I went to see Mr and Mrs Smith yesterday night - it was very entertaining and a lot of the dialogue had double meaning, which I enjoyed.

However, due to the somewhat inconsistent mass transit system we know as the CTA, I had about 15 minutes to kill before the movie.  After buying my ticket, I purchase the requisite bag of Sour Patch Kids and made my way to the theater.  I was shocked to find out that we, the audience, were not even to be entertained by the trivia slides and advertisements before the movie - a bare black screen hung before me in the dimly lit theater.

Thankfully, I had a big bag of candy and my Audiovox XV6600, with an all-you-can-eat data plan.  I popped open the bag of candy and visited my favorite Internet Movie Database to find out if Mr and Mrs Smith is a remake (verdict: uncertain, although the surface theme is strikingly similar to the old Hitchcock film of the same name).  As I was surfing the web, I was simultaneously enjoying my bag of sour-flavored, sugar-coated, gummy baby things.  That is, until I observed a disturbing fact - each time I reached in to the bag, I pulled out two candies, and each time, they were the same color.  This held for three tries; the fourth was an odd pairing.  I thought to myself, "What are the odds that I would pull three pairs of matching candies in a row from a new bag of candy?"  Since I'm not particularly spiritual, instead of thinking this was an omen, I literally considered what the odds were.

   There are 4 color options in a bag of Sour Patch Kids - green, red, orange, and yellow.
   The bag identifies one serving as 16 pieces and ~3.5 servings per bag, so I'm estimating 16*3.5=56 pieces of candy.
   I'm also assuming an even distribution of colors - 56 / 4 = 14 pieces of each color
   Finally, I'm assuming that the pieces are not picked at the same time, but rather microseconds apart (which may have a slight impact on the math).

   The odds of pulling those six pieces in three color-matched pairs is therefore:
      56/56 x 13/55 x 54/54 x 13/53 x 52/52 x 13/51
   which reduces to
      1 x .2364 x 1 x .2453 x 1 x .2549 = 0.0148 or roughly 1:68

At that point, I realized that the odds weren't so bad.  It's only slightly less likely than pulling a particular card out of a full deck (1:52), which does of course assume that I'm playing with a full deck.  It's significantly more likely, however, than winning the MegaMillions Lottery Jackpot - odds of getting the big score are 1:175,711,536.  Plus, with the candy, you're guaranteed a winner every time, unless you really don't like the red ones.