Next: Tootsie Skippy Eskimo Welch

Delicious Cookie Co. sandwiches two shortbread cookies around peanut butter and jelly for Skippy & Welch’s Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich Cookie. And Tootsie Rolls and Eskimo Pie are collaborating on Tootsie Pops, where Tootsie Rolls are surrounded by orange, cherry or grape-flavored ice shells.

Crunch Quandary

Now you can buy Nestle’s Crunch bars molded with the words “It’s Crunch Time” and one of 27 NBA basketball team logos. So when your team’s behind and gets a couple of fouls, you can crunch along with them (but hey, should you show loyalty by eating a bar with your own team’s logo, or symbolically destroy the other team by eating its logo?).

The July 4 Bunny, the Labor Day Bunny, the Thanksgiving Bunny . . .

Paas Seasonal Products is thinking about putting egg-dyeing kits in the stores year-round as a crafts activity. To test the waters, it’s running a non-seasonal egg art contest (deadline May 30) with a seven-day Caribbean cruise as first prize. For info on entering, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Great Eggspressions Contest, c/o Paas, 87 Park St., Montclair, N.J. 07042.

I Yam What I Yeat

In case you haven’t noticed, Popeye has broken out of the spinach ghetto. The cartoon character with the world’s most famous brachioradialis muscles now promotes not only spinach products but microwave popcorn, shoestring potatoes, frozen pizza (well, it has a spinach topping), candy sticks, fruit chews and two cereals from Quaker Oats: Popeye Fruit Curls and Cocoa Blasts.

Stand Back, Popeye

Mussels are among the most efficient filter feeders in the world. A single mussel can suck as much as 15 gallons of water a day through its gills and strain out and consume just about everything in it. This is why they’re such efficient producers of protein--and why they’re vulnerable to infection and pollution.

Death Sentence for Salami

From “Lip Service,” the newsletter of the Marcy Lippman music marketing firm, comes the world’s greatest palindrome (i.e., a sentence that can be read the same forward as backward): “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog.”