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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Wednesday, November 6, 2002
20:12 - Huh huh huh. It's incredible.

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A whole shelf of these, and candy novelty-type-things like them, was in the supermarket right next to the Valrhona and the Godiva, which undoubtedly turn away their creased faces with a sniff and an upturned nose at having to share shelf space with such... monstrosities.

But somehow I'm encouraged to see that the candy industry has become so audacious all of a sudden. (One of the other delectable offerings was "[gummy] rats in a [sour-powder] bucket", and another was a set of dispensers of liquid/syrupy material billed as "toejam", "pus", and "boogers", among other things.)

There's a sour revolution going on, in fact, and I've never been happier. Except for the unaccountable prevalence of watermelon, raspberry, and green apple flavors in everything? What the hell? What happened to the good old favorites-- lemon, orange, grape, cherry? Adding citric acid to those flavors was a perfectly fine idea. And yet they've gone about inciting a new shift in the flavors that make up the candy landscape, perhaps the most significant since the early-century shift away from flavors like plum and quince and horehound.

It's a dirty trick someone's pulled on me. A sour revolution! My fondest dream come true! And yet... and yet... it's soured by this bizarre cultural shift, which for the life of me I can't imagine is demanded by the public.

(But then, this summer, in rural Ontario, I stopped at a store that billed itself as the World's Biggest Candy Store or some such-- a claim that is probably not unfounded-- and the kindly lady inside told me, much to my amazement, that the candy companies are being flooded with feedback that kids just can't get enough of watermelon, green apple, and raspberry. Huh. Go figure.)

Ah well. I think that even with all these startling new developments-- even with sour-powder toilets with candy plungers; even with Sour Starbursts; even with Sour Skittles; even with Nerds Ropes; even with the sudden universality of sour in every checkout aisle-- nobody has quite gotten the formula as just right as Goelitz, with the Jelly Belly "Sours" mix. It's the right flavors, and the right level of acidity. It has the perfect balance between flavor and kick, between dissipation speed and corrosiveness.

And they've dispensed with those five awful new flavors they tried to add to the mix a couple of years ago.

Yeah, I'm happy.

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© Brian Tiemann