the X-Men of jelly beans

I've been given so much candy at work this week that I've filled an entire drawer of my desk with it. Christmas in our office is like "Halloween 2", and there's so much candy flying around that you could actually die if you ate everything you were given at one time. I now think of my top right drawer as "my little coma".

Out of all of the candy I was given, though, these were the ones that most intrigued me:



Belly Flops, according to the bag, are irregular Jelly Bellies. The bag goes on to inform me that Belly Flops are not often available, but when they are, "enthusiasts snap them up immediately!"

I greet this claim with skepticism. I know that there are people who collect pretty much anything. I casually collect comics and comic related items, and I'm sure there are people who collect candy instead of jamming it into their gaping pieholes as rapidly as possible or storing it in their desk. In that subset of candy collectors, there is probably a group of Jelly Belly jelly bean collectors, but I have a lot of trouble imagining these people shrewdly haggling over a bag of irregular jelly beans at a candy show. People wouldn't actually pay extra for defective jelly beans, would they? Especially with Jelly Belly already priced at the high end of the candy scale?

Yes, people actually will. An e-bay search for "jelly belly flops" produced nine items, some of them with multiple bids.

Rather than sell mine, I decided to eat them:



They're not just irregular. They're like ten jelly beans melted together. There was one lump in there that was the size of my thumb. There were some that were just one really long jelly bean, some that were round and clearly too big, and at least one that I swear had to have failed the taste testing, because it was so hot that it burned my tongue. Clearly, these were the mutant freaks of jelly beans.

And they were delicious.