Comments & Curiosities:

Did you miss it? I almost did. Had it not been for my friend Carol Mentor McDermott, who has a very sharp eye for totally meaningless information, which is what we live for, I would have missed it.

Guess who turned 80 last Tuesday? Twinkies. Are you excited? I am. This is major. April 6, 1930, is the exact date on which the little yellow tubular food with very little food in it was born.

Exactly what happened to those mind-numbing, guilt-inducing little cake things between 1930 and today to make them an American icon?

It all has to do with bananas, the Great Depression and a double slaying in San Francisco.

In 1930, the Great Depression was about as depressing as a depression can get, which is really depressing.

James Dewar was the vice president of Continental Bakeries, a big commercial baker whose sweet stuff was sold under the name of “Hostess.” Heard of it?

Dewar wanted to come up with a snack for the masses — something that was filling, tasty and cheap. He had an idea for a snack-sized sponge cake that looked like a little banana with a cream filling inside.

On his way to a meeting to discuss his idea with Continental’s ad agency, he looked up and saw a billboard for “Twinkle-Toe Shoes” and thus, “Twinkies” were born.

By the way, the filling in those beta-Twinkies really was banana cream, but Hostess switched to vanilla cream when bananas became scarce in World War II.

Was Dewar’s idea a hit? Are you serious? Is the Pope Bavarian? They were launched on April 6, and I’m guessing that by April 9 people were bonkers, crazy, insane for the little rhino haunch-inducing yellow cakes.

Eight decades later, little has changed on the Twinkies front. There are several Hostess bakeries around the country that pump out nothing but Twinkies, 24/7.

How many Twinkies? A staggering 500 million a year, which comes to 8 million pounds of sugar, 7 million pounds of flour and 1 million eggs.

OK, here it comes, the shelf life of a Twinkie — as if you didn’t know we would get there sooner or later. Regardless of how many times you’ve heard it, the shelf life of a Twinkie is not between 15,000 and 25,000 years. According to the Hostess website, the official shelf life of a Twinkie is — wait for it — 25 days.

The next giant leap for Twinkie-kind came in 1970, with the introduction of the “Twinkie the Kid” logo — a full-on cowboy Twinkie complete with 10-gallon hat, bandanna, white boots and lasso. The Hostess website says that Twinkie the K’s “…magic lasso allows the Kid to swiftly capture Twinkie bandits and vandals who threaten the planet’s supply of sweets,” which tells us that whoever is writing the Twinkies copy needs to take some personal days, throttle back on the sugar and no more caffeine, none.

In the late ’70s, Twinkies took another star turn on the pop culture catwalk when they got caught up in a sensational assassination in the City by the Bay. On Nov. 27, 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Dan White slipped into City Hall with a handgun and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

At his trial, defense psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified that White was suffering from diminished capacity caused by too much soda and junk food, specifically — Twinkies. The “Twinkie defense” made headlines around the world.

Very funny, except it worked. Incredibly, White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder and sentenced to seven years, of which he served five.

I think that’s it. Quite a run for a little yellow cake shaped like a banana. Will Twinkies see their 100th birthday? When you’re sealed in cellophane and have more preservatives than King Tut, I don’t see why not.

That’s fine when you’re 20, but definitely not age-appropriate when you’re 80. Pretty amazing though, 3 inches long, 80-years-old and still going strong. Sweet. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.