An old-timey soda shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, has been busted for selling candy cigarettes.

Lynden's, on Hamline Avenue near Cretin-Derham Hall High School, said a city inspections official came in last week and gave the shop a warning and added that a misdemeanor citation -- with a $500 fine -- would be next if the non-carcinogenic confections continue to be sold.

The sugary sticks were recently banned in the city, which would prefer that you just shop at Amazon.

Once again with Halloween upon us, it’s time to revisit candy culture, or more specifically, a system that aims to rank it. Like before, the mechanism to do this would be according to, well, let’s just call it "joy induction."

This hierarchy actually began in 2006 as the work of a friend and colleague, Ben Cohen. Ben is an environmental historian over at Lafayette College, but in a previous life, he and I use to blog together. This partnership happened because of our backgrounds publishing science humor, and so in some respects, this "Candy Hierarchy" is just another creative juncture. However, since publishing the 2010 version at Boing Boing, we received such amazing feedback from the community, I thought it would be great to continue this tradition and allow even more kickass "peer review" into guide the rankings.

As always, I’m aware that: (1) some people will still be deeply offended by the rankings; (2) because the new rankings tried very hard to incorporate the feedback, you now know that we were serious about the potential for readers to shift the hierarchy year to year; and (3) above it all, we can all hopefully agree that the process of peer review is just kickass anyway. Anyway, do play in the comments, but without further ado, read on...

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