The Coolness Continuum Craze ... um... Continues:
What's The Coolness Continuum? It's all explained here through the use of giant rabbits and comic books.
Today, it's The Best Candy Bar That's So Lame It's Cool, and the winner here demonstrates more rules of cool.
I have to point out that not everything that's cool was once lame or becomes lame again. As The Coolness Continuum makes clear:
things can be cool, then lame, then cool again. But they don't have to go through the whole continuum. Some things are just cool -- Invader Zim, for example, is just cool.
But the focus of this month is things that start being cool and then become lame and then become cool again, like Swing Music, or things that start out being so lame that they shoot right around that circle and are cool, like The Atom and longitude.
Or things that somehow flip The Coolness Continuum into a Mobius strip and are both lame and cool at the exact same time. Like the Charleston Chew.
Here's how candy bars sort out. First, there's size. Most of them are roughly the same size: think Snickers, Milky Way, and 3 Musketeers. Some of them are littler but try not to seem so small, like a Hershey Bar which is so thin it's almost 2-dimensional but it's stretched out to look like a real candy bar. Some of them are small but deceptively packaged, like Mounds and Almond Joy and Heath, which each have two tiny pieces in them but a full-sized package.
Then there's shape. Candy bars, as I pointed out recently, have almost always been rectangular. But they mess with that shape a little, like the "Chunky," which wants to be a square and feel hefty but is still small. Or the "Bun" which had the kind of shape that would make you avoid it if you saw it on the sidewalk.
And, finally, there's flavor: Almost always chocolate, with some caramel or "nougat" thrown in.
When buying candy, then, choices are, really, limited. Which rectangular nougat-filled candy bar should I get? And that decision almost always boiled down to this thought: Whichever one gives me the most candy for my money.
Because I was a kid, I had limited funds and an unlimited need for candy. So Bun, Chunky, Heath, Mounds, and Hershey were out already: too small. I had to scan the regular-sized candy bars to choose the best value remaining.
That's where Charleston Chews come in. Those things are HUGE. They were, like, as long as my arm when I was a kid. There'd be a candy shelf and it was stacked with Twix and Snickers and things and then off to the side or at the top or wherever the Piggly-Wiggly could fit it was the box of "Charleston Chews," taking up almost the whole row with their hugeosity.
I couldn't resist; the value was just too good. I'd buy Charleston Chews even though I didn't know anything about them and even though, frankly, the candy was lame. Charleston Chews weren't even really trying, honestly. Everything about the Charleston Chew was lame.
Take it's name: "Charleston Chew?" "Chew" was chewing tobacco when I was a kid. And "Charleston" was... nothing. I know there's a city called "Charleston," but nobody cares about that and probably everybody gets it confused with "Charlotte." It sounded fogeyish.
And the flavors: Vanilla? Strawberry? These were not candy bar flavors.
And then there was the actual "chocolate" that covered the flavoring. It didn't quite feel or taste or seem like chocolate. (And it's not, legally speaking.)
Finally, there was the actual experience of eating a Charleston Chew. It was chewy. Too chewy, in fact. And chewy in a weird way. You'd eat it and the bar would pull and pull and pull and not quite break off and that "chocolate" would be cracking and falling.
Charleston Chews are so chewy, as it turns out, that they appear to bend the laws of nature, and that's the beginning of the explanation of why they're cool. Getting a lot of candy bar for a little cost is not "cool," it's just good economics. "Cool" is something different.
Charleston Chews are so chewy that they've been used to study rheology. "Rheology" is defined, on Wikipedia, as "the sound a duck makes." (See! I did it again!). 
But it's actually, as non Wikipedians know, the study of unusual flow behavior-- things that flow differently than water, in a nutshell. Things like mayonnaise and Charleston Chews. These things do not "flow" the way we think they should -- they flow in non-Newtonian ways.
"Non-Newtonian" is important because Newton was the guy who explained gravity. 
(Not discovered. As Dirk Gently pointed out, gravity was always there waiting to be discovered -- "they even leave it on on weekends," he said).
Newton explained other laws of motion in the universe, laws that are supposed to be universal. (Newton's laws are: (1) an object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force, which explains why it's so scary when The Boy can't remember which pedal is the brake, (2) Force = mass times acceleration, which explains why you don't want Brian Urlacher to hit you, (3) For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, which explains why Sweetie gets so mad when I let Mr Bunches and Mr F have a splash fight in the tub and don't clean up afterwards.)
Those laws, like I said, are universal. Or are supposed to be. But not everything got the message, and Charleston Chews did not get the message that Newton's laws apply to them.
That's the first part of why they're cool: They appear to be nice but secretly are outside the law. Charleston Chews are the Michael Carringtons of candy bars. 
Charleston Chews don't obey the Newton's rules, or any other rules, apparently (except the rule about whether they can claim to be real chocolate or not). They don't need no stinkin' badges. They can flow, or twist, or be chewy, however they want.
Charleston Chews have another thing going for them, too: they are good at more than one thing. Just like Michael Carrington. Charleston Chews, in their coolness, found a way around that insane chewiness that made you suspect that just like Wrigley's gum they'd stay in your stomach for seven years...
... why seven years? Gum stays in your stomach for seven years. Break a mirror and you get seven years' bad luck. Why? ...
and let you eat them almost like a normal candy bar. Charleston Chews suggested that you freeze the bar and then whack! hit it on the counter, breaking it into little pieces that would be bite-sized except they were frozen so you couldn't "bite" them without cracking a tooth. But you did get to hit your candy bar on the counter.
So, like that kid in 11th grade who not only played receiver on the football team but was also the lead in the school play and president of the student council, Charleston Chews were cool because they were versatile.
I hated that kid, but I loved (and love) Charleston Chews. They overcame fake chocolate, vanilla nougat, the name, the chewiness, and they did it by adapting and, when they couldn't adapt, by simply ignoring the rules. There's nothing cool about them, except that everything about them is cool.
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