My students asked me if I've ever eaten Dippin Dots.I have, and there's one thing you should know: Dippin Dots are not the ice cream of the future. They are an abomination thrust upon real Americans who like their ice cream pure and creamy. I'm not exactly sure what they are made of; all I know is I tried them once. Kinda taste like frozen plastic beads. Remember when beads were all the rage? My girls loved them. Bead stores sprung up across the country: rows and rows of buckets filled with colored plastic beads. Make bracelets! Make necklaces! Make dad broke! They finally went the way of Cabbage Patch Kids; all their outlets dried up. The salvage companies swooped in and held all the product in storage for the next outbreak of bead fever. But it never came. I think they sold them to a guy who owned a cryogenic lab. That's my theory, but I'm not sure. One thing I am sure of: ice cream is the ice cream of the future.
Note: where do you find the most Dippin Dots kiosks? At shopping malls! Further proof of their evil. I have a hard time with shopping malls. They emit electromagnetic waves that scramble my brain whenever I drive within a two mile radius. True story - I once drove in circles around a mall for approximately three and a half hours, completely unaware of what I was doing. I was only able to break free of it's grip when the mall closed for the evening. It's what Ufologists call "lost time." I had a lost time episode! I have no idea what transpired, but I felt violated. I tried to work in a mall once, but I blacked out my first day. They found me endlessly riding the escalators. Down one side, u-turn, back up the other side. They say I was gone for over six hours.
That wasn't my worst job. I flunked a few classes in college and had to attend summer school to make up the credits. One of the classes was a theology seminar, and since I went to a Catholic college, I couldn't just blow it off. So I took two courses at Loyola in the city. Thing was, they were night courses, so I had to work graveyard shift. I couldn't work a regular day shift because I wouldn't be able to get off work early enough to make the 16 hour commute to the city. The only company hiring a third shift at the time was a new amusement park called "Great America." That's right, the only hell worse than a mall. I watered flowers. For eight hours. Oh, I got a lunch break: Dinty Moore Stew in a can from the vending machine. My co-workers were college students, too. Most of them. They asked me what I was studying. "Oh, Augustine, Henry James." "Who?" was the only response.
"I'm taking a course at the local college," one of them said. "It's really cool; it's called Philosophy of Star Trek." Another co-worker chimed in: "That sounds like the dumbest course anyone could ever take." The first one countered with, "So what are you taking?" To which he responded, "How To Be A Better Student." I laughed and mentioned the ultimate irony if somebody managed to flunk that course. "I did," he said. "This is my second time."
By the way, amusement parks usually boast several strategically located Dippin Dots kiosks. Draw your own conclusions.
You can find Dippin Dots at most Major League Baseball parks, too. But that's okay, they have baseball there as well. And real ice cream. I like it when they scoop it into those miniature batting helmet replicas. The only bad thing about that is sometimes I fell like Hannibal Lecter when he was eating that FBI guy's brains right out of his head. Yikes. Speaking of baseball: The best hitter in major league history was Ted Williams, and guess what? His family had him cryogenically frozen. Three guesses where he is right now, and the first two don't count.
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