Friday, April 16, 2004

Space Dust

Wasn’t Space Dust great, eh readers?

Y'know --- Space Dust. Those packets full of brightly coloured rock cocaine that you put on your tongue and let crackle away in your mouth in an explosion of chemically enhance strawberry flavour. If you were lucky, you might get a shonky pack that had one huge rock of the stuff in it, that would go off like a small bomb in your mouth, knocking out several teeth and doing permanent damage to your tonsils.

It should, in retrospect, have come with a health warning of some sort. But then it was the 1970s, and you could still get sweet cigarettes, Licorice Imps made out of compressed napalm and toys made out of real lead and hardly anyone died. But still, "Don't try to eat three packets at once, you bloody idiot" wouldn't have gone amiss.

Or even "Don't feed to your pet dog, spazz-brain." Honestly, some companies just have no sense of responsibility. In retropect, I should be suing the bastards in a toothless class action.

So, we gave it to the dog. He loved it, especially when it started exploding on his tongue, and he came back and asked for more. We thought it was funny as well, the way he stood there with his tongue hanging out like an idiot, crackling away. The budgie, on the other hand, wouldn't touch the stuff. The feathery little killjoy.

Fair enough, quite understandable behaviour for twelve year olds with a small yet significant disposable income. But now I've grown up and I know stuff. Like how sugar makes kids go bonkers. Give my daughter a polo mint and it'll have her bouncing off the wall for hours; while anything from the Coca-Cola company is akin to leaving nuclear fuel lying around, and if the recent bottled water fiasco is anything to go by, it probably is.

Snoopy the dog went loopy, and did Bad Things.

Terrible things, like running round and round the lving room for half an hour, knocking ornaments off shelves and overturning tables. He darted upstairs, and before anyone could stop him, he had, in a flurry of fur and teeth, completely destroyed my hand-built radio controlled plane which had taken my the best part of three months to construct. Then he shat on my bedroom carpet, curling one off into my lucky football boots, a pair of Patrick Super Keegans personally signed by the man himself. And I had a match the next morning, which we lost 14-0, no thanks to the mutt.

If only we had listened to my mother on the subject of gum-rotting sweets, we might have learned a thing or two:

“All your teeth will fall out by the time you’re twenty”

She was right. The dog’s dead.

And have you noticed how Creme Eggs are smaller this year? *walks away mumbling*

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