Dew Me, Baby

While making the usual mid-week trip to buy milk and other crap we never buy enough of on grocery day, I spied something glorious in the soda cabinet by the checkout line. Something gloriously… blue. Mysterious comb liquid blue.

Could it be? Surely, it couldn’t be. They hadn’t… brought back Pepsi Blue?! My heart leapt at the prospect of a delicious Pepsi Blue float, which was the only reason I really miss the stuff much.

Sadly, it was not to be. What I did find, though, was almost as intriguing. And much weirder.

Not being one to pass up a weird soda flavor, and because they were marked down to 79 cents each, I grabbed all three. Apparently Mountain Dew is running a contest between these three flavors, all of which are user-created. If I was a better journalist I’d investigate the website further, but instead I’ll just tell you that you can vote for your favorite flavor here and skip right along to the fun part: Taste-testing!

Now, before I comment on the flavors, I should make my position on Mountain Dew clear. Original Mountain Dew, to my tongue, is like some combination of urine and stomach acid. It’s nasty, it burns, and it reminds me never to punish myself this way again because no human deserves that. Code Red and LiveWire, on the other hand, I’m okay with. I won’t reach for them first, but when presented with a soda machine that doesn’t have Dr. Pepper, they’re a good second choice. And I loved Pitch Black so much that I would probably lick some off the floor of a movie theater just to taste it again. With that in mind, I begin.

Round One: Mountain Dew Voltage

This is the flavor I had initially mistaken for Pepsi Blue. The description on the bottle says “Dew charged with raspberry citrus flavor and ginseng”. Adding ginseng to soda sounds completely fucking weird to me, and it should to you too. This flavor is actually somewhat reminiscent of Pepsi Blue, enough that if you’re one of the many people who thought PB resembled toilet cleaner in taste as well as color, you’ll want to avoid this. If, on the other hand, you likened Pepsi Blue to the sweet vaginal fluids of Aphrodite, this *might* be a decent replacement. Maybe. The ginseng gives it a weird, almost green tea-like aftertaste, but it’s definitely the closest you’ll get to Pepsi Blue without creating an elaborate basement soda lab.

Score: B-
I’d drink this again, but I ain’t gonna cry if it goes away forever. It would’ve been a C+, but it gets an extra point for coming *this close* to reviving the Crystal Pepsi of the 00’s.

Round Two: Mountain Dew Supernova

This one gets two immediate brownie points from me without even being opened yet. One for reminding me of DDR, and one for being an eerie pinkish-purple color, which my camera didn’t properly capture, that reminds me of what alien slime would look like if it was created by little girls. Description: “Dew with a blast of strawberry melon flavor and ginseng”. Oh okay, I get the gimmick now, they all have ginseng. I should really read before writing. Anyway, this stuff is pretty excellent. It tastes pretty much like your standard strawberry soda, but with a little less bite. Which I’m quite happy about, because I usually think strawberry soda has WAY too much bite.

Score: A-

Still not gonna win any awards, since it’s not terribly unique, but I will definitely be buying more of this stuff.

Round Three: Mountain Dew Revolution

The color of this one is… weird. It looks too watery to be soda, which is misleading since it’s not any healthier than the other two. Remember that “cornflower” crayon everyone hated because no child on Earth knows what the hell a cornflower looks like? And it was this weird off-shade of blue that didn’t remind you of corn *or* flowers? That’s what this reminds me of. The bottle blurb calls it “Dew infused with wild berry fruit flavor and ginseng”. The flavor is something I’m having trouble putting my finger on. It definitely also has a Pepsi Blue-ish flavor, but not as much as the Voltage. Actually, on second thought it tastes more like carbonated Vitamin Water. That makes the color make more sense, but carbonated Vitamin Water is not something I want in my life. Not at all. It’s not a terrible flavor, per se, but I want my junk food to be honest about its identity. If you’re going to be soda, be neon-colored and bad for me. Don’t pretend to be a health food. Mountain Dew Revolution needs to come out of the closet.

Score: C

Not impressed. I’ll finish the bottle I bought, but I’m going to scowl.

So there you have it. My pick of the three, obviously, is Supernova, but since my tastes are wildly unrelatable to anyone else’s, I’d definitely encourage you to try these for yourself, especially if you’re a connoisseur of peculiar sodas. Only one flavor will win, but I personally don’t think any of them are good enough to last. So try them soon or they will die alone.

Marky Mark and the Smelly Bunch

I’m finally back to blogging! This one will be on the short side, but I’ve got a longer article in the oven, waiting to be born and then frosted. I like mixing up my oven metaphors.

One of the reasons for my non-blogging is I’ve been on a major art kick lately, so I’ve been spending more creative time at my other desk than at this one. My whole life I’ve been a hoarder of art supplies, and I have pretty much every kind under the sun – crayons, colored pencils, gel pens, pastels, watercolors, oil paints, beads, modeling clay, random shiny things I can hot glue to stuff, etc. But the other day when a friend mentioned coloring something with markers, I realized I hadn’t had a good set of those since elementary school. Oh sure, I have more than my share of Sharpies and Expos, but a nice set of markers for actual coloring? That was like a foreign concept. So today I took a random trip to Walmart, and purchased these:

Being the good little sheep that I am, I had to have the same set of markers my friend has. This goes way back to third grade, when my childhood best friend was constantly one-upping my crayon efforts. Oh sure, I had the BIG BOX of 96 crayons with the fancy sharpener in the back, but Stephanie? Had glitter crayons, and glow-in-the-dark crayons, and jewel tone crayons, and crayons that smelled like leather, and god knows what else. She was to crayons what Bubba was to shrimp. Oddly enough, the friend with the markers is also named Stephanie. I am forever having Crayola wars with people named Stephanie.

Anyway, this is a pretty good set of markers. You get 50 markers for about 8 bucks, and if this was QVC I’d do math and tell you how little money that is per marker, but I don’t care that much and neither do you. Some of the colors are pretty repetitive – there’s eleven or twelve shades of green, depending on whether you count teal as a shade of green or a shade of blue. Personally I just call it biracial and count it as both.

The markers are also “supertips”, which is Crayola’s marketing jargon for “you can make thick or thin lines with them”. I really like that, since it means you can color details without having markers that dry out in five seconds, but this is probably not the feature that’s gonna draw the kiddies in.

This is the real moneymaker: Crayola is recycling its old gimmick of convincing small children to shove markers up their noses and inhale. This seems like a dubious marketing technique, but it’s not nearly as bad as what one of my first grade classmates once brought to school: lemon-scented glue. I shit you not. Kid strutted into class all proud of his new glue, and was all “MY GLUE SMELLS LIKE LEMON!” So of course, being first-graders, we all stood around sniffing this kid’s glue until the bell rang. This had been such a hallmark moment in my life that I ran to my mom as soon as I got home from school and excitedly told her about the AWESOME GLUE, and she freaked the fuck out and told me that sniffing glue was VERY BAD and I might DIE. That was pretty much my mom’s default technique for getting me to stop doing stuff as a child. “Don’t climb on that! You’ll fall and DIE! Don’t drink that! You’ll DIE!” It was incredibly effective, but I was totally Chuckie Finster as a kid.

You’d think the ability to inhale marker ink without worrying about the state of your brain cells would be a strictly childhood trait, but you’d be wrong. I felt the need to smell all twelve scented markers, just like I did at age 7. The markers aren’t labeled, leaving you to guess what they’re supposed to smell like. Here’s what I came up with:

Yes, you heard right. Chocolottie. It’s not her exact scent, but it was reminiscent enough to make my brain go “HOLY SHIT IT’S CHOCOLOTTIE!”, which made me all kinds of giddy. I haven’t smelled that smell in years, and this marker will probably be responsible for my eventual brain damage.

So basically these all smell like flowers, food, Christmas, or various cleaning chemicals. I was completely thrown for a loop when the black marker didn’t smell like licorice. I’m still not 100% settled on pudding, but it was definitely something weakly chocolate-scented, and pudding was the first weakly chocolate-scented item I thought of. Also, I’m pretty pissed that there’s no scented purple marker. I want to make a smelly rainbow, dammit!

If you like markers, I’d totally recommend this set. Just don’t shove them too far up your nose. You don’t want to color your brain.

Stop! Meme time!

Yeah, it’s been months since I’ve updated. The last few months have kept me either sick or busy, so this took a backburner. But I’m trying to get back on the rickety tricycle that is life, so I should be back to this soon.

Meanwhile, here’s a meme I ganked from Mystie. Consider it a warm-up exercise, if you will.

Here are the rules: 1) Link back to the person who tagged you. 2) Post the rules on your blog. 3) Write six things about yourself. 4) Tag six people at the end of your post by posting links to their blog sites. 5) Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their site. 6) And let your tagger know when your entry is up.

1. My first celebrity crush was Danny Bonaduce.

As I plan to write more about soon, I grew up in a weird fusion of different decades, never knowing the difference between what was current and what was from my mom’s generation.  This resulted in some hilarity, particularly when I got addicted to The Partridge Family and developed a weird crush on the middle son, Danny. Danny Partridge was your standard “lovable brat” character. Think of him as a Dennis the Menace or Bart Simpson for the 70s, but with red hair. I guess I hit my “bad boy” phase at the tender age of seven. How was I supposed to know these were reruns, and by the time I saw them, Danny was a creepy washed-up druggie in his mid-thirties? Lousy confusing childhood. I also once wrote on a Girl Talk card that my future husband would be Don Adams, better known as the original Maxwell Smart. My mom pointed out he was very old by then, but I was all “So? He has a shoe phone!” At least I had my priorities straight.

2. I love small, enclosed spaces.

For some reason, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved to crawl up in small spaces and hide out in them. We had, and still have, an entertainment center with a decent-sized cabinet in the side. I’d crawl up in there and pull the door almost closed and just chill. When I got too big for that, I’d drag some Barbies into my grandma’s closet and play there. I always loved the idea of a tiny attic bedroom or even a cupboard bed, and I’d totally love to stay in one of those Japanese capsule hotels. In fact, one summer when I was older than I care to admit here, I thoroughly cleaned out my own closet, dragged a sleeping bag and a radio in there, and used it as my own personal fortress, which I slept in every night. It’s a good thing I have understanding parents, or I’d have ended up on all kinds of interesting medication.

3. I once helped name a Harry Potter shipping.

When I was in high school, I hadn’t read any of the Harry Potter books yet. But a friend dragged me to the first movie when it came out, and being the perverse weirdo that I was, my main reaction was “Dude, Harry and Ron are totally gay for each other”. So, along with a fellow Dodger by the name of Cyclone, I sat down to try and think of a name for this glorious shipping. (For those who are less geeky than I am, a shipping is just a pairing of characters you believe/want to believe are romantically or sexually involved in some way.)  We decided on Candyshipping, since they shared their candy on the train when they first met. Kinda lame, but 5 seconds of Googling tells me it seems to have caught on. I’m not 100% sure this came from us and not from someone else with the same idea, but it’s nice to think I may have made a contribution to what grew to be a scary, scary fandom.

4. I’d go straight (or at least bi) for the Take-Home Chef guy.

Hey, that rhymes!

5. I collect catalogs I’m never going to order anything from.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, I absolutely love catalogs of all kinds. Makeup catalogs, office supply catalogs, those leaflets that come in the newspaper advertising mediocre furniture stores, anything. In my bathroom magazine rack I currently have three different catalogs from Sephora, including one from 2004; one of those ridiculous airline catalogs; a ThinkGeek leaflet that came with a Christmas gift; one of those “Buy 5 items for 40 cents each!” ads from a New Age book club; and most bizarrely, a Montessori school supply catalog. I wish I had some interesting explanation for this, but really I just like to look at all the pictures.

6.  My religious beliefs change almost constantly.

I figured I’d throw in at least one fact that’s not totally frivolous, so here you go. I’ve been everything from Christian to Taoist to Wiccan to wannabe-Jew. I seriously celebrated Chanukah one year with 8 random candles I scrounged up from around my house. That was really weird at the time, but now I’m a Unitarian and can celebrate whatever the hell I want. I don’t think I can convince anyone I need Rosh Hashanah off work, though, unfortunately. But either way, I’m constantly changing my mind about what’s the best way to express my spiritual side, and frankly that’s fine with me. I enjoy the process.

Also, cocks.

Oh yeah, I’m supposed to tag 6 people. Most of my friends have private blogs, so no linkies here, but I’ll tag Roni, Fez, Spiffy, and Terry. I can’t really think of anyone else, but if you read this and it looks like fun, HAVE AT IT.