How Smart Are You, Smartie Pants?

Smarties®, the innocuous yet tart little candies that resemble the placebos a doctor might administer to a hypochondriac, actually have a website. There are regular Smarties® and Tropical Smarties®, which apparently doctors administer to Bahamian hypochondriacs. There is also a "nutritional information" page. Its very "informative." Check out this "info" below:


I was glad to see that Smarties® still contain "Red 40 Lake," "Yellow 5 Lake," "Blue 2 Lake," "Yellow 6 Lake" as those are quite tasty. They also used to contain "Lake Michigan" and "Lake Erie" but the Food and Drug Administration put a stop to that. The entire "nutritional information" page ought to be replaced with the following, in big block letters:

I actually wrote my college thesis on Smarties®. It was entitled "Smarties® And Their Effect On The Economic Upheaval Of The Industrial Revolution." I admit that this was a strange choice given the fact my major was Communications/Broadcasting . A more appropriate thesis might have been "Proper Etiquette For Standing In The Unemployment Line Upon Graduation." My professor referred to my paper as "inane and drug-addled yet with a certain panache." Extra points were given for my use of, in his words, "high quality bond paper," and I ended up with a C+. I intentionally spilled a martini on the paper before I turned it in to make it appear more urbane and sophisticated.

At one point the Smarties® people were saying on their website that the various multi-colored candies had "flavors," and gave a list of same. For example, did you know that the white one was pineapple? I didn't. I thought it was chalk. They've removed the flavor list from the site, apparently because they don't want the placebo administering physicians chasing them around with a big net.

Smarties® have a listing on Wikipedia which lets you know that the "The candies bear a strong resemblance to tablet-style pills, in shape and texture." I believe I already pointed this out, Wikipedia, albeit in a more off hand and pithy fashion. Wikipedia goes on to mention that:

"One individual candy is in the shape of a cylinder with a diameter of roughly 1 centimetre and a height of roughly .4 centimetres; larger ones do exist, dwarfing their european namesake impostors, with a diameter 2.5 centimeters and about .6cm tall... both sizes are double concave."

This relevant point I was not aware of. I firmly believe that if Wikipedia were a town it would be located in Pennsylvania and the motto on its entry sign would say "The Birthplace Of Useless Fucking Minutiae." And who are these "European Namesake Impostors," by the way? Are there operatives in other countries who spy on the Smarties® factory to gain trade secrets?

Part of my thesis was an analysis of the Smarties® flavors, so of course, I was quite intrigued to find the now defunct flavor list years later. You see, in my college days there was no "Internet (© 1995 by Al Gore, All Rights Reserved)," but rather, "Intuition." So, I drank a case of beer and along with that ate a one pound bag of Smarties® to try and ascertain their flavors. Here's the chart I came up with for my thesis (NOTE: there was also no "PowerPoint" back then. I painted this chart with various nutritional dyes I extracted from the Smarties® using a four dollar chemistry set and a blow torch):

Of course after all the beer I drank they seemed to all taste exactly alike. Maybe it wasn't the beer that made me think that.

Hey, at least they're "nutritional."