A n d r e w s G u m W o r l d

The usefully named howtocleanstuff.net has a feature on its site called “How to Remove Gum | Stain Removal,” and in the interest of public service, we thought we’d share some of its insights, which includes some of the usual suspects (ice, toothbrush, rubber gloves), but also the surprising emergency ingredient of peanut butter. Here are some of those peanut butter-related tips:

If you do not have a freezer or ice handy and you are in a pinch, you may want to try using peanut butter.

• Spread peanut butter over the gum.
• Scrape the gum so that as much of the gum as possible is exposed to the peanut butter.
• Let sit for 15 minutes
• Scrape off peanut butter with a knife. The gum should come off with the peanut butter.

Here at AndrewsGumWorld, we’ve found a great site, Origrami: Diagrams, with literally hundreds of projects including, happily, project #74 on one of its pages of designs, which offers you a design involving gum wrappers (we are making the assumption that if you are reading this, you may have some gum wrappers laying about).

Look for about the seventh project down on the left on this page, and you can download a .pdf file with complete direcitons (Need software to read a .pdf file? Click here).

Happy (elaborate) folding….

Gum wrapper chain, originally uploaded by thunt77.

We’ve already reviewed the best places for chewed gum (your mouth, the garbage bin, or made into sculptures of bears — see below), but what to do with the wrappers?

The Make Gizmos site (which is a great name for a site which has as its mission “Things to make for fun using common tools and inexpensive materials;” click on Things to Make in the upper right hand corner of the main page to get going) has some pretty simple directions on how you can make your own gum chain. For what it’s worth, here’s what Step Four looks like:

(Incidentally, the great shot above is of a gum wrapper chain that was created between 1974 and 1992 by school teacher Nicholas Miller of Missouri, and is more than 6,600 feet long. You can see it yourself at Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It’s an amazing shot by thunt77 from Flickr).

Today’s Food Processing website reports on a new version of Trident gum which uses Recaldent, which actively protects, strengthens and rebuilds tooth enamel. Trident Xtra Care will be only gum in the US that will have this ingredient, and here’s how it works:

A unique form of calcium derived from milk, Recaldent increases tooth remineralization (strengthening) over and above the salivary stimulation from regular sugar-free gum. Cadbury Adams holds exclusive rights in the U.S. to use Recaldent in gum, and Trident is the only gum brand that contains this ingredient.

An article earlier this week in The Daily Toreador, the student newspaper of Texas Tech University, starts up innocently enough an like any number of articles we’ve perused in these pages, especially those times we’ve roamed the United Kingdom exploring the blight of discarded gum. It’s no different in Texas: gum causes problems when it’s thrown away. Here’s how the article begins:

Chewing gum: Most folks probably don’t realize it, but there are strings attached to the stuff.

If anybody knows just how sticky the gum situation can be, it’s Charles Leatherwood.

Leatherwood, senior superintendent for the university’s grounds maintenance department, said the sidewalks around the Student Union Building are most littered with discarded gum.

“We go over there with pressure washers, razor blade scrapers and things like that,” he said. “It’s about $600 dollars worth of labor (each time grounds workers clean the areas around the SUB). You’ll see it all around campus, but it’s really bad around the SUB. I don’t understand that. We have lots of trash receptacles, cigarette urns - I mean there are plenty of places to put it other than on the ground.”

Fair enough, and we’ve advised elsewhere that gum belongs in one of two places: your mouth or the garage tin (can).But The Daily Toreador does not stop there. It invokes the Mayo Clinic, suggesting that you don’t have to spit out your gum, you can swallow it (with yucky, but predictable end results), it chats up an associate professor named Lee Cohen who talks about the history of gum research, especially as its related to reducing tension and helping people stop smoking and Matt McGowan, who wrote the article, also talks to a local dental hygienist in Lubbock, who reviews the dangers of chewing sugared gum, the possible benefits of chewing sugar free, and closes by noting that “You don’t have to chew gum. It’s not going to help you if you don’t. It’s not going to hurt you if you don’t.”

You’ll want to read the whole article yourself, trust us. You can find it here, complete with a sidebar from the National Association of Chewing Gum Manufacturers, including facts about the first patent on gum, William Wrigley, Jr.’s role in the history of gum (massive, as noted elsewhere in this blog, and not just because his company makes the Official Gum™ for Gum Guy), the emergence of bubble gum trading cards, why bubblegum itself is pink and tips on removing chewing gum from your hair.

Like we said, read it. It may be the only article about chewing gum that you’ll ever need.

We met Bonus Gum earlier (with their US election themed gum; a chance to poll, via chewing gum purchases, the electoral chances of Obama vs. McCain).

In their Monday edition of the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail, the newspaper reported on the Canadian company’s efforts to try to introduce health benefits directly into chewing gum, a story that involved green tea (as you can see above) and a manufacturer in Denmark. In the article, company president Jay Klein described some of the challenge in introducing the new flavor, using chickens and eggs to make his point:

“As a startup with limited resources, it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario,” says Mr. Klein, president of Toronto-based Bonus Gum. “We have spent our time convincing retailers to give it a shot, but you still have to convince consumers, and move the gum off the shelves.”

Mr. Klein, who has a background in marketing and advertising, decided last year that he wanted to get in on a trend that has seen manufacturers imbue food and beverages with vitamins. He read a lot about the health benefits of antioxidants - molecules that slow the deterioration of cells in the human body and are believed to strengthen the immune system - and decided they would pair well with a stick of gum.

“Nobody has gotten into adding more nutritional value into gum,” Mr. Klein says.

After working with his Denmark-based manufacturer, Mr. Klein decided on two gum varieties: cranberry and green tea. Both products are considered excellent sources of antioxidants and, according to Mr. Klein, one piece of Bonus’s mint-flavoured green tea gum has the same health benefits as two mugs of green tea.

Photo: Los Angeles Times

This morning, Christie St. Martin used her blog, Funny Pages 2.0, on the Los Angeles Times website to list some of the problems, including ones that involved nitroglycerin, that MacGyver had solved on his eponymous television show

However, we’re most interested in the problems involving chewing gum, and Ms. St. Martin does not let us down:

MacGyver repairs a blown fuse using the aluminium wrapper of a stick of chewing gum to close the circuit (this was tested and confirmed to work by MythBusters*).

*(See video clip below…)

Hannah Sandling is a British television presenter, including work as a fashion stylist on the show Richard & Judy, a presenter for the children’s show Clutter Nutters, and is known for her DIY work on her self-renovated cottage in SW London.

In yesterday’s Daily Mail, she weighed in with some of her favourite tips for what she calls being a Lazy Goddess, noting that “being lazy gets a bad rap - but it’s not about being a slob, it’s about taking shortcuts and getting the same result with less effort.” Her article about “one minute makeovers” includes some of her top tips, including this one involving our fave confectionery item:

If you get chewing gum in your hair, soak it in full-fat cola until it comes loose.

Meiji, another one of Japan’s big gum manufacturers (we’ve reported elsewhere on Lotte and its new line of bubble baths based on their gum flavors) has a brand of gum called Xylish (which uses Xylitol as a main ingredient).

What makes the gum especially fun is its unique Autobots-like packaging, feaured (and visually demonstrated) on a post from a few years back in the (no longer published) blog booniverse.