A Rough Draft of My Doctoral Thesis:The Aesthetics of M&Ms

I'm fixated on M&Ms lately. They're so convenient to eat. I have a crystal cookie jar in my livingroom that I have turned into the candy jar (what does that tell you about things at my house?), and I routinely empty large bags of both peanut and plain M&Ms into it. Recently, I noticed--much to my chagrin--how horridly gaudy they've become.

I blame it on the blue.

There really was no reason to add the blue one into the mix. The original mix was so pleasant: a rather natural and almost autumnal blend of red, green, yellow, orange, tan, and brown. Take a moment to appreciate how lovely the colors look together. Nice, isn't it?

And then, in a misbegotten marketing ploy to hype sales and rekindle interest in what many may have seen as an impossibly old-fashioned confection, the people at M&M/Mars Company decided to launch a campaign whereby the public got to vote on a new color of M&M. And blue won. Did they tell us that poor old tan would be replaced? Honestly, I don't remember. But look at the M&Ms now: red, green, yellow, orange, brown, and blue. Yuck. That's just wrong. It's like...a tutu at a funeral. It's Grandma at pole-dancing class. It's Michael Jackson in...you finish that one.

Sigh. I miss the old M&Ms. And I hate the fussy "Holiday M&Ms", too. Until the day after the Holiday. Then they get marked down to 50% off and I can dump them by the double-bagful into the crystal cookie/candy jar.