Twix

What came first: a chicken or a chicken egg? What is the sound of one hand clapping? What color is the wind? 

Which is better: Left Twix or Right Twix?

Language and knowledge are useful tools, but one unfortunate condition of our reverence for their efficacy is their ability to make palaces and prisons out of what amounts to empty paradox. Knowledge is fractal in many ways, building a gradient of difference out of simple dichotomy and self-reference; just as everything's identity is wholly bound up in its own opposite, these opposites are key in establishing self-reference.

Such is the case with Twix. While Left Twix and Right Twix seem eternally at odds, their complicated identities are inevitably and inextricably linked. Honestly, they are more alike than they are different. Both are a flaky, neutral cookie bar serving as a boat for a layer of dense, sweet caramel. Encasing each is a thin layer of milk chocolate. Truly, the only difference is perspective.

But there is the rub; all of language is a construct, and all knowledge is illusory. All of reality hinges on a delicate cross-modal sensory process that is, at best, creative, and at worst, deceptive, so in many cases, the only difference is perspective. Why should Twix be any different? Like the best zen koans, Twix invites us to a space beyond language and beyond knowledge, where true understanding lives.

i give it 84 radicals out of 100, and 3 hype out of 5, making it "yeah, hype"

Reese's Outrageous!

 

Some things are too good to be true. Sometimes genies are spiteful, the devil is in the details, and a monkey's paw comes with a catch.

Reese's is a strange company. They have what could be boiled down into two basic market strategies. The first is obvious: sell Reese's peanut butter cups.  Different prints, different counts, different sizes, and different flavors. By flooding the market, the brand exposure pays for the extra shelf space and allows a hypothetical company like Reese's to fund a second type of market strategy: throwing stuff at the wall.

What works? Reese's peanut butter. Throw a candy shell around it and you have a Reese's Pieces piece.  Form a bar with those pieces, bind it with that peanut butter, ribbon it with caramel, then coat that in chocolate. This idea, no matter how outrageous it sounds, is an actual candy bar. It's incredible.

The end result of Reese's relentless experimentation (and the ultimate evolution of Reese's bizarre tinkering with the NutRageous line), this candy was born out of a period of time where Reese's was just throwing Reese's Pieces in everything. They replaced the peanuts in a NutRageous with Reese's Pieces, reformulated the ingredient ratio for at least a third time, and released history's greatest candy bar.

A lot of it speaks for itself. The peanut butter is obviously doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.  While it acts as a binder alongside the caramel in the bar, this is decidedly a bar of Reese's Pieces, and more peanut butter is just on the other side of that candy shell. But right there is the true magic of this candy bar; entirely ignoring the conventional wisdom that has held candy bars back for decades, this candy bar has candy shell inside the bar. Because of the merely philosophical difference between the peanut butter inside the piece and the peanut butter binding the piece, the candy shell gets a chance to shine as a valid candy bar ingredient.

But what about the monkey's paw? Yes, it is too good to be true. It could use more caramel. The candy is a little bit one-note, even if that one note rocks. Too much of a good thing, though? Hardly. This might not be a perfect candy bar, but few things are perfect when they aim for greatness. And at the end of the day, isn't greatness great?

i give it 90 radicals out of 100, and 4 hype out of 5, making it "super hype"

Looks just like the photo.