This is a prime example of what happens when I'm forced to spend the day performing my real job rather than leisurely prowling the Cookie-hatted Bunny Superhighway for hours on end: I completely miss hearing about a giant Snapple popsicle melting and flooding Union Square with sticky goo. "What was unsettling was that the fluid just kept coming," Stuart Claxton of the Guinness Book of World Records told the Daily News. "It was quite a lot of fluid. On a hot day like this, you have to move fast." Gothamist has posts on the publicity stunt gone awry here and here, and a thorough rundown of media coverage can be found here. A number of the stories do compare the popsicle to Icarus, but stop short of actually accusing it of hubris. I was planning to say that this never would have happened if they'd run the cockamamy scheme past Wendy the Snapple Lady first, since she seems like a woman possessing good common sense to me, but the 2nd page here (found via the "More Multimedia" link) shows that Wendy was, in fact, right there at the scene of the slush. Perhaps it was a case of Snapp-otage? Or maybe this was the plan all along, check out this press release from the day prior to the event: New Yorkers and tourists alike will be overwhelmed by the immense "ice scraper" ... "We're thrilled to be offering our Snapple fans the chance to enjoy their favorite Snapple and Diet Snapple flavors, now all over their shoes." Okay, I added those last four words, but that talk of "overwhelming" onlookers does sound rather ominous, huh? Odds are Sen. Charles Schumer is already having a press conference about this as we speak, and I join him in demanding answers as to the cause of this meltdown so whatever changes are necessary can be implemented before it happens again.