Yoo-Hoo or boo-hoo?

One of the interesting things about shopping at Tractor Supply is that they have candy you don't see elsewhere. Your average gas station has to make room for the 98,000 varieties of Reese's, so they don't have space for Big Hunk Bar or Mallo Cup. Or this.  

As an adult who remembers Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinks fondly, I felt compelled to purchase this candy bar. I'm not sure Yoo-Hoo is well known outside the northeast, where it originated in 1928 (in New Jersey, to be specific). Yogi Berra was a pitchman for it for decades. In the eighties it was still considered a regional favorite.

Yoo-Hoo is not exactly chocolate milk, as its unusual composition allows it to stay fresh at room temperature, and its more watery consistency puts some folks off. But there's no denying it has a very particular type of chocolate flavor that most people enjoy. 

It that way it is like Hershey milk chocolate, and for the same reason -- bizarre American inventiveness. Milton Hershey was already rich from his caramel business when he decided to get in on the ground floor of the milk chocolate craze that was sweeping Europe. He went to Switzerland to learn the secret -- making milk chocolate is a lot more complicated than you'd think -- but the Swiss wouldn't tell him. So Milton just invented his own process, resulting in that unique sour-milk tang that sets Hershey's apart from all the other milk chocolate to this day. 

Similarly, juice bottler Natale Olivieri set out to make a chocolate beverage and just worked it out on his own, using canning methods to make a shelf-stable chocolate drink. Thus, nothing else tastes quite like a Yoo-Hoo.

Or does it? Does this Yoo-Hoo branded chocolate bar have the same taste? That is what I set out to discover. 

And the answer is -- not really. I kind of thought it did, and then maybe it didn't, so I bought a bottle of Yoo-Hoo to compare it directly. I have to say no; it's similar but not the same as the unusual Yoo-Hoo flavor. 

Here's why:  

Yes, the Easter candy giant Palmer of Reading, Pennsylvania, manufactures the Yoo-Hoo chocolate bar under license. Palmer chocolate is the sort that you give to kids, because they don't know enough to be discriminating in the least. It's fine -- but it's not great. And I think they failed to really capture the Yoo-Hoo taste. So while there's nothing wrong with it -- hey, even so-so chocolate is still chocolate -- I fear it does not live up to its label. But it’s still a break from the 98,000 Reese’s varieties.

So that's my report for today. It's been a while since I did one of these, taking a caloric hit for the team to help you spend your candy allowance wisely. You're welcome! 

Walmart lies.

Just for the record, Walmart totally lied to me and knew they were lying and did it anyway. 

One day I went into the store, as one does, and forgot to bring my reusable bags. The People's Republic of New York has outlawed the complementary plastic bags that have been used for forty-odd years, but grocery stores all have paper bags that the consumer can buy for a nickel. That's the law, and they all comply. 

Except that this time, with a cart full of Walmart crap, I pulled up to the checkout to find that the paper bags were no longer available. I had forgotten my stupid and probably germ-laden reusables, but figured I could blow forty cents like a Rockefeller on paper bags. But no -- no paper bags anymore. 

I guess I could have just taken everything out of the store loose, but that would be hard to deal with in the car, and that's if the Greeter Patrol didn't stop me because it looked like I hadn't checked out. This is not some lawless horror show like Portland or Chicago, where one just takes what one wants and leaves. So I bought some more stupid reusable bags. 

When I got home, I wrote to Walmart, asking what was up with no paper bags. Sadly, I did not retain the conversation, but the poor schlub (probably on the other side of the world) explained to me that this was Walmart's latest effort to save the environment in which we live, by doing away with paper bags. 

Uh-huh. Okay. I thanked the person with the phony name and said I knew he/she/it was lying, but had to repeat the company line. 

Proof came a couple of months later, when I was in Pennsylvania, and stopped into get a couple of things from their Walmart. And what was at all the checkouts? 

Plastic bags. 

So clearly, Walmart -- a company that sells more cheap and easily broken plastic garbage than any other on Earth -- doesn't give a damn about the sainted environment. (I know, you're heading for the fainting couch as you read those words.) 

I still don't know why the New York Walmart decided to make life even more annoying for its customers than the law requires. I doubt they think that New York's environment must be preserved but Pennsylvania's can go to hell. But, yeah, Walmart lies, just like every other damn institution these days. You literally cannot trust any institution to tell the truth about the slightest thing. 

Shame on you, Walmart. You can't even be honest when it would cost you nothing. I shall be making a greater effort to avoid Sam Walton's misbegotten beast in the future.

A chunk of history.

I found this brick by the site where an old retaining wall had been taken down and a new one put up. 

"Salina 40" is written on it; this meant nothing to me. But a short visit to the Internet yielded some interesting information. 

Salina, Pennsylvania, about five and half hours west of here by car, was a factory town built in the early 1900s to house workers at the Kier Firebrick Company. Kier was quite an operation at the time. Established in 1874, it "was known internationally for building the first continuous tunnel kilns for producing fire brick. The new kilns allowed streamlined manufacturing of the brick, which was more efficient than the traditional beehive-shaped kilns," according to an article in the Trib. The firebrick, which was made with and used to endure extremely high temperatures, is probably the type seen here labeled No. 40 (although according to Steve Nelson of the town's historic society, the No. 9 was supposedly the finest firebrick ever made).

Alas, nothing remains but the brickworks' foundation now. It closed in 1981. I suppose it wasn't a matter of the brick-making all going to China, but rather the demand for firebricks bottoming out. The Trib article said that "A vital part of the Industrial Revolution, fire brick companies were busy in the late 1800s and first half of the 20th century producing the fire brick to line equipment in steel mills and locomotives, both industrial processes involving high heat." But materials science came a long way in the twentieth century, and diesel-electric locomotives overtook steam in the United States between the 1930s and 1950s. 

Still, it's another sign of what happened to Pennsylvania, which at times led the country in oil, natural gas, coal, and steel. This purple swing state seems to have been stuck in a rut for a long time now -- or has it?

Salena Zito, whose first name is coincidentally almost the same as this town, has a different take in one of her periodic dispatches for PJ Media. She finds that there are still plenty of manufacturing jobs in the state of Pennsylvania, but too few people qualified to do them:

For generations, people in the U.S. were known for their work ethic, for making things, for using their hands alongside their intellect, from farming to mining to building roads and bridges. Our parents and grandparents and their parents before them built this country with those types of skills.

     Those same jobs are often not just financially rewarding but also emotionally rewarding, often giving children and grandchildren the opportunity to remain in the communities that suit them rather than migrating to larger cities or faraway states that break up those family and community bonds.

On the other hand, a lot of Americans have reason to distrust factory towns because we know what happens when the factory closes, perhaps because the company went bust or decided to move its jobs elsewhere. It's like the sun went out -- everything in town revolved around one workplace, which granted light and warmth. You can't even leave because your house has lost its value because everyone else wants to leave. The children flee for other places. It's an awful situation.

On the other other hand (get someone to lend a hand), people on the Left tend to look on every instance of manufacturing and think of Blake's dark satanic mills. They act as if the Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened just last Saturday, that nothing has changed in 109 years. For generations, our social elites have despised manufacturing as ecologically dangerous, soul-killing, exploitive, fit only for morons. Few of them have ever spent a day at a real job, I suspect. 

I guess when you've been to college you know everything.  

I certainly don't know everything. I don't know enough mechanics or physics or engineering to get any kind of a advanced job with a plant, but all those things go into it. 

I also have no idea why a Salina No. 40 firebrick wound up in a retaining wall, seemingly all on its own, now left by the side of the road. Some mysteries just have to remain mysterious.