Adventures in Eating: Dark Chocolate Minty Mallows

Marshmallow?
meh.
Dark Chocolate?
well......
Peppermint?
I'm listening....

I've been a terribly negligent horrible blogger.  I apologize.  Fortunately for you all, I have been provided with inspiration in the form of Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Minty Mallows.  My good friend and lab-mate, Steve, put them on my desk and said, "Here's something for you to blog about." (true story).  That just goes to show you that inspiring me to blog is as simple as giving me free food.

Let's get down to brass tacks.  What are Minty Mallows?

They are "Light and Fluffy Peppermint Marshmallows Drenched in Smooth, Dark Chocolate", just like the box says.  There's a decidedly wintry theme to the decoration on the package -- ice, snow, candy canes, etc.  I don't know if Minty Mallows are a seasonal treat (just like Ma used to make us on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Eve back in the day), or if the mintyness is meant to evoke a cooling sensation a la York Peppermint Patties.

I'm not really a marshmallow guy, so these weren't exactly the best snack for me.  Marshmallows are too springy.  If I'm going to expend extra effort chewing, I better get a substantial pay-off in flavor.  Plain marshmallows are just gelatinized corn syrup, so the only flavor you get is sweet.  They're like eating big chalky gummi bears with no fruitiness.  You may like 'em, but they're not my fave.  The minty mallows supplement the mallow with -- you guessed it -- mint.  That's an improvement, but is it enough?  No!  Fortunately, the good people at Trader Joe's realized that, and they coated the mallow with a layer of dark chocolate.  Okay, now we're talking.

Here's what they're like to eat:  When you pop one in your mouth, it fills up a whole cheek -- left or right, it doesn't matter which.  Frankly, these suckers are too big.  If they were a little smaller you would get more dark chocolate per volume of mallow, and I'm in favor of that.  When you first bite down, the outer chocolate shell crumbles apart, and you get your first blast of mint.  The flavors aren't bad, but you still have that spongy wad of sugar to get through.  As you chew, the chocolate bits from the outer shell start to melt, and gradually, with effort, the mallow dissolves away.  What you're left with is a nice creamy residue of peppermint tinged dark chocolate coating the inside of your mouth, and eventually that too disappears.

Minty Mallows are just okay.  If it were up to me, I'd dump the mallow business completely and just make Dark Chocolate Mintys, and call it a day.

My Connection to the Guy Who Brought ESP "Mainstream"

Today, I was perusing one of my favorite blogs, boingboing.net, when I came across a post that struck a chord with me.  The post referred to a New York Times story about the acceptance by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of an article by Cornell Professor Daryl Bem supporting the existence of ESP (Man, there are a lot of prepositions in this sentence!).  As the NYT piece mentions, this research has been met with a lot of doubt and even a little outrage.  Ordinarily, my response to someone claiming that they had proved the existence of ESP would be "Pfft!  What a load of hokum!", but this time I'll be more nuanced.  Like this, "Hmmmm. Interesting."  Why the retreat from my typical hardened skepticism?  Because of my experience with Daryl Bem himself.

<Putting on monocle> You see, I attended Cornell University from 1991 to 1995, and while at that fine Ivy League Institution I had the pleasure to take Professor Bem's Personality Psychology class.  I enjoyed the class greatly, and I think I got an A of one sort or other.  Let's say an A- so I can maintain some semblance of humility.  Actually, I remember a lot about that class and Daryl Bem in particular.  The class was taught in the big lecture hall in the south wing of Goldwyn Smith Hall (yes...I had to look the building name up).  I remember that this class took place around the time that portable laser pointers were still fairly expensive but by no means unattainable.  I know this because some rich entitled tool thought it was funny to covertly project a red dot on Professor Bem's tie during one lecture.  Fitting the academic stereotype, Professor Bem never noticed.  I also remember that Professor Bem's wife, Sandra Bem, was the head of the Women's studies department, and the two of them were raising their children free from gender roles.  I later heard that Sandra left Daryl for another woman.  Shocking, I know.

But most of that is beside the point.  Here's the relevant stuff.  Daryl Bem is an accomplished magician.  In fact, the first time I saw him he was a guest lecturer in the uber-popular Cornell Psych 101 class.  He recreated one of those big-tent mind-reading events where he picked someone seemingly at random from the audience and then proceeded to tell her all about herself, much to everyone's astonishment.  The fact that he knew she had a poster of herself in a bikini on her bedroom wall was particular compelling.  Of course, it was all fake, and he told us how he did it after the fact (put simply, she wasn't randomly selected, and he got all the information about her from her mom).  It seems a little incongruous that a guy so familiar with charlatanism and trickery would be interested in studying parapsychology.  He's like the opposite of the Amazing Randi.

I think that Professor Bem's background lends a lot of credibility to his research on ESP.  Frankly, I think that familiarity with experimental psychology and the techniques employed in performing illusions should be the minimum requirement of anyone wishing to perform research into paranormal phenomena like ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, etc.  I remember Professor Bem telling us about his research in class, and though I'm not convinced that his results truly prove that parapsychology is real, I'm sure that he sincerely believes that he's onto something.  I'm also sure he did his damnedest to account for all the potential confounding variables.  Only time will tell if this research stands up, but I hope Professor Bem comes out of this with his reputation intact either way.