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
Jon, This reminded me of a childhood experience. When I was in middle school my sister and I set out to discover how many licks it actually takes to get to the tootsie roll center. We opened a new pop and began counting our licks. We agreed that in order to have reputable scientific results we could only consume the outer candy by licking and were careful to never once actually suck on the lollipop because we thought that would be cheating (I still agree that would be bending the rules). But a terrible thing happened at around lick 800 if I remember correctly. The small holes that were in the hard candy where air bubbles had formed became very sharp around their edges as we exposed them. And our tongues were cut with every lick and we started to bleed. In the name of science, we kept going as long as we could. Eventually, I passed out from so much blood loss and when I came to I forgot what number I was on... and I never did find out how many licks it takes to get to the center! (That last part was slightly exaggerated for dramatic effect.) It's definitely better to leave a matter this serious to the professionals at Cambridge University! Lesson learned. Thank you Siri.
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed your post Jon, especially --
"like so many model homes and whitewashed tombs, what's on the inside is so much worse."
"Chocolate" is a very generous word for Tootsie Rolls
ReplyDeletewhile I agree that tootsie rolls don't really qualify as chocolate, I can think of many many chocolate items that I would rather not eat than a tootsie roll. Basically any brand of off-the-wall chocolates are way worse, in my mind...like the Whitman's and other brands like that...so so so bad. I'd also wayyy prefer a tootsie pop to a blow pop...the gum is just so horrible inside and it's such a weird concept to have a "lasting" candy inside a lollipop...the thing that makes it the worst, in my mind, is having to get the gum off of the paper lollipop stick, inevitably getting some paper with it...I'm gagging just thinking about it!
ReplyDelete