A trip to Mars for Ohioans?

Forget gerrymandered Congressional districts and bogus red/blue Electoral College overlays. The image that should have every red-blooded Ohioan boiling with more rage than Donald Trump after the latest New York Times report is a map showing the Mars bar as the favorite Halloween candy of the Buckeye State.

The Mars bar. Really?

Now I understand the favorite trick-or-treat offerings of some other states. Texans love a 10-gallon hat full of M&M’s, California is purring for Kit-Kat bars, and 12 states recognize that chocolate and peanut butter are greater than the sum of their individual parts with Reese’s.

I can even see how Tootsie Pops could shoot straight to number one in Vermont and Montana. Although I personally find them disgusting, they are at least a high-profile candy, thanks to a decades-old advertising campaign that asked, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? (Who cares? Throw them away before you get to the ghastly middle.)

But I can’t possibly understand how Mars clawed its way to the top of both Ohio and Pennsylvania. I have lived in northeast Ohio all my life and have never once seen anybody eating one, let alone handing them out on Beggars’ Night.

The map in question originated with Bid-On-Equipment in Illinois, which noted in a blog post that it had used the Google AdWords site — now known simply as Google Ads — to analyze “search volume trends for more than 100 different types of candy” from September 2018 to October 2018 in all 50 states.

So apparently more folks in Louisiana searched for Air Heads than any other candy during that time period, just as people in North Carolina and South Carolina surfed for information about Milk Duds, and North Dakotans improbably were burning to learn more about Hot Tamales while their South Dakotan neighbors went digging for news on Gummy Worms.

It all sounds highly suspect to me.

And again I say — Mars bars?

I am trying to wrap my mind around the paradigm-shifting injustice of it all. When I tweeted the Bid-On-Equipment map, I called B.S. on the results. (That’s Bachelor of Science to anybody who is offended.)

One respondent noted that nobody Googles candy they are already familiar with, so maybe the map is more reflective of state residents’ curiosity than their favorites.

That makes sense, but still leaves me wondering why, over a 13-month period, Idaho residents looked up SweeTarts often enough to make it number one, or why Swedish Fish surfaced so frequently in Kentucky searches.

It just sounded bogus.

But then came my epiphany. What if “Mars” wasn’t a reference to one particular candy, but rather to all the candy made by Mars, Incorporated?

According to Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know), Mars Inc. produces Milky Way, M&M’s, Skittles, Snickers and Twix. If Ohioans were looking up these, and Google captured them under the Mars umbrella, we would go from the doghouse to the penthouse of good taste.

But it can’t be that either, as Snickers and M&M’s make the list separately in several states.

So either the entire study is wonky (but not Willy Wonka-y, because those didn’t make the list either) or Ohioans really were jonesing for their Mars bars last year.

All I know is, based on the vacant stares I’ve received when talking about all this, if your Halloween plans include handing out Mars bars, you’d better be ready for a swift kick to Uranus.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter