“The Column on Pez”
Did the inventor die of an intravenous PEZ overdose? If not, let me be the first to start the rumor. (The quote in the column is a tad ambiguous).
I don’t see the ambiguity. The guy who dosed himself invented a baking powder. The candy wasn’t around until his grandson got into the family business.
That’s the problem with starting a rumor by referring to the source. Easily squelched. : )
Still, the quote disturbs me. If I read it right, this man was injecting himself with god-knows-what just out of curiousity, under the guise of medical experiments. At least drug addicts have a rationale of sorts. Ah well, different times, different context. Just the same, shudder, shudder, shudder…
The column says:
Hmm–I’m sorry but I don’t see any ambiguity there, either. ::: shrug :::
A. The guy invented baking powder.
B. He was also experimenting on himself with those newfangled hypodermic needles.
C. It doesn’t say, or even imply, what he was injecting himself with. He could have been injecting himself with sheep urine or pureed goat testicles or chocolate milk, which AFAIK aren’t “controlled substances”. For all we know, he could simply have gotten tetanus or blood poisoning from the needle. Shouldn’t assume “drug addict” just because there’s an injection.
D. He died. (So it couldn’t have been the goat testicles, because everybody knows that those work.)
[do i need to point out that the above remark about goat testicles was meant as a joke and in no way was meant to imply that it was anything that myself or cecil adams or the straight dope message board or the chicago reader or anybody in the whole wide world except for possibly some people in << checks trilobite’s profile >> ottawa could possibly take seriously]
Yumpin yiminy!
My last post spelled out that I didn’t assume him to be a drug addict, just experimenting. I was merely pondering the mindset required for this (as opposed to the junkie, whose rationale is, er, that he’s a junkie, having graduated from smokin’ and snortin’ to needles coz he gets more bang for his buck).
Though, at first, I thought the quote might have been just a polite way of saying he dabbled in recreational heroin abuse. But at the time, we had amateur chemists who’d regularly give ‘taste’ as a property of new compounds they created. Some of these chemists were short-lived. I figured the hypo-craze was just taking this one step further. If PEZ was available, would he have tried it out? (That last bit is the subtext of my first post, which I confess was too obscure – as brevity is the soul of wit, it can also be the embodiment of cluelessness. Mamma mia culpa.)
By the way, my neighbour, Mrs. Shakes, has tried both chocolate milk and goats’ testicles (intravenously). On their own, they’re fun, but she warns “DON’T MIX THE TWO”. The last time she did, she spend two weeks at the Margaret Trudeau Clinic. (Ottawa joke*).
Cheers!
- (More precisely, lame Ottawa joke).