Thursday, October 20, 2011

Storm in an ice cream cup

Schweddy Balls ice cream is brewing up a storm. It has caught the ire of One Million Moms, who are protesting about it. Wow !

Ben & Jerry's seems to be the flavour of the month on this blog. They are the lot who are churning our a limited edition Schweddy Balls ice cream, which they claim has risen to the top of the charts - presumably charts exist for ice cream flavours too.  Apparently it is "fudge covered rum balls" , whatever that means. Schweddy Balls is a take on a Saturday Night Live skit (a television show in the US). An innuendo laced old skit aired on that programme has the "memorable" tag line - no one can resist my Schweddy Balls.

On Million Moms is some obscure conservative organisation based in Mississippi of all places. They are up in arms. They say the language is unsuitable for children. They have forced some supermarket chains not to carry Schweddy Balls and are petitioning the company to stop the production. Little wonder Ben & Jerry's is revelling in the publicity and refusing to do anything of the sort. I thought motherhood was a pretty taxing full time job - are One Million Moms having enough idle time to be protesting about some trivial stuff ?


B&J of course has a long history of quirky names. The initial lot were simply just that; quirky  - Chunky Monkey, Cherry Garcia and the like. They seem to happily coexist with the more prosaic Banana Split and Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Presumably uncolourful lot like me would prefer Chocolate, but a breezy sulo would want Bonnaroo Buzz !  But then they graduated to Karamel Sutra, which was apparently lapped up by the kilo litre. They had a Chubby Hubby flavour, which was fair enough considering that most hubbies in real life are fairly chubby, if not downright tubby. But when same sex marriages were sort of in the news, out came  Hubby Hubby. 

Perhaps Hopfrog or J or Deepa, who have access to the miracles of modern day indulgences can pronounce on the relative merits of Schweddy Balls vs Karamel Sutra vs Hubby Hubby !

Ah ; what a storm in an ice cream cup.