Welcome to the Kotke Ride Home for Friday, September 10th, 2021.

I'm Jackson Bird today.

What exactly is Blue Moon-flavored ice cream?

And where did it come from?

Plus, NASA is planning to purposefully hit an asteroid with a spacecraft.

More on why and when that'll happen.

And this year's Ig Nobel Prize winners have been announced.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

So until I saw this recent article from Atlas Obscura, I had completely forgotten that

this thing existed. I hadn't thought about it in decades, I'm sure. It was a relic of my

childhood that I had to take a second to clear the fog from my memories to even be certain

I'd actually experienced, but then it all

came slamming back to me. I am talking about Blue Moon ice cream. If you're from the Midwest

in the U.S., you know what I'm talking about, but if not, you may be confused. Like one

Redditor who replied to a post asking where to find Blue Moon-flavored ice cream

in New York City by asking, what? Like the beer? No, poor, deprived Redditor, not like the beer.

This electric blue dessert is a monstrosity all of its own. It looks less like something you should eat and more like a

dropping that a smurf left behind. In the kindest interpretation, it looks like the imaginary

food that filled the plates of the Lost Boys in that iconic food fight scene from Hook.

And that's actually an apt comparison because the ice cream is both something that tends to be favored more by kids than adults and bears a peculiar flavor that almost no one describes the same way.

Citrusy, vanilla-e, almond-y, is it bubble gum, raspberry, cotton candy, fruit loops, lemon, black cherry, marshmallow?

The descriptions go on and on.

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