I wanted sugar. That’s about the best explanation I can give right now as to why I just spent a dollar getting probably the worst thing in the vending machine as a late afternoon snack. Damned if the chocolate flavored Dolly Madison Zingers aren’t good, but man do they cram a lot of horrific crap into a small package. They must have a plunger back in the factory to shove ever more bad stuff into each group of three little cakes.
But what struck me as I’m walking back down the stairs to go to my office is the nutritional content on the back of the package and how it makes no mathematical sense.
For instance, one cake of two inches has 150 calories. Damn.
But wait. Three cakes together have 440 calories.
Wow! If you eat three you get a 10 calorie discount. Think how much you could save over your lifetime by just eating these things!
But fat calories are 45 per cake, 140 per 3. Apparently eating all three means the spontaneous creation of 5 fat calories. Pulled from the netherworld and placed in the space between cakes (alongside dark matter).
Maybe by eating three cakes, your body converts the ten extra regular calories into 5 fat calories. Maybe it’s a situation like with Heisenberg, where, as long as there’s no observer (and based upon the sugar induced coma of eating all three (which, by the way, is 18g/55g for a net gain of 1g having been inserted into the void) we’ll have no observer) then there’s no way to determine if it is either fat calories or regular calories.
Oh, and that sentence, ladies, gentlemen, and English instructors, is in the running for the 2009 award for most painful molesting of the English language through an otherwise grammatically correct sentence.
But hey, it’s not as bad as the cholesterol magically shifting around. It goes from 10 mg for the one to 25mg for all three. What i’d like to know is whether your body would recognize it if you ate all three at once. Or would it say “ah ah ah! you can’t trick me. I see those gaps in the icing. 30 mg of cholesterol for you.”
Now, you might say “Ender, duh. They’re rounding.” well then I have a quiz for you hot shot: What number can multiply by 3 to equal 10 that can also be rounded fairly to 4? I’m going with the log of pi.
I did learn that no matter how many of these things you shove down your gullet, you’re never getting above 0% for Vitamin A or C. So maybe a multivitamin wouldn’t be remiss in this equation.
The real question is this: how did I manage to eat all three during the typing of this post?
Extra credit: how many calories did I burn in the eating of each one? what about all three? Do you feel three times as sick as if you had just consumed a single cake?
