DailyDirt: Trick Or Treat
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
With Halloween upon us, some of you might be hiding out with the lights off to keep kids begging for candy off your front lawn. Or you might be generously handing out full-size chocolate bars instead of those “fun size” candy bars that aren’t really that much fun at all. Either way, if you like candy, you might be replenishing your supply on the cheap soon.
- What can you do with all the Halloween candy your kids have — but that you don’t want them to eat? Try a ‘Cash for Candy’ buyback operation (usually from a local dentist) that will take your candy and send it to troops overseas. Or just prank them and record it. [url]
- Poisoned Halloween candy is a myth — except for Ronald Clark O’Bryan who actually did hand out poisoned candy to a few kids. O’Bryan was executed for murdering his own son and trying to cover up his heinous act by passing out poisoned candy. So don’t worry too much about poisoned candy, but it’s still a good idea to check to make sure the candy isn’t rotten or something. [url]
- The International Cocoa Quarantine Centre studies hundreds of varieties of cocoa plants to help protect the crop from disease and other threats — and keep chocolate production in step with demand. Chocolate flavors could also change drastically as different crops become popular, but the alternative of chocolate shortages isn’t an appetizing idea, either. [url]
After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: candy, chocolate, food, halloween, international cocoa quarantine centre, myths, ronald clark o'bryan
Comments on “DailyDirt: Trick Or Treat”
For Halloween, I like to bake a couple dozen three-layer double-chocolate chocolate cakes. Then, I give a big piece to every trick-or-treater, but I give it to ’em on really nice china. That way they have to stand there and eat it immediately. While they’re eating, I read from the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Good times.
Different flavor chocolate -
God, it’s bananas all over again. Perhaps most of you are too young to remember, but today’s banana doesn’t hold a candle to the flavor of bananas decades ago. That’s because they’re all dead. While distributors were willing to pay to overthrow legal governments to keep their banana monopolies, they WEREN’T willing to pay to keep them healthy, and a global blight killed them. They found some hardier variety that VAGUELY tastes kinda like bananas to replace them, but they all suck. There’s a handful of the old varieties left in the hands of a few universities that are trying to find a way to bring them back, but don’t hold your breath.
It would be a shame to see chocolate go the same way, but the chocolate overlords at least seem to be spending money on the problem.
Re: Different flavor chocolate -
Just like tomatoes… And a bunch of other domesticated plants. Strawberries….
Re: Re: Different flavor chocolate -
But I really like the taste of Monsantomatoes & Monsantoberries.
Re: Re: Re: Different flavor chocolate -
Croptrust.org has some information on bananas, including some ‘impact stories’. How useful their information may be, I can’t bear to find out: the web designer went for ‘user obstruction’ instead of ‘user interaction’. People more tolerant of annoying design & implementation choices than I am might find it interesting. There are also strawberry stories… supposedly.
I found the page that allows access to the public data from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, but I can’t seem to find any entries for ‘Musa’*. Then again, they don’t seem to understand why databases are useful: the result of almost every query is ‘Records haven’t been indexed yet.’ An alphabetical walk through the full seed list finds plenty of ‘Fragaria’, so at least strawberries are in there.
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* – is this because the bananas we eat tend to be seedless, meaning that preservation would be in a ‘gene bank’ instead of a ‘seed bank’? Don’t know much about botany.
Re: Re: Re:2 Different flavor chocolate -
Bananas propagate through rhizomes: “a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.” Basically, the roots spread underground and send up stems periodically. You split the rootball at the stems to separate the plants. Technically, bananas are herbs, not trees. Just REALLY BIG ones. Modern bananas have three sexes and immature seeds that don’t mature, making them “seedless”. So you’d need gene samples of all three sexes.
Re: Re: Re:3 Different flavor chocolate -
Cool. That’s actually interesting info that I never would have learned if I’d counted on myself to google it ‘one of these days’. (Drinking Earl Gray for thirty years, and I only got around to looking up ‘bergamot’ last week.)
Re: Re: Re:4 Different flavor chocolate -
I know what you mean. I never thought about googling “bergamot” myself until I saw it mentioned as a scalp treatment. Then I was like “I thought that was something added to snooty tea…” and got the gumption to look up what it was. It’s odd what leads to looking up certain bits of info. I looked up the info on bananas some time back when I was looking for a recipe for plantains and got distracted by the story of the demise of the modern banana.
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