Experiment 639: Jolly Rancher Freeze Pop

A few days back, @theogeo asked me, “Grandpa, what were freezer pops like back when you were my age?”

Back in 1996-1997, there existed a mighty beast of a frozen confection known as the Jolly Rancher Freeze Pop. It was, as implied by its name, a freezer pop that tasted JUST LIKE A JOLLY RANCHER (Its existence has been documented by others—I am not an insane old coot). Then, an asteroid hit earth, and the terrifying monster occupying our freezers went extinct.

Until today.

Using Jolly Rancher DNA and the finest science, I have re-created the Jolly Rancher Freeze Pop. You will know that science was involved because there are metric measurements.

Ingredients:

• A big-assed bag of Jolly Ranchers.
• Water

You will need a big-assed bag of Jolly Ranchers because if you buy a normal-sized bag of Jolly Ranchers you won’t have enough to make even one tray of an individual flavor, and not even half a tray of grape, but will have no shortage of “blue.”

Hardware:

• Ice Cube Trays
• A glass you can stick in the microwave
• Measuring implements
• Toothpicks
• Plastic Wrap

If you have something fancier, like popsicle molds, you can use those. If you have one of those vacuum sealers, you could probably make actual freezer pops out of the plastic sheeting, but I’ll leave those experiments to others.

Step One: Figuring out the measurements

Each Jolly Rancher candy has enough DNA to make 25 mL worth of freezer pop mix. That’s 1.7 tablespoons, which is why this recipe is in metric units. As it happens, the ice cube trays I’m using produce ice cubes that are precisely 25 mL, so it made measuring ridiculously simple. See Figure 1. You’ll note that I didn’t have enough Cherry to make a full tray, or enough Grape to make even a half tray. This is because I bought a normal-sized bag of Jolly Ranchers. Also, Cherry is almost undetectible from Watermelon these days, so read.

I had 14 Cherry candies, which translates to 350 mL of mix, so I unwrapped the candies, put them in a beaker, and filled it to the 350 mL line, as shown in Figure 2.

(Yes, it doesn’t look like 350 mL in the picture. Bite me.)

Step Two: Extracting the DNA

Microwave it on high for two minutes, which results in molten lava candies at the bottom of slightly-red water. Stir. The candy gloop will stick to your spoon. Keep stirring, and eventually it will all dissolve, as shown in Figure 3.

Your beaker (or coffee cup, or whatever) will be near boiling at this point. DO NOT REACH IN AND GRAB IT, OR IF YOU DO, DON’T SUE ME BECAUSE I HAVE WARNED YOU. Let it cool down. You can cool things faster by putting the container in an ice bath, but I didn’t take a picture of that, and you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

Step 3: Setting up the samples

Now, for the pouring of the mix into the ice cube tray. Leaving a couple of blank spaces is okay. Cover with plastic wrap, as shown in Figure 4. Poke a toothpick through the plastic into each space, and (if your mixture isn’t pretty cold already) chill in the refrigerator, as shown in Figure 5.

Why chill it in the refrigerator? Because of the thermodynamic properties of freezing water, if the mixture is still at 100°F when you put it in the freezer you’ll end up with big chunky ice crystals instead of fine delicate ones. It’s okay if you want to skip this step, though.

Step Four: Resurrecting the beast

Move the ice-cube trays to the freezer. As shown in Figure 5, but in a freezer this time.

Go away for a couple of hours, and you will be rewarded with the re-creation of the fabled Jolly Rancher Freeze Pop. If you eat them all, you will get a whangin’ sugar headache.

“Hooray, Fancycwabs! You’ve saved Summer!”

Yes, yes. I should warn you NOT TO MIX STRAINS OF JOLLY RANCHER DNA, BECAUSE HORRORS WILL BE UNLEASHED INTO THE WORLD. Unless you find some lemon Jolly Ranchers. Grape-lemon or Cherry-Lemon Jolly Rancher Freeze Pops might just be improving on what Nature intended.

Also, no Fire-Stix Jolly Rancher Freeze Pops. This ain’t Alinea.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Towards a system of categorisation of male looks.

nickdouglas:

sokeri:

indefensible:

So here are three kinds of male attractiveness.

1: Hyper-pretty men that everyone knows are attractive even if straight guys don’t say it because they are afraid of being called gay.  IE Brad Pitt.

2: Handsome guys that make women go week at the knees because they’re good looking but also somehow masculine: IE Clive Owen.

3: Guys that it would be awesome to look like because they’re not good looking but they look like they were carved out of stone with a chainsaw.

EG: Jurgen Prochnow. Even his name is fantastic. Say it. It’s like chewing tobacco and a handful of gravel at the same time. That’s one magnificent brute.

you can only come up with 3? as a straight woman, I could certainly come up with more than 3 kinds of female attractiveness.

There’s definitely a fourth category for “cute but not hot,” which include me and, if I’m not being insulting, our dear indefensible. Ladies: You are allowed to call me hot! But I’m not gonna say I’m any of the three above.

And then there’s the rest of us, who somehow manage in spite of being, you know, repulsive, apparently.

Irrelevant, But Assume Yes - WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT

"Sanford said the trip was legitimate but he put the agency in an awkward spot “based on what I did in terms of eating dinner down there."

—

I was actually looking for the quote where Sanford compares himself to King David, but this was funnier out of context, and every quote I’ve found so far has been paraphrased anyway.

Nevertheless a few more fun facts about King David, post-affair:

One of his sons (Amnon) raped his half-sister (Tamar), and was ordered murdered by yet another son (Absalom), who subsequently rebelled against dad (David/Sanford) in the “trying to overthrow the government” sense. David had at one point left ten concubines lying around the house, and Absalom decided to have sex with them all in front of the entire population as a display of his prowess.

And they say the internet is corrupting youth.

Anyway, at some point during the rebellion, there was a battle, and Absalom got his hair caught in a tree, which leads one to believe he had a mighty ‘fro or perhaps some amazing dreads, and one of David’s generals killed him with a spear. The end.

Well, not quite the end—Bathsheba’s (that’s the Argentinean mistress in our version) son (the one who didn’t die, which is another story), Solomon, became king and was known for being wise and having lots of wives, and for writing the sexy-sex book of the Bible.

The moral of the story is: keep your eye on South Carolina politics for the next several years, because things could get way more interesting than just an Argentinean affair.

After nearly six months of waiting, I’ve decided to set my location to the center of the Bermuda Triangle until Latitude actually, you know, works.

We put “Dead and Gone” (a reimagining of James Joyce’s “The Dead” set in post-reconstruction Memphis) to bed last night. There’s a few days of editing to try to throw in some addition SFX, take out the room noise, and trim a few page turns, but I think it’s gonna end up being a really good show.

Normally when we record everyone gets headphones so we can hear the mix and whether we’re clipping out mics or not, but there was choreography for this one—not particularly conducive to walking around tethered to a headphone jack.

Normally the things that get recorded end up at the Chatterbox Audio Theater website, but in this case it’ll be going out over this cutting-edge technology called “radio”—namely, the local public radio station, WKNO FM 91.1 on July 21 at 7pm Central time. Those of you in the Memphis area can tune in, and the rest can either stream it from WKNO’s website, or wait a couple of days and download the podcast.

Also, for those interested, their older recordings are available for free in iTunes, so check ‘em out!

My previous published contribution to their collection is playing a dog and the Pepperidge Farm guy, among others, in their recording of Rip Van Winkle—I’ve contributed on a couple of other items that haven’t been posted yet (but I play animals in ALL OF THEM), but even the ones without me are worth a listen—their collection runs the gamut from horror to classics to sketch comedy.

"Instead of shooting the dais during a congressional hearing on health care reform, NPR’s photographer, in a very clever move, shot the audience. And now NPR is asking for help identifying the lobbyists and other players in attendance. Very smart."

—

NPR Gettin’ All Edgy Now | TPM

Nice. Kudos to NPR.

(via moltz) I’ll try to pick ‘em out of the crowd this afternoon!

As I listen.

To the radio.

I think I may have spotted a flaw in their plan.

The Palmolive is frustrated.

Robot in disguise?