"Ms. LaFavers said in an interview that Liam, 8, became familiar with Amazon and other shopping sites during the pandemic..."

"... when she regularly ordered supplies. Since then, she has occasionally let him browse the site if he keeps the items in the cart."

From "Boy Accidentally Orders 70,000 Lollipops on Amazon. Panic Ensues. Holly LaFavers said she was eventually refunded $4,200 for her 8-year-old son’s order of Dum-Dums candy" (NYT).

I haven't seen a story like that in a long time. Seems like an early-internet cautionary tale.

Suffice it to say, the LaFavers got their problem straightened out, and "Spangler Candy Co., the company that has made Dum-Dums since 1924, invited Ms. LaFavers and Liam to visit its factory in Ohio." Everybody wins, especially Dum-Dums, because who cared about Dum-Dums? 

"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).

The recipe refers to the candy as "Starlight," and they are still sold under that name. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the product, in case you're yearning to relive old-timey hard-candydom. And here's the Keebler chocolate crust. Now all you need is a can of evaporated milk and some packaged gelatin and you can figure out how the restaurant did it. Stivers makes a posher version of the antiquated treat. She makes the crust from scratch... if you consider Oreos scratch. 

New term learned: "Sunday scaries."

I was surprised to see this childish locution as a serious answer — clued "Feeling of dread heading into a workweek." It would be a spoiler to say where, but it was in a highly respected puzzle and presented as an established phrase.

I googled and got over a million hits:

"... the exact source of deadly outcomes remains 'a big mystery.' A mystery made even harder to solve by the murkiness of the supplement industry."

"The industry has many well-known problems: a lack of scientific evidence for the benefits of certain products, a habit of misleading marketing, a deep reliance on magical thinking. But the recent spate of pediatric melatonin overdoses represents another big one: the products’ maddening irregularity. If no one knows what’s in the supplements, doctors may never understand whether or how they cause serious harm."

From "Something Weird Is Going On With Melatonin/Pediatric overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade" (The Atlantic).

We're talking about 3 to 5 year old children eating gummies that are infused with a substance that is believed to promote sleep. Are the kids getting into what seems like candy or are the parents trying to put their kids to sleep? 

ADDED: There's an old tradition of quieting children down with drugs. See "The poor child’s nurse/Charming family scenes in Victorian adverts for children’s medicines were in stark contrast to some of the dangerous ingredients that the products contained. Alcohol and opiates, such as laudanum, were among the substances helping to ‘soothe’ the nation’s children."

Spokescandies — one more item for my list of things I'd never heard of until I heard they were going away.

A message from M&M'S. pic.twitter.com/EMucEBTd9o

— M&M'S (@mmschocolate) January 23, 2023

What did they do wrong? I feel uneasy, because these imaginary beings embody only rejection. Rejection by whom and for what reason? It's free-floating anxiety in candy form. Yeah, the M&Ms company is "tricking" me into doing viral marketing for them.

According to The Daily Beast, Tucker Carlson is responsible for the polarization over the candy's shoes. See for yourself:

"If you’re allowing people to bake cookies and muffins and breads, why should they not be allowed to make cocoa bombs?"

"The first case said that the government can’t ban the sales of perfectly safe homemade baked goods. And so, since we already had that victory regarding baked goods, it definitely made things easier the second time around.... People shouldn’t need to buy or rent a commercial kitchen in order to sell fudge or candies...."

Said Justin Pearson of the Institute for Justice, which brought the 2 cases discussed in "Wisconsin residents can sell more than baked goods from home, judge rules" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Pearson asserted "the 49 other states... have better cottage food laws than Wisconsin."

I'd never noticed the expression "cottage food," though of course I know "cottage industry." "Cottage" makes the particular home sound unusually cozy and quaint. If you look back into the history of the word "cottage," you'll see that that originally it meant a small home for a poor laborer. The oldest use of "cottage industry," according to the OED, came from was in the Freeman's Journal (Dublin) in 1849: "Do you wish to make your labourers comfortable? Teach their children the use of the loom, and every kind of cottage industry."

 

That's "Children On A Path Outside A Thatched Cottage, West Horsley, Surrey" (late 1800s) by Helen Allingham. I found that at the Wikipedia article "Cottagecore." Did you know that some kids today romanticize the cottage and the styles and activities they imagine in and around it?

You know what they always say: The only Halloween that matters is Election Day.

Let me just screen-shot my ramblings on Facebook (where I only talk to a few friends and family and don't want new friends):

Ah! It worked out to an even 10 this time. Enjoy my selection of TikToks, and let me know what you like best.

1. She's decided she's going to start gaslighting you.

2. Her problems are not relatable.

3. The Greeter.

4. After that short trip to France.

5. Boy instructs his daddy about the meting out of sweets.

6. The little girl will tell you clearly what she likes.

7. If you ask a 5-year-old boy what he thinks of your dress, you deserve the brutal truth.

8. The Cookie Incident.

9. The Greatest Love.

10. The Donkey Song.

"Socialcandy are slightly sticky gummies, in opaque pastel shades... and different shapes, most of which take the form of a word, acronym, or symbol of the Internet age."

"There’s a LOL, a yolo, a hashtag, a thumb’s-up sign that looks like the one on Facebook. There’s an O.M.G., a SELFIE, an @, and [another symbol that is is html code and would screw up this post].... Nordic countries, in general, are crazy for candy... But if any one particular country knows its candy, it’s Sweden....  In Sweden, every Saturday is effectively a national holiday, called lördagsgodis, which means 'Saturday candy.'... [I]t tasted of artificial strawberry flavor, as opposed to strawberries themselves, just as the yellow half of a two-color, pill-shaped banana-and-caramel 'bub'... tasted, quite pleasingly, of artificial banana. The flavor of a skull-shaped gummy, on the other hand, Pepto-Bismol-pink and coated in sour sugar crystals, was shockingly reminiscent of a real strawberry, specifically an alpine variety.... I stocked up on those, plus some gummies in the shape of vampire teeth, gummy Coke bottles; a scoopful of delicate little marshmallows that looked like pink-capped mushrooms; and a small selection of what we in America know as Swedish fish but in Sweden are called pastellfiskar, or pale fish...."

From "How to Eat Candy Like a Swedish Person" by Hannah Goldfield in The New Yorker.

I've collected 9 TikToks for you today. Let me know what you like best.

1. How to live really well in what ought to be a too-small space.

2. At the "dollar holler" in Purvis, Mississippi.

3. "Don't look at me like that.... Don't look at me like that either."

4. Let's take a close look at those "thirst pockets."

5. How to sound like a TV news talking head.

6. About that candy bar with teeth marks, found on the floor.

7. Finding out your little girl can sing.

8. The "pride" collection at Target.

9. Get ready for the trends of summer 2022.

Cracker Jack introduces Cracker Jill.

 

At the product's website, it says: "Sometimes all it takes to believe you can do something is to see someone who looks like you do it first. It is in this spirit that Cracker Jack proudly introduces Cracker Jill. A team of new faces showing girls they're represented even in our most iconic snacks." 

What is the something you're supposed to believe you can do? Eat caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts? I think we knew that all along. And I've always felt represented by iconic snacks. I mean, Mary Jane made me feel like I could...

 

... simper and squirm like a complete idiot.

I watch TikTok so you don't have to. Here are my 5 selections of the day.

1. Nurse Melissa channels Nancy Pelosi. 

2. Tiny toddler tastes a Peep and reaches a new level of consciousness. 

3. How to interact with a crackhead. 

4. Have you encountered the "Be a man" man yet? Well, here's one example. Lots more here.

5. A sheep burdened with 40kg of extra wool is saved.

"Lieutenant Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny parachutes from their planes..."

"... while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.... A 9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. ... Peter sent another note reading: 'No chocolate yet.... You’re a pilot... I gave you a map.... How did you guys win the war anyway?' Lieutenant Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail. 'Gail Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,' recalled Ursula Yunger, who had been one of those children and later settled in the United States. 'It wasn’t the candy,' she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. 'It was his profound gesture, showing us that somebody cared.' Ms. Yunger had met Mr. Halvorsen for the first time at a reunion of airlift veterans in Tucson in September 2003. 'I was just shaking,' she said. He hugged her and handed her a Hershey bar."

From "Gail Halvorsen, ‘Candy Bomber’ in Berlin Airlift, Dies at 101/Lieutenant Halvorsen came up with the idea to drop candies, chocolate and chewing gum for the children of West Berlin during a tense Cold War standoff" (NYT).

Can you find the mask? What's Martha googling on her cell phone? Why is she eating fun-size candy bars?

Such a fascinating picture from the Super Bowl:

Incredible. So important. pic.twitter.com/FmERB17Lan

— Jason Diamond (@imjasondiamond) February 14, 2022

Just to help you with the middle question: She's googling who's that guy? Ironically, it's a guy named Guy.

On having a soft spot for gummy bears and being a soft spot for real bears.

I'm reading "Learning to Love Solitude (and Hate Oatmeal) on a 15,534-Mile Canadian Trek/For six years, the filmmaker Dianne Whelan hiked, biked, paddled, snowshoed and skied from the Atlantic to the Pacific and north to the Arctic. Here’s what she learned along the way" (NYT).

"I won’t be eating oatmeal ever again in my life. Ever. Throughout the day, I had a snack bag with trail mix and dried fruit and cheese and crackers and nuts. And of course, chocolate, and I have a soft spot for gummy bears. Dinner was instant noodles, pasta, carbs. At the beginning, I was nervous about bears and trying to keep a clean camp. I met many, many, many bears and 98 percent were kind and wonderful to watch. I never carried anything but bear spray for most of the journey. When I went to the high Arctic, I carried a gun and had to use it once because I had a bear come into my camp. My partner was with me. She picked up the gun and fired a couple of warning shots and we quickly packed off into the canoe and realized we didn’t spill our coffee."

That article is from last August. I just ran into it today because — as described here — I was searching the NYT archive for the use of the word "sherpa" to mean something other than a person within the ethnic group called Sherpa. This article — with the line "Very few get up that mountain without a Sherpa" — is not an example of what I was looking for.

"The green M&M, previously seen in ads posing seductively and strutting her stuff in white go-go boots, will now sport a pair of sneakers."

"A description for the green candy on the M&M’s website says she enjoys 'being a hypewoman for my friends.' 'I think we all win when we see more women in leading roles, so I’m happy to take on the part of supportive friend when they succeed,' the green M&M said on the promotional site." 

From "M&Ms characters to become more inclusive" (The Hill).

I didn't know that M&Ms had become color-based characters. If you're green, you're one thing, red, another...? Is that a good lesson for the kids?

I feel so old, only able to remember an M&Ms advertisement that's half a century old — you know, the one where the peanut M&M and the regular M&M are sunning by a pool. The emphasis back then was that kids made a mess out of chocolate that's not "candy-coated." They did add arms, legs, and faces to the M&M, so they were, essentially, characters, but I don't think we expected them to have individualized personalities. Or was the peanut M&M a bit "nutty"?

"Nerds are winning."

I said to a trick-or-treating kid just now, and he seemed amused. I am taking a survey, giving all kids a choice between Twix — which I consider the mature choice — and Nerds Ropes — the funny choice.

The near west side of Madison has voted and the choice is clear: Nerds are winning.

I don't know what this necessarily means for society at large, but it seems to me it's a vote for fun.

"If you thought they were gazing at the earth, and feeling small, and reflecting on the trouble the planet and its inhabitants are in, they weren't. They were trying to catch skittles in their mouths."

A comment at a Facebook post by the NYT: "Watch Jeff Bezos and his fellow passengers on the Blue Origin flight play with Skittles and experiment with gravity on their trip to space on Tuesday."

What if you had to argue: The Skittles-catching foolery in space was the best form that philosophical inquiry could take under those circumstances.

 

If the "what if you had to argue" game seems alien, read my 2012 post "What if you had to argue that it's good for children to play 'What if you had argue?'"

Here's a similar game — I just thought it up — "What if you had to write a book about...?" To play the game, you don't have to write the book. You just sketch out ideas about how this subject could fill an entire book. Now: What if you had to write a book about candy and philosophy?

The Skittles company — the aptly named Mars — must be pleased to get this relatively jaunty moment in the limelight — lime, not green-apple — after the unpleasant associations that have come its way in recent years. See "Skittles can’t seem to escape political controversies" (WaPo 2016). 

First, there was the incidental presence of Skittles in the possession of Trayvon Martin (whose killing riveted the country in 2012). Then there was an absurd Donald Trump Jr. tweet "'If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?'/This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first."  

Much better product placement this time, Skittles.

"I had a producer bring me to his office, where he had malted milk balls in a little milk-carton-type container under his arm with the spout open."

"He walked back and forth in his office with the balls falling out of the spout and rolling all over the wood floor as he explained to me why I should fuck my co-star so that we could have onscreen chemistry. Why, in his day, he made love to Ava Gardner onscreen and it was so sensational! Now just the creepy thought of him in the same room with Ava Gardner gave me pause. I watched the chocolate balls rolling around, thinking, You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test … Now you think if I fuck him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed. I felt they could have just hired a co-star with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines. I also felt they could fuck him themselves and leave me out of it. It was my job to act, and I said so. This was not a popular response. I was considered difficult."

From "Sharon Stone Says Producer Pressured Her to Sleep With Male Co-Star to Create 'Onscreen Chemistry'" (The Vulture).

"Americans are split on whether children should be allowed to trick-or-treat on Halloween this year and whether they will hand out candy, given the coronavirus pandemic."

"According to a YouGov poll, 30 percent of Americans say they plan to hand out treats to trick-or-treaters, while 26 percent say they usually do but won’t this year. Another 35 percent, who I can only surmise are either unable to give out treats or just extremely grumpy, said they never give out treats.... Twenty percent of American adults say that ghosts definitely exist, according to a YouGov poll conducted last week. About a quarter say they probably exist, 39 percent say they probably or definitely do not exist, and 16 percent said they don’t know."

From the extra stuff at the bottom of a FiveThirtyEight page with the headline "Americans Say They’re Fired Up To Vote — Especially Democrats." 

I clicked on that headline because I thought it sounded dubious. A poll asked Republicans and Democrats whether they were "more fired up than usual" about voting. Do you vote because you get "fired up"? I think more conservative people vote because they have a civic duty and a standard practice of voting. So they might not "say" that they are "fired up" — that is, emotionally agitated — even though they're going to vote. 

Really emotional people might react with a quick "yes" to the question whether they're "fired up" but may have some other emotion going on when election day comes around, perhaps a peevish resistance to the damned candidate put up by that party they feel they're supposed to vote for.