Spring is in the air and what does that mean? Easter? Nope! Snoop down at Ft. Lauderdale with a camcorder? Guess again! Dick Cheney shooting lawyers? Well, that TOO, but that's not what this blog is about.

No, spring means the arrival of a whole new batch of peeps. These confections, originally designed to produce diabetic comas in elephants to put them to sleep for transport, were apparently the fourht gift of the unmentioned Magi at the birth of the Christ child.

Some years back, friends of mine and I were tipped off to the fact that peeps were flammable. This to us was the Holy Grail of pseudoscientific findings. We wasted no time bringing home a batch of peeps, which confirmed our information.

We of course followed this revelation by asking ourselves what other potentially flammable foods had we been served all these years? We figured that most foods with a high moisture content were out of the question, and soon were discussing the probability that many breakfast cereals could produce copious amounts of flame. Added to the fact that most breakfast cereals had a high caloric content, and a calorie is (of course) the amount of energy required to raise 1 cc of water 1 degree (yes, I know the difference between a calorie and a Calorie, which is actually a kilocalorie, but save it...this is not a nerd site!), we deduced logically that higher calorie foods would burn more readily.

So we readied our experiment. Armed with jumbo sized boxes of Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crisps and of course Captain Crunch in every conceivable variety (my favorite would be crunchberries), we headed off to our scientific testing facility, namely my friend's apartment. We decided that the experiment would be enhanced by imbibing in the rum and Cuban cigars my friend had just brought back from the Bahamas, and the experiment was shortly abandoned, and the cereals were sacrificed to the snack table as we watched "Mars Attacks!" for the 5,367th time.

The next year, the peeps discussion came up again. But we had heard the makers of peeps had wised up and changed the formula for the peeps so they wouldn't be so readily combustible. We were quite disappointed when our experiments confirmed this, as we felt it would have made a very solid foundation for a major advertising campaign.

We thought about revisiting the breakfast cereal experiment, but without the flammable peeps, rum, and Cuban cigars, it wouldn't be the same. we instead tried to make plastic easter eggs into "hamster balls" for my friend's pet Madagascar hissing cockroaches.