Sparky’s Homemade Ice Cream in Columbia, Missouri, announced on their Facebook page on May 31 that their next ice cream flavor would be laced with cicadas. Yeah, the loud, buzzing arthropods that have been emerging from the ground recently. Since then, public health officials have been bugging out. However, the University of Illinois says the little buggers are edible and have an almond flavor.

I gotta say, anything smothered in brown sugar and chocolate must be absolutely delicious. If I weren’t geographically dislocated from Columbia, Missouri, I’d definitely give the cicada ice cream a try. What say you, Candy Addicts? Go or no on cicada ice cream? We have bugs in candy – why not bugs in ice cream?

• Sparky’s Facebook page
• CBS coverage

We all have trick-or-treaters we really don’t want to give candy to. You know the ones – thug teenagers who have no business being out trick-or-treating, parents asking for candy for their third child who happens to be 2 weeks old (“Yes, she eats breast milk, formula, and a few Snickers here and there”), and repeat customers who come back because they know you give out the good stuff. So what to do with these ne’er-do-wells? Give them some candy that sucks, of course! And I found the perfect candidate – crunchy tarantulas.

I found crunchy tarantulas at the same time I got the gummy brains from Oriental Trading. I really truly thought they would be good – marshmallow, gummy, and hard candy bits? What could be better? Well, for one, eating a bar of soap. Or possibly chemically treated wood pellets. Seriously. Nasty. Stuff.

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Very few candies scare me just by hearing the name. I can think of a few though… vomit flavored jellybeans, garlic mints, Hotlix (candy with real bugs in it). I think these Chum Bucket Mints are some of the scariest though.

I’ve had the tin of them for a week or two now but keep finding other things to do rather than try them. But, the time has come and as I sit here writing this, I still have not tried them. The tin says “Chum Flavored Candy,” the ingredients include “artificial seafood flavor” and the smell is telling me to throw them away and don’t try them. “DON’T DO IT, BRIAN!” my brain yells at me. I don’t like most real seafood, so I can’t imagine I will like “artificial seafood flavor” in candy form.

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If you knew me in real life, you would know that very little shocks me. I’m one of those people who finds things like comic strips and stand up comedians funny, but rarely laughs out loud. Every once in a while, though, something comes along which makes me not only laugh, but laugh long and loud enough to justify sharing it with my friends. In this case, as the cause of my endless laughing was a candy, I felt compelled to share it with the wider Candy Addicted world.

I am, of course, talking about gummi lighthouses.

The thing that perplexes me, of course, is that I have no idea why anybody would think about making a gummi lighthouse in the first place. The whole gummi animal thing makes sense to me – fish and bears and little tiny people are kinda cute. Gummi fruit is a total no-brainer – because it makes logical sense to make a candy look like the flavor of fruit it is. Random shapes like rings and squares and soda bottles also make sense. Lighthouses? Yeah. Not so much.

One wonders if this is some sort of subliminal message. (You’ll have to click on the link below to see what I mean.)

For the purposes of not harming small children in the making of this article, a photo of the actual product can be found at this link:

• Gummi Lighthouses at joeydevilla.com

(Thanks to Bob at http://pfdebate.com for the tip – no pun intended)

Bertie Bott and Beanboozled have nothing on these beans.