This week, we have…

• A fun fact inspired by a recent Fictogram answer

• Answers to last week's games

• Reader survey

Charlie and the Corporate Candy Espionage

Many children have dreamed of drinking from the chocolate rivers of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Some, like Charlie Bucket (Fictogram guest #285), are lucky enough to experience wonders like Everlasting Gobstoppers and Lickable Wallpaper in their fictional lifetimes. But what if there was a real chocolate factory that you could visit to sample their yet-unreleased delights? It may sound too sweet to be true, but such was the case for Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and attendee of British boarding school Repton circa 1930-1934. In those days, Cadbury held a blind tasting facility at Repton, and schoolchildren tasted and rated new products before they went to market. This early exposure to chocolate innovation inspired Willy Wonka’s factory in the 1964 book.

Dahl said in one speech, “It was then I realised that inside this great Cadbury’s chocolate factory there must be an inventing room, a secret place where fully-grown men and women in white overalls spent all their time playing around with sticky boiling messes, sugar and chocs, and mixing them up and trying to invent something new and fantastic.” He imagined himself as one such chocolate inventor, dreaming up successful sweets to pitch to Mr. Cadbury himself. 

Roald Dahl was allegedly obsessed with sweets, and the lore behind their invention. Thanks to the secretive nature of the candy business, sending spies to work in rival candy shops for espionage (such as Cadbury and Rowntree) was so prevalent that it became legend, and inspired the paranoia that Willy Wonka feels about his competitors. Candy factories actually employed detectives to monitor suspicious workers, and recipes were kept top secret. 

So the next time you catch yourself dreaming about edible daffodil teacups and gum that tastes like every meal of the day, take a visit to your local candy factory and see if they’re hiring any taste testers. And if not, there’s always corporate espionage.

Learn more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/07/real-life-espionage-that-inspired-dahl-s-classic.html

Answers to last week's games

Monday, August 26 to Sunday, September 1.

Linxicon

The following are the shortest paths from last week:

• #196 independence -> freewill -> soul

• #197 call -> talk -> speaks -> therefore

• #198 pure -> wild -> bear

• #199 net -> screen -> display -> contrast -> distinction

• #200 dispute -> controversial -> influential -> powerful

• #201 forward -> heading -> head -> headache -> symptom

• #202 evolution -> humans -> people -> anyone

• #203 Play now!

Forgeous

Play Forgeous for Sep 3