“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”*…
“What do we do to things we don’t need/want/like?” Amy Erickson asks on her blog, Oh, Bite It!. “We fry it … that’s what!” In this case, the creator of deep-fried Pumpkin Spice Lattes and, for rougher days, deep-fried tequila shots has put Brach’s famous candy corn inside Pillsbury dough rounds and subjected the whole package to a bath of hot oil. The finished product is dusted with powered sugar, zeppole-style, and allegedly yields “doughy pillows” that are “just a shadow of that seasonal, sad, tooth-buster of a treat.”
In a world in which somebody has already fried every bagged item that comes in a snack size — M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls, Twizzlers — no one can really blame Erickson for daring to dream, but the ultimate end-of-October Frankenfood made Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs (“Two words: DEEP FRIED CORN CANDY”), and now that’s basically what the internet is doing, pretty unanimously and in repulsion:
May vomit at desk http://t.co/tOiTPj50CL via @rustyk5pic.twitter.com/kPTQ0rDjf
— Kyla Gardner (@gardnerkyla) October 20, 2014
Not everything needs to be fried RT @DarthVenn: Fried candy corn balls.pic.twitter.com/AvNzRUd20Y
— F. Thot Fitzgerald (@DaniFantastic) October 21, 2014
Fried. candy corn. LISTEN, MAYNE. pic.twitter.com/djDdrdQW7B
— Laraine Lujack (@therainebeaux) October 21, 2014
Why did the phrase “deep fried candy corn” just crawl across my timeline? Why is that a thing? What is the matter with people?
— H. G. WellActually (@andthenlynsaid) October 20, 2014
Deep fried? Fine. Candy? Okay. Corn? We’ll allow it. But those four words in THAT order? NAW.
— H. G. WellActually (@andthenlynsaid) October 20, 2014
Well, almost. Some blame is getting spread onto others known to fry a thing or two
:I believe Paula Deen did this. RT @__Huss: RT @Nerdonic: Satan. “@DarthVenn: Fried candy corn balls. pic.twitter.com/VZJSytXs6u“
— Styx (@RenRennyy) October 20, 2014
via Grub Street
* proverbial saying of unknown origin
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As we heat up the oil, we might send fertile birthday greetings to Luther George Simjian; he was born on this date in 1905. The son of Armenian parents in Turkey, Simjian escaped the genocide and made his way to the U.S., where he worked initially as a lab photographer at Yale Medical School– and began his career as a inventor, creating a projector for microscope images among many other devices.
In 1934 Simjian moved to New York City, where he invented a self-posing portrait camera, with which the photographed person could see and optimize their own image in a mirror before the photo was actually taken. In order to manufacture and distribute the camera, which became a success for use in department stores, he founded the company Photoreflex. Years later, after selling the invention and the trade name, the company was renamed Reflectone, after another of Simjian’s inventions, a kind of cosmetic chair with movable mirrors, via which one could see one’s own body from all perspectives.
In 1939 Simjian had the idea to build the Bankmatic Automated Teller Machine, probably his most famous invention. Despite skepticism from banks, he registered 20 patents for it and developed a number of features and principles that can still be found in today’s ATMs– including their name. He finally persuaded the City Bank of New York (today Citibank) to run a 6-month trial. The trial was discontinued — surprisingly not due to technical inefficiencies, but to lack of demand. “It seems the only people using the machines were a small number of prostitutes and gamblers who didn’t want to deal with tellers face to face,” Simjian wrote. Hence Simjian missed out on not only the commercial success, but also the fame associated with inventing the ATM. (This credit is often attributed to John Shepherd-Barron, who invented the first true electronic ATM, and Donald Wetzel, who directed a 5 million US-$ project to build upon Shepherd-Barron’s invention in the late 1960s.)
Simjian achieved real commercial success during World War II with another invention, his Optical Range Estimation Trainer, a kind of simple flight simulator, made from mirrors, light sources and miniature airplanes, used to train US military pilots in estimating the speed and distance of airplanes; Simjian sold over 2000 of these devices. Today’s successor of Reflectone (after a number of mergers and acquisitions), CAE, is still selling flight simulation and control technology.
Simjian founded several other companies in the following years and invented a number of very different devices and technologies,including a teleprompter, medical ultrasound devices, a remote-controlled postage meter, a golf simulator, and a meat tenderizer. He never stopped inventing in his laboratories in Fort Lauderdale. At the age of 92, he got his last patent on a process for improving the sound of wood for musical instruments– seven months before his death in 1997.
