Max2!

We -- and I speak quite broadly as a society, not just as part of a household -- have been assaulted by the horrendously awful Max5 commercial. Those of you in the U.S. of A. may recognize this despicable chocolate bar as the Take5, but its new alias has done nothing to endear itself to your neighbours in the Great White North. First of all, the bar is so Frankensteinian, if that's even a word, that you expect it was created by some slob who swept under his sofa, assembled the results into a bar-like shape, hit it with lightning a few times, and then sent it upstairs for management's approval. Secondly, the jingle has the most vapid lyrics ever conceived in all of jingledom, with gems like "Peanuts are just nutty" and "'Cuz more is more". In fact, you expect that the jingle writer just swept under his sofa, combined the results onto a single sheet of paper, and sent it upstairs for management's approval. Worst of all, the jingle grabs you around the neck like a professional wrestler, and you often find yourself involuntarily humming it and singing the "One more than four" verse.

Our dog loves chocolate. This is not to say that he sits enrapt in front of the TV every time a Max5 commercial comes on -- which, by my estimates, would be about 14 hours a day -- but he enjoys the occasional bar the way a high school drop-out enjoys the odd hoot. We found this out the hard way soon after we got him, when we returned to the car and discovered he'd eaten the four chocolate bars we'd foolishly left on the console wrappers and all. The only evidence that suggested we had had chocolatey confections in the car were a small brown smudge on the passenger seat and a grinning dog with refreshingly minty Aero breath. Needless to say, we didn't want this to happen again. Not only because chocolate can kill dogs, but because we bought those for ourselves, dammit! What are we going to do with two packages of Beggin' Strips?

But we have found two foods Nicky doesn't like: shrimp and pretzels. The shrimp I can at least understand. Nicky is a dog of the people. He's working class, having grown up in an abusive family. He even spent a few months in the slammer before we came along to bail him out -- though in those days he and the other dogs called it the Joint. He simply doesn't have the refined tastes for hoity-toity foods. Give him a bowl of kibble and a bowl of water -- maybe the odd pair of underwear -- and he's good for another day of sleeping on the sofa, pooping in the basement, and barking menacingly at passersby.

It's the pretzels I don't understand. Pretzels are a working man's food. You're done after a hard day at the mill and you head down to old Doc Johnson's for a beer and a bowl of pretzels, which you scarf down in huge handfuls while watching highlights from last night's game and bitching about your coworkers. But Nicky won't even touch them, and I've tried all the tricks: eating them in front of him while making "mmmmmm, these are so good" noises, burying them in his kibble, covering them in various sauces, even chucking them at him so he'll catch them in his mouth. Nada. He might have seen too many reports of G.W. Bush choking on one; he's pretty smart, for a dog. So's Nicky, come to think of it.

Enter Max5. While the website goes out of its way to not tell you the ingredients of Max5 -- which is extremely handy for those people with peanut allergies -- I assure you that pretzels are one of the five ingredients. Unfortunately, there's probably enough other stuff there that Nicky would actually devour these bars pretzels and all. So, in the hopes of saving our dog from an early death at the hands of chocolate, and to provide a semblance of a chocolatey treat for me and the missus, I submit to Hershey's the Max2 -- a bar made of shrimp and pretzels, covered in a layer of rich Hershey's chocolate. I even adapted the Max5 theme for the Max2, so all the hard work is done! I leave the marketing to Hershey's, and let's be honest: if they can sell that oddball conglomeration, the Max2 should be 60% easier.

Shrimp are really fishy
Pretzels go crunch!
Put them both together
You're sure to lose your lunch!
Max2! Three less than five!
Max2! Two-fifths of the taste, it's
Max2! 'Cuz five is jive!
Max2!