Easter bunnies in peril everywhere

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This article was published 31/03/2018 (3022 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s the Easter weekend — a time for family, a time for quiet introspection, a time for new beginnings, and, most of all, a time to make lewd remarks to people wearing Easter Bunny costumes.

You probably think I am kidding around about that last thing, but, sadly, this is not the kind of deeply disturbing news item we joke about the day before Easter Sunday.

What with being a crusading newspaper columnist, I was bravely wasting time on the internet the other day when I spotted the following headline on the Time.com website: “Woman arrested after making lewd comments to the Easter Bunny.”

According to the story, a 54-year-old woman was posing for a photograph with someone dressed up as the Easter Bunny at a park in Mansfield, Ohio, when she got just a “hare” too excited and began making a series of lewd and suggestive remarks to the iconic rabbit.

After abandoning the shocked bunny, news reports state, the woman attempted to make her escape by hopping on a nearby carousel, which is where police found her and booked her on a charge of public drunkenness.

I have no idea what sort of lewd remarks this woman made to the innocent bunny, but, for the police to become involved, they were obviously hare-raising.

You are probably thinking that, as Easter Bunny-related news reports go, that is about as bad as it gets, but, and I hate to say this on the holiday weekend, you are an idiot.

I base that insult on the fact one of the news reports about the lewd woman ended with the following paragraph: “In an unrelated incident, the Asbury Park Press reports a woman dressed in an Easter Bunny costume passed out at a mall in New Jersey on Monday.”

But we do not have time to waste fretting about whether people dressed as giant rabbits are being subjected to unwanted advances or passing out for reasons unknown, because there is a far more serious hazard on which we should focus all of our mental energy.

I would like to break the news of this hazard to you as gently as possible, so I will do that by sharing an emotional rendition of one of our favourite holiday classics from way back in 1950.

Brace yourselves, because it goes something like this: “Here comes Peter Cottontail, Hoppin’ down the bunny trail, Hippity Hoppity… WHAMMO! OH NO! PETER COTTONTAIL HAS JUST BEEN CRUSHED BY A FALLING CHUNK OF SPACE DEBRIS! THAT POOR BUNNY IS FLATTER THAN A (BAD WORD) PANCAKE!”

If you find that traditional Easter nugget alarming, imagine how upset I was when I spotted the following headline on the website of Scientific American magazine: “Chinese Space Station Could Crash to Earth on Easter Weekend.”

According to Scientific American (and they almost never joke about stuff like this), China’s 9.4-ton Tiangong-1 space station is expected to enter Earth’s atmosphere sometime during Easter weekend, but the exact location of its re-entry remains a mystery.

“Its uncontrolled fall to Earth shares some similarities with the end of the Skylab space station in 1979; some of Skylab’s pieces rained down on rural Australia,” the story warns.

I don’t wish to cause widespread panic, but for the time being I suggest everyone put on a tin-foil hat and spend the weekend hiding in the basement.

When I was a kid, the only serious Easter hazard was that, after consuming your body weight in chocolate eggs, your teeth would resemble something normally not seen outside of the British dental system.

Now you could be in the middle of a relaxing egg hunt in the backyard with your kids when, suddenly and without warning, you end up wearing a massive, flaming chunk of a Chinese space station like an Easter bonnet, if you catch our drift.

It is disturbing news like this that makes me want to spend the holiday weekend chugging a few cold brews. That brings us to our next shocking Easter item, which appeared online under the following headline: “Peeps-flavoured beer is here to haunt the Easter Bunny’s nightmares.”

It seems the beer makers at Fort Worth’s The Collective Brewing Project — who previously brought the world ramen-flavoured beer — have teamed up with Lone Star Taps and Caps bar for a beer flavoured with the world’s most iconic Easter treat.

“Called Peep This Collab, the beer is a sour ale brewed with Peeps, vanilla, and butterfly pea flower (which is the same magical plant that Starbucks is using to turn its drinks into Instagram-worthy creations),” a report on FastCompany.com noted. “As if drinking a purple beer wasn’t festive enough, the brewers also threw in some edible glitter to make it really sparkle.”

(Speaking of disgusting brews, the Speiriscope column in today’s 49.8 section features five of the weirdest beers in history, including one packaged in the taxidermied bodies of dead rodents.)

For the record, Peeps are those ubiquitous Day-Glo-coloured marshmallow chicks and bunnies that are packed with so much sugar they have your average child bouncing off the walls faster than a rubber ball fired out of a cannon.

In my view, spring has not truly sprung until supermarket shelves are groaning under the weight of millions of these iconic Easter treats. Every year, they produce enough of these sugary candies with creepy edible-wax eyes to circle the Earth twice.

And every year for the past 10 years, I have hosted an Easter Weekend “Peeps Jousting” tournament, wherein we force innocent gooey candies to battle to the death in my microwave oven.

The way it works is this: “trainers” arm their Peep knights with toothpick lances, place them facing each other on a paper plate and pop them in the microwave. As they heat up, the Peeps expand to the size of regulation softballs, and the winner is the first to skewer and deflate its opponent.

It is great fun, and this year I might do it while enjoying a few ice-cold Peep beers. Which means you might want to avoid my house this weekend, especially if you’re dressed like the Easter Bunny.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca