Has anyone else tried that sugar substitute called "Splenda?"

My wife, Roxanne, read about it, and with me being on a diet for the past few weeks, she decided to buy some for me. I've had it twice now, once a couple teaspoons on a bowl of Grapenuts, and another time as the sweetener in some so-called dietetic ice cream.

Let me tell you something, folks, calling the results of eating Splenda "having gas" is like calling the Space Shuttle an airplane. (Well, it would be like calling it an airplane if the damn thing could fly.) It's like calling a stick of dynamite a "partypopper." (No, wait. In the crowd I party with, dynamite is the partypopper of choice.) OK, fitting comparison escapes me. Let's get down to the issues.

Although I suspected Splenda the first time it happened, I didn't have enough empirical data then to blame the artificial sweetener. The second time, however, removed all doubts, as well as most of the wallpaper. I sat on the couch and blew holes in the cushions. I cleaned all the dustbunnies out from under the sofas and beds, in my own house as well as the one next door, and I blasted the doors right off their hinges in the living room.

My home lifted off its foundation, like Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz. I could have stuck a fan out the back door and a trumpet up my butt and flown my house to Dallas, playing a rendition of The Lonely Bull that would have made Herb Alpert eat his own heart.

Smoke alarms were going off six houses down, windows rattled the next county over, and strange lights can still be seen in the sky over most of North Arkansas. Roxanne went around turning off all the pilot lights and electrical appliances in the house, for safety reasons. Some guy downtown lit a cigar and his head exploded, burning down the hardware store, the flower shop, and the newspaper office (which is probably why you haven't read about this before now.)

My bottle of Beano melted in the medicine cabinet like the nuclear core at Chernobyl. Average global temperatures warmed four degrees, the polar ice cap broke into several pieces and floated south, and ocean levels rose three inches. Under some mountain in Montana, lights flashed, alarms sounded, and the nation went to Defcon Three. When paratroopers landed to cordon off and quarantine our little town, the lame excuse they used was "anthrax." We know better, don't we?

Sugar, my dog, is no longer my best friend -- I no longer have a best friend, or any friends at all, for that matter. I'll have to have the roof re-shingled, and most of the siding replaced. Everything in the garden is dead, dead, dead.

Now, I've eaten beans and I've eaten cabbage and I've even chased it all down with sour beer, but I've never been turned into an actual human wind tunnel like happened with Splenda. So being the curious sort, now I'd like to know: Is it just me and my particular metabolism?

For experimental purposes, I think you all should try it. Eat some Splenda, then we can take a survey. (For that matter, I think you all should try it anyway, survey or not, just so you can brag about the survival experience. I'll make T-shirts to sell, and later, much later, we will all have a big laugh.)

Meanwhile, looks like I gotta go. There's some guys at the door flashing Homeland Security credentials.

A sidebar on the Splenda story:

My daughter, Trista, called a few days after our granddaughter, Jaden, had returned to her home from visiting with us for about a month. She told me that she had been giving the 3-year-old a bath when the little scamp pooted in the tub, blowing bubbles in the bathwater.

She looked up at her mom with a rascally smile and a twinkle in her eye, and stated matter-of-factly, "Doggy did that."

"Now where did she get that, Dad?" my daughter demanded to know, "We don't even have a dog."

Ted Thomnpson is a Freelance Writer living in Harrison, Arkansas. You can see more of his works at http://www.phfft.com

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