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nobody@vox.com(Akela Talamasca) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:25:39 -0700

What's triangular, white, yellow, and orange, and belongs in my mouth? Depending on your snarkiness level today, you may choose from between two answers:

1. My teeth
2. Candy Corn

Yes! It's that time of year, when stores across the nation once again carry perhaps my favorite candy of all time. Not just any candy corn will do, mind you. It must be Brach's Candy Corn. I've tried them all, from the hard plasticy variety, to the overly-mushy type, and Brach's is the only one who's ever gotten it just right. Oh, sure, if Mr. Wonka were to ever throw his oversized purple hat into the ring, we might see some new competition, but let's face it, he's got his hands full with those child labor law disputes.

So, why Candy Corn? Is it the fact that you can affix them to your own teeth to make vampire fangs? Let me mention here that the vampies I know find this practice to be extremely vulgar and an affront to their race. It's like having an icepick and putting a cork on the end of it: useless.

Is it the jolly carnival-like colors? They're certainly festive enough; few know this fact of candy corn lore, but I swear on my name it's true: the colors represent the passing mortality of all mortal beings. The base of the corn at its widest is a mellow yellow, representing the new growth of youth, embodied in the kernels of corn to be found in the fields of the Earth. Rising upward and truncating to an eventual point, the middle section of the candy corn is a saturated orange, representing the burning passion of adulthood, the glorious seethe and fire of accomplishment, the prime years of life. Finally, the lambent and matte white of the pointed tip representing death and spirituality, pointing us upward toward communion with the Higher Plane.

And what of the shape itself? A slightly flattened cone, it possesses a little bump on either side of its lower half that calls to mind San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid. The shape, O friends and neighbors, is a solid manifestation of a thought-sigil, the pictogram of the name that means He Who Only Superficially At Best Resembles Actual Corn, And You Have To Squint To Get Even That Much, the Elder God of Triangular Candy.

More than any of those things, however, it's all about the taste. The flavor of Candy Corn is at once heady, and down-to-earth. It's mellow, it's fruity, it's exciting. The textures are wonderful, starting out smooth, then becoming chewy, dissolving into slight granularity as the last vestiges of corn-ness vanish into the tastebuds and your memory. I once ate a whole bag of Candy Corn and was unable to even smell the stuff for another 2 years without feeling ill, but it was worth it.

So here's to you, Brach's, for providing the world with the wondrous, magical confection that is Candy Corn! May your Vasty Halls of Goodness continue to generate only Yummy Things for millennia to come!

(Look, I know it's just candy. Work with me here, I'm trying to get an endorsement.)

So Father Mason, clutching his crucifix
Baptized the baby in whiskey and licorice
What a lovely way, drowning sins in tooth decay
-- "New Mistake", Jellyfish

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