AlphaLima

Snaps your teeths.

Next up in the Licorice Shootout are Snaps Classic Chewy Candy, a confection that is at this point bringing up the rear in terms of licoricey goodness.  Here at Chez Lima, afficianados of all things licorice (thus far), this entry recieved enthusastic thumbs down. Here are the principal reasons:

Texture:  well, not really chewy.  All of us have had to grind away with serious lifelike grinding molar action to get the Snaps into anything other than their original form, a form that bears uncanny resemblance to the plastic insulation on the outside of wire.

Upon partaking, young Sonny Boy quipped, “I wouldn’t really call them chewy candy.  More like ‘impossible to chew into pieces candy.’”  Baby Girl opined, “I can’t even eat them.”  Mind you, she got some pretty effective teeths as she’s still at the age where many of her teeth are very small and pointy.  It must be that she lacks the massive hyena-like jaw strength required to eat these things.  In my Mr. Fancy sommeliery comments on the back of an envelope, I observed that a Snap “doesn’t chew so much as break into rubber shards.”  I also noted that eating the candy makes my mouth feel like it is full of “foamy dye.”

Have you ever seen those blown-out tire retreads beside the interstate?  If you haven’t, it may be because they’ve already been collected and sent to the Snaps Candy Factory.

Taste:  Some tasters have called the taste of the pink ones “soapy,” but I think they taste like incense smells, and what’s worse, the taste offers up some faint aromatic quality, so subsequent exhalations invoke the badness once again.  The incense I’m alluding to might be sandalwood or some other head-shoppy variation of hippie scent.  I’m not talking licorice incense here.

Final Damning Evidence:  The kids and I got my wife to try some as she was absent at our first tasting.  We all cackled with impish glee at her displeasure.  Later on I duped her into trying one of the soapy/incensey pink ones, and she spat it right into the trash can!

Having eaten one, Baby Girl voluntarily threw her other one into the trash as well.  My kids consider dessert as one of the greatest possible things ever, a vice that ranks right up there with putting underpants on their heads, watching television commercials, or drinking beer through straws.  Well, actually, not the beer one, but dessert is a very important part of their culinary existences.  And Baby Girl chucked it right into the trash.

One observation that might give Snaps some redemption in the big old Licorice hierarchy:  I’ll bet that you could get some serious velocity and knockdown power by shooting Snaps out of a Wrist Rocket.  And maybe, just maybe, because they are hollow in the middle, they might make an unsettling whistling noise as they flew by, fast as a bullet!

Fare thee well, gentle Snaps.  We shan’t see you again.

For my birthday, my dear Bubby sent me down a big old sack of 25 different kinds of candies that are either black licorice or have some black licorice component to them. Over the last week or so I’ve been opening a new kind every two or three days and sampling it. I’ve shared with my dear children and beloved wife. Basically, we’re going crazy with the licorice here. As I sample new licorice candies, I will apprise you of their licoricey worthiness. Mind you, I am not being paid to endorse any particular kind of candy. Also mind you, if you want to pay me to write whatever you want me to write about whatever candy, I will gladly oblige you provided that the income eases any pangs I might feel about sacrificing my journalistic integrity.  You will have to pony up an ox-cart full of hundred dollar bills if you expect me to write anything even remotely positive about those godawful wax bottles that have the horrible syrup in them.

Also mind you again, I have googled around a bit, and the folks over at Brian Pipa’s candyaddict.com site have the bases covered as far as candy reviews go, so you might head on over there and check it out. Incidentally, you might just see the pictures I am using here over there as well which makes sense because well, they were over there first. I figure that everything balances out because I’d imagine that my mention here will send two or three visitors over there to check things out. Win-win.

Licorice Dollars

Licorice Dollars. Not legal tender.

The first box I opened and sampled was the theater size box of Licorice Dollars, an artificially flavored confection produced by the Farley’s & Sathers Candy Company out of Round Lake, MN.  The front of the box says “Heide Quality Candies Since 1869,” but that’s only a front for the Minnesota folks. As soon as I am through here I am going to call Jesse Ventura on the red phone to straighten those lutefisk eaters out.  And yes, I realize that Ventura is no longer the governor of the “Summer of ‘99 Timber Blowdown State,” but with his gigantic arms, he still wields considerable clout amongst the pasty political types.

The Black Licorice Dollars are a good candy; the licorice flavor tastes pretty good.  The texture right out of the box has a certain stiffness to it–try to start chomping away and you’ll probably pull out your fillings, but let a dollar warm up in your mouth for a bit and the candy becomes more palatable.

Sonny Boy and Baby Girl did not complain about the stiff texture of the Licorice Dollars; instead, they ate them greedily (running into the dining room at dessert time POST HASTE) and then spending the next twenty minutes gouging the dollar remnants off of their little teeth with their fingers.

Ms. AlphaLima has eaten a few dollars and hasn’t really shown her figurative hand as to her preferences.

I like them pretty good.  Were I in a theater, I would not pay $3.50 for a box of them, but they are good.

Here’s an interesting historical note to conclude: if Heide Quality Candies started producing Black Licorice Dollars at their startup in 1869, they would have named the candy after a denomination of currency that was actually worth $2.50 when weighed against the consumer price index.  At least that’s what this genealogy site says.  The page also notes that before 1861 barter figured heavily into American economics.  I surmise that in 1869 the barter economy was still alive and well; from this I conclude that the Heide Co. might have, in a fit of patriotic duty, named their candy the “dollar” to stimlulate interest in the new-fangled currency.  That and the fact that naming their product “the licorice equivalent of seven chickens or one-sixteenth of a steer freshly slaughtered” would have killed their sales.

Another historical aside:  the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in ‘69; many of the workers chose to be paid in licorice dollars.

History can be interesting, can’t it?

You know who else just enjoyed the heck out of Black Licorice Dollars?  Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, that’s who.

in a weird kind of way. For some reason, the utility company fixed the streetlight that stands right across the street from our house, and now our yard has that Gulag-y daytime-in-the-nighttime brightness at night again. While it was out, we could see constellations, we could admire the night sky, we could have a dark house in the night after we’d all gone to bed, but now? Now we can read right out there in the front yard day or night. The Luddite in me chafes.

On a whim I picked up Mamma Mia! at the old video store a night or so ago as the lovely Ms. AlphaLima is a big-time ABBA fan from way back in her middle school days.

We watched it last night.

About five minutes in, right around the scene where the young girls (Sophie and her pals) are reunited on the pier, do you want to know what really went through my head? This is the truth, right here:

“This is one of the nine levels of hell.”

Same deal with the older wimmins’ reunion (Donna and her pals). Ugh. I had to bite my tongue to keep from guffawing right out loud.

As the movie rolled on, my impressions changed some, and here’s why: I figured out that the plot is much like a Shakespearean comedy. It’s complex but simple to grasp, the age-old conflict between the generations is there, it’s all resolved in the end through some credulity-straining events. I believe that Shakespeare has a slight edge in dialogue-writing skillz, however. I also like ABBA, and the music is integrated nicely into the story. There’s a few of those “Uh-oh. I feel a song coming on” moments, but for the most part the music serves as a vehicle to advance the story and flesh out the characters. I also did not realize that Meryl Streep has such a strong singing voice. Yeah, I know there’s probably some Hollywood Trickery in there, but I am equally confident that she is talented. Pierce Brosnan? Not so much.

Check out the scene where she’s headed up to the ridiculously remote church for the wedding (and yeah, I realize there’s probably a real church like that, but its presence does not decrease in the least the impracticality of it–maybe there’s a chairlift up the other side, out of camera range) and she belts out “The Winner Takes It All.” The whole time I’m wondering if she’s going to get blown off the cliff, and she still elicited in me some degree of empathy. The lyrics of the song made sense there, too. In retrospect the scene also makes sense from the Pierce Brosnan character angle as he has loved her all these years, and here she is going through a tough time (and looking GREAT doing it, even with the red scarf all tangled about her. What is this, Ran?). Rock on, Meryl Streep.

On a slightly different note, Freud would have had a field day with the old Mamma Mia! as pretty much every scene features Streep wrangling some phallic object in some way or another–power drill, wine bottle, caulking gun, fifteen different varieties of fake microphone.

Not the greatest movie ever, but I enjoyed watching it (though I feel now as if some of my joy stemmed from the fact that my dear wife was so wholly immersed in that wondrous thing). It was the feel good hit of the Sunday.