11.06.2013

Tootsie Pops: a critical review

Friends,

I hope you have an iPhone 4s or 5 for two reasons: (1) I'm about to tell an iPhone story, and (2) iPhones are awesome (I want good things for you).

Like most iPhone owners, I had an initial period of fascination with Siri. Not with her relatively boring functionality, of course, but with her sassy personality. To try to tease this out, I asked her various popular questions to see her responses. For instance, I asked her "Who's on first?", and she aptly replied, "Correct. Who is on first."

One such question is related to our current topic. Check it out:

Oh, the days before I had 4G or could dictate question marks.

That this question has been researched by students at Cambridge raises dire concerns about the state of higher education worldwide. This terror notwithstanding, we forge ahead to the question at hand:

What's up with Tootsie Rolls?
Aside from Tootsie Pop anticlimax

There was a time when I loved Tootsie Pops. An age of innocence, when anything that had sugar filled me with delight. But times have changed ("relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, instincts more developed"), and now I more or less demand that my food taste good from start to finish.

And therein ("as the Bard would tell us") lies the rub. The actual lollipop portion of a Tootsie Pop is pretty awesome, at least in whatever flavor one usually enjoys. I could pound the outside of cherry Tootsie Pops for days (an additional reason I will never buy a bag of them). But, like so many model homes and whitewashed tombs, what's on the inside is so much worse.

Does anyone actually like Tootsie Rolls? If you want to taste chocolate, you can more profitably eat any other chocolate product. In a pinch, you can just imagine the taste of chocolate. I think even that's better than eating a Tootsie Roll. 

Like, instead of giving you actual chocolate, Tootsie Rolls give you a faint semblance of chocolate in chewy-but-not-gooey form. It doesn't melt in your mouth or your hand, it just gets stuck in your teeth.

At least Blow Pops (bought out by the Tootsie Roll corporation in 1988) give you some utility at the end of the lollipop. That gum may only be enjoyable for 18 seconds, but hey, that's 18 seconds more than you're getting from a Tootsie Roll. At least the bubble gum isn't pretending to be edible.



I have two questions for you:
Can you think of a chocolate item worse than a Tootsie Roll?
Blow Pops or Tootsie Pops?

Jon