Top Pop Cola, Found!

Top Pop Cola, Found at Last

Top Pop Cola reminds me of an incredibly beautiful woman I've long admired from afar, yet only got around to seducing last night. The delayed gratification heightened my interest in the consumation of my desire, but the act itself turned out be a disappointment.

As loyal readers will know, I first spotted Top Pop empty on a sidewalk a few months ago. I cased the local shops but didn't turn up a bottle and had to decide that the litterbug had ported it in from some far off locale. Fortunately I was proven wrong when I saw some in a deli about four blocks from my initial encounter. A whole range of generic flavors was lined up for the eager customer, so generic I can't remember what was actually there.

Fearing my wife's rage, I only picked up the cola. I'm sure that those same bottles will be lingering on the shelves when I return in a year or two.

First off, the cost to flavor ratio is tops. I believe the bottle was sixty five cents, and it contains twenty four "fl" ounces of drink. That's pretty good, considering it tastes like medium class generic bar cola. It ain't bad at all, certainly not as awful as what I'd braced myself for.

Which brings me to an aside: The sodas I've been drinking for the past several months are all pretty not-awful. I mean, I haven't had a Skeleteens level of awful since the Skeleteens drinks, and I haven't had "sweet corn drink" awful since I woke up while sleep-eating out of the cat litter box. Damn you Ambien! The danger and excitement is sorely lacking from my reviewing, it's now sort of like hanging dry wall as I work through my umpteenth orange drink which is only differentiated from all the rest because it was mixed up in Oregon.

Bah.

Drinking Top Pop is like drinking dry wall, review-wise.

Anyways, it's a better tasting cola drink. Not as thick as Coke or Pepsi, none of the chemical nasty found in those drinks. No after taste, no slime on the teeth. It's still made with corn syrup, but I couldn't tell. It's main impression is that it's a diet soda that wasn't made with diet sweetener, as silly as that sounds.

In fact, that's what it is. It has all the qualities of Diet Coke but it's not aspartame sweetened or whatever that crap is.

Reviewing this soda makes me feel like Clement Greenberg.

As a failing artist, I appreciate the label in particular. It's a combination of Jackson Pollock with a Roy Lichtenstein drawing of a paint brush stroke worked through in a 60s slasher film color palette. The yellow band across the top reads "20% MORE THAN 20 OZ." then there's a circle with a U in it. What the hell does that mean? I know the "circle K" for kosher, maybe circe U means it was packed by an undine. Or it's safe for consumption with brains for the undead. Or the liquid is less than twelve percent umber hulk.

Anyways, there you go. Not great, not bad, just middling blah. But a good blah for the price.

President Lincoln Hated Fast Food...

...and they've banned it at the Lincoln Memorial. He'd written that in as a requirement in his will, or his estate wouldn't have payed to have it built. Considering his book proceeds alone, that estate is worth a fortune. And with the money he gets from letting his likeness by used on the five dollar bill...

New 7-11 Gimmick

New 7-11 Gimmick

I don't know what they're selling me, but I doubt that they'd've done this if they'd realized how tacky it is to make something so similar to the "missing children" milk cartons.

Speaking of which, do they still have missing children pictures on milk cartons? When did milk companies stop caring about missing children?

I wrote them a letter that goes a little like this:

I love Slurpees and drink them all the time. However, I was a little uncomfortable with a recent promotion I saw on a Slurpee cup. It shows the profile of a Slurpee cup and says "I lost my Slurpee".

I'm not an old fogey, but man... Do you folks realize how similar this is to the old missing children on the milk cartons? It's sort of tacky.

I'll be writing about this on my soft drink review blog, and would love to hear your side of the story.

http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=7117116885333133555&searchType=ALL&txtKeywords=&label=Slurpee

I do love Slurpees, though.

Best,
tim h

Stealing Stuff at McDonalds

I commend whoever was able to get their act together enough to keep a McDonalds cup intact long enough to try and use it over two separate visits. I'll also salute whoever was cheeky enough to bring in their own cups to fill them at the station, and then tried to justify it by saying "But I was in here last week and bough at a soda, I thought it was all you can drink?"

I myself could never manage any of these things. Try as I might I could not keep a Taco Bell cup in sanitary shape long enough to use it twice. I'd stash it in my car in a safe place and by the same time the next day it was so full of dirt you could use it as a plant pot.

I wonder if I could score a free McDonalds meal by offering to fix the capitalization on their sign? Mind you, I don't eat at McDonalds very often, just when there aren't any other options. Or I'm in a foreign country, few things more awesome than a McDonalds full of funny talk and crazy items that should be in a Jack in the Box.

Ralph and Charlie's Green Apple and Kiwi Pineapple Juice

My hand isn't to scale.

Ralph and Charlie's Green Apple and Kiwi Pineapple Juice

This is a drink fraught with contradictions - it tastes watery and thick, all at once. It's a little bit sour like a green apple, but in a way they isn't very convincing, as if pineapple was wearing a cheap green apple costume it rented from a discount masquerade shop.

The juice matches my teeth.

I just realized why this stuff strikes me as gross, even though it really isn't... It's the consistency of milk. It has the thickness and viscousity of 2%, and the mouthy aftercoat of fat free. I shit you not, it's identical.

With all my willpower I will push that horrid realization aside and focus on the taste. It really is pretty good, few manufactured flavors go out of the bounds of decency faster than green apple. It's like some guy in a fancy suit says "Make me an X that tastes like green apple" and the flavor chemist says "Oh, you want something that tastes like green apple Jolly Ranchers". In a just universe the chemist would be beaten and have his taste buds shaved off with a planer. Sadly, in our universe the suit guy would nod just dumbly as he dreams about his new sports car-

"Of course".

This stuff doesn't taste like Jolly Rancher's.

The label says it's "naturally turbid", a word my iPhone insists should be turbo. iPhones show an uncanny wisdom at times. The label also calls it an "everyday beverage", I am a little uncertain what that means. Maybe it's like writing "Consumer Loyalty" right on the box.

Oh no! Corn syrup! C'mon Ralph, charlie! I am ashamed of you both. It says "sugar (A) and/or glucose - fructose syrup (B)". That means corn syrup, right? Right? I'll cheat and look it up... Yep, generally means corn syrup in disguise.

Bummer.

Anyways, I drank it, hated it at first, got over it, sort of liked it, then didn't finish it. That's the big measure, if I finish the drink or not. And I didn't, so there.

Snake in the Grass, Coca Cola Slurpee

It's important to grip the adder firmly behind the head,
so it cannot twist and bite you. Be strong.

Snake in the Grass, A Coca Cola Slurpee Betrayal

In an effort to offset the crushing sadness inherent in my being a guy who gets up for work before six and seldom gets home before ten, I bought an xbox. This was to ensure that the twelve free minutes I enjoyed at home each day weren't frittered away on my wife, or my cats, or my robot or my novelization of this blog. None of those things hold up to being cursed at by the effeminate voices of the next-next generation, a rather high strung people thick with racism and innumerable other incarnations of ignorance.

I mean, really, I have yet to meet a twelve year old who actually knows what "hull down" means. What do kids learn in school nowadays?

So in this "xbox" there is a game called World at War. One of a myriad of World War II games where we get to take the role of soldiers who never lived to be our grandfathers. While playing these men doomed to never don the mantle of "confused giver of unwanted and uncool Christmas gifts to ungrateful children", you can earn "achievements".

At least I think that's what they are called. An achievement is acquired when you've done something deemed noteworthy by the game designers like killed three enemies with one bullet, or having team killed your fiftieth crying eight year old.

Achievements, by the way, are pretty arbitrary. I've done things I thought were pretty remarkable but went unrewarded by the happy little pop up bubble announcing my accomplishment. In World at War, for example, I managed to roll a tank all the way over and back onto it's treads. Pretty cool, and I've only ever managed it once, no matter how much effort I've devoted to repeating the feat. But, roll a tank - no accomplishment. Neither do you get an accomplishment for making your friends sputter with anger, or for choking on a grape during "Headquarters". Fall off a building roof, however, and the game congratulates you.

I've fallen off roofs before, and nowhere in my swimming vision was a pop up commending me for it. Blood, gravel, stars - but no pop ups.

A charming characteristic of achievements are their often clever names. "Hammer Time" and "Soul-Survivor" are two examples. Maybe not so charming. "Saved Private Ryan" is another that quotes popular media, kids love that.

One particularly not charmingly named achievement is called "Snake in the Grass". You get it for shooting a Japanese soldier in a gilly suit while he is hiding in the grass. In the campaign versions of the game, there are numerous places where enemy soldiers hide in the underbrush, then leap up and rush you with bayonets. After playing once or twice you learn where they hide and can gun them down before they act.

Not very sporting - after all, it's basically cheating to use knowledge of the ambush to forestall an otherwise unforeseeable event. But that's sort of the point of any xbox game, to break the unfolding of the game so as to play it out with the least possible enjoyment.

But, "Snake in the Grass": an incredibly easy achievement to collect. I have it, got the way I described above. I'm not proud of it and certainly didn't learn from it. I wish the achievement conditions had been refined a little - that you only had the chance to earn it the very first time you passed through a level, before you learn where all the enemies are hidden.

But that just means that someone would release a cheat guide, detailing enemy locations so you would enter prepared. It's my honest belief that xbox players hate a challenge more than anything else, except possibly being surprised by something.

As someone who has a bronze medal in shooting threats before they manifest themselves, you might think I wouldn't have been surprise-bayoneted by a slurpee. But like I said, my qualifications weren't honestly earned.

Here's the story:

I was craving a Coca Cola slurpee, but the dispenser at the local 7-11 was broken. Two weeks went by without satisfaction, even the Burger King slurpee dopplegangers were consistently unavailable. During that time I even pressured my workmates to buy me a slurpee from a nearby town when they drove over on business. They merely laughed in a sinister manner and consistently "forgot".

I started calling the 7-11 and asking if the machine was online, to save myself the six block walk. Eventually the machine was fixed, I was informed via telephone and scudded over to fill my void.

I was immediately suspicious, the machine which dispensed Coca Cola slurpees wasn't repaired, they had merely changed one spigot on the sister slurpee machine over to Coke. This wasn't a well reasoned suspicion, but more of the feeling a cat seems to get when it enters a room and discovers something has been fundamentally changed about it's universe, maybe that someone dropped a sinister envelope on the living room floor or left a frightening umbrella leaning in the corner. Alert!

So I filled my cup, tasted and a screaming Japanese soldier rushed out of the weeds and stabbed me in the mouth with artificial banana flavoring. Alas, the worst of all artificial fruit flavors - and in my mouth no less! The slurpee machine had not been cleaned out properly, and a horrible flavor lingered from before. Awful.

Having committed myself (those cups are inventory!), and still burning with slurpee lust, I resigned myself to my imperfect drink, cut it with extra fountain Coke, paid and left.

Bah.

[Note: This was written on my iPhone during my daily commute. Please excuse the ad hoc nature of the writing, and any totally bizarre words. I would assure you non sequiturs are the result of the auto-spell build into my treacherous phone.]

Maine Root Sarsaparilla

I get those stupid plastic pillows
from Amazon and keep them to reuse, but they suck to
store as they are just little balloons which take up
a lot of space en masse. Keep forever, though.

Maine Root Sarsaparilla
Maine Root Sarsaparilla smells like a mixture of lake water and SweetTarts, being from Missouri I like this. Really. It smells like a good summer's day spent menacing fish from the safety of a flat bottomed boat. Taste-wise it ain't so hot, though.

It has a great aftertaste, a bit like minty discount toothpaste. The initial flavor though, ugh. Somewhere between freezer burned vanilla ice cream and cardboard. You only get a flash of sarsaparilla about two seconds into a taste, then it yanks off it's Halloween mask revealing itself as root beer.

Yeah, this is a pretty bad flavor right out of the gate. Too foamy, too, right when it's opened but much better after it sits for about fifteen minutes. The foaminess early on covers some of the nastiness, but it really is better flatter.

Maine Root is puzzling in the big picture. It's part of a wave of designer soft drinks waving the flag of environmentalism and responsible social activism, which rocks. These are great things. What baffles me is that I bought this at Duane Reade in a fancy 4-pack. Why are these hoity toity drinks being carried by a big pharmacy chain? Is this part of the movement that put fancy coffee and fresh made sandwiches in 7-11s? It's puzzling.

The thing is that I don't trust it. Maine Root sells itself like it's a small label, but it must have a pretty significant factory output to fill all the Duane Reade's and everything else in the world. It says right on the label that it's a handcrafted beverage, but how? It's that sort of fake down-homeiness that puts my guard up.

I mean, yeah, it's awesome that it has certified organic fairtrade sweeteners and spices. That's hard to beat, but it feels... disingenuous. And it doesn't taste good, which is a bummer.

By the way, I used to work in Maine during the summers and have no idea how this relates to Maine at all. It doesn't taste a bit like the state.

I dub thee, Sir Buck the Cat, defender of the true faith
and upholder of my right to look at internet
pornography when my wife isn't around.