Commuting - If your NYC Commute wasn't hard enough already.

June 22, 2005

A publicity stunt gone wrong left park-goers in Manhattan dealing with a big sticky mess Tuesday. NY1's Adam Balkin filed this report.

It seemed like a good idea; a marketing gimmick for the first day of summer.

“We're here in Union Square Park trying to break the Guinness Book or World Records, and we have this kiwi-strawberry 39,000-pound ice pop,” said Wendy Kaufman, otherwise known as "The Snapple Lady."

It was an ice pop so big, it took a crane to lift it into position in Union Square, where a Guinness official was on hand to judge if the pop was a record-breaker. The idea was to promote Snapple's new line of frozen desserts.

But one thing the promoters apparently forgot; a massive ice pop doesn't like 85-degree weather.

“The giant icicle is melting into the street,” said witness Robert Mennella. “You can imagine when that stuff melts and gets into the street it creates a sticky, messy, hazardous situation.”

It wasn’t hazardous enough to injure anyone seriously, but for a while the sugary mix forced police to stop traffic around the park.

“They waved me through, and they were letting some buses through. They said, ‘Just be careful.’ I didn’t know what was on the road,” said Nile Heffernan, a cyclist who fell and got cut because his bike slipped in the melting sugar water. “Nobody said, ‘Get off your bike,’ or anything. “I didn't know, I just came around the corner. It's like oil.”

So how do you clean up this kind of spill? Bring in the fire hoses.

So much for the publicity stunt.

“We're not going to stand the pop up. It’s just gotten too hot,” said Snapple’s Lauren Radcliffe. “With the heat that we've been having, unfortunately the pop did melt, and we're sorry. The mess is being cleaned up in the street.”

Snapple's dreams of breaking a Guinness record melted away too. They never got a chance to weigh their ice pop, so they'll never find out if it breaks the 20,000-pound record set in the Netherlands in August 1997.

- Adam Balkin
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=51671

More Pics
http://www.adrants.com/images/snapple/
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/06/21/fruity_juice_brand_attacks_union_square.php

Thought I do wonder if a cyclist who rides through a giant melting popcicle with no sense that it could be dangerous might need a few riding lessons :)http://www.adrants.com/images/snapple/

They put all the planning in to create a 20 ton popsicle, yet no one realized that it would melt? Hilarious!

Though you have to think, how many times do you have the chance to ride through the mess created by a giant melting popsicle? I'd have ridden right to it just so I'd have a story to tell my friends:

"Oh this cut? Yeah, I got it when I fell off my bike. I slipped on a puddle of sugar water from a giant melting kiwi-straberry Snapple popsicle."

"I could have DIED."

Then the women will want to make babies with you.

Though you have to think, how many times do you have the chance to ride through the mess created by a giant melting popsicle? I'd have ridden right to it just so I'd have a story to tell my friends:

"Oh this cut? Yeah, I got it when I fell off my bike. I slipped on a puddle of sugar water from a giant melting kiwi-straberry Snapple popsicle."

"I could have DIED."

Then the women will want to make babies with you.

It must be the air in Canada, must be...

Wow.

Just... Wow.

[edit] I never get anything that cool on MY commute... :(

Yeah I heard about it this morning. What a moronic thing to do.
There are people starving in this country and we got morons making giant 10 ton sandwiches and putting 200 pounds of sliced ham on a mattress and calling it art.

Here's a story of hindsight being 20/20 from my old engineering place.
Someone wanted one of the engineers to do some consulting and help him design a children's sneaker that had a little pack of soapy water in the sole with a nozzle and a pump so that it would let out bubbles as the child walked. $20,000 later, they realized how much liability was involved in selling a SNEAKER full of SOAPY WATER.

Yeah I heard about it this morning. What a moronic thing to do.
There are people starving in this country and we got morons making giant 10 ton sandwiches and putting 200 pounds of sliced ham on a mattress and calling it art.

Though if you could hook me up with 200 pounds of prosciutto I'd call it food. I'd even eat it on a mattress if someone wanted me to. ;)

I added two links to pictures in the top post.

It must be the air in Canada, must be...

Yeah, all the smog that blows up from the states:) Sometimes I get to work high.

I must say, that I was expecting a more impressive popsicle before looking at the pics. I was thinking something along the lines of that stay puffed marshmallow man from ghostbusters. Not much of a publiciity stunt. That thing was nothing more than a big pink ice cube. That cyclist is a whiner too.

I saw this on the news, it made me incredibly angry when they were like--
"Oh, and a few cyclists fell"
Like it was no big deal.

Here's a CNN article along with a video of it.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/22/news/funny/ice_pop/index.htm?cnn=yes

The truck driver's reaction is priceless.

Start checking your Snapple bottle for pieces of gravel, cement, or tar before drinking.
You never know where that kiwi-strawberry snapple has been. :)