I Drank the Peeps Milk

A few weeks ago, my friend Rod posted an article about Peeps Milk. Actually, several of my friends posted about it, but Rod posted the first one that I saw, so he gets the credit. I immediately went on a quest to find the Peeps Milk, because I was curious.

Several of my friends greeted this curiosity with horror.

Many people assumed the Peeps Milk would be horrible. Some compared the Peeps Milk to harbingers of the apocalypse, while others talked about the death of culture. I have bad news for you, friends: Peeps Milk is American culture. Taking a natural product generated by force from captive animals caged in an industrialized setting, pouring high fructose corn syrup generated by governmental agricultural subsidies into it, then flavoring it with chemicals before packaging it in bright colors and selling it at the average child's eye level in the grocery store? The only thing more American than that would be if every carton had a tiny American flag attached to the side.

I spent a few weeks trying to find the Peeps Milk. Some of the initial articles were slightly unclear about where to locate it, in that they suggested it was exclusive to Walmart. It turns out that only the orange flavor is exclusive to Walmart, but I went to four Walmarts nine times in less than ten days before I realized that. Have you ever been to that many Walmarts in that short a time span? Toward the end of last week I started to feel like Rooney Mara in the cemetery in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" remake, shuddering and whispering, "You have no idea what I've seen," and I decided to give up.

And that's all it took. Yesterday morning I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the half marathon, and there it was:



Peeps Milk.

Peeps Milk as far as the eye could see.

I looked up to the heavens, hands out, eyes opened. I was like Miss Sofia in "The Color Purple" talking about that day at the store. I knew that there is a God, and that one day I would come home. I searched for the Peeps Milk, and right when I was about to give up, there it was.



Thank you, Jesus.

In the interests of convincing my friends that Peeps Milk is actually a symbol of American Culture, I decided to place it in a cultured setting, and busted out the Make Your Own Museum kit that's been sitting on my bookshelves since I got it in college for some reason.

I started with the Strawberry Crème Peeps Milk:



I was immediately shocked that it wasn't bright pink. I was expecting it to look like a liquefied Peep, but instead it just looks like a slightly tinted regular milk. I also expected it to taste like strawberries, or at least like strawberry milk usually tastes, and I was wrong there as well. It has a hint of strawberries. It has a hint of milk. It also has a hint of... something. After an entire glass, I couldn't figure out exactly what I was tasting, and decided to eat the Peep on the plate as a palate cleanser and then switch flavors.

I moved on to the Egg Nog Peeps Milk:



It looked like egg nog. It smelled like egg nog. The ingredient list suggested that it was some version of egg nog, but it has the consistency of whole milk. It's very thin egg nog, and doesn't have even the slightest hint of nutmeg, so it's not very good eggnog. I'm going to have to repurpose this, because I'm not going to drink any more of it. Egg nog French toast might be good, or maybe a bread pudding. I ate the egg-shaped Peep, again as a palate cleanser, and switched to the last flavor.

I couldn't find a Peep that looked like the one on the Chocolate Marshmallow Peeps Milk carton, so the milk stands alone:



After drinking it, I figured out what the weird underflavor in the Strawberry Crème milk was: marshmallow flavoring. This is chocolate milk with a strong dose of artificial marshmallow, and that's the same thing they did with the strawberry. This is what makes it Peeps-flavored instead of just regular flavored milk. It's not terrible. It's just a surprise.

So, the final verdict on the Peeps Milk is that the Strawberry and Chocolate flavors are drinkable, if you like flavored milk and the taste of marshmallows. Nobody should drink the Egg Nog flavor.

I have no verdict on the Orange Crème flavor, because I cannot bring myself to visit Walmart again to look for it at this time.

Even I have limits.

Easter Morning Lois Lanesanity - Part 1

I know that yesterday I said that I would post twice for missing Friday's blog entry, but I decided to hold off until today, because I have a fantastic story of death and resurrection to share this Easter.

It's also a story of insanity.

Let's jump right in, shall we?



Ferro Lad, like me, is only happy about solid bunnies. We both understand that hollow bunnies are lies. They promise that they are thick, delicious chocolate, but then you bite and they explode into shards. Shards of lies. Chocolate lies.







Like nobody saw that coming.





Our story opens with Lois, as is often the case, babbling something about herself at Clark while he wishes that there was a horrible emergency somewhere that needed responding to.



Lois is excited to be on this television show about Superman and his secret life, until she discovers that she's not the only one who might know about Superman's secrets:



Lana's eyebrows are not those of a friend who's happy to see you. Sensing animosity, the host immediately begins poking the hornet's nest of jealousy with a stick. He's a brave, brave man.

Lana, slightly less insane than Lois, attempts to take the high road:



but the host immediately begins dredging up the past:





Before Lois can do more than hmmph, though, he goes right back to poking:



which ends up going about how these things usually go. Lois and Lana get mad, but still decide to go get some lunch together, because they are the original Best Frenemies.

Lunch quickly turns sour:





and then the hair-pulling starts:



And, of course, the one threating murder is Lois. As I said, Lana is the slightly more sane of the two, although in this pair that's like being the slightly less burning log in the fireplace. Still, faster than you can say, "Violent, irrational mood swing," Lois is calling to apologize:



She wants to take Lana on a drive.

Alone.

In the rain.

On a bridge.

You see where this is going, right?



And off the bridge they go.



Lois, as good a friend as she is a driver, hauls herself out of the river without bothering to check on Lana, and hitchhikes back to her hotel, just in time for Superman to show up:



The police are trying to recover her car, and asked Superman to check on her. They're having a little trouble, though:



And then we all see what Lois has done:



Lana's dead. And she still has great hair.

What follows is a scene so horribly written that I couldn't take pictures of it. I was too busy face-palming.

Lois ends up in the county lockup, where she is visited by Bruce Wayne. Bruce informs her that he's got the perfect lawyer for her, if she'll just wait right here in this room while he goes to another room to get the lawyer. Bruce leaves and then Batman comes in, because Bruce Wayne is Batman and Batman is Lois' lawyer and HOW THE HELL DID NO ONE EVER FIGURE OUT BATMAN AND SUPERMAN'S IDENTITIES WHEN THIS IS THE BEST THEY DID TO COVER THEM?

Superman joins them with some terrible news:



So, Lois is going with the Ted Kennedy defense, then. Who knew that the writing pool at DC Comics was following the "Law and Order" "ripped from the headlines!" school of plot construction? I'm not just being facetious in bringing that up, either. This comic is from February 1970. Chappaquiddick was barely months old at that point, and probably still in the newspapers.

Getting back to the story, Superman informs Lois and Batman that he'll be serving as the prosecutor, since Batman's skills as defense attorney require super skills on the other side of the aisle as well. Also, you know, Lois killed his other girlfriend, so he's a little upset.

Lois, being Lois, immediately starts ignoring the advice of her lawyer and making things worse for herself:



and the Langs are, not surprisingly, not at all happy to see her:



And that's where we leave things, for now. Lana's dead, Lois is going to stand trial:



and I'm going to go eat some of Ferro Lad's chocolate bunny.

Happy Easter!

Oh, Easter, most confusing of American Christian holidays, when we mingle pagan tradition with what's supposed to be the holiest of days. Granted, Christmas has a dash of the pagan thrown in:



But Santa is at least based on St. Nicholas, so they're trying to keep the holiday properly religious on some level.

Easter, though, is pretty much full-out pagan once you get home from church. Colored eggs, magical rabbits, the goddess Estre, sugar-related gluttony... they're not even trying to keep it clean.

I'm not judging, really. I'm just amused by the inherent contradiction in the way America generally chooses to celebrate the holiday.



How can a holiday with electric blue coconut not be amusing?