Monday, February 02, 2004

I Am A Strict Segregationist (When It Comes To Candy) I have previously made my feelings known about candy.  Today, however, I saw something new and disturbing in the candy machine, and it's important that we talk about it right now. It comes in a purple bag, and it's from the good folks at Wonka candies, the folks who bring us such delights as the Gobstopper, the Runt, the Nerd, the Pixie Stix, the Laffy Taffy, and so on.  If you want an extra-annoying experience, I suggest you visit Wonka candies.  It's sort of like seeing a poorly-animated version of the Willy Wonka movie with a bunch of annoying sounds that serve no apparent purpose.  No, really, try it.  It's worse than I make it sound. Anyway, the name of this unfortunate candy in the purple bag is "Mix-Ups".  As in, it has such Wonka staples as Runts, TARTnTINYS and Nerds, all in one package.  I poured them all out on my desk, and it looked like the aftermath of a horrible Teletubby car accident.  I haven't seen that much color since that one time I did that one thing that I shouldn't talk about on my blog.  Now, I don't know about you, but whenever I see a co-mingling of products like this I get real suspicious.  Why would they combine all these candies when they also sell them seperately?  My first thought is always: Why didn't these candies make the cut?  I'll tell you why: The candies in the "Mix-Ups" all fell on the plant floor.  That's right.  These are all candies that were just rolling around on the floor, like so many hair clippings under your feet at the Great Clips Salon.  Can I absolutely, 100% prove that?  Circumstantially, yes.  Consider: Here's a broken banana Runt that has what appears to be the print of a shoe tread on it.  I think I can make out a part of the Nike logo.  Or there's the fact that the ingredient list on the package isn't itemized by candy.  There is no "Runt Ingredient List", followed by the "Nerd Ingredient List", and so on.  They all have the same ingredients!  Thus, obviously, they are all made on the same production line, with the same vats of...let's see...dextrose, and Yellow 5 Lake, and Carnauba Wax, which for some reason is capitalized.  Is there an animal named the Carnauba? Well, if you've ever been in a production environment, you know that things end up on the floor.  You also know that a good many pieces of whatever it is that is being made might pass inspection, but not be quite up to the standards of, say, a flagship line like Nerds.  So, what to do?  You sweep them all up off the floor!  You gather them out of the nooks and crannies of the Candy Sorter every year or so, and then you suddenly figure out that you've got 30,000 pounds of this stuff.  And because Wonka is a genius, he figures he can move this product if only he can come up with a proper name to put on the purple package.  Mmm, Mix-Ups.  Sounds delicious! Of course, this gag will backfire on them, as more and more people figure out that these are all really just the same candy, sort of like how once people caught on that Skittles were nothing more than Starbursts with a fruity M&M coating, nobody wanted them anymore.  I see this co-mingling of food in a variety of places.  First, it was the Ritz Bits with the cheese and the peanut butter.  Fair enough.  Those things go together.  If people would independently put two or three things together, that makes it OK, as long as we acknowledge the Goober Grape Exemption.  But then things started to go awry.  There's that Dorito/Cheeto/Pretzel combination from Frito-Lay, which is an Abomination.  Nobody in history has ever willingly mixed Doritos, Cheetos and Pretzels.  It Has Never Been Done.  Even people in the worst throes of the munchies would not do such a thing.  They might independently take bites out of three bags of Doritos, Cheetos, and Pretzels, but they would never mix them.  Why has Frito-Lay violated this law of nature and consumerism?  You can't tell me it was because they weren't selling enough goddamned Doritos or Cheetos.  Candies and snacks should remain seperate.  A Twix is a Twix, and should never be paired with a Three Musketeers.  To do so would demean them both. 3:41:42 PM    Say what?[]

A Foot A foot.  That's how much snow we're supposed to get by tonight, on top of a good four inches yesterday.  I shoveled my walk and driveway yesterday, and then it dumps a foot of snow on top of my freshly cleared efforts.  When that happens, the only reasonable thing to do is go sledding.  Unbelievably, Linus has never truly gone sledding.  We didn't have the snow for it last year, and the year before that we just sledded in our yard, which is even lamer than it sounds. So yesterday, we hit a modest slope at a neighborhood park.  We had to work hard to pack down the snow and make a path, but soon he was riding his purple saucer like a champion.  We were out so long we had snot-cicles hanging from our noses.  But we didn't care.  There's some kind of magic to being in a snowstorm, with your body heat elevated to the point that you can't get cold, and having nothing to do but slide down, walk up, and slide down again.  Over and over. I told him of a place that we can go where the hill is like a mountain, and we go down on inner-tubes, and we don't have to walk up the hill because there is a rope that will pull us all the way up.  He wouldn't have understood the attraction of such a place before yesterday, but when I told him, his eyes lit up.  We'll go there soon, and I promise that I will not sled recklessly and try to see what I can get away with before wiping out.  I promise that I will sled the straight-and-narrow while Linus is on board.  Unless he requests otherwise. 1:00:33 PM    Say what?[]

The helmets weren't edible, unfortunately Super There are few things in sports as enjoyable as a well-played Super Bowl.  The World Series, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup...they can all reach a fever pitch if they reach a Game 7, but there's something about the journey to get to a Game 7 that removes some part of the suddenness and finality that envelops a Super Bowl.  That is especially true if one of the teams happens to be a huge underdog, and I think the Carolina Panthers qualified as such.  What a crazy game.  I was making jokes about a riveting field-position battle after the first quarter, and I legitimately thought that the game might be over when the Patriots scored their first TD.  After all, at one point the Patriots had outgained the Panthers by 103 yards to zero.  Carolina had run 17 plays at one point, for 0 yards! And then things got crazy.  Jake Delhomme started to look like Joe Montana.  The Patriots stopped covering people and couldn't tackle DeShaun Foster.  Janet Jackson bared her breast.  It was a back-and-forth counter-punching game all the way to the very end.  It was every bit the game that the Rams/Titans Super Bowl was, and was better than the Patriots/Rams Super Bowl.  I'll always wonder, as I'm sure all Panther fans will, whether the out-of-bounds kickoff by John Kasay with a minute left really was the difference in field position that cost them the game.  We watched the game with several friends and many children.  It was a festive atmosphere, with good food and ample play area for the kids.  All in all, much better than spending the Super Bowl nearly passed out on the floor of Fabulous Fern's, which is how I spent the Broncos/Packers masterpiece which I have no recollection of.  You know, I used to lament how having kids meant that events like the Super Bowl were much less fun.  But now that I attend kid-friendly Super Bowl parties, I remember and enjoy the games so much better than I used to.  And the only time I spend on the floor is when I'm making silly faces at a baby who's lying down. As you can see, we were required to bring a Super Bowl-themed food item to the party, but as near as I can tell our Jell-O Cake was the only one that met the criteria.  I figured this made us a shoe-in for the door prize, but alas, there was none.  In case you are wondering, yes, I do happen to have a wide variety of novelty-size football helmets.  One never knows when they might come in useful.  And as for Jell-O cake, I think it is the highest of haute cuisine, and I insisted that we bring it as our contribution to the spread.  The only mystery was whether we would use red or blue Jell-O, and how such a decision might reflect my given allegiances during the game.  As it turned out, I had picked the Panthers to beat the spread (which they did), but I thought it would be a much more low-scoring affair, so I don't think I really deserve any credit for being a soothesayer.  And, as the game went on, I found myself rooting vigorously for the Panthers.  As I said earlier, I like the Patriots.  I think they're good, and I have no reason to dislike them at all.  But I often find myself watching a game in which I have no serious rooting interest, and drifting toward rooting for a team given how the game has transpired, or which path a given team may have taken to get to that point.  I was compelled by the underdog status of the Panthers, and more than that, I just liked how they played their playoff games.  Beyond that, the halftime show was painful, even with all the industrial-strength cleavage.  Hey, if I want to watch a contrived MTV event, I'll watch MTV.  Remember when MTV was great?  And I thought the commercials pretty much sucked it, too. Good thing the game was great. 12:52:55 PM    Say what?[]

Postscript On Friday, I wrote: "Eventually, we managed to push the Saturn back in without breaking any more bumpers."  Turns out I was only partially right about that.  We didn't break any more bumpers, but I did discover that I smashed the front grille of the Golf.  Further structural damage may be discovered after the spring thaw. 11:28:51 AM    Say what?[]

© Copyright 2004 DH. Last update: 3/1/2004; 11:37:45 AM.