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For those of you planning to pull pranks on the ice cream truck driver this summer, here’s a tip: If one of your pranks involves climbing a tree with a well-crafted dummy and hurling it in front of the approaching ice cream truck, it is usually a mistake to set it on fire first.

When I was a kid, my neighborhood had a high turnover rate for ice cream truck drivers. The reason, of course, was that my cousin Steve and I, who lived just one street apart back then, were constantly planning crueler and crueler pranks to play on them. Each new ice cream man quickly learned that when he got close to Steve’s house, he needed to step on the accelerator and speed by as fast as possible thus shortening his time in the “Hot Zone.”

Like most twelve-year-old-boys, we started out with the classic water balloons and dirt clods, and then advanced to more elaborate, sophisticated pranks such as those requiring various types of illegal fireworks.

But, then we got the dummy idea.

There are two proper methods to throwing a dummy out of a tree and into the path of a moving ice cream truck: a.) Face-up-horizontal as if some knucklehead accidentally fell out of the tree to die a horrible screaming death beneath the truck, or b.) Face-down-horizontal as if someone purposely catapulted out of the tree to commit an ice cream truck related fantasy suicide.

We went with “suicide.”

But, first, we had to build the perfect dummy. We started off with old clothes, which we stuffed with other old clothes; then we used one of those white, Styrofoam wig-stands for the head and used sticky double-back tape to attach a Freddy-from-Scooby-Doo Halloween mask for the face. Gloves and shoes completed the form.

One of us, I think it was Steve, thought it would greatly enhance the effect if we saturated Freddy’s upper torso and head with Raging Rocket High-Octane Barbeque Starter Fluid then light it off just before we tossed the dummy out of the tree.

It’s funny how it never occurred to us that this was a bad idea until the exact moment the dummy erupted into flames.

We were sitting in the lower branches of the tree which hung about four-feet above where the roof of the ice cream truck would eventually pass. As the ice cream truck approached, Steve let go of the flaming upper torso leaving me holding the knees pressed against a limb and causing the dummy to swing down to stare directly at the ice cream truck driver.

The plan was for both of us to let go of the dummy at the same time so it would fall just in front of the truck, but I momentarily froze in the wake of the tall flames—hesitating just long enough for the truck to get underneath before I snapped-out-of-it and dropped my half.

I can only imagine what this looked like to the ice cream truck driver: He’s slowly driving along, minding his own business blasting Pop-Goes-the-Weasel from his loud speaker, when the flaming upper torso of a body swings out of a tree upside-down; the friendly smile of Freddy quickly melting and distorting into a rictus grin shouting fire like a blowtorch.

As it turned out, the dummy landed square on top of the ice cream truck, lying on its back with its arms spread out, blazing away. We watched as the truck made its way down the street, turned the corner, and continued on its regular route to deliver treats. The flaming body, now appearing as if the driver placed it up there on purpose, sent a confusing message to those wanting ice cream. I doubt he sold many ice cream bars that day.

We never found out if the burning dummy did any damage to the truck, nor did we ever play another prank on that guy. In fact, if we heard Pop-Goes-the-Weasel, we just went in the house.

Stater Bros. Cocoa Comets Cereal: A sweet part of a nutritious breakfast, or mind altering hallucinogenic dream enhancer?


Men should never be allowed to go grocery shopping unattended. If we are, we will always come home with either A: several cartons labeled Beers of the World containing many obscure and unusual tasting beers from many lands; or B: at least one food product designed exclusively for child-type nervous systems, usually with colorful and exciting sugar-based packaging.

Yesterday I went shopping. Since my refrigerator was already full of a mysterious, life-form producing beer from Porcupine, Alabama, I decided to go with two boxes of Cocoa Comets cereal. I had never even heard of it before, but it was on sale for two bucks a box and the illustration on the front suggested an astronaut-oriented-chocolate-fantasy. I had to have it!

When I was a kid, it was easy to tell which breakfast cereals could potentially kill you; they always had the word “sugar” in the title: Sugar Crisp; Sugar Smacks; Sugar Pops; Sugar Frosted Flakes, etc. But, over the years, things changed: now you have to read the list of ingredients to figure it out, and let’s face it, I’m not going to do that unless I eat the product, begin hallucinating and need to find the emergency hotline number.

So, last night, just before bed, I decided to try some. Before I knew it half the box was gone and I was flying around the house like Superman. This stuff tasted better than anything I’ve eaten in 20-years! I loved it! Of course, it didn’t take long before I was experiencing a sleep comparable to a morphine-induced coma.

I’m not sure what they put in this stuff, but the dream I had was weird on a scale that is off the charts! It involved an oversized, steam-powered mechanical vehicle rolling at a snails pace down the street sucking up screaming, panicked pedestrians that should have been able to outrun it, but for some reason, could not escape.

Each person, after being captured, was instantly converted into a fully-articulated garden gnome featuring the classic pointy-red-hat and white beard. One by one they were shot from a large cannon-like smokestack which sent most of them into the trees and onto rooftops; others simply crashed to the ground where, uninjured, they scurried off to create mischief.

What was most disturbing to me though was that every person that was once terrified and running for their life was now happy, even gleeful to have been converted into an evil little garden gnome. Unfortunately, I woke up before I found out what type of diabolical plans they were to unleash.

To those of my readers that happen to work in the psychiatric community, please consider that this was most likely just a children’s cereal-induced episode before you decide to send the guys with the white coats and butterfly nets.

Photo credit: Suzanna - tweaked by DeadRooster

I was shocked to discover, after years of trying to forget about them, that Good & Plenty candies are not only still being manufactured, but that it would not even be illegal for any knucklehead off-the-street to purchase a box and offer them to some poor shlub as a treat.

This candy is so awful it should only be sold in joke-shops. When I was a kid, if I had somehow got hold of some, I would only chew off the Kaopectate flavored coating—while being extra careful not to disturb the horrible tasting tobacco center—then spit out the rest.

Older kids in my neighborhood would buy Good & Plenty’s and pretend they were drugs. Of course, they would never actually eat them; they would instead force us younger kids to “take” them and tell us we were hallucinating.

How is it that these wretched little pellets are not yet extinct? Back in the 1960’s, it was probably their diabolical marketing campaign that kept them afloat. They would put a magic trick on the back of the box, get some snotty kid (oh, how I loathed him) to perform it in a TV commercial, and then force you to buy a box in order to learn the secret (which was revealed on the inside flap). I never did learn how to make a quarter cry—I think they purposely let that creepy TV kid be the only one to know how it was done.

I also remember a deceptively benign cartoon ad featuring a menacing little engineer by the name of Choo Choo Charlie who—immediately after tasting them, I bet—decided to fuel his engine with Good & Plenty candies. I cheered when he burned them, but was totally unprepared for the catchy background jingle that was obviously a subliminal hack designed to permanently embed itself into the brains of innocent children. Here is an early version of the commercial:

Trust me: you don’t ever want to get that stuck in your head—not unless you’re planning a killing spree or want to start doing needle drugs.

After a bit of research, I learned that Good & Plenty’s are the oldest branded candy in the United States (true). They were first produced in 1893 by the Quaker City Confectionary Company of Philadelphia (also true) and were fiendishly invented a few years earlier by an irritable pharmacist with an intense hatred of the human race (probably not true).

Seriously, does anybody like these things?

Note: I know there’s a chance that Kaopectate (a remedy for diarrhea) and tobacco (a remedy for health) may not be the precise ingredients, so please don’t email me.