Don't Mess With My Oreos!

Let's just get it out of the way right up front.  Oreos are the closest mankind has ever come to achieving perfection.  A pair of delectable chocolate cookies with just the right crunch, sandwiching a layer of exquisitely textured creme filling.  You don't even need to dunk these heavenly morsels, they stand on their own just fine.  And to top it off, you can enjoy 'em with STYLE!  Remember the theme song?  "A kid'll eat the middle of an Oreo first, and save the chocolate cookie outside for last."  Repeat as desired.  My dear Mr. Nabisco, you are the Patron Saint of Chocolaty Goodness.

Or were.

Somewhere along the way, Mr. Nabisco went overboard.  I don't know what caused it.  Boredom, maybe. Over-confidence, perhaps.  Maybe he got caught up in this attention-deficit decade that offers up two hundred varieties of everything from cellular phone services to potato chips.  Whatever the reason, under Nabisco's supervision, someone over in product development decided to screw around with greatness.  First came the Double Stuffed Oreo, which was perfectly acceptable.  That's just more of a good thing, like adding an extra patty on an In-n-Out Double Double.  That's greed, not change, and as Gordon Gecko so eloquently put it, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."  And so were the Oreo and its Double Stuffed comrade.

But Nabisco and his minions couldn't leave well enough alone.  No, they just went friggin' berzerk, like the Lucky Charms people did when they started throwing a bazillion different kinds of marshmallows into the fray, screwing up what was already a great cereal.  The Lucky Charms of my youth featured pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers.  That's all, and it was wonderful.  But then the blue diamonds crashed the party.  Completely unnecessary, of course, but it didn't stop there, oh no.  Next came the rogue purple horseshoes, and then all hell broke loose.  Red balloons, pots of gold, rainbows, little green hats, shooting stars, and now they've added hourglasses.  What's lucky about an hourglass?  It wasn't for DOROTHY!  Has Lucky the Leprechaun started dropping acid or something?  Sure, maybe at one time I was "always after his Lucky Charms," but now I just want to snap, crackle, and pop the little fucker's spinal column.

Okay, back to the Oreos.

Like I said, I had no problem with the Double Stuffed edition.  But suddenly, out of nowhere, Cool Mint Creme Oreos appeared.  No offense, Mr. Nabisco, but let's just leave the mint cookies to the Girl Scouts, shall we?  They've got it down friggin' pat.  Then, with Halloween right around the corner they whipped up a batch of Oreos with orange filling.  These mutant-cookies didn't look festive, they looked radioactive.  And then, chaos took over.  Spring Oreos with yellow centers, red-filled Oreos for Christmas, chocolate filled, strawberry milkshake, white fudge, Golden Oreos . . . cats and dogs, living together, MASS HYSTERIA!

This is not to say that the expansion Oreos aren't tasty.  The strawberry milkshake ones, in particular, are delicious.  But they're not real Oreos.  Call them something else, maybe, let's say, "Strawberry Smushkadoodles", whatever, and I'll be the first one in line.  And don't even get me started on the peanut butter Oreos.  They're the Cousin Oliver of the Nabisco Bunch.  Annoying, unwanted, funny-looking and, let's admit it, just a tad creepy.  Oreos are chocolate cookies with white creme filling.  Period.

It's time for consumers to take a stand, show 'em that we mean business. I propose a national boycott, forcing Nabisco and General Mills to gather up all the wannabe Oreos and A.D.D. Lucky Charms and ship them off to the Island of Misfit Food where they can hang out with Blue Heinz Ketchup, New Coke, and the McRib.

Or better yet, send them to China and give 'em to those starving kids my mom always told me about.


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