Who doesn’t enjoy a handful or three of jelly beans at Easter time? Well, now that Easter has passed and you’ve consumed your yearly quota of that confection, it’s probably safe to share with you an interesting tidbit that most of you most likely weren’t aware of …
That beautiful glossy glaze that makes jelly beans glimmer is made from the poop of female lac bugs! YUM! YUM!
The female lac bug (Kerria lacca) sucks the sap out of trees in the forests of India, Thailand and Malaysia, and then poops out the excrement (called sticklac) on branches. This will become shellac that’s used on our furniture as well as “Confectioner’s Glaze”. (I think you’d agree that’s a much more appetizing term than “Liquid Lac Bug Sh!t”).
This sticklac is then then scraped off the branches – but because it also contains pieces of bark and pieces of lac bug, it needs to be purified. The glob is place is a long canvas bag and heated over a fire to liquefy the … hmmm … let’s go with resin. This is then mostly converted to shellac, and it’s estimated it takes anywhere from 50,000 to 300,000 lac bugs to make a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of shellac flakes.
These shellac flakes are then converted into the Confectioner’s Glaze that’s sprayed on jelly beans, Malted Milk Balls, Raisinettes and even apples. It not only produces an attractive sheen, but it also extends shell-life.
To make you feel better, the FDA has approved it as safe for human consumption.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll be sticking with Peeps and chocolate Easter bunnies from now on.
As long as were discussing Easter, we shouldn’t pass up covering Rep. Steve (Cantaloupe-Calves) King (R-IA) who had the temerity to claim victimhood comparable to the suffering of Jesus by claiming he’s been crucified by his fellow Rethuglicans.
You can easily recall that while King has a very long and a very ignoble history of uttering racist remarks, this is the one made during an interview with “The New York Times” that crossed the red-line for Rethuglicans:
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
He was quickly stripped of all his committee assignments – and his whining immediately commenced.
King said he can easily relate to the suffering of Jesus Christ, equating his recent humiliation to what Christ “went through for us.”
“And, when I have to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives, and look up at those 400-and-some accusers, you know we just passed through Easter and Christ’s Passion, and I have better insight into what He went through for us partly because of that experience.”
Well, if King is saying that he, you know, wants to get the full experience of Christ’s Easter Passion, I’m sure there are people willing to chip in for the lumber. Just saying …
But I don’t want to close with that downer, so I’ll share with you some tidbits and a GIF I came across that illustrates how Twitler will cheat on anyone, everyone, anything and everything … even something as trivial as a game of golf.
Twitler is such a well-know golf cheat that an entire book has been written about it: Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
In fact his caddies have witnessed him kicking his ball out from the rough back onto the fairway (a YUGE golf “NO-NO”) that they’ve nicknamed him Pelé, after the Brazilian soccer legend.
But I will say he’s a very accomplished and skillful cheater, as this GIF demonstrates. But I slowed it down and you have to watch closely because he’s perfected the art:
You don’t get that smooth at cheating without years of practice!
