A List Of Reasons Why I Might Possibly Need A Treat This Week:

• Had a date but forgot how fast I get pit stains when the temperature is above 20 °C.
• Wore my new hiphuggers but no one lovingly referred to me as a muffin top.
• Sarah in Accounts Receivable did her impression of how loudly I blow my nose and everyone had a good laugh when they did not know that I was within earshot, hearing the whole thing, and I am sorry that I blow my nose so loudly but I have a condition.
• My parrot, Professor Wikipedia, refuses to talk to me anymore, and when I ask him to do his wolf whistle, or if he would like a cracker, he just goes “Page not found L-O-L!” (And I did not teach him that.)
• I sent Josh an email almost a whole day ago, and all I’ve received in return so far is his usual “AFK, either blind off Maw’s hooch or ruining another toilet maybe both and if this is Kiven (sp?) I thought I said fuck off” autoresponder.

Is it any wonder, with a week like this, that I might run bawling in the direction of the nearest frozen ice creamy treat? Even if said treat is at McDonald’s? Can I be forgiven for such a crime against humanity/cows/rainforests/whatever? It’s so easy for you all to judge me, you don’t have my life. You don’t have my pit stains. You don’t have Josh to deal with. You don’t know the special place McDonald’s shakes used to have in my life. Especially around St Patrick’s Day, when Dad’s alcoholic haze would lift just enough for him to pile us in the car for Shamrock Shakes. “Kids,” he would say, “Your mom hates you and it’s your fault she left, but there was ne’er a pain that a Shamrock Shake wouldn’t quiet.”

And god damn it, he was right. Little did my dad know that a lifetime spent drowning my emotions in sugary juices and sodas would one day lead me to starting this website. I guess I have him to thank for that. And the fact that none of my belts fit.

Shamrock Shakes are gross now, by the way. I guess at some point they began replacing the mint flavoring with Wintergreen ‘Tussin? Kinda weird, not really my thing. The Minty Mudbath doesn’t fare much better; the chocolate and mint don’t blend so much as cancel each other out. Pretty disappointing. Normally when a drink has a name like “mud bath” you expect it to be so good.

Dag Josh I wish you had been the one writing this beview because it would have been a great opportunity for you to do one of your patented Behind The Scenes dialogue imaginariums. Like you’ve got the Microsoft/Bungie people on one side of the room, and the Mountain Dew/PepsiCo suits on the other side, all banging their noggins together and saying just the most ridiculous ideas for what kind of soda would help sell Halo 3 to gamers. I picture you writing something very hilarious. ((I picture you writing SOMETHING OK that was uncalled for.))

So anyways it would be fun to imagine how that conversation went, because somewhere along the line, for some reason I cannot even begin to wrap my head around, someone decided that a good marketing campaign would center around a soda that tastes like a mouthful of Starburst-flavored condoms. And then other people OK’d that idea. And then hundreds of other people got out of bed the next morning and set to work, bringing that idea to life.

Related: I’m kind of not super excited about the next 50+ years on this planet.

Anyhooters. Halo 3 isn’t out yet, so if you want to know does this beverage make you awesome at using the gravity gun to remove Miranda Keye’s pantaloons, hold tight. I do not have that information yet. But I can tell you that after drinking this I did absolutely whale on some Super Mario Bros. 2 on the GBA. I finished the game using Luigi almost exclusively! There was just this one part where I had to use Toad b/c homey is waaay faster at picking up the Birdo eggs and I was getting mad pissy at the game. You know how I do.

Aiiiiiieeeeee why do I even bother. Even though I’d already completely besmirched the name of this drink in the asides, when I came upon it in the wild, I allowed myself to get all curious and intrigued despite myself. Because god damn it, where I come from coconut + pineapple = piña colada, and that is the kind of solid beverage a man can hang his Kangol on, nephew.

But no, my previous complaints about Zico are still valid: God or Science or whoever has not taken my advice and re-engineered natural coconut water flavor, it still tastes like complete saliva ass. At least in this case it’s a little sweeter and more fruity than Zico, like tongue-kissing Carmen Miranda, maybe. OMG YOU GUYS did I just make a Carmen Miranda reference on the internet? God, what year is it. No one will have any idea what I’m talking about, and I’m too lazy to think of a more inspired simile.

Well while I’m showing my age, I will also tell a related anecdote from my personal life. The other day my 4-year-old was doing something, I don’t know what, maybe playing video games?, when suddenly he stopped and looked off into the middle distance for a moment and then turned to me and said: “Everyone’s slobber tastes the same.”

Which: YES. And coconut water tastes like everyone’s slobber, although it will apparently take me a lifetime to learn this lesson.

PS. Confidential to Josh: This comes in a Tetra Pak, which I know gets you all boney maronie.

There’s this Spanish billboard for Sierra Mist that’s near my work, and I see it every day, and I think about it every day.

Against a blank white background is a giant bottle of S. Mist surrounded by small people. One small guy is chainsawing the bottle vertically, chopping off the front half. This half is falling over onto three other small people, who are recoiling in terror, about to be crushed. The back half of the bottle stays put, revealing what is contained within Sierra Mist: blue skies and white fluffy clouds. There is a Spanish tagline but I can’t remember what it says.

The whole thing looks like it was assembled from royalty-free stock photos in some program that you use when you can’t afford Photoshop. I find it fascinating.

Advertising Expert A: What’s inside a bottle of Sierra Mist? A nice summer day is what.

Advertising Expert B: You mean metaphorically.

A: Keep up with me now. How do we communicate that visually.

B: The viewer dives into a giant bottle and swims around some kind of magical summertime dreamworld.

A: OK but we only have this one picture of the bottle. And only about $200 left in the budget. And this is a billboard.

B: We have someone slice open the bottle and it’s like hell-o!

A: Like with a fucking katana?

B: Yeah like a ninja of some sort.

A: The bottle needs to be the hero, though. Needs to be really big.

B: So he’s the littlest ninja.

A: What if instead it was like a lumberjack, chopping down a tree. That way the sizing thing makes more sense.

B: He’s got a chainsaw.

A: Yeah but except he can’t cut it like a tree, like horizontally, because we need to see the nice summer day inside, so he’s got to cut it from top to bottom.

B: No argument over here. What if he chops that thing and it falls on some people?

A: What the hell are you saying to me right now.

B: Billboards are wide. We need something to fill up the right side.

A: How about a nice tagline like a normal person!

B: Picture it, they’re all: Aiieeeeeee!

A: Because … because the flavor is so big and overpowering and delicious? It could actually crush you?

B: Yeah man. Doy.

A: Dang man you’ve done it again. Let’s put our clothes back on and type this up before we forget!

[curtain]

There’s another one where the little people are trying to climb into the bottle via giant straw, but at least with that one you sort of understand the message.

Anyway I’ve been trying to write a review of Cel-Ray for about a month now and I can’t get beyond: “Hi dudes yeah it tastes exactly like you’d imagine celery soda would taste!!” Fuckin’ Cel-Ray. I suppose if you like ginger ale but want something more in the celery department, you should basically look no further.

You’d think it’d be a gross novelty drink like those turkey-and-gravy ones, but it’s really just kind of inoffensive, like the vegetable from which it is spawned. I figure you’re either picking it up in a Jewish deli without really thinking about it because you’re 78 years old, or you’re making a special trip to find it and then flaunting it in the break room, being all: “Eww look what I’m drinking, here taste this, ewww.”

Frankly my favorite part about this drink is the name. I’m pretty sure Cel-Ray’s new joint drops on August 7. Supposedly taking his sound in a whole new direction, really changing the game up.

Jiggedy wiggedy. I do not know what you do for fun where you live. I picture you high atop a mountain, staring glumly at the ground, bummed that you couldn’t find any dinosaur bones. How close is that to your actual deal, I wonder. But around where I live it is COUNTY FAIR SEASON. Yay for County Fairs and BOO to everything else. Tractor pulls and wood chopping contests. Demolition Derby and The Scrambler. Throw a dart and pop a balloon and win a small mirror with Bang Tango on it. Some lovely delightful little treats like Fried Twinkies and Pickle-On-A-Stick, Funnel Cake/Elephant Ears/Fried Dough and oh my God, what? What’s that? What’s the best part of the best part? Uh yes that would be Lemon Shake-Ups.

Lemon Shake-Ups, I am basically convinced at this point, are the best part of summer. You can get them at other times during the year, but you should not. Likewise you can get them at non-county-fair locales, but again you should not. Stick with what works. Stop fucking around. Just as insightful pop culture commentary belongs in an article written by Stephen King in an issue of Entertainment Weekly, so do Lemon Shake-Ups belong on the midway at the fair in the small town during the summer.

There are plenty of decent recipes on the webs for Lemon Shake-Ups (We never talk about recipes. What’s that about? You’d think we would, occasionally. Are we too butch for our own good?) but me I prefer to have mine made by an expert (ideally an old church woman or a Mexican on a TN visa).

Anyways I hope you have fairs where you live this summer, so you can go have one. I feel bad for you if you can’t. If there are no fairs where you live, maybe you could start one! I always felt there was some latent Carny in you. Explore that.

Also if anyone has any other midway fair beverage treats that they like, I would like to hear about it. You can also get Orange and Strawberry Shake-ups, but that ain’t my scene, Sizzlean.

All right. Fine, OK, whatever. Jesus, stop looking at me like that. It’s just that I’ve been a little sick of all the juices and sodas lately. The other night I was food shopping, lonely as a cloud in the beverage aisles, thinking The next company that tries to make me drink something cherry-vanilla’d or green-tea’d is getting stabbed in the ass, AND NOT IN THE GOOD WAY.

But then —just like at Homecoming, when the DJ played “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All” and I thought I was going to be alone for the rest of my life, and then Joanne, this girl from Chemistry who I’d never really noticed, asked me to dance, and suddenly, there in the gymnasium, under the streamers and disco ball, I realized She’s actually not a complete dog, if you ignore her breath and acne— there it was: Mike’s Hard Lime, jumping off the shelf and into my lap and heart. I mean it’s basically soda, right? With the sugar and the carbonation and what not? We’ve talked once before about my predilection for the fruity malt beverages, and not a thing has changed.

I’m not really an alcohol drinker, like, at all. Because I only enjoy sweet things, beer and wine for me are the potable equivalents of beets and cauliflower. Unfortunately this sudden love affair with Mike’s Hard Lime is turning out to cause major problems: I’m having a hard time reconciling my love for it with my normal, non-alcoholic beverage drinking tendencies. When I was checking out at the supermarket, I was like Oh man, I am drinking two of these as soon as I get to my car. No. Bad. Every morning I see them in the fridge and think: OMG I definitely need to have one of those before work. Also very bad. I seriously want to drink these all the time—while holding the baby and operating heavy machinery and writing on my blog and everything! I’m just saying please keep a close eye on me. You don’t suppose Mike’s Hard Lime is a gateway drug, do you? Watch there be a pomegranate-and-açai-infused meth. That’s all I need.

Been in Indiana recently. Home of blah, blah and blah, whatever it says on Wikipedia today, but most importantly: the home of Faygo. Well not home of, I guess, but they have it there. Close enough. Here are some good pictures I took as proof:

I mainly avoid the stuff, no offense to my homies in the ICP who are seriously going to get their GEDs some day. But I saw Faygo Rock & Rye recently and was intrigued. The only Rock & Rye I ever knew was the alcoholic kind. Back when we were tapping the cab in high school my dad’s bottle of Mr Boston’s Rock & Rye was the ultra high class stuff. It had slices of orange in it! Even as teenagers we recognized that this was not a booze to be idiots with. Just a sip to help the jungle juice go down, and then off to the local mall to shop for new patches for our denim jackets. Perhaps Overkill or Death Angel today? Who knows where the day will take us.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell Faygo Rock & Rye has naught to do with the alcoholic stuff, so I’m not sure what the deal is there. On their 1999 website, they suggest it as an ingredient in something called Burger Bean Pie, so apparently they are not sure what the deal is either.

So OK already, did drinking this take me to a land of magic and wonder? Depends. Do you consider my cubicle a land of magic and wonder. Some may– it is a lion’s den of a cube, with the Christmas lights, the latest Transformers all on display, and a couple of pretty excellent Star Trek Successories pinned up on the walls.

If you Google around you can find some people debating what exactly the flavor is; many suggest it’s like a cream soda mixed with a cherry cola. I’ll say: cherry vanilla cream, and let all debate cease there. I liked it, but not as much as Mr Boston’s. Man when I was 16, I thought I had everything figured out, but then time passed and I recognized that mindset as the solipsistic folly of youth. But now a few more years have passed and I find myself re-reconsidering everything. Look: at 16 I was drinking high class booze on my parent’s nickel, but now as an adult I’m spending the hard-earned on a just-OK soda sort of named after it but not really. What if I really did have it all figured out at 16, and have only been kidding myself ever since? I mean I am not about to bust out the denim jacket, but maybe I will find my old cassettes and see if I can listen to Overkill without having to lie down, and then just go from there.

Josh this morning I was trying to figure out what is my favorite Tears For Fears song. I was listening to “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” at the time, which, hello has that song even aged one day? I don’t think so. And then I was remembering how in the band I was in in college, the drummer, every rehearsal, would INSIST that we should do a rockin’ version of that song. And we’d be like Yeah totally, good idea, but no one would ever get around to actually orchestrating it. And I guess, knowing what I know now and wishing I had known it then, if I ever have a time machine (someday!) the one thing I would want to do is go back in time to that crummy-ass basement and darn it we will play that cover version of EWTRTW. Although I would lobby quite strongly that we perform it as a sincere tribute, not an irony-clad rockin’ out cover version. Because god damn. That song.

What does Tears For Fears have to do with Pig Iron Cola, you’re wondering. No idea. Probably nothing! But Pig Iron Cola doesn’t have any kind of website that I can find, and there seems to be absolutely zero information about this product anywhere on the planet aside from that it’s somehow associated with a Seattle BBQ place. And I really liked it, found it totally excellent (real sugar + Pepsi-level sweetness + complete mouth-bite of Coke = best of all 3 worlds), but since they don’t care about marketing or getting information about this product out into the world, I figure we might as well use this space to discuss something that we’re passionate about. ARE YOU WITH ME JOSH ALLEN WATER DRINKER OF AMERICA.

So anyways. I’m sure your favorite T4F song is going to be some deep cut I’m not super familar with, but lay it on me. Everyone else reading this who is down with Orzabal & Co., chime in. Do you know what my favorite one in high school was? You’ll laugh, but it was Badman’s Song. Which also still completely holds up. We used to crank that in Jamie Candiloro’s basement. I love that “Faith can move mountains” part. It’s like spiritual, you know? Which we need more of these days. Well, I do.

OK. No more lies. No more sassafras. No more jingo-jango. If you sat me down, right here right now, lay an avuncular hand on my shoulder, leaned in and quietly asked, “If you could only drink one beverage for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

I mean, this is the question. This is what we’re here for. And although my thumbs tremble as I punch these words into my jerry-rigged Merlin, I feel that – right here right now – I have a very real answer: SmartWater.

But first I feel I must approach this with the cold, clinical logic that we apply to all of our beviews. I can’t let raw emotion affect this decision. I’ll be using our standard SAD/RAD binary schema.

SAD:

1. It’s called SmartWater. GHEY. Throw in the interCaps and you’ve got a real bad case of 1998. And if you put “smart” in the name, you better be delivering Smatthew-level results.
2. It’s bottled water. Dude they just take your local tap and mark it up like infinity percent. You are an A-1 chump if you shell out your hard-earned for that.
3. What are you, some kind of bicyclist? Do you wear four-way seamless stretch microsensor moisture-wicking 3D chamois shorts that leave nothing to the imagination? Do you try to intentionally get your heart-rate up? No. No.
4. Plus I guess you hate the environment!
5. Yet another Glaceau product, which already had the whiff of smug exploitation about them even before Coke swooped in and bought the company. Now Jennifer Aniston’s doing TV spots. Is this where your allegiances lie.

RAD:

1. Holy fuck this is good.
2. GODDAMN IT WATER FTW
3. Dearest Jesus in deep space this is the purest, cleanest, most perfect water in the history of water.
4. Fuck you they make this in a lab. You think natural water tastes good? Pulled out of some dirty spring, choked with fish poo and chemical runoff? These Glaceau punks built a little chamber where they manufacture beautiful white clouds, unsullied by real-world pollutants, and then they make these clouds rain ever so gently right into SmartWater bottles for you to enjoy.
5. It was really hot over the weekend and I seriously, hand raised, had a like five-minute reverie where I envisioned a walk-in refrigerator filled stem-to-stern with liter bottles of SmartWater, perfectly chilled, gleaming, and lit from within. There was a mist.
6. It hydrates the shit out of anything it touches.
7. gotta stockpile man coke’s going to change the formula i just know it
8. so clean, so so clean
9. oh god unnnhh
10. SMARTWATER RUNS BARTERTOWN

Italian Volcano Blood Orange Juice. Orange juice made from Italian Volcano Blood. Mount Etna, dude. Pompeii. Complete carnage. A city frozen and buried in time, its treasures lost for eons. This is not some shit to be trifled with. This is fucking lava juice. This is a juice that many men died to bring you. Many burly, muscular men. Men who do not speak so much as grunt. Men who do not ask politely but simply brush you aside and take what they want. Men with sweaty foreheads and a lot of chest hair. Like, A LOT a lot of chest hair. So much chest hair that at first you think “Wow that is gross!” but then you find that you keep thinking about it, and you’re unable to stop yourself from imagining what it would feel like, to lie on it and run your fingers through it, all tufted and pillowy, such a soft and delicate counterpoint to this absolute musky brute of a man, until finally you think “Wow I think I would like to be intimate with a man that hairy!” I mean am I right or am I right? That is the emotion behind this juice. Taste-wise it’s still right in line with regular old orange juice, but STILL. It is a Juice of Men. Drink this juice and then get your comb, because it will be a LONG night. And then tomorrow you will have to hand-vac all in and around the bed, probably. There will be hair everywhere. Actually I bet it’s kind of a gross situation in the shower drain, too. But still. Drink deep of the Lava juice, my friend. You now have within you the fiery blood and aged spirit of Italian volcanoes, and they will fortify you for the task at hand. Also: check your MySpace, I sent you a picture of me with my shirt off. Tell me what you think, and be honest. I know I need to lift weights more.