Among his comments in the new Esquire "What I've Learned" feature, he begins one, in bold print (as every item begins), "I love spaghetti."

And I like to cook spaghetti. And I used to eat it every day. I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. You can't — you can't do that. Ice cream — I love to watch television and eat ice cream. But that's like a ten-year-old. I can't do that anymore. Beer. Beer, spaghetti, ice cream.

Update at 8:30 p.m. after a rough afternoon: Sincerely, tonight's Blue Moon Winter Abbey Ale, San Giorgio, and Turkey Hill "Double Dunker."

(Photo by Dave)

For those who aren't on Twitter, Ben & Jerry's has started producing a flavor named after the greatest NPR parody ever. A sneak preview of the flavor arrived in our offices last week. As a prize for explaining how poorly my previous meeting had gone, the ice cream recipient awarded me a pint to taste and distribute to digital colleagues. I was honored.

How did the flavor taste? A winner. And I'm not saying that in hopes of more free ice cream. You know me. I have a lengthy track record of A) receiving free ice cream and B) still having a critical eye. (Just mistyped and wrote "critical ice.") The rum flavor didn't come through much, but both rum and malt balls sat well with vanilla. Could I have eaten the full pint by myself? Yes. I didn't but could have. And may in the future.

A necessary break amid laundry and writing for work.

1. If there are sexier ads involving ice cream, I haven't seen them.

(This ad is now airing in English on one of your cable channels.)

The ice-cream maker has also employed Karl Lagerfield to make short films. Like one where Rachel Bilson, seen above, eats the ice cream to get a photo shoot right. Or where she eats the ice cream to do well in art class. Or to recover after a dance show. How all these places have fridges that contain premium ice cream, I don't know. Good for them.

2. For research purposes, I picked up a Magnum ice cream bar in NPR's cafe last week. New from overseas, Magnum was the richest ice cream I had ever tasted. In a way, the bar was almost too rich. As much as I liked the taste, I couldn't reach my full ice-cream speed. Should speed be one's top priority when eating ice cream? No. But when ice-cream experience slows to the point where you feel as if the ice cream could elude you (must be experienced to be believed), something is wrong.

3. No, your tax dollars did not buy me elitist Euro ice cream. I bought it with my own money (and the system doesn't work that way, anyway). If there were ways to use your tax dollars to buy me fancy ice cream, I would have thought of them long before I arrived at NPR, thanks. You would have seen me in TV ads where I wore a question mark suit and told you how you too could get FREE ICE CREAM from the government.

4. A Magnum ice cream bar has 50% of my daily saturated fat and has gold foil on the inside of the wrapper. I am willing to put health aside for ice-cream breakthroughs, yes, and Haagen-Dazs bars are worse for you. But the gold takes the gluttony feel over the top. No airs, please.

5. Given that 50% sat fat, it's a safe bet Rachel Bilson does not eat Magnum ice cream very often. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

6 (because it's important to add). But if you have Magnum ice cream, you are welcome to give it to me. Especially if you are Rachel Bilson.

Back to work.

People at Drumstick's PR firm saw my blog post about the product this week, and they e-mailed to ask if they could link to it from Facebook. I of course said yes. When they linked yesterday, what I didn't expect was the mix of reactions from their fans. I would never have guessed traditional Drumstricks had an issue with the nuts falling off too easily. That's what you get, nut people. That's. What. You. Get.

(Click to enlarge)

If you know me, you know I hate peanuts. I'm not allergic to them at all. I just hate them with a passion. If you have two minutes, I can tell you the story of the crucial  moment in my childhood where I first hated them. Peanuts, peanut butter, peanut products. People say, "You hate peanuts? What's wrong with you?" I hear it from people. I say back to those critics, "What's wrong with you, man? What's wrong with you?"

In my hatred, something I'd always missed out on was Drumsticks. As a kid, I was transfixed. Here we had chocolate-dipped ice cream atop a miraculous chocolate-lined cone. I didn't know how scientists had built the Drumstick or why they had chosen to share them with the masses. I just knew they had erred in the final step. They had put peanuts on top. I didn't have the long-term memory of, say, a Cam Jansen, but I never forgot the moment in the elementary school gym when I bit into one, realized and found my hopes crushed like so many… you know.

But when I went to the supermarket last month and strode the ice cream aisle, I nearly jumped through the freezer glass. "For those of us with too much nuttiness in our lives already… finally, The Original Sundae Cone without nuts." There it was. A peanut-free Drumstick.

Plus, the ice cream inside was Cookies & Cream, my favorite, and the cone was entirely chocolate and yet still chocolate lined. Growing child allergies to peanuts had finally done something for me and liberated the Drumstick. Sure, the allergic kids were still taking a chance; a tiny font on the side of the nutrition box told of the product's manufacture on equipment shared with peanut products. But I had nothing to fear. Maybe the lifelong effects of eating ice cream where a lone cone gave my blood half of its daily saturated fat. But beyond that, nothing. How the discovery gave me hope, I couldn't explain. I dreamed that night of Cookies and Cream Reese's, almond Crackerjacks, a brittle-free world with butter and jelly sandwiches and an Elvis who just fried bananas.

Along the cracked and endless highways of rural Texas, certain types of landmarks appear repeatedly. Whitewashed grain elevators rise on the horizon, like flags marking the settlements below. Larger towns have schools, and almost every town has a water tower. Wherever Main Street is, the courthouse sits at the end of it. There's the cemetery, and there are the churches. Then, if the town is big enough, there's the Dairy Queen.

The Atlantic has my favorite ice cream piece in a while, an understated look at small-town Texas DQs and a secret love letter to soft-serve.

The article brings back the summer we went to Dairy Queen, over and over. Raisin Bran, you see, was for a while the most generous cereal in the supermarket. The time was 1990-ish. UPC symbols had succeeded the boxtop, and at first my family stockpiled baseballs. What Kellogg's paid in real shipping cost, I have no idea. But for more UPCs than cash we sent away for dozens of Tony the Tiger baseballs. They piled in milk crates in the garage, crashed through backyard windows and kept our various Little League teams in shape. Who knew they were $20 balls?

But — back to topic — next came the Dairy Queen. The UPC-to-reward ratio was similarly low. Our household was majority Cheerios, minority Two Scoops, so we couldn't have been working too hard. But we still managed to spend most of a summer vacation at Dairy Queen — or what seemed liked it. The UPCs got you a free chocolate-dipped cone or sundae. We collected them. Washington didn't have Dairy Queens, so we had to make good use of the family beach trip to Nags Head.

Arriving, we knocked over every Dairy Queen on the island, all three, hitting different shacks on different days, taking different cousins on different days, and it was harder then than it would be now because they hadn't yet built the fancy Dairy Queen by the pirate mini-golf. We ate in the sun on the highway, chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream dripping toward the cones, and every second I stopped eating meant losing ice cream. Time was ice cream and ice cream was everything.

If the summer we went to Dairy Queen was 1990-ish, soon after I discovered Blizzards. Upside-down and complicated, Blizzards made the chocolate-dipped cone look like kids' stuff. Islanders raised the new DQ, indoors and air-conditioned with an arcade, and the cereals tightened up with freebies. Or maybe I just stopped looking. Either way, I woke today and wanted to get in line with UPCs in my pocket.

Everyone touched this Charles Bridge plaque for luck. But what kind of luck? Faithful, financial, fertile? Eek. Googled later: To return to Prague.

What to eat after a huge breakfast? Ah — rolled dough, cooked on a spit and dipped into cinnamon and sugar. Perfect for walking up a hill.

Atop the hill was Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world, office to kings, emperors and now presidents. A crowd had gathered.

No idea what hour it was, we'd met the changing of the castle guard, and at noontime it brought with the only change fanfare of the day.

There at primetime, we circled St. Vitus cathedral but didn't try the line. We did have a good conversation about what nationalities cut in lines.

Thought Kristin was going over the side here. And a random girl came up to me and said she liked my Threadless T-shirt. (Go Threadless!)

Fun Explosive followed us everywhere. More writers need wild design.

Just outside the castle gates: absinthe ice cream. I passed on tiramisu gelato for it. It was great. (Potential slogan: "Go crazy for ice cream!")

Not done on the ice cream: Wonderfully light with the cream flavor just above the spirit. Also, may have made me fall back in love with cones.

Jess forwards a Serious Eats item on how gritty biodegradable spoons are possibly on their way to ruining our ice cream experiences, and I think this is a serious concern. If I have to choose between ice cream and the environment, I want to know how much ice cream is involved.

These new-fangled spoons sound awful, and I'm with those backing metal spoons in shops. But for ice cream to go? A few Eats readers suggest cones are the answer, doing away with cups altogether. But in Soviet Russia, ice cream cones… something, something … making everyone use cones is communist. Ice cream lines would be next.

How about, if we're going to hurt the environment, we hurt it slowly? Perhaps in a way that makes our ice cream look giant-sized and last longer? Tiny spoons, my friends. Tiny but sturdy gelato spoons are the answer. On top of helping the experience, these spoons mimic the ice cream size of the tongue and human bites. They also give America's top flavorologists the time they need to find delicious, environmentally good solutions. We are the ice cream spoons we've been waiting for.

Unless you're the one particular dude with a suburban Detroit improv joint who won. His essay got him $100k and, as mentioned in this blog previously, a role in introducing the new Edy's flavor, "Red, White & No More Blues." The flavor has strawberry and blueberry swirls mixed in vanilla ice cream, with a "Recovery never tasted so good" badge on it.

For a friend who's stressed… here's the beginning of "The Animals" by Geoffrey Lehmann, in a recent New Yorker, the first issue I've managed to knock off in months… "A 'domesticated bearded dragon $400' / is not my idea of an animal companion. / A calf asleep on a double bed, perhaps, / or a hare with long ears / crouched under a mahogany sideboard, / thumping the floor. / Or a koala that climbed up a four-poster bed / surprising a seventeen-year-old in her nightie. …"

Says one blog, "I really dislike this one but I've read it three times so I suppose that means there's something compelling in it." Sitting here with mint chocolate chip on my tongue and an ice cream scoop upside down in a glass of water, I'm going with the hare under the sideboard.

(Oh, and don't read the rest of the poem. Just realized it's a bummer.)

(Sorry about that one. The ice cream was distracting.)

(Mint chocolate chip on Wikipedia.)