Spontaneous multiplication
Have you ever noticed that no one ever seems to buy Smarties? They just seem to appear before Halloween, and disappear sometime after. Quietly, without fuss. Not like my beloved Cadbury Mini-Eggs. I mourn their passing after Easter; seek them out in discount bins.
No one seems to miss Smarties, but neither do we turn them down.
I witnessed a strange phenomenon at work last week.
As an aside, in many office environments, there is the keeper of candy or delicacies of a sweet nature. I’ve been fortunate to be near a couple of keepers, though have never been the keeper myself. I’m not social enough, and to be the keeper, you have to enjoy the banter of people as they come for the real purpose: the goods.
The keeper in my current environment often brings wonderful cookies courtesy of her mother. But for the last month and a half, the main attraction has been Halloween candy. In a purple jack-o-lantern.
A couple of good souls have supplemented the supply with their own offerings. Some people have starting throwing money into the temporarily empty vessel, jonesing for their next fix of sugar.
Better than a trip to the vending machine. And you’re always welcome back.
But I noticed a strange offering last weekend. Smarties. No one knows where the Smarties came from. And though they’re not nearly as appealing as the chocolate goodies, they also get eaten.
Smarties! I love their empty goodness. The mixture of food coloring and sugar. It’s hard to not eat the whole roll in a matter of a minute. And then you go back for more.
Luckily, there is a finite amount of Smartie consumption. You can realistically expect to eat maybe two or three rolls and then lose interest.
But you’ll remember them later, and go back for more. They seem a lot less dangerous to the waistline than a similar quantity of tiny Snickers… It couldn’t hurt to have just one more.
Smarties were the Halloween candy that you least liked to see in your own bucket. But they were plentiful, cheap, and hey, didn’t taste bad. They weren’t a gold mine of goodness, like a fun-size Kit-Kat, but they were sweet, and good and fun to pull out of the tight plastic roll.
Anyway, nobody admits to buying Smarties. They’re just there.
I have a theory about where they come from. They’re not manufactured or bought, but simply exist.
It started with some single roll of Smarties. For the sake of argument, we’ll say they were spontaneously created from a thick, rich soup of dextrose, not unlike the goop that all life sprang from.
One roll is created, and goes on to divide, creating other rolls of Smarties.
A few people are duped into buying entire bags of the clever Smarties, disguised as harmless Halloween candy. But I suspect that those bags gather together in hopes of being distributed into the stomachs of unsuspecting children and gluttonous office worker adults. Then, when a few are dumped into an unsuspecting receptacle, they are free to multiply. No one sees this process. And no one sees how they get there.
And being candy fiends, we take the bait. The Smarties are deposited greedily into our stomachs with little delay. And there the candies are left to slowly, surely take over our willpower and try to get us to eat more Smarties.
Eventually, Smarties will rule the world, through us. And we won’t see it coming.
Everyone knows that Smarties are the flavorful droppings of MENSA members. The droppings are collected by the MENSA members that produce them and are shipped free of charge to Gobbler Knob, West Virginia. There they are packaged by the inmates of the Robert C. Byrd home for abandoned Eighth Grade dropouts. From there, they are dispersed across the country by U.S. postal employees working in a top secret U.S.P.S. facility in nearby Shitepoke, a facility also brought to West Virginia by the tireless efforts of Senator Byrd. The postman secretly delivers the Smarties using his special magic fairy dust, which transports the candies into waiting candy bowls everywhere.
Seriously, the only thing more mysteriously ubiquitous than Smarties are candy corn. You don’t want to know where I think those nasty things come from.
What do you mean, least liked to see? Smarties are great. Tasty, sugary, sufficiently far-removed from anything natural. Hand me another roll.
But I think you’re right: They just exist. Keep multiplying. They may already rule the world.
And as for the candy corn: That brings to mind damp, cold fall mornings on the school bus with torn papers stuck to the ground by dirty boot prints and grubby hands pulling out weird radioactive treats from linty pockets. Ew. I couldn’t eat those until I was older.
I’m older. I still can’t eat those (candy corns). To me, it brings to mind my grandmother’s house. She kept a bowl of candy corn on the coffee table in the Fall. It’s the only kind of candy I have ever known her to eat. I cannot stand the stuff. I always thought of chicken poop when I thought of it–I don’t know why. Maybe because chickens eat corn?
I hate to admit this, but I have no idea what Smarties are and now with Matt’s very clever and ver humorous description, I don’t think I want to know. As for candy corn, I’ve always found theme kind of disgusting. The strange thing is I don’t think I have ever had one. Just one of those foods I have developed a loathing for for no particular reason.
Hilarious, Matt.
And on candy corn, I was explaining my Smarties theory to the keeper of the candy, and she said she thought candy corn was probably produced the same way: by spontaneous generation or multiplication. Nobody buys candy corn. Nobody especially likes it, but they will eat it. I’ll eat it.
Never thought of it looking like chicken shit.
And Todd, you can’t seek out the Smarties, to get an idea of what we’re talking about. The best you can hope for is to take your son trick-or-treating and steal some of his. If you are drawn to buy them, it’s because some greater Smarties force is at work.
And candy corn… well, because that’s usually loose, you have a better chance of your son avoiding it in his bucket.
Assuming you guys want to take him trick-or-treating.
Now, a particularly useless bit of trick-or-treating candy was the gum. Usually bazooka. Hard as a rock, and tasted as good as rock after about 30 seconds. Mmmm mm.
That, and some peanut butter candies. Nasty stuff.
My mother-in-law gives out Double Bubble bubblegum for Halloween. It has to be the worst chewing gum, on a par with Bazooka gum. After only thirty seconds of chewing, the flavor is gone, your jaw aches from chewing , and your mouth tastes chalky and dry. She has this irrational nostalgia for this gum, however. I guess she liked it when she was a kid, and she was under the illusion that it was made in the United States. I pointed out to her that it says it’s made in Canada, right on the label, and so now she is on a quest to find the American-made version of Double Bubble.
Why does it matter if Double Bubble is American made?
Todd, I am really surprised that you are not familiar with Smarties. They remind me of kool-aide, but in candy form. Can’t say I am a big fan of them.
Now I am a sucker for candied corn! Not sure why, but I just can’t eat one!
Brandi, thank God for you!! I was starting to think I was a real weirdo for loving candy corn!! I haven’t had any this year (yet–I may get some on clearance), but I’ve always been a sucker for the stuff. And while I have on occasion just popped handfuls in my mouth, my prefered method of eating candy corn is to eat it piece by piece, starting out by nibbling off the white bit, then the orange, then the yellow, each color tasting just a bit different. Yum!! Such sugary goodness! But then, I also used to eat Karo syrup sandwiches on white bread, squishing the bread into the corn syrup until it was all gooey and glistening. Mmmm…
Now Smarties, I like those too. I don’t seek them out exactly, but I do like them. Remember when Smarties were being recalled about 12 years back for believed contamination with glass? My college roommate had bought a huge bag for distribution, then dumped them in her wastebasket when the scare was announced. Then she left for the weekend. With the Smarties still in her wastebasket. And, yes, I ate them because, well, they were in the room and I was in the room and, well, they’re Smarties, damn it! Wouldn’t you have done the same? OK probably not.
I think I’ve just got a thing for sugar of all types, exceptions being jelly beans, gum drops, and Skittles.
Great blog, Melissa. You had me at “Smarties”
If I eat candy corn, Dawn, I eat it in much the same way. In layers.