South Bend Report, Part 1

We spent today in South Bend, Indiana and no, we did not go to see Notre Dame. I saw something so much better than a university best known for something wholly unrelated to academics. Today, I saw a bear's natural habitat. The Studebaker Museum in South Bend has one of the two 1951 Studebaker Champions used in The Muppet Movie, subject of Fozzie Bear's memorable line "A bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker," complete with the remnants of the whacked-out paint job courtesy of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. I'm pretty sure the one I saw today is the one from the second picture in that link. It was the one that was chopped up so that a little person could sit in the trunk and drive the car by way of a camera mounted in the bullet nose, and was used for the wide shots where you see the whole car actually driving with a poly-cotton bear at the wheel. This, incidentally, was one of the main reasons they used a '51 Champion.

Amazing, the power the Muppets have. Fozzie's Studebaker sits probably 30 feet from the Studebaker carriage that Abraham Lincoln took to Ford's Theater on the night he was shot, and I still thought Fozzie's Champion was the neatest thing there.

We also toured the South Bend Chocolate Company and I've now found another job I definitely do not want to have. You know how, in your box of chocolates, each different flavor of creamy filling has a different swirl on the top? Seems that, although some chocolate manufacturers provide you with a decoder ring for figuring out the difference between a raspberry creamy filling (yummy) and an orange creamy filling (ick) before you have to spit one out into your bare hand, the reason for the different swirls is not so you don't accidentally bite into something nasty (again, whose idea was it to put orange creamy filling into perfectly good chocolate?). The real reason they code the chocolates with the swirls is so they know what they're putting into the box when they pack them, given that they can't take a bite out of each one to know if they're packing buttercream-filled or chocolate-filled confections. Which is where my new Job I Do Not Want To Have comes in. The swirls do not get there on their own. Nope, there is a guy whose job, for eight hours a day, is to stand there and manually swirl each chocolate as it comes out of the chocolate-covering machine. He has a set of doohickies that look like bent paperclips and all he does is tap each candy as it rolls by to put the right swirl pattern on the top to match the flavor of creamy filling that went in. I saw it with my own eyes. The guy spends all day just tapping chocolates. And you thought they were just being nice to you with that map.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you all about the Chocolate Spies and Tippicanoe.