Thursday, 12/13

I think dark chocolate stars have gone the way of dinosaurs, wagon trains, and Kim Kardashian’s first 2 or 3 marriages—

They’re extinct.

I realized that as I started to make some of the cookie dough I'll be baking in the next week or so. For many years I would try to get a bag of dark chocolate stars for those Cherry-Chocolate Explosion cookies I make. Every year when I made them I would get a bag of milk chocolate stars and a bag of dark chocolate stars, and alternate putting them on the cookies. One cookie would get milk chocolate, the next would get dark chocolate, and so on. But you know what?

I can't do that any more. But thank goodness for Dove Dark Chocolate. It's a lifesaver.

The store where I used to pick up my dark chocolate stars was (and don’t laugh) Menards. That’s right; I’ve never once gone to Menards to buy a hammer or screws or a roto-tiller; I have, however, gone to Menards to buy dark chocolate stars, if only because they usually had a pretty good selection of them. But not any more. Because of that I ended up checking out over a dozen other local stores, coming up empty. Most of them had a selection of milk chocolate stars, but nothing in the way of dark chocolate stars, which meant that a few years ago I had to make a choice—I could either make the Cherry-Chocolate Explosions with only milk chocolate stars, or I could find a substitute for the dark chocolate stars.

Oh, the horror.

Since I couldn’t make the cookies without SOME form of dark chocolate, I turned to the aforementioned fine people at Dove, and have started picking up a bag of their yummy dark chocolate Promises, a chocolate on which I munch quite a bit. So half the Cherry-Chocolate Explosions now have milk chocolate stars on them, while the other half have chunks of Dove dark chocolate on them. And if anyone notices and/or complains that they miss the dark chocolate starts from years past, I’ll refer them to the Menards customer service department.

It's the least I can do.

Although I once again didn’t find dark chocolate stars anywhere while doing my annual cursory search a few weeks ago, I almost picked up something else at one of the stores. Like many stores, this one has strange things planted near the checkout, in the hopes of piquing your curiosity enough that you’d pick one up and throw it in your basket. And I have to admit, I came close to buying something that I saw there; you see, next to glow-in-the-dark pig stickers and a Homer Simpson chia-head sat something I never thought I’d see, something that really has no reason to exist, except to separate a consumer from their money—

What did I see? A Justin Beiber musical electric toothbrush.

That’s right; you can buy an electric toothbrush with Justin Beiber’s picture on it. Not only that, but when you use the toothbrush with Justin Beiber’s picture (pre-tattoos) on it, you can listen to Justin Beiber singing while you’re brushing your teeth. You know, I don’t think I’ve come across something so useful and vital to humanity since, oh, 1979, when I believe I saw a Rex Smith three-in-1 hair brush/tire gauge/mini filing cabinet somewhere in a catalog. Of course, now that I think about it, the Rex Smith three-in-1 hair brush/tire gauge/mini filing cabinet might have been something I imagined after eating a bad taco. Unfortunately, the Justin Beiber musical electric toothbrush was real. After all, I haven’t had a bad taco in quite some time now.

See what the lack of dark chocolate stars has led to?

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)