno's, because that's what they do there. That's ALL they do there. That's why half the store is taken up by the giant rollertoaster. Wedging a tiny steel broil-cube in your miniscule counter space helps nobody.

I don't know why you feel threatened. I don't know why you feel the need to keep up with the Quonzes. Subways are everywhere. Thicker than Starbucks. I think one opened up in my left shoe last week. At least, I hope that's why it smells like salami. Please fight the impulse to try to compete in the toasting arena. It's a mistake.

For one thing, the whole setup and menu don't support toasting. The cheese is under the meat, most of the meat was meant to be cold. You serve tuna fish, for fuck's sake. You don't toast tuna fish. When I go into Subway, I want my pallid, rubbery chicken the way God and Allah intended it - microwaved by a surly minimum wage worker for 90 seconds and then covered in shredded lettuce.

But most importantly, you're giving one more choice to the morons in line who have too many choices as it is. The son of a bitch in front of me is already going to spend three minutes contemplating Green Peppers Or Not Green Peppers. I don't need him meditating on the application of radiant dry heat to the Cold Cut Combo on top of that.

And while I have you here, please pay Jon Lovitz an exorbitant salary for being your pitchman, so that he can save it wisely and never have to do it again. Thanks.

QUIZNO'S:

OK, fine. You're the underdog. We get it. For every Quizno's out there, there are five Subways. You want to take them down. And that's OK. But you don't need to seem so desperate about it.

When you run ads telling us you can't even see Subway's meat, because it's so tiny, then follow it with a shot of your gargantuan bun-load, that's hitting below the belt. Metaphorically. And it's not at all the kind of thing I want to be thinking about when I'm having lunch.

If you're going to play that game, you might as well go all-out. Get John Edwards. No, not the politician. The dickweed fake from Crossing Over. And have him do a bad Clara Peller impersonation. You get the psychic crazies, the 80's nostalgies, and people like me who you didn't just make think of cock.

Barring that, bring back the singing whateverthefucktheyweres. Any ad campaign that royally pisses off 90% of the population may be bad for business, but it made me happy. And I'll tell you this. I have no need for a pepper bar. I do not patronize the pepper bar. But between now and the heat death of the universe, I will know that Quizno's has (or had, assuming toasted subs do not survive until the heat death of the universe) a fucking pepper bar.

And it's not like a Pile Of Meat is some huge culinary achievement. In fact, as an aging nerd whose heart could explode at ANY MOMENT, maybe you should think about offering those sandwiches with only HALF a mountain of protein. And maybe throw a fucking tomato on there to balance the mighty triple-nozzle Sauce Gusher you use.

Subway and Quizno's can coexist peacefully, carving out their individual ecological niches in the great monocultural "bio"sphere. They just need to recognize and embrace their differences, and stop pissing me off.