Month: August 2006

Man, when was the last time I had Yoo-Hoo? Probably twenty years ago, at least. Ugh. I don’t want to get all heavy about my Early Circumstances, but Yoo-Hoo was one of the beverages of my youth that my dad and brother both loved and I couldn’t stand. Moxie being the other. My inability to chug those bevs along with the other men in the family is basically how I ended up casting my lot in with the women-folk, and well, I guess you know the rest. I showed you my therapy bill that one time.

But a lot can change in 20 years–I did turn out heterosexual, Dad, and apparently Yoo-Hoo now comes in a host of different flavors! Who knew! Not me.

With a name like “Dyna-Mocha”, you’d expect the beverage to absolutely decimate your preconceived notions about the mixing of coffee and chocolate, and that is exactly what it does. OK not really, but they seem to have the science down. I’ve still got the empty Dyna-Mocha bottle on my desk and dang I would love another one. If only I could share the moment with my father. O, to have those twenty years back!

Dad? Can you hear me up there, Dad? I found a Yoo-Hoo I like, Daddy. Your boy finally found a Yoo-Hoo he likes. *uncontrollable sobs* Hold on, my Dad’s not dead.

The SoBe Love Bus recently pulled into town, and K4T got the exclusive interview with the kid who drives it!

K4T: Hey what’s up.

SoBe Kid: Hey.

K4T: You just drive around, showing off the beverages?

SoBe Kid: Yeah.

K4T: How’d you get hooked up with that gig?

Sobe Kid: My friend did it last summer. So…did you want to try something?

My host gestured to the table in front of him, across which an array of SoBe products were displayed.

K4T: What kind is your favorite?

SoBe Kid: I guess this one.

K4T: You know these pink ones have cochineal extract in them? It’s a red dye made from bugs.

SoBe Kid: *shrugs*, *checks watch.*

After carefully perusing the ingredients, I indicated that I would like to try SoBe Energy Power Fruit Punch and he poured me half a Dixie Cup’s worth. It was OK. Tasted fruit punch-y. Actually as such, it was significantly better than a lot of the energy drinks out there, which generally taste like a grapefruit trying to fuck an electrical socket. And of course it made me mildly anxious for 30 minutes, as anything with even one gram of taurine or guarana seems wont to do. Pretty soon I won’t even be able to leave the house for fear of getting too hysterical.

While I was finishing my bev and crushing the Dixie Cup against my forehead, the local Pepsi rep came over to talk to my guy about how things were going and where his next stop was going to be, so I was unable to continue the interview. Still, I feel like some real headway was made. Significant inroads, as such. Look for SoBe to pull all cochineal-infused products from the shelves any day now, and stay tuned to K4T for more exclusive interviews with the leaders in the beverage industry!

I have some young friends. You don’t know this about me, but I’ve got these young friends. Because of how I transcend trends and am basically timeless? So I can relate to any generation? Right? We’ve talked about this. The youths of today just plain feel comfortable hanging around me and don’t care that I listen to Scritti Politti on cassette and fall asleep on the couch at 8:30 while trying to stay up to watch Dinah Shore. Anyway point being that’s why I have a Coheed & Cambria ringtone and ended up giving Gatorade Rain a shot. The kids were all:

“You’re into hydration, right?”

And I go: “What time is it? How did you scalawags get in here? I smell a Sharpie mustache that someone drew on my face.”

And they say try this Gatorade Rain, it’s the “shit.” And I just scoffed because as you well know I do not like drinking s**t or having potty-mouthed teens use my ears as garbage cans! But then they called my commitment to hydration into question and I couldn’t back down — they might lose respect for me and find somebody else to buy them beer!

So I grabbed the too-big, overcomplicated, ghastly plastic bottle — it was the Berry flavor, kind of a sickly pale purple — and took a hearty swig.

Now the kids swore up and down that Rain was a tremendous alternative to regular Gatorade, with a nice clean aftertaste, and I said they better be right because regular Gatorade tastes like something pissed out of a hobo with urethral lesions (if memory serves — I have not taken a sip of that vile concoction since 1986 when I played two games of badminton in a row). And they said: Oh yeah, old timer, Gatorade knows how “ass-nasty” its drinks are so it decided to market this new product as something that doesn’t taste quite so wretched. And I said: Bully to them.

And I will grant you that Rain has a pretty inoffensive aftertaste. Unfortunately they forgot to do something about the foretaste which has that patented Gatorade gym-sock flavor and makes me think of nothing more than their advertisements where they show athletes actually sweating out Gatorade and I’m forced to assume that a key ingredient is, indeed, the perspiration collected from a football player’s moist, stinking, pendulous, postgame jockstrap.

Hecho en Mexico. What other three word phrase is capable of conjuring images of such magic and wonder? None! And Jarritos Fruit Punch (a.k.a “Tutti Fruiti”) delivers on that promise. This is a beverage that literally sent me on a journey, even before I’d taken my first sip. It seems the cap is not a twist-off, so I was all over creation looking for an opener. To the far corners of every single one of our kitchen drawers, honestly. I can’t remember the last time I needed one of those. But I found one eventually and the cap came away from the bottle no problem. I sipped, intrigued and emboldened by the promise of riches from a far-off land, delivered.

Fruit punch? More like fruit ambrosia. A rapturous melange of orange, cherry and lemon juices, cascading against fragrant notes of mango and passionfruit, with only the most delicate hint of goji–like a coy lover, peeking out from beneath the sheets.

J/K. Fruit punch is just code for “red sweet flavor,” right? I mean does anyone think any actual fruit was ever harmed in the making of fruit punch? No, but so what? Who cares. Not me. Mexico: you keep tossing it over that wall, I’ll keep catching it.

Forget regular lemonade: you’ve been with her too long, and she still hasn’t shut up about not getting the lead in the drama club’s production of Anything Goes. Honestly, let it go. But whoa now who is this new girl in school? She loaned you a pencil in Chemistry, and then winked at you when she bent over to pick up her books. So she’s very sweet, but also just a little bit tart. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. And with her pierced tongue and that offhand remark she made about her overbearing stepfather, there’s a hint of mystery about her. (Seriously, WTF is prickly pear?) You have no idea, but you will dedicate yourself to finding out. After school you’ll go three blocks out of your way just so you can walk past the house/grocery store where she lives. You hear her bedroom’s in the produce section, how kinky is that? You should ask her out before Country Time and Minute Maid hatch a plot to get her kicked out of school. Plain old lemonade can be such a bitch when it wants to be.

Have I ever regaled you with tales from back when I was a DJ in college? Probably not, it was kind of a weird time. But you’re right, I had no business in college radio. I knew nothing about the hip bands of the day; even a decade later, when I hear the name “Silver Jews” my first instinct is to be offended. Still, I was a freshman in search of a clique who would accept me, and I wanted to be able to regale people later in life with tales from back when I was a DJ in college.

Of course everyone who joins a college radio station does so in hopes of getting their own show. At my school this turned out to be a complicated, almost political process, and you know me, I’m not a small-fish-in-a-big-pond kind of guy. But I learned that the station was in need of someone to head up their jazz department, and if I took those responsibilities on I would fast-track my way to the mic. Sure, I had to play jazz, but now I wouldn’t be just some freshman who wanted a radio show, I would be the Jazz Director of a radio station. Transportin’ in the chocha, as they say.

The primary duties of the Jazz Director were to contact labels, have them send over the latest albums from their artists, and then play them on air. I don’t know what you remember about the state of jazz in the mid-90s, but most of it was derivitive drivel, basically unlistenable. But it was my job, and the hip-hop DJ with the time slot after mine was very cute, so I wanted to keep doing it.

Unfortunately, my need to play new jazz was in direct opposition to my listeners’ need to not hear new jazz. This led to me taking a very hard-line approach. People would call in every week asking 1) what the hell was I playing, and 2) Could I play Miles or Thelonius or anything else instead. And I would tell them No, the point of my show was to showcase new jazz artists, and yes we all love the greats but it’s imperative that we support these contemporary artists, who are struggling to advance the genre and carve out careers, because without them jazz as an art form would stagnate and die. I would actually deliver sermons like this to the callers. Thanks for listening and calling in and being engaged, here’s a fucking lecture.

Eventually I got so exasperated with people calling in making requests like that that I began pre-emptively proselytizing on air, explaining the importance of what I was doing and why people shouldn’t call in to request something else. I mean modern jazz artists are reinventing and pushing the limits of the genre every day, but what’s the point if we’re not bearing witness to what they’re doing? As if I alone, the Jazz Director of a small FM station in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, was keeping the torch lit for future generations. Like anyone within the sound of my voice would have given a shit if jazz died. Like it hadn’t already.

It took a long time before I realized that there was a reason why no one wanted to be the Jazz Director, and it wasn’t just that everyone else preferred indie rock.

Jazz Diet Pepsi comes in two flavors: Strawberries & Cream, and Black Cherry French Vanilla.

Josh the latest report from this packet of duck sauce I got the other day says Americans drink about 600 sodas a year. I don’t think I get up that high, even with this albatross of a website dangling from my midsection.

You know better than anyone that energy drinks and I have a troubled past. Bloodshot eyes, heart palpitations, amateur karate competitions, god complexes, picnic, lightning, etc. I’m just not the target audience. I long ago hung up my extreme parachute and developed secondary sexual characteristics.

But my lucrative job as a Junior Bevolologist [sic] requires me to sample every drink I come across. And these days you can’t drunkenly stagger into a convenience store shrieking obscenities and grabbing handfuls of pep vitamins without running into a wall of energy drinks.

This brings me to Celsius, which not only plies you with the caffeine and guarana seed that your body so desperately needs, but also promises to raise your metabolism by 12% and “significantly increase calorie burning for three hours.” This has been proven by science.

For someone like me who enjoys nothing better than drinking and watching his gut slowly expand, this sounded like the perfect beverage. I tried the lemon-lime Celsius, and even though the flavor was not unlike that of a household cleanser or urinal cake, I didn’t care because my metabolism was going ape and the ladies were appreciatively eyeing my very slightly diminished waistline. Science tastes like shit, but isn’t that sort of the point?

Stay up all kinds of late. Pudding for lunch AND dinner. Clean underwear totally optional. Drink as much soda as you want, when you want. Who’s with me: being an adult is awesome. OH WAIT OR IS IT? Your lower back basically hurts all the time, you have no clue what that noise on the radio is, you can’t remember the last time you had anything interesting to write about on your blog, and every bowel movement is written in sweat across your brow.

Enter GuS, or Grown-Up Soda, to provide the perfect accompaniment to the end days of your existence on this planet. GuS is about as un-fun as a soda could possibly get, but let’s face it, at your age maybe it’s all you deserve.

The label says “Not too sweet,” but I’d describe it as “Not at all sweet.” Many sodas, when they want to want to seem more mature, get fruit juice involved. This is why you see apple and grape juices listed as an ingredient in basically everything: it allows them to bump their fruit juice percentage (and appear healthier), while also making the drink sweeter. Not GuS Dry Cranberry Lime. Basically it’s just plain cranberry with some water. This combination of ingredients has been clinically proven to suppress smiling, ask any scientist. There’s a little bit of lime in there, but it’s really only there to remind you what a complete ass you made of yourself the last time you had a margarita. I couldn’t even think of what alcohol I would want to mix this with. That’s a sign of trouble, right there, on a number of levels.

But no, best leave the drinking to the high school kids. For you it’s a quiet night in the house–just you, a salad, and a vague distrust of Youtube. Twist open another GuS. It’s the sound of your hopes, dreams, memory and prostate all throwing in the towel.

OK I am back from my trip to Boston. Good job on updating the site once while I was away, you exceeded my expectations by exactly 100%.

I had hoped to discover all kinds of new juices and sodas while I was over there, but to be honest I mostly only drank beer. Taste-wise it was all fine.

I did have some kind of fruity icy tea concoction from Starbucks, on a day when it was about 120 degrees celcius and armpit-to-armpit with no air conditioning on the Green Line. The tea hit the spot, but at that point I would have drinken any mixture of bodily fluids, provided they were served in smoothie format.