X-Entertainment.com X-Entertainment.com A Proud UGO Affiliate
X-Entertainment loves Christmas and will not stop talking about it, ever.
« [Main Index] »

Dissecting Gummy Frogs, with Crab Chip bonus.

The latest Halloween Countdown entry, which I am dating as yesterday's to keep myself and check and not try to skip a day, turns one of the most memorable and disgusting moments of grade school into hot Halloween candy. It's the Gummy Frog Dissection Kit, and it comes with a knife and everything!

And as if that didn't spike your appetite enough, get a load of these:


I wrote a big long hate rant against Clamato in my youth, but the truth is, I've warmed to the idea. Went to Canada a while back and had dinner with a bunch of locals who all ordered Bloody Caesars, which more or less take a Bloody Mary and replace the tomato juice with Clamato. I've always regretted not joining in. I love Bloody Marys, but I never feel right ordering them because I'm always the only person in the place who wants one. Caesars are like, the official drink of Canada. Everybody drinks them. It's close enough to a Bloody Mary, and I'm tempted to go back there just so I can finally down the swishy red drink without having to be the only idiot in the joint with vegetables protruding out the top of his glass.

It's those inklings that make me not at all averse to Lay's new "Crab Spice Seasoning" chips. I never saw them before yesterday, so if they aren't new, they're at least new to my city. The list of ingredients vaguely refers to "crab spice seasoning," but I'd say that they're basically regular potato chips dunked in a pit of Old Bay. They really aren't that bad, and while I wouldn't christen them as the new "it boy" of Potato Chip Land, it's neat to see bright red crabs on the potato chip bag you're eating from.

Posted by Matt on 09/27/2007. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 151 comments

Crab Spice? My spice rack seems to be missing that one.

Chestnuts roasted by Bill @ 09/27/2007 8:06 PM

Ugh, I hated dissecting stuff. We had to do fish repeatedly (for some reason they see fit to dedicate a large chunk of the science curriculum EVERY YEAR to fish), and in middle school I had to do cow eyeballs twice, since one classmate missed that day and it needed to be done in partners. I nearly hurled several times because of that horrific formaldehyde smell. Eeeeewwww…I can still smell it!! Gah, thanks for reminding me, Matt. ;)

Chestnuts roasted by Frakkyfire @ 09/27/2007 8:10 PM

I have never dissected a frog, but in school I did dissect:

A flower
An egg
Owl pellets
A worm
A crayfish
A sheep’s heart
A squid
A fetal pig

Never did the cow eyeball either. Our high school had cats and rats, but those were reserved for anatomy class.

Chestnuts roasted by Bluejay @ 09/27/2007 8:13 PM

Bluejay, I was starting to think I was the only one who had to dissect a squid. I guess it makes sense now that I think about it, considering most places are landlocked. Outside of a worm in elementary and some owl pellets, that’s all I ever had to do. There was a picture of a pig fetus on my most recent biology book though. I covered that shit up with baby animal stickers. Full term baby animals.
I swear, you show me someone who didn’t hate middle school? I’ll show you somebody I’d like to punch in the face. Present company excluded, I’m sure.

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 09/27/2007 9:08 PM

Shuanfu, if it makes you feel better I dissected a fetal pig in Tennessee.

Chestnuts roasted by Ragnarok @ 09/27/2007 9:08 PM

I like frogs and cats too much to dissect them. :)

One thing I’ll never understand,is why it is that if you believe in Jesus,than you have to NOT believe in pollution. Noone’s ever been able to explain this to me. If God were real,wouldn’t he be angry if you threw garbage in his woods,or put chemicals in his air? I don’t understand the correlation between God being real and pollution not being real. Pollution has nothing to do with your religious beliefs or political affiliation,and I’m not some tie dyed Dave Matthews fan driving an electric car to protest rallies,but poison in a lake equals a poison lake,poison in the air equals poison air. It’s pretty cut and dry.
Sorry,feel free to flame me.

Chestnuts roasted by Kid Nicky @ 09/27/2007 9:10 PM

That frog looks so much better to dissect than the actual frogs we got to dissect.
We did all our dissecting in 10th grade.
It went from an earthworm that was about a foot long , the biggest GD crawfish I’d ever seen, through cows’ eyes, onto a horse head, with the capper being fetal pigs.
Our teacher, the greatest one I’d ever had, was a bit of a freak and made us name each thing. The only one I can recall, is that we named our pig Hamlet… and, it turned out to be a hermaphrodite.

Chestnuts roasted by Raechel @ 09/27/2007 9:22 PM

Back when I was in grade 10 (which was a whole whopping 8 years ago) we dissected frogs and pig fetuses..wait a sec..is that supposed to be feti? Anyways, it was a baby pig. And a lamb’s brain. Except I went to high school in a small Newfoundland town of 1500 people (counting surrounding areas) and the pigs weren’t preserved right. Or they were way old and were opened once and some shit. Anyways the pigs just were decaying as we were dissecting them. The smell was terrible and many of us (including me) ended up running to the bathroom and puking. Even if we didn’t do it we got a pass cause of that little incident. Eww..

Anyways..my dissection horror story

Chestnuts roasted by Mandi @ 09/27/2007 9:42 PM

In my small home town in Maine, the AP (advanced placement) science classes did cats. :( Thank God the system did NOT label me as an “advanced” student.

I did however fail bio my 10th grade year, because I refused to touch those damn fetal pigs. When I think about the smell, and that grey/green flesh…OMG…I am going to throw up. I had this OLD bitchy hard core science teacher whose only power in life was to pass or fail students…and of course she failed me.

The next year, I was a junior in with ALL sophomores for bio, but we had this new awesome young teacher, and she tells me, oh, I can get you a copy of the virtual dissection. She let anyone who wanted to, do the virtual dissection on the computer. That teacher kicked ass, we all loved her!

I wonder why schools dont just find a local vetrinarian, who would be willing to allow students in an operating room, to view SAVING an animals life?! I would have been all for that!

Chestnuts roasted by crazy_mainer @ 09/27/2007 9:55 PM

Hoo boy…I took zoology my senior year of high school, so we literally had to do one dissection for each class of the animal kingdom! From sponges to rats and everything in between. The worst were probably the rats, since they were literally SATURATED with formaldehyde. It smelled like moldy cheese, which seemed really wrong since I like cheese a lot. The scariest was some kind of parasitic worm, since, as my teacher put it, there was an “extremely slight chance” of catching it… I enjoyed learning about animals, but all that dissection put me off going into zoology.

Chestnuts roasted by The Real Andrew @ 09/27/2007 10:14 PM

I saw this thing at Target and thought it looked amazaing but then remembered that for as long as I can remember I’ve hated anything and everything to do with gummy. I just can’t do it. But, you make this sonofagun out of jello, and I’m there.

Until I read this article I’d never even heard of Clamato. I’m still not sure what the heck it is.

Wal-Mart has gone all out Christmas too. At least they had the decency this year to sepearate the holidays, putting the Christmas stuff in the gardening section and the Halloweenie stuff right smack dab in the middle of the store. Most of the time Halloween’s in the gardening section and as October progresses, the back row becomes a little Christmasy until finally giant Santa and Frosty statues are standing back there mocking Halloween, slowly advancing forward, and ruining my life.

They’re also carrying a new line of stuff that I think originated at Hot Topic. It’s called “Pretty Freekin Scary” and features cute little skeleton kids, the kind of stuff I would probably have propped up somewhere in my apartment all year round anyway. There’s a tote bag in the line with a picture of one of the kids on it with the words “You Smell Dead”. Guess Wally World’s trying to cash in on the Hot Topic crowd, or trying to compete with Target’s thing about putting creepy goth cartoon characters all over everything.

As far as dissecting goes, freshman year we went from small to big–working our way up from an earthworm, to a starfish, to a frog, to finally a fetal pig. I remember we had to scrape away the spine of the pig with the scaplel, cut the head open, peel back the skin, cut through the skull and after all that, if we could successfully remove the brain and spinal cord intact and all connected, we got an extra A+. My brain held up pretty well, but when I tried to take the whole thing out the spinal cord kind of fell apart in several pieces. And yeah, I agree, you NEVER forget that smell.

Chestnuts roasted by DJ D @ 09/27/2007 10:17 PM

Kid Nicky – I’m an environmentalist and I believe in God (at the same time!) and I’m actually the organizer of a group that is trying to get our church to become more environmentally friendly. The correlation between my faith and environmentalism is obvious to me, but are tons of people who still think, for some reason, that ‘subdue the earth’ means ‘destroy it’.

Chestnuts roasted by Jessica Marie @ 09/27/2007 10:23 PM

You guys only dissected animals in school? So very boring. Next you guys will tell me that no one here has sliced up a human.

Chestnuts roasted by Rob Zombies reimagining of Michael Myers @ 09/27/2007 10:23 PM

Back in Jr. High we cut up earth worms and a frog. It was gross but still managed to be very informative and a lot of fun. Call me crazy if you will… but I did have a frog foot, wrapped in brown paper towel, in my locker for a couple of days afterwards. I don’t recall what I did with it, but I am sure that I had grand plans of sticking it in someone’s PB&J sandwich at lunch or sneaking it into the hood of a random kid’s coat while standing in line for the bus.

Chestnuts roasted by Magic Toy @ 09/27/2007 10:33 PM

I was a little skeptical about those crab chips at first. But, then I realized that I love Zapp’s Crawtators, so now I would like to see how Lay’s compares.

Also, Bloody Marys are quite common to drink at breakfast or brunch around here, but I’ve never had one because I hate tomato juice. Bleh.

Chestnuts roasted by GloomyJack @ 09/27/2007 10:43 PM

I think the gummi frog dissection kit may be one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. I think I may have to try and track one of these down. Kind of surprised they didn’t have a gummi worm dissection kit as well. Always hated worms for some reason and never seemed to have a problem slicing one of those suckers in half to see what made them work.

Chestnuts roasted by jjwspider @ 09/27/2007 10:45 PM

Just to clarify,I did not mean that ALL Christians are anti-environment,my anger is directed towards those that are,and use Christianity as their dreasoning. My girlfriend is Christian and she is against pollution.

Chestnuts roasted by Kid Nicky @ 09/27/2007 10:50 PM

Yes, Old Bay DOES make everything better (though it’s generally used with seafood and potato chips). We’ve sold those in the grocery store where I work for a couple of weeks now, and many of my customers are very happy. You wouldn’t believe what some people would do for a chip that tastes like seafood seasoning.

Chestnuts roasted by starwenn @ 09/27/2007 11:03 PM

You’re right, Kid Nicky. That’s absolutely undreasonable.

Heh, heh…sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.

Chestnuts roasted by DJ D @ 09/27/2007 11:08 PM

That’s a very creative form of candy. Although it’s weird to see merchandise for a nearly-forgotten series of cartoon shorts that ran on Nicktoons TV a few years back.

In other Halloweeny news: for those interested in Clive Barker’s Jericho, there’s a free demo available for download on the XBox Live Arcade.

Chestnuts roasted by TB Tabby @ 09/27/2007 11:11 PM

TB Tabby Jericho might be the single reason why I decided to get a X-Box 360 over a PS3. I’ve been on the fence about it for a while but once I heard Jericho was coming out, that settled it. I’m a big first person shooter guy and completely obsessed with Clive Barker, so it’s a marraige made in heaven as far as I’m concerned….or actually, in hell I would think. I can’t wait to get my 360 now. Too bad I gotta wait a while so I can actually afford it! It’s gonna be my birthday/Christmas present to myself.

Chestnuts roasted by DJ D @ 09/27/2007 11:19 PM

Kid Nicky

Damn. I’ve typed like three different messages only to delete them all since they didn’t really represent exactly what I wanted to get across.

I’ll just say that in my opinion, sadly, some Christians probably deny the ill-effects of pollution (global warming, etc) because the people that are the most vocal in those causes are usually also the most vocal in calling anyone that subscribes to the idea of a higher power “idiots”.

I would bet that most Christians believe in cutting down on pollution, conserving resources, and not littering. You just don’t hear them ranting about it on TV, the newspapers, or the internet. They are just normal people who are living normal lives. You typically only hear the zealots on television… on both sides of the issue. Whatever the issue.

Chestnuts roasted by Magic Toy @ 09/27/2007 11:23 PM

I remember that during frog dissection, some of the boys in my class figured out that you could pop the lenses out of the frog’s eyeball. They spent the rest of the lab bouncing them on the floor. As I remember, they were quite bouncy. That’s my weird 7th grade story. As to dissecting other things, I also am from TN and had to dissect a fetal pig. I wonder if it’s a TN thing. I would have liked to get to dissect a squid, but alas, my poor landlocked state makes that nearly impossible.

Chestnuts roasted by Jill @ 09/27/2007 11:29 PM

Jill Who knew that frog eyeballs were all bouncy? Never would have thought it. I ate a fish eye once at a Chinese restaurant on a dare.

I’m just glad someone else around here lives in the south. I’m in SC and thought I was the only one. Not that I’m all full of some kind of super southern pride or anything. Just nice to know that someone else around here can relate. Although, I think someone else mentioned something about being from Texas once.

Chestnuts roasted by DJ D @ 09/27/2007 11:39 PM

I don’t know why, but those chips look really good. But the frog I am disappointed in. I would have liked to have seen frog guts.

Chestnuts roasted by kb @ 09/28/2007 12:26 AM

Add A New Comment!


This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.