Good Job, Brain! - 35: I WANT CANDY

Episode Date: October 29, 2012

Let's get hopped up on sugar GUYS, GALS, & GILA MONSTERS. Controversy! Intrigue! Hot molten explosions in your face! We dive into the weird world of candy just in time for Halloween. Serving the sweet scoop on Cadbury Creme Eggs, Tootsie Roll Pops, Gobstoppers, and more. ALSO: "Wonka? Or Urban Dictionary?," candy name quiz, a very special comics quiz formulated for extra awesomeness and gamma radiation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, Anna Graham, adoring, audio-absorbing, awesome audience. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 35, and of course I'm your humble host, Karen, and along with me, RR, bevy of brainy but bumbling beauties and bros nice thanks I'm Colin

I'm Dana I'm Chris well I have a little bit of weird news that I came across this week and I felt this was absolutely something you guys needed to hear as well so I'm just going to read the headline of one of a sample of articles all around the same topic

cash strapped farmers feed candy to cows so this is the result of corn becoming so expensive now that farmers, dairy farmers and cow farmers, it has become pricing out of them to give the cows as high a percentage of corn in their diet as they did before. So for beef cows in particular, they need to have a high sugar diet. It fattenes them up. They need the energy.

It's not so much the nutritional value of the candy that they're worried about. So what farmers have started doing is buying secondhand and leftover broken candy, things like that from candy companies and are mixing it in with the feed that they give to the cows because it's cheaper than buying corn. The cows are literally eating candy corns and tootsie rolls and crushed up candy canes and things like that. It's insane. Oh, man, I wonder if they enjoy it more.

Yeah, so it's like 5 to 8% of the cattle's total feed can be up to just this secondhand candy, basically. They must be really excited in the next couple weeks because it's going to be after Halloween and all the candy is going to be marked down. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. All right, and it's time for our general trivia segment. Pop quiz, Hot Shot.

And here I have, I'm going to mash up two Trivial Pursuit cards, random ones here. Okay. Get your buzzers ready, and here we go. First question, Blue Wedge Geography. What award ceremony is held each December at Oslo City Hall in Norway? Chris? The Nobel Prize ceremony awards? Specifically.

The Nobel Prize. Yes. Nobel Peace Prize. The other prizes are awarded in February, I think, right? In Stockholm. Oh, oh, sorry. In another place. And pop culture, Pink Wedge. In Superman 3, what structure does Superman straighten after being exposed to red kryptonite? The Leaning Tower of Pizza. It is a leaning tower of Pisa. Yellow Wedge.

On what show did Brad Pitt appear in a monkey suit? And this is multiple choice. Fear factor. Jackass or punked? I'll say jackass. Yes, it is jackass. All right. Because I wouldn't be afraid of Brad Pitt in a monkey suit.

Purple Wedge. What is the only one word anagram for the word Monday See if Dana The anagram Queen can solve this one The only one word Anagram for the word

Monday Yes, the word Monday Only has one Anagram O damn O'Don D-I On to me It is

Hold on wait Cheating Yeah, no only in your brain Well only my brain It is Nomaday It's a nomaddy As in like a nomad

No, it is dynamo. Okay, good one. Dynamo. Good one. That'd be tough to do in a game of trivial pursuit. I know, it is. Green wedge for science. What common household appliance contains a magnetron,

a part that was originally created for military radar? The microwave oven. Correct, the microwave. Orange wedge, very topical. Necco wafers, that's N-E-C-O, neco sweethearts and neckle squirrel nut zippers what does neko stand for which is a candy company is the new england candy and confectionery company i might have swapped the seas it is close it is new england confectionary company ah oh okay got it's just c o yeah which relatedly that question and what

you shared earlier we've been dancing around it yeah exactly and and of course this week being the week of Halloween. This week's topic is on candy. Candy! Hey. Rock that candy shop. Rock that candy shop. Rock that candy shop.

Set it on fire. Run away. Watch it burn. Smell the azures in the on of this. So immediately my mind went to. What was my favorite, favorite candy to eat all year round? And, of course, it was Cadbury Cream Eggs. Oh, all year round.

All you're around. Well, I mean, I'm just saying I can't imagine any other candy at any other time of year that I enjoy eating more. Easter time for me was always wonderful because Cadbury cream eggs have always loved to eat these things. And you know what's really awesome about Halloween is they also have, they have the Cadbury cream eggs, but they're called Cadbury Scream eggs. Interesting. The goop is green. So it's like gross and ick factor or whatever. They're only available for us.

certain period of time. Does anybody want to go ahead and guess or does anybody know the exact dates on which Cadbury cream eggs are available in stores? Oh, it's official. There's an official date range? Yep. I don't even know when Easter is. Well, I know. Yeah. So, I mean, Easter's one of those that fluctuates. I'm going to guess March 15th to April 15th. So you're actually, you're February 15th. You're getting around there. They start selling them on January 1st. And the last day that they are on shelves is Easter Day, whenever, whenever Easter is that year. January 1st. The day after that, they stop supplying stores with them. The stores typically clear them out, and they're gone. And they're off to be eating cows. Yeah, exactly. So you can

have delicious Cadbury cream steak. If you don't know, a Cadbury cream egg is a hollow chocolate egg filled with fondant is what it technically is. It's like the white and yoke of an egg, and it is runny and messy and delicious. Cadbury's has actually experimented with selling the cream eggs all year round, but what they've actually found is that the limited availability makes people buy more of that. It makes it more special, too. With that limited availability window, they actually sell as many Cadbury cream eggs as they do some of their other major chocolate bars

that they sell all year round. I found out during this research that in the UK, there's a bar called the Cadbury Cream Egg Twisted, which is actually a chocolate bar. Looks like a Twix, basically. But the inside is the Cadbury Cream Egg filling. It's too much. That's taken it too far.

Because you know what? The beauty of the geometry of the egg is like when you bite it in half, you have two bowls. You have like a little bowl for all the gooze. It's funny you should talk about how much is too much because it was around 2006 that people started to notice something or they thought they were noticing something. They were getting fat. Well, that was Cadbury's explanation, but what people started to notice was that they believed that Cadbury cream eggs in the United States had actually gotten smaller. But you can't really tell because, you know, they had not been on sale for eight months.

So you only buy them and you're like, oh, yeah, Cadbury Cream eggs. Wait a minute. Is this a little smaller than it was? So here's the thing. If you went to Cadbury's website at this time, or in 2006-2007, they had a fact on their website. And the last question was, Q, have Cadbury's cream eggs gotten smaller? A, no, you're just grown up now.

Oh, dang. So here's the thing. Sassy pants. The eggs had gotten smaller. And the reason why, as Colin suggested, is that there are people who hoard Cadbury cream eggs. And one of them turned out to be, this is a sort of very famous thing that happened about five years ago,

actor B.J. Novak from the office, went on Conan O'Brien, and he was actually an a ficionado and hoarder of Cadbury cream eggs he revealed on Conan O'Brien and he pulls out a 2005 Cadbury cream egg that he had had in his freezer. It's in a lawsuit case.

Yeah, no, he just kept him all year and put him in his freezer. And he pulls out in 2007, and it was smaller. And they had actually taken it down a few grams and reduced it from like 180 calories to 150 or something around there. And yeah, and then Cadbury did, in fact, changed their website. They were outed. We, no, it had a very PR response that was just like, we make changes to our products based on the desires of consumers, blah, blah, blah.

It used to be like almost the size of an egg, and now they are actually smaller than that. It looks like the little, not like quail eggs, but smaller. And they're like, no, no, no, you're crazy. I have to say my favorite part of the marketing is the commercials they have with the rabbit that makes the chicken noises. Right. Yeah, it's a little rabbit going, bop, bop, bach, b, it just cracks me up every year. Because I know it comes out of rabbits. Like, either baby rabbits or poo.

No, it's a bad at two things, guys. Or Pete. There's a little bit of Pete. So which one do you want to eat for Easter? Right. But yes, if you do want to try a Cadbury cream egg, as Karen said, they are on the shelves now is the Cadbury scream eggs. And I think one of the reasons why everybody's kind of fascinated by this, because it's a

novelty and I think it is kind of wonderful that's like oh it's a chocolate egg and there's fake yolk and white and the white and the yellow stays separate inside of the candy there is something very inventive and kind of like fantasy fulfilling it's really interesting and it reminds me of what fantasy do you have about like just like chocolate version or candy versions of everything oh okay I see you're saying imagine if everything had a candy form and I would feel like oh my god like this is it like you're living in Harry Potterland or in the Willy Wonka factory or something exactly Exactly. It's just so, so wonderful and so wondrous. And I remember, you know, either if you're reading the book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the movie Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory, when you see the chocolate room and they have like chocolate flowers and chocolate river and chocolate trees. And so this week I'm going to talk about some of the very interesting and wonderful candies from the book. So, we can take a

anything you want to do it, you can even eat the dishes. We can take a sunrise. Sprinkle it with dew. So one of the things in the book is what they call the strawberry juice water pistols. Doesn't that sound awesome? I know, it sounds great.

It sounds sticky. I'll be honest, it sounds sticky, is my first thought. You'll have like a sticky neck. Yeah, yeah. All I can imagine is having to clean that off. Maybe I'm a spoil sport. You're an old man. Every party has a pooper call.

You are the party pooper. And another really weird one in the book is called the Magic Hand Fudge. I think the less said about that. the better. Moving on. Wait, it has a tagline. I need to share. I need to give you guys the tag.

That's chapter 37 of 50 Shades of Grey. The tagline is, when you hold it in your hand, you taste it in your mouth. Another one is fizzy lemonade swimming pools. Thirsty in the pool, you drink it. Oh, I remember that. I do remember that. These all sound like Urban Dictionary. Oh, that.

It didn't, it's not until I'm reading them out loud that I'm realizing this. The color would be a little bit weird. Yeah. Swimming in a... Right, yeah. And we, everybody's like, okay, it's lemonade, yeah. Move on. Now, of these, magical hand fudge is scientifically, there are certain, um, it's just serious.

There are certain, like, creams and things like that that are, you know, used to treat injuries that when you put it on, you can taste it in your mouth. That's true. Or it triggers like a metallic taste. Yeah. That's true. That is true. Yep. Maybe they got to figure out the name.

Right. Well, they have to make it taste like chocolate. And this one is a little bit of a nightmare town. It's called Square Candies That Look Round. I don't know if you guys remember that part in the book. So he introduces these, which are officially called Square Candies That Look Round. Wonka was like, oh, these are really cool. But all the kids are thinking themselves.

They're like, wait a minute. These actually are square shapes. Why are they round? And it's square candies that look apostrophe round. Like look around because these candies have eyes on them. And they look around. It was going to like a more innocent time. It was.

When I was looking at these up, I was like, well, these sounds so fun. I'm going to share them with everybody. And then I read it out. Well, believe it or not, I actually have a transition from hand fudge. So that reminded me of one of the. The most famous successful advertising slogans of all time melts in your mouth, not in your hands. Oh, that is good. Yes.

And it is, of course, as we all know, M&M's chocolate candies. They melt in your mouth, not in your hands, alluding to the fact that they have the hard candy shell, which keeps them from getting all over the place. In fact, that actually is what made them so successful in the first place. So we'll go back a little bit. I really wanted to focus on the details of M&Ms. Do you guys know what the M&M in M&M's stand for? Mars is one of them. Mars and Murray, Chris, absolutely right, yes.

Who's Murray? He's the guy who got cut out of the deal like Robuck. You don't need to cry for Bruce Murray. So the first M was Forrest Mars, Sr., as in Mars Dandy Company. And Bruce Murray was actually the son of the president of Hershey's at the time that they were invented. He took a fairly sizable stake in the original M&M. operation in large part because at the time chocolate was pretty heavily rationed. So this was 1941 and at that time Hershey's had a near monopoly on chocolate production and it was so

heavily rationed that having Bruce Murray meant that they could get their hands on chocolate. So the story goes that Forrest Mars was inspired to make M&Ms by seeing some Spanish soldiers during the Spanish Civil War eating little chocolate candies that had a hard shell and he was in fact particularly impressed by the fact that they weren't melting. And he's like he thought this was actually a perfect little candy. It's not inspiration. Yeah, it's like copy. Yeah. Yeah. Good old plagiarism. Well, you know, I mean, this is the 30s. You could get away with things like that. But anyway, so he came back to the States and basically decided, I'm going to copy this and come up with my own process. So he did. He has a patent for the process of coding the chocolate and the candies.

They were exclusively under contract to the military. So M&Ms, really, before they became a civilian product, soldiers serving overseas, got to know them as part of their little ration kit. And the military loved them because they didn't melt. They could send them tropical. They could send them freezing. And they survived all kinds of weather conditions in terms of marketing as well because you have these soldiers coming home. And then when you start marketing them as a product, they already were...

That's right. They had already been given them for free. Everyone loved them. So obviously the war ended, became a huge hit. And what I didn't know until I started researching this was they didn't have the M's on them in the very beginning. What were they called them? They were called M&M's.

And they were called M&M candies after, you know, Mars and Murray. but they weren't branded as such. They realized, well, this is a pretty popular thing. We've got to start branding this. So so much scrupulous inventor doesn't steal my idea the way I stole it, I suppose, is the subtext. In 1950 was the first year they started stamping M's on the little candies. And they were black at first, little black M's. They are actually mechanically stamped on each individual candy.

I mean, not one at a time, the many at a time. But so it has like a little ink pad that stamps onto the ink and then stamps. amps onto the candy. And it actually is pretty amazing. They said that, like, one of the hardest parts, it was getting it so they didn't crush the candies. Yeah, right. Yeah. 1954 was a big year for the M&M Corporation. That was the year they introduced peanut M&Ms. Whoa. That was the year they introduced the tagline. The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. And most importantly, for the purposes of this segment, that was the year they

changed the M to white. Oh, dang. So all of this happened the same year. So, yeah, so since 1954. That's been the story behind the M's. They switched to white now. This is for the super, super nerdy typographs out there. So I'm a big font nerd. Probably some other listeners out there. Karen's nodding her head as well. The M&M

font, I set out to try and figure out what it was. And apparently I'm not the first person to try and track it down. The consensus seems to be that the M&M's in M&M. Can I guess? Yeah, well, please, Karen, take a guess. Courier new. Not courier. It is a slab-sera font. It is Ackon. A

A-C-H-E-N, particularly Aachen semi-bold, and the ampersand and the S appear to be ITC-Lubalin graph, which is one of my particular favorite fonts. Wow. But they have been tweaked a little bit. So, yeah, if you need to reproduce the official M&M's fonts, there you go. For your M&M counterfeit business. For your giant, homemade M&M costume. There you go, guys.

A little primer on the M, on M&M's. And, of course, I will make the dad joke as... Oh, someone slipped me some W-N-M-M-M-com. you's in here. Yeah. I saw online, of course, in the course of researching, a math nerd is, oh, I got a bunch of sigma's in mine. Oh, my God.

Yes, yes. All right. That was really interesting, learning about M&Ms and the history of M&M's. So I made a quiz about historical candies. It's called the candy formerly known as. It's the name of this. Nice. Tell you, like, the name that we don't know.

We might not know in the States. And then you tell them. me what name you think. Oh, okay. It is. This chocolate caramel cookie bar was known as Raider throughout most of Europe and changed this name in 1991 to match the

international brand name. Twix? Yes. This candy bar was sold under the brand name Marathon in the UK and Ireland until 1990. Oops, sorry. Did I get it? Yeah, yeah.

It's Snickers. Yes. Which is interesting. In the States, they're bringing it back. The marathon. brand name, but they're making it into an energy bar, like a nutritional energy workout bar with the same kind of components as a snicker. In 1939, this malted milk candy was originally called Giants.

Is it Whoppers? Yes. And I was like, oh, they both kind of mean big, right? Giants and Whoppers. This candy from Germany was originally known as the dancing bear. Gummy bears. This traditional sugar confectionery gets its name. from British slang for the word mouth.

Godstopper. Yeah. We know them as jawbreakers in the U.S. and Canada. This fruity hard candy was originally sold at ranch-made ice cream stores. Jolly ranchers? Yeah. I always wondered what the ranch name was, yeah. Do you guys know what a tree's favorite candy is?

Peppermint bark. Jolly branchers. Yeah, jolly brach. These conversations. Conversation candies were created in 1866 and used in weddings, and they often had witty sayings pressed onto them, such as married and white, you've chosen right, and married in satin, love will not be lasting. Are they called Conversation Hearts or Sweethearts? Sweethearts. They're actually officially called Sweethearts.

Yeah, okay. This candy got its name from the German word for peppermint. Pez. Yes. Do you know what the German word is? Fezermens. Yeah. Feffermans.

Pfeffermans. This candy invented in 1925 was originally called the Papa Sucker. Sugar daddy. Yes. I laughed for so long. Guys, we got to send this back to brainstorming round, too. The name of this candy comes from the Spanish word, which means to suck.

Those are chupa chupes, lollipops. And Dali did the rapper. Yes, that's right. That's right. Originally known as chocolate beans in 1882, these candies were renamed in 1937 and renamed again in 1977 due to trading standards requirements because the use of the word beans was felt to be misleading because they were chocolate. They were called chocolate beans.

They were called chocolate beans. Is it? I would say M&M's, but. Uh, uh, Guber? or raisinettes? Nope. Oh, I mean, it's not Hershey's Kisses. No.

Is it M&Ms? No, we talked about that. What are they? Hold on, no, no, no. We can... It's not the Boston baked beans. Those aren't chocolate. Chocolate.

It was renamed in 30s and 70s. Smarties? Yeah. Smarties. Oh. I am one. I did not know. They were called Smarties chocolate beans

and then just Smarties. Yeah. Cool. Good job, you guys. All right. No frills, delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders.

Shop now at nofrills.ca. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion? Don't you wish you had a trustworthy academic resource to help make sense? of all of this. Well, I'm Dan Beecher, and he's award-winning Bible scholar and TikTok sensation, Dr. Dan McClellan, and we want to invite you to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where our mission is to increase

public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and also to combat the spread of misinformation about the same. But, you know, in a fun way. Every week we tackle fascinating topics. We go back to source materials in their original languages. And we interview top scholars in the field. So whether you're a devout believer, or you're just interested in a clear-eyed,

deeply informed look at one of the most influential books of all time. We think you're going to love the Data Over Dogma podcast. Wherever you subscribe to awesome shows. Completely coincidentally, I had actually done some research on gobstoppers, a.k.a. jawbreakers. Yes, random fake candy in the Willy Wonka books, But the most famous one, which was also in the movie and in the book, was the everlasting gobstopper. And as we now know, a gobstopper.

Now, this actually kind of threw me for a loop because I was looking up Wonka Candy and found that there was actually something called a gobstopper. And I was like, wait a minute. Oh, this is a real thing. Oh, before the book or the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an actual candy. Because the magical part was the everlasting part. Right, right, right.

But in the U.S., we don't have the word gobstopper. So it was just sort of like, oh, that also sounds fanciful and ridiculous. It does. I remember some grown-up at the time explaining to me what it meant. Right, that it was in fact a jawbreaker, and it means it means the exact same thing. You break your jaw because you try to bite it because it's so hard, or it stops your gob or your mouth because you can't bite down on it. And so I decided to find out some things about jawbreakers, and they're actually really, really fascinating candies.

Very, very simple, but utterly fascinating. So Willy Wonka's version, of course, would never run out. It was everlasting. Because it's like for poor kids. No, for children of the very little pocket money. Sorry. Poor kids. You could have it in your mouth forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and it would never get any smaller.

That is why kids would buy jawbreakers because they would last a really long time. They would make some that would actually last like days. Wow. Right. One of the reasons why this is true is not just because it's just a giant solid ball of pure sugar. It's because of the process that they use to make it. You're not like just pressing sugar together into a ball. Like, you have a big rotating pan.

It's like making a pearl. Yeah. And it's like constantly rotating. Yeah. So a pan that just goes around and around and around. You dump in grains of sugar and then just like... Snowballs into it. You ladle liquid sugar into them and it coats the grain of sugar and then more liquid sugar

and it coats it again and it coats it again and it coats it again. It can take weeks to really to make them in the classic way. Wow. Because it's just tiny layer after tiny layer. Yep. And then tiny layer becomes tiny layer becomes tiny layer becomes tiny layer. Tiny layer becomes tiny later, and then you get a actual, like, large golf ball-sized jawbreaker. But really, the making of a jawbreaker is, like, the making of a pearl, just like the constant, you know, rotation of one grain of sugar.

What happens then is if you, if the sugar that you're ladling in there, the liquid sugar, is different colors. You get this rainbow effect of the jawbreaker. So if you were to slice it in half, you'd see all the concentric rings of sugar. And I did. I did that as a kid. Oh, yeah. I mean, because it was. How did you even break it in half?

Well, sometimes you just throw it down or break it, or we would literally get our hands on a hacksaw and cut through them. Yeah, if you could throw it on the ground or something, you could smash it, right? Very scientific kids. You can't get impatient and just bite through them. Like, that's why they lasted all that time. You couldn't just go, oh, you know, whatever, and just bite it. You can't. You have to just keep working at it with just your saliva, basically.

And it would change color. At the end of the day, just put it on their bedside table and then put it back in because, like... Well, and periodically you need to take it out of your mouth to check what color it's at. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it would just be endless entertainment, and, of course, because it made out of sugar and nothing else, they were cheap. But, big butt, there's something very interesting about the way that these things are made, which gives them very interesting properties. In 2003, there's a police report about this you can find on the smoking gun, right, and they have the original document.

A nine-year-old girl had a jawbreaker. She left it on a table, apparently, sitting in the sun, for a few hours, and then went back to get it, grabbed it, and was going to put it into her mouth. And as she was doing that, squeezing the jawbreaker, it exploded. It exploded and melted candy came out of the jawbreaker and got into her face and, like, severely burned her face. I don't think it just figured her, but, you know, got bad burns on her face. Didn't really understand why this would happen. You know, they're thinking like, oh, my God, is it like, what's in these jawbreakers, you know? But it's not really the chemical.

It wasn't a chemical in the jawbreakers. It was just a ball of sugar. As it turns out, MythBusters ended up doing an episode on this because there was this sort of urban myth that if you heat a jawbreaker, a jawbreaker could explode. And it's like, well, why would it explode? Yeah, why wouldn't it just melt? Exactly. What MythBusters found out was that the many, many, many, many, tiny layers of sugar, what it causes is they set a temperature differential. So if it heats up, the inner layers can actually heat more than the outer layers or heat up faster.

because of the way that it's structured. And what you then get is a piece of candy that you can pick up because it maybe is just slightly warm to the touch. And the outer layer is cool fast. The outer layer is cooled down, right? And so you pick it up and it's cool. But then what you have is you have a ball of hot molten 225 degree sugar that can explode in your mouth. And as things heat up, pressure increases as well. Yep.

Yep. They tried this on Mythbusters, and one of the hosts actually burned. himself because they heated up a jawbreaker in the microwave and you can do this and you shouldn't but you can please don't heat up a jawbreaker in the microwave and then put it in a vice or something like that wearing proper safety protection

whatever give a little squeeze and just lava will just start pouring out of this thing it's like a candy grenade yeah so I know kids listen to this show so be careful with those jawbreakers make sure you don't leave them in the sun yeah or on a radiator do not put them in the microwave to see if they'll melt and then take them out of the microwave and go

oh no it didn't melt oh man wow well that's a good public service announcement right there right you talk about the jawbreakers and the whole point of the candy is you know prolonging it because you can't take the shortcut as you say that's right so i want to talk a little bit about one of my favorite candies which part of the whole brilliant marketing is that you cannot resist taking the shortcut So, listeners, arrayed on the table in front of me here are several Tootsie Roll pops. One of their classic advertising campaigns is, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Roll pop? And the joke, of course, is always, no one knows because you can't, you bail out and you just bite through to the center.

I was always at way as a kid, too. Yeah, you're like, ah, forget it, I'm done with it. You get so close, you can see it. Yeah, it's tantalizing. So their slogan is, the world may never know. And of course, this was deeply unsatisfying to me as a child. I'm like, well, what do you mean the world may never know? What kind of cop out is that?

So every kid sits there and takes that as gospel and be like, I'm going to be the first to discover this. That's right. And we did. I remember like at summer camp. And it was so great because then we would run our own little exceedingly unscientific experiments. Well, so let's just go back a little bit to where they came from. Obviously, Tootsie Roll came first. The story goes that it came out of essentially a brainstorming meeting at the Tootsie Roll Candy Company, where they were expressly trying to come up with, all right, we need a new candy, new hit.

And I don't know how accurate this is, but they do say that the story came from one of the employees and who says that he was eating a tootsie roll at the time that his daughter shared a lick of her lollipop with him and that he thought it was such a great taste combination. We should bring it to the company. and they took off, they were a hit. It wasn't until the 70s that this, how many licks does it take to get to the center? That was one of the sort of the things that really cemented Tutsi Roll Pops. And the other thing was their prevalence on Kojak,

which was the cop show in the 70s with Tully Savalas. And he would famously have the little Tutsi Roll pops instead of cigarettes. That was his substitute for cigarettes. I didn't know this, but if you write into the Tutsi Roll company and tell them that you know how many licks it take, Since 1970, they will send back to you an official Clean Stick Award certificate, you know, basically rewarding little kids for doing the little work.

Do they still add to that now? Oh, dang! So I have here in front of me the official certificate that says, be it known to all people. The world may never know how many licks it takes to reach the center of a tootsie pop, but a few strong-willed young men and women know the bearer of this award. award is one who knows. No, you can actually print out a copy of the PDF yourself in the website.

It cheapens it a little bit. I did not mail away. But before we went on the air today, I did, in fact, finish a Tootsie Roll Pop, and it took me 317 licks to get to the middle. And I defined Middle as the first bit of Tootsie Roll breaking through. And in case you've never had one of these, it's a chunk of Tootsie Roll candy surrounded by lollipop. That's the tricky thing, because obviously it depends on your eating style or your licking

style. So sometimes the top, you know, you see the tithy roll emerging in top, but the bottom's still filled with... Well, and it's got a little, it's got like a ridge around the edge, too. So it's like, do you go with the ridge? Yeah, I went for the easiest, the path of least resistance. Okay. But what is hilarious to me is how many official attempts

there have been made to figure out this is how many licks it takes. Students at Purdue University, college students built a licking machine. That's what I heard that. Aren't they so busy going to their classes and things? They found that with the licking machine, it was an average of 364 licks.

But they found that people did it on average 252. Now, this is where it gets a little bit off the rails to me. Researchers at Cambridge said by their conclusions it was 3,481 licks. And I call shenanigans. I think they're doing it wrong. They had a kitten licking. Now we're down the nitty-gritty. When you're talking about licking, is it just one-tong-lick?

Yeah. Or do you put it in your... Every time you... In the mouth and out. Out of the mouth. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And is it one lick up and down? How do you... Why are we having this conversation? Also, yeah, it's like, the thing with the licks is like, do you really eat a lollipop like that? You know, just put it in your mouth. It's like no one does that. Right.

I feel like that's what the machines probably were doing. So some of the machines hold the lollipop and spin it against an artificial tongue. Some of them hold the lollipop still. So some Harvard grad students have a mechanically rotating tongue that they used in their experiment, which, again, was into the thousands. Right, right. There are a couple interesting rumors and urban legends that popped up around Tootsie Role, Tootsy Pops as well. And Dana, I think you were alluding to one of these, too. You had said that you used to hear when you were a kid. So some of the rappers have stars on them.

I think I heard that you got a free one if you found a rapper with a star on it. Yeah, you're right, right. I never noticed that before. So there are a couple of variations on the rumors. And so if you look at it, if you unwrap a Tootsy Roll Pop, they've got pictures of kids doing various activities. And one of the designs is a kid with a, uh, Native American style headdress on shooting a bow and arrow at a star. We're actually examining the wrappers. Yeah, we have one here in front of us. Right. So the

rumor was that if you got one of the rappers that had the kids shooting the arrow at the star, you could redeem that for a free Tutsie Roll pop. Huh. Oh. And another one went that if you could get a rapper that had three consecutive circle logos, that was also redeemable for a free pop. So apparently, this was really widespread all over the country. This was never official. The company never had anything to do with this, but local merchants and retailers would, on their own, decide to support this cool little

imagined among kids, because of course it makes sense, they're going to come back to your store. My first thought was, well, I would just stand there and unwrapped them and then rewrap them. But again, this is something that the company decided to adopt and embrace. So if you write into the company, you know, trying to claim your pop or whatever,

they will send you since the 80s, the legend of the Indian rapper, which is a possibly not politically correct name, but is a little story basically about this legend as a consolation prize. And again, I like when companies will just take on these things

that pop up around them and embrace them rather than just... They won't send you the free pop. They won't send you a free pop. This one is so close with the three circles on the rapper. It's not quite there. Yeah, yeah. Well, so out of the four Tutsi pops we got in front of us,

only one of them, it looks like, would qualify for the freebie. Oh, well, yeah, because one has the star on it. That is cool. So very quickly, I want to share my favorite candy, too. And you guys, listeners, and we'll probably see where this is going, knowing me. So one of my favorite candies is called gas. So if you go to some grocery stores, especially Persian food, ethnic food stores, they have it.

And they're basically nuggets with pistachios in them, probably seen them before. They're white, usually kind of like squares, and they're individually wrapped. Oh, yeah, yeah. And you see kind of studs of pistachios, green pistachios. I have seen those. It's called Gaz. And when you eat it, G-A-Z. Yeah, G-A-Z. And it's flavored with rose water and some other spices. And it's delicious. For me, it's delicious. For some people, they say it tastes like soap because of the rose water. Ah, it's very polarizing. But that is really my favorite candy. And every time I go in the store and I see it by the cash register, I will buy a

whole bag. And I would probably eat the whole bag in one sitting. So, Gaz, this Persian candy dates back to, oh man, olden days. No one even really knows because it is an old type of traditional candy. So the name of candy comes from GAS of K-H-U-N-S-A-R. And that's K-H-U-N-S-A-R. And it's a sweet, milky sap that

they find on plants called angibin. And this plant is associated with a lot of old religious texts, and it's sometimes referred to as mana. And of course, you know, video gamers and religious that strengthen your spirits and that kind of connotations. This milky sap, Gaz of Kuntar, is not really from the plant.

It is produced by these little bugs like aphids or nymph bugs, very small. And they produce this type of sap as they're eating this plant. They live on the plant. Of course, this sticky white substance is exuded from the anus of these bugs. So what traditional people did was they would collect all of this anal secretions of these bugs and they would mix it with egg whites and rose water and nuts and sugar and they would cook it down into like a nougat form. So I read this and I was like, oh, that's great.

Why is everything in my life that I love comes from the butts of animals, including this thing. Obviously nowadays, if you buy gas, it's just made out of basic. basically meringue and sugar, the traditional... It comes from the anus of artificial bugs. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So it doesn't really have that real bug kick. Well, I'm listening to by a gas classic.

Gas throwback? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, lots of things come out of butt. Oh, gross. Yeah, cool. I figured I'd end our candy episode with that little fun fact, you guys. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus,

IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. All right, so it's time for our last quiz segment. So this is quite a special quiz segment because Nicole from Kentucky wrote in. She told us that she's a big trivia nerd and so is her boyfriend and his name is Josh. So Nicole and Josh are very, very big trivia people in Kentucky where there isn't a lot of pub trivia and that's why they enjoy our podcast so much.

And she wrote in to tell us that their anniversary is on November 1st and thought that maybe it'd be cool if we could dedicate a segment for their anniversary. And here we are. They're very into comics. So Colin, you prepared a very special. special comics quiz for all of us and also for the listeners, but especially for Nicole and Josh. Going out to you guys, Josh. All right, a comic book quiz, and we're going to do this a little bit differently from a regular quiz.

I've given you guys pads here. You're all going to write down your answer, and then we're going to score you guys as we go, and then there'll be a tiebreaker at the end. Oh, wow. This is like real pub trivia. I know with comic books, this is always tough of too hard, not hard enough. I think I've tried to get a good balance here of questions for you guys. All right.

So remember, don't shout out of buzz in. You're going to write down your answers. Okay. Here we go. Specifically, what type of radiation was responsible for turning Dr. Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk? And in the comics, they always rendered this type of radiation as green. All right, ready? Answers.

Dana says gamma. Chris says gamma. Karen says gamma. Correct. Yeah. Gamma radiation. That's right. In the Batman comics, what is the name of Gotham City's asylum for the Chris?

criminally insane. Yeah, easy. All right. Karen says Arkham. Dana says Arkham. Chris says Arkham. That is correct. Arkham Asylum for the criminally insane.

Thanks, video games. Frequently home to the Joker. So even if you've never read a single issue of Batman, the name Arkham might sound familiar. So tell me, Arkham is inspired by the works of what 20th century author? And think about the kind of place it is, the atmosphere it has. Oh my God All right

Answers up Dana guest George Orwell Not a bad guess Oh Karen says Edgar Allan Poe Not a bad guess But Chris is correct With HP Lovecraft

Darn it I should have thought Because there was a Ford game Called Arkham Horror Yes that's right Yes The creator of Cthulhu mythology And all of it

Yes A lot of his tales were set In the fictional town Of Arkham, Massachusetts I'm so ashamed of myself In Iron Man's debut appearance in 1963, protagonist Tony Stark builds his armored suit while imprisoned in what foreign country?

And I'm giving you the year there for a reason. Say the year again? 1963. All right, answers up. Chris says Vietnam. Dana says Russia. Karen says Iran. Chris is correct.

It is Vietnam. Yes, he was the Vietnam War. He was captured. there. They did in fact later update it to the Gulf War and the current story I think is Afghanistan where it took place. Over the years, various superpowered animals have made their way into the Superman comic storylines. So I'm going to give you guys five super pets. Only one of them is fake. So you need to tell me which one of these is not real. Okay. Crypto the super dog, Nova the Super Bear

Beppo the Super Monkey Comet the Super Horse and Streaky the Super Cat All right answers up Karen says Bear Dana says Steaky Super Cat Chris says Nova the Super It is Nova the Superbearer is made up

I invented that one Yes streaky the super cat is real There were just some really off the wall storylines they had, and you can do your own Google research on these various animals. You know, and also I was thinking it was like, well, Superman's like super America and bear is such a Russian kind of... That's what I was going for. I was trying to mislead you guys. Wow. So he wouldn't have a pet bear because that's un-American at that time. At some point. You guys saw through my ruse. All right. What mansion would you find at 1407 Grey Malkin Lane in Westchester, New York?

1407 gray malkin lane all right answers up Karen says Wayne Manor Chris says Wayne Mansion Dana says X-Men House Dana is correct I will accept X-Men House The Academy Because of course Wayne Manor be in Gotham City

That's right I try to give you the extra little clue there Westchester yeah You've been in the suburbs Yeah he has a house in the handling He's got a fast car But yes, I would have accepted Charles Xavier's house, Professor X's Academy for Gifted Youngsters, X-Men H-Quarters, or in this case. X-Men House. Well done.

Well done. Dean Johnson, the X-Men of X-Men House to throwing another party. X-Men House. X-Men House. Wonder Woman famously graced the cover of the first issue of what U.S. magazine in July 1972. First issue. First issue. July 1972

In 1972 Okay All right Answers up Dana says Ms. Magazine Chris says Ms. Magazine Karen says TV guide

It is Ms. Magazine I've never even heard of that Corriest items Famous feminist iconic magazine So speaking of magazines Newspapers Figured prominently

in the storylines of both Spider-Man and Superman Because both Clark Kent and Peter Parker Work at newspapers We're going to start off here For one point each, can you tell me the names of either or both of the newspapers in the Spider-Man and Superman worlds in Metropolis and New York City? Yes, all three of you have it correct. It is the Daily Planet in Superman and the Daily Bugle and Spider-Man.

All right. So now don't get too happy with yourselves because for one extra nerd point each, I need to know who are the editors-in-chief of the two newspapers. J.K. Simmons was the actor in Spider-Man. Yes, yes, a fantastic performance by J.K. Simmons in the Spider-Man movies. Okay, we'll start with Dana, who has Perry White and Larry Rogers. Oh, Perry White. The two answers are Perry. Oh, and Chris has nothing, and Jay Jonah Jameson.

So, yes, Jay Jonah Jameson is the Daily Bugle Editor-in-Chief. Perry White is the editor-Wite. Don't call me cheap. And Karen has put Hugh Jass and Hugh Cares. All right. Well, coming down to the finish here, it's close. So I will make this last question three points, just to make it anyone's game here. Okay. So one thing that a lot of these heroes have in common, Superman and Spider-Man and Wonder Woman and Iron Man, is that they all made their debuts in anthologies. Out of these characters, we've named Only Incredible Hulk debuted in his own series. So Superman debuted in Action Comics, number one, June 1938, which, as I say, was a mix of hero and crime and sort of light comics.

comics stories. It was a 64-page anthology. So, including the Superman cover story, how many features were there in action comics number one? And this will be closest to gets the answer. Wow. I will even tell you, Superman was 13 pages out of those 64. There were some features that were only a page long. All right. And numbers up. Chris, okay. Karen, I think is preparing two answers here. She's writing a paragraph about it. Numbers up. Chris says not. Dana says 19 Karen says X-Men House It is X-Men House

That's amazing I think your real answer though Was the right well You put 10 You were the closest Actually there were 11 They were 11 features So I'm going to give Karen the three points

I'm that it matters And I'm throwing all the points away Chris does in fact win For those of you who had money writing on the game So well done, good job And I hope that was an adequate anniversary present No watchman No Judge Dread

I, you know, I wanted to keep it for people who may not be comic fans. Yeah, you know, it could have gone a lot of ways. Good job, guys. Yeah. All right, and that is our show. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you guys listeners for listening in. Hope you guys learn a lot about candies and, well, hopefully you guys all have a good Halloween.

And you can find us on Zoom Marketplace, on iTunes, on Stitcher, and also on our website, which is goodjobbrain.com. and check out our sponsor bonobos.com and we'll see you guys next week. Later. Bye. Bye. a week. You can learn a lot in just a few minutes with stories about impending hurricanes, winter storms, or even what not to miss in the night sky. So listen and subscribe to Acqueweather

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