My horrible supressed memory has returned to me.

So my roommate (John) went out and bought a bunch of snacks for movie night tonight (the 1989 "Batman"). Microwave popcorn, soda, Reese's Pieces, Nerds, and... Mike & Ikes.

Flash back with me to 1993. Freshman year of high school. Honors Geometry class. My teacher decides to put our math skills to the test. She has a huge jar of Mike & Ike candy on her desk. Our job is to try to figure out how many Mike & Ike candies are in that jar, using our calculate-the-volume-of-object formulae. We were each given one of her "spare" Mike & Ike candies to do our measurements of the candy's volume. We could each go up to the jar and measure it from the outside, making adjustments for the thickness and curvature of the glass. Then, of course, we had to account for the amount of air that was in the jar.

Long story short, I made a guess of 1,604. The actual total was 1,632. I won.

One guy calculated that there were 2,448 in the jar, but he forgot to account for the air between the candies. Turns out that there's a theorem out there that if you randomly drop objects into a container, it'll occupy 2/3 of the total volume (1/3 will be air). If he had multiplied his guess by 2/3, he would have been exactly right.

The first day of victory was awesome. I ate a few handfuls, and shared them with my classmates. Still plenty left. I'd munch a few here and there at home. Still plenty left. I took them with me to other nerd school functions (math club, Knowledge Masters). A few handfuls got eaten. Still plenty left. I took them to youth group. Still plenty left. Finally, I gave up on being able to finish the jar of Mike & Ikes. There was well over half the jar remaining when I dumped it in the trash, vowing never again to eat Mike & Ikes again. The jar, which still had that sickly sweet odor, was used to store loose change.

16 years went by...

Now I am confronted with the horrifying reunion ahead of me this evening. I surely will not open that package of candy. Someone else will. They might even pass it around or offer it to me directly. My screams will be heard throughout Cook County. Probably sometime between 7-9 p.m. Listen for it.