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Anent our recent discussion of PR-driven “news”, here’s an interesting specimen: three photos, with captions, from Snapple’s attempt yesterday to break the world’s record for largest ice pop. This event took place in Union Square, just a few blocks south of Tor.
Here’s one of Snapple’s suggested captions:Didn’t break the world’s record? That’s one way to put it. Reading that, you’d never guess how much wilder the real story was. As our mailroom guy Mike put it, “When I saw all those engines I thought it was a huge fire, but it was just a popsicle.”Today, Snapple and CoolBrands International launched new Snapple on Ice pops with an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest ice pop. Even though the 35,000 pound, 24 foot tall ice pop didn’t break the world record, New Yorkers had a great time kicking off the first day of summer.
For reasons that are not yet clear, the 25-foot popsicle suffered some kind of cooling failure, and seventeen tons of bright red slush were loosed upon Union Square. From the Times:
From Newsday:Under the noontime sun of New York’s first day of summer, Snapple, the soft drink maker, answered the question of whether a 17-1/2-ton Popsicle can be made to stand upright in Union Square.
It cannot.
In a brave attempt to surpass a Guinness record—“The World’s Largest Popsicle”—Snapple mixed and froze a gargantuan icy doppelganger of its new kiwi-strawberry flavored Snapple on Ice. Then the frozen treat was hauled by freezer truck from Edison, N.J., and raised with an enormous crane in Manhattan.
Alas, like James Arness in the 1951 alien thriller “The Thing From Another World,” the giant Snapsicle began to melt. Soon pedestrians were fleeing in not-quite terror, fire trucks were converging, and the police were closing off streets to contain the publicity stunt gone wrong.
From the Daily News:“A small wave of slush began moving across 17th Street,” said Ken Giddon, the president of Rothman’s, a clothing store on the square, who was watching from a perch of relative safety on the sidewalk. Asked what it looked like, he responded, “the red tide.”
“It wasn’t a bad smell. But the people stepping in it were not pleased,” Giddon added. “People were pretty bummed out with what was going on with their shoes.”
It took the Fire Department 45 minutes to hose away the mess.Bicyclists wiped out in the stream of goo. Pedestrians slipped. Traffic was, well, frozen.
Snapple officials had hoped to get in the Guinness Book of World Records and promote their new line of ice treats.
Instead, New Yorkers got a first-of-its-kind, first-day-of-summer mess.
“It was a big boo-boo,” said Kizzy Vazquez, 28, of Manhattan, as she watched the mammoth pink pop ooze while someone with a sick sense of humor blasted “Cruel Summer” over a sound system. “They should have had that [up] before the sun came out.”
Firefighters hosed down E. 17th St. between Union Square East and West, and about 100 yards of Park Ave. South, rinsing away a thick, sweet slime.
So, Snapple, New Yorkers had a great time kicking off the summer? Sort of. In a New Yorkish “oh yeah, giant popsicle gone wrong” kind of way. Except for the ones whose shoes were messed up, and the pedestrians and bicyclists who slipped in the muck, and the drivers caught in the traffic jam; but hey, next time there’s a giant popsicle meltdown it’ll be somebody else’s turn, so it all evens out in the end.* Otherwise, it was a complete hoot—just not the sort Snapple had in mind.
Anyone see the 50s Sky-Fie Horror movie The Blob?
A small wave of slush began moving across 17th Street,” said Ken Giddon, the president of Rothman’s, a clothing store on the square, who was watching from a perch of relative safety on the sidewalk. Asked what it looked like, he responded, “the red tide.”
Just a few blocks south of Tor, the general public learns what wading through slush is like.
I am so sorry I missed this. I was even in the neighborhood yesterday afternoon.
This is the greatest story I've ever seen posted on Making Light. Are we sure this wasn't some sort of promotional tie-in to "War of the Worlds"? Is that "red tide" going to form into some kind of "red plant"?
Dick: What did you do when you fell into the vat of chocolate?
Tom: I shouted "Fire!"
Dick: Why did you shout "Fire!"?
Tom: Nobody'd have come if I'd yelled "Chocolate!"
--[Smothers Brothers single, early 60s]
ps: I might have.
Pink-coloured slush? Kiwi-strawberry scented pink paper slush manuscripts ... I don't know if that's a nice thought.
Sounds a bit like the ectoplasm from Ghostbusters II. If that stuff went into the stormdrains would they cop a pollution fine? But they must have known it would melt, even slowly. Didn't they have some sort of receptacle, like a giant wading pool sort of idea, or saucer, or some sort of drainage arranged? Was it swamped because it all happened too fast?
Anyway, I do hope we get to see this in the "funny-hah, funny-peculiar or warm'n'fuzzy" part of the news coverage. I'd love to see footage.
Any idea of whether Snapple will at least have to pay for the clean-up costs?
According to histories of my home town, around 1907... or maybe it was 1917, I'm not in my library... there was a pond where they took to dumping the effluent from the molasses plant. After a while, the molasses pond was full of worms that formed a solid surface, all in parallel with one another, heads in the molasses and the rest radiating out. Just a wiggly pink mass of wormitude.
The waste pond was pretty obnoxious, and it got cleaned up a good long time ago. One has to wonder just what sort of a sight it was, and try not to imagine the smell. Worms, for crying out loud.
[If that asterisk is supposed to be a link, it's not working for me....]
Posts like this make me long to live in New York. I realize that sounds vaguely masochistic...but yesterday the most excitement we Boise-ites had was watching the humidity drop to 8% in 103 Degree heat. Not as scorching as Phoenix, not at dry as Yuma, just the ho-hum baking melancholy of the desert's edge intermountain west.
How I long for a giant slushy tide to provide some kind of conversation piece for a city that is starting to broil in it's own boredom.
I envy you your PR snafu. Is that twisted or what?
Am I wrong for making parallels to the Boston molasses flood in my head? Fewer fatalities, of course. But still very much ill-advised and sticky.
Oh, oh! It hurts to laugh that much.
And I'm sure that for those who had to clean it up, it wasn't funny at all, just a huge nuisance.
That is one of those "only in New York" moments, for sure.
I'm amazed this didn't happen last Friday, though -- that's just about the only traffic-jam-inducing thing (up to and including the helicopter crash) that I didn't run into trying to get from New Haven to Midtown to Pennsylvania that day! My route took me right through Union Square, too. I guess at least one minor deity was smiling down upon me.
Bob O., the asterisk doesn't go anywhere, but that's okay, because it's not supposed to. Try putting your cursor over the link and leaving it there for a moment. (Then go use the same trick on the various items in the particles/sidelights lists. All kinds of seekrit coolness.)
Well, you know, people will probably remember the Snapple name long after they've forgotten the inunduation of slush, so maybe it was good PR, after all. (Gulp!)
Oh, I wish I'd seen this! I've been up at Union Square several times in the last week, but not that day...
For me, the media storm about this (or about that girl in Ethiopia with the lions) ranks high on my "OOPS" meter ... "Observations On Planetary Silliness". (Not the stories themselves, but the way the "news" media pick it up endlessly.)
I'm not saying all news has to be serious and depressing but even the lighter stories should inform. For New Yorkers, yes, "Avoid 17th Street because of the Snapple snafu" is news. For the rest of us, not so much.
But I guess that "PR News" is part of the price we pay for actually still having news on radio and TV.
Domendur
Sundre writes:
Am I wrong for making parallels to the Boston molasses flood in my head? Fewer fatalities, of course. But still very much ill-advised and sticky.
Nice closer in the Daily News:
The remains of the pop were loaded into a freezer truck to be carted back to Edison, N.J., which apparently is where monster frozen treats go to die.
Checking out the molasses flood link led me to pages on Lake Peigneur. How could I have missed this?
I don't really dig on what you edit, but if all it takes is a big-big popsicle to get your attention than I know what my slush friends have been doing wrong all these years.
oh noes this is amazing, any pictures anyone?
It's a nice closing line.
I'm wondering whether the disastrous liquid core could have been produced by trying to freeze the entire popsicle from the outside in. Unless they flash-froze the thing, or froze successive layers onto it from the center out, reverse distillation would freeze out water ice on the surface, causing the solution at the popsicle's core to become increasingly saturated, which would lower its freezing point. Testing the core temperature by inserting the ice-lolly equivalent of a meat thermometer would only tell you that the material at the core had reached a temperature at which the initial solution would freeze solid.
Hi, Alex. Got rejected, did you?
Thewebguy, follow the links for photos.
There's a course at MIT where one full semester was spent on designing an improved industrial ice-pop freezing machine. When students protested that this was silly, the professor showed some slide (which dates this anecdotes). "It's a 3-billion per year industry. Hence a 1% improvement in manufacturing is worth $30,000,000. Any more questions?
When me and my brothers were children, I asked my brother Andy this riddle:
"What do you get if you stuff our father in the freezer?"
The standard answer is:
"an ice pop."
He thought for a while and said:
"a Bird's-Eye View."
Right now, I'm picturing waves of pink goo pouring down into the IRT, causing the trains (and passengers) to stick in place, rather like a giant roach motel.
The subway rats would not only be immune to the ill effects, they'd become civic heroes, unsticking distressed straphangers by licking away the sticky goo.
I think this must have been picked up by CNN's Weird Images feature, because our local NBC affiliate had a photo of this on at the end of the late night news. The shot I saw was of some poor bike messenger picking himself up off the deck. When the fiasco gets air time in Hawai'i...
My fiance works at Bryant Park, which was apparently Snapples first choice for a venue. They turned Snapple down, and are now glad they did.
Not incredibly impressive, but here's a few photos I found.
One of the three Snapple-supplied photos in Newsday's slide show did use the Snapple-suggested caption. Newsday credited AP with the first two, and AP's captions in turn say the pics came from Snapple, but the third (using Snapple's caption) was credited to Businesswire, who made no mention of its origins.
Looks like Businesswire doesn't distinguish between press releases and news copy.
Looks like Businesswire doesn't distinguish between press releases and news copy.
Precisely. Unfortunately, some of the outlets that use Businesswire either don't know, don't care, or neglect to tell their readers. From the Businesswire site:
Business Wire disseminates full-text news announcements from thousands of companies and organizations worldwide (our members) to news media, financial markets, disclosure systems, investors, information web sites, databases and other audiences.
I am suddenly reminded of the even more misguided Thanksgiving turkey promo on "WKRP", which ended with Mr. Carlson saying "As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
You can get video of the pop melting here.
Teresa, I wonder if you are right on the freezing issue -- your hypothesis makes sense. I work in food processing, and when we freeze something big, like an entire pallet of product, it gets air blast frozen at -100 F or lower. In this case brine immersion would make more sense.
While there is no published explanation of how they did this, the process that I would use would be to build a stainless steel form that can stand on its own when filled, and can be picked up and tipped by a gantry. The open top of the form should be one of the long sides of the pop-to-be. First, spray the inside of the form with something, such as 100 cans of PAM, that will help the pop release from the sides later. In a cold room I would fill the form with pop solution that is within a few degrees of freezing. Then lower it quickly into a circulating cold brine bath well below the tested freezing level of the pop solution. Use chilled stainless steel rods to circulate the pop solution a bit before it freeezes hard. (You can also try the supercooling/crystallization approach, if you are really good at this and are willing to do a lot of testing first.) Lift the form out of the brine when the pop is fully hard, and gently extract it out onto cold-stable food quality plastic on top of a custom built pallet (you want air circulation under it). Use a frame and gantry to move it to an industrial blast freezing chamber, and leave it in there for 24 hours, which should drop the core temperature under -40 F. Wrap in something insulating, and transport in a freezer trailer. (And make sure it is really freezing -- a lot of freezer trailers depend on the product being deep chiled and packed in well so that there is limited surface area to gain heat).
I can envision dozens of suit-clad MBAs, sitting around a table, sipping their Snapple, and all vigorously agreeing that raising a giant popsicle in June is an *excellent* idea, a *quality-driven* idea, an idea that will result in *increased market share* and create a new marketing *paradigm*.
They were unware, of course, that during the discussion their hair was slowly and irreversibly becoming pointier.
Now, I've gotta ask; does this publicity stunt fit the Infernokrusher paradigm, or is 17-and-a-half tons of deliquencent summer snack not explode-y enough?
Hmmm. Looks like they failed to use a refrigerated truck. In June. In New York. Presumably through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Mmmm, tunnel-soot!
It worked fine during the test run in January....
Alas, thise that fail to learn the lessons of Project Habbakuk are doomed to repeat them.
Now you see, this is why I get bummed sometimes that I no longer work in Manhattan...
the video shows someone pulling melted ice out and it sure didn't look as if it was done in layers to me.
Andrew Willett: Oh, thanks, I know about the seekrit coolness.
It's just that, when it's used hereabouts, I usually see it attached to a working link. So I wondered if the asterisk was supposed to lead somewhere.
Mike Bakula: ...you make a good point. Clearly, the problem was in their not thinking big enough. Frozen-Snapple battleships cruising into New York Bay, anyone?
an actual photo of the pink sludge, with accurate caption:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/n/a/2005/06/22/national/a112347D95.DTL&o=0
" A 25-foot-long, 17 1/2-ton popsicle made of frozen Snapple melts in New York's midday sun, flooding Union Square with a sticky pink fluid that sent pedestrians scurrying for higher ground."
Yes but, who, or what, would want to lick a 17-ton ice pop?
And do we want to know why it's in New York.
Others beat me to mentioning the Boston molasses spill, but there is an interesting detail to that incident I've rarely seen discussed. There is some speculation that the molasses was intended for use in the production of bootleg rum.
i'm certainly relieved that no one has started to take up a collection for environmental cleanup to be called the Snapple Disaster Slush Fund.
triticale:
...but there is an interesting detail to that incident I've rarely seen discussed. There is some speculation that the molasses was intended for use in the production of bootleg rum.
Legal rum. Prohibition was a year away.
How about Kiwi Snapple Rum!
Just what King Kong fancies on a hot day.
Two contributing factors to all the fun. The AP is reporting that a Snapple spokesperson has admitted that the pop may not have been frozen all the way through. And as Larry has already pointed out, they just had this in a crate on the back of a flatbed truck. Bad move.
(BTW, I aplogize for the spelling and grammar -- I was perhaps thinking faster than my fingers can type.) When I first heard this story, I was struck that no-one had thought of embedding refrigeration in the "popsicle". Did they expect that it would not melt so fast as to be a problem? Was there a thermodynamics guy on their team? Inquiring minds want to know...
The SFgate photo is accompanied by a string of sidebar ads, one of which is for a chocolate fountain.
Special Revenge of the Pop-sith-cle joke:
"You! You were the frozen one!"
This discussion is taking me back to the halcyon days of Open Thread 2.
does this publicity stunt fit the Infernokrusher paradigm, or is 17-and-a-half tons of deliquencent summer snack not explode-y enough?
A 17+ ton popsicle seems like just the thing to krush your average inferno.
A sad scene. It reminds me of the great jello disaster of 1987, when a 3-foot-by-4-foot altar of Jell-O, glitter, and decapitated dollheads -- destined for the Radarangels Jello Art Show -- failed to achieve the requisite solidity, and splooshed out ankle-deep all over the sub-basement of F.X. McRory's. The Angels were so distressed that the bartender hosed them with single-malt to calm them down.
Desserts do not necessarily scale up, architecturally.
I like the coverage at AdRants, particularly this:
Our man on the street, Bucky Turco, reports "a very angry, but cute promotion girl who was supposed to tell people to 'watch their step' as they cross the Snapple river instead was telling me, 'Can't you ask me before you take my picture?' My response: 'Can you not wreck my streets with a big smelly ice dildo?'"One of the less charming features of street life in New York is the frequency with which whole blocks are taken over by movie production companies, catalog shoots, etc. Evidently, the fact that these entirely commercial entities have bought a permit from the city entitles their reliably fatheaded employees to give orders to law-abiding citizens about what they may and may not do on the public streets. A more concise example of their impenetrable sense of entitlement--I get to pour crap all over your street for a publicity stunt, but you can't take my picture--I'm not sure I can imagine.
Patrick, I think the promotion girl with attitude is the one in these two pictures, possibly seen before and after the "giant ice dildo" remark was deployed.
If you're working a PR event and have the company logo embroidered on your shirt, you've got no grounds to object when someone takes your picture.
Amen to the point about film and photo shoots camping in the streets. They have a real problem distinguishing between "the city has given you permission to do this here" and "you own this area for the duration of your shoot."
Bill, thank you for reminder. That was a great thread.
Perhaps I'm weak, but I looked at those pictures of the PR fluffer and I thought, "You poor thing. Bless your heart."
A prescient note from Robert Frost:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say with ice.
From what I've tasted of frozen Snapple
I hold with those who blow shit up.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know that'd be really cool,
'Cause then we could crush it with something
That could put out the fire
And then maybe explode?
adamsj:
When first I chanced
to read your verse,
a groan did rise from within.
But reflecting,
I printed it
and tacked it to my corkboard.
My inner muse
it does incite,
a chuckle infernokrusher.
Every day I find something new to put on my "museboard", today is your day. Any thoughts on a title for your poetry? I find "In the [Blast] Clearing" infernokrusher-esque...
adamsj: Oh that's so funny. Only the hysterical laughter triggered a coughing fit because -- oh never mine. That's hysterical. I hold with those who blow shit up too
MKK
PS: When I read it out loud to Jordin he thought it was Mike Ford. Greater praise hath no man.
John Houghton - Legal molassas, bought in anticipation of a coming market shift. It wasn't going to become as hard to get as some drug precursors are now, but the value was going to jump.
MSNBC just put the Snapple Pop (I nearly put "Crack" at the start, helpless consumer-slave that I am) in their Peculiar Postings section.
I must say that their photograph really drives home how much Snapple was coming off the truck bed. (And I thought it was a freezer truck that transported it, not a flat-bed with insulation? Hmm... gotta read more carefully.)
Dick: What did you do when you fell into the vat of chocolate?
Tom: I shouted "Fire!"
Dick: Why did you shout "Fire!"?
Tom: Nobody'd have come if I'd yelled "Chocolate!"
That's the album version:
"What did you do when you fell into the vat of fertilizer?"
. . . .
"Nobody'd have come if I'd yelled "Shit!'"
At least the Boston Globe was not impressed by the press release; it ran the AP pic of the draining ice pop with a comment about the mess it caused.
Heh. Was there, the snapple lady was there, t'was real disappointing when they had to put the popsicle away. But the smaller versions they were giving out were reeeeeeeeal tasty.
pericat: "Looks like Businesswire doesn't distinguish between press releases and news copy."
BusinessWire is 100% press releases.
a big smelly ice dildo
okay, i just spewed tea all over my keyboard. another computer ruined.
thanks a lot, nielsen haydens
New InfernoKrusher Poetry caption:
My dildo leaks at both ends
and makes an awful mess,
but ah my foes, and oh, my friends,
that makes for better press!
Same pattern (indecipherable urls). They've found another way in. Time to get out the steel wool and Borax.
This reminds me somewhat of the not-exactly successful at first apparent attempt to make lime jello in a bathtub in the Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington DC on Labor Day Weekend 1974.
======
Hmm, maybe Snapple should have done some research into e.g. how the radar site at Thule Greenland was constructed (the permafrost had to be kept -frozen- while four extremely large concrete pads to each hold a football-field-sized radar fan upgright got poured and solidified...)
Click here to see picture and press release.
MIT Physicists Create New Form Of Matter
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.
The key to be able to view these superfluid vortices was to reduce the temperature to an extremely cold temperatures, when the fermionic gas was cooled to about 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin, very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). "It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "Plus, to use a different flavor of Snapple. We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever." Scaled up to the density of electrons in a metal, the superfluid transition temperature in atomic gases would be higher than room temperature. "High enough, in fact," said Ketterle, "for noontime sun of New York’s first day of summer, near 17th Street."
He wore a tee-shirt. The front read, in huge letters, "M.I.T."
The back read, in very small letters: "... because not everyone can go to Caltech!"
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