A Spoonful of Sucralose

Splenda has been challenged in court for saying that its artificial sweetener is — to quote the ad line — “made from sugar so it tastes like sugar”. At issue is the fact that key molecules have been changed in deriving sucralose from sucrose, with no actual sugar in the result, and that the majority of Splenda is filler supplementing the sucralose.


Photo: François Duhamel for Walt Disney Pictures © 2013.

Or something. You can go look it up if you want. My point is that Saving Mr.
Banks, Walt Disney Pictures’ current release about the difficult adaptation of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books into the eventual classic Disney movie, has roughly the same relationship to the truth as Splenda does to sugar.

Gift Rap

“Okay. Here’s the situation.”

To a large swath of Generation X, at minimum, it’s danged near impossible to hear those words and not feel the urge to reply “My parents went away on a week’s vacation.”



To a decidedly smaller segment of the population — we few who recall the music
video for “City of Crime”, a track played over the closing credits of the 1987 Dragnet movie — a similar trigger is provided by an even simpler and more mundane phrase: “Excuse me.”