LUDIC LOG

Are web logs art? I certainly hope so. Because I suffered to write this entry. And I don't mind suffering for my art. But if web logs aren't art, then I suffered for nothing, and that makes me as pathetic as Jesus.

A while back, I gave up drinking sugary soda. I figured that with my intake of fat, weed and alcohol, I was getting all the poison I needed on a daily basis, and there was no reason to add diabetes and severe hypertension to my roster of health woes. However, I never lost the ridiculous consumernaut desire to try out the innumerable gimmicky sodas that the marketing geniuses in the sugar-delivery industry shove down our throats in order to send their kids to college. Finally, this weekend, I took the plunge and bought seven "new" sodas and tasted them all. Now I'm going to write about what they were like, before I slip into a diabetic coma. Why did I do it? I did it so you don't have to. Stay away from all this crap, people. Drink beer instead. It's not as bad for you, plus it gets you drunk!

DIET COKE WITH LEMON. Lemon Coke has been a longtime soda-fountain favorite, along with Vanilla Coke and Cherry Coke (which have likewise been made canonical by the Coca-Cola Company, with varying degrees of success). I'm not really sure why Coke chose not to produce Lemon Coke in a non-diet variety as did Pepsi, but after tasting it, I'm glad they didn't.. Diet Coke with Lemon, while trouncing Pepsi Twist both in advertising (its classy, subtle campaign has it way over Pepsi's asinine celebrity gag ads) and packaging (Diet Coke with Lemon doesn't have a particularly distinguished package, but it's at least more well done than Pepsi Twist, which could have been designed by a sleepwalker), but it tastes just awful. It has the same harsh, vaguely addictive chemically taste as regular Diet Coke, with a rotten, obvious artificial lemon flavor layered clumsily over it that recalls Lemon Pledge a lot less than it does lemonade. Steal yourself one of their nice print ads, and give the drink a pass.

DR. PEPPER RED FUSION. Dr. Pepper, being a sort of vanilla-fruit-dairy-cola concoction lacking the 'cola-neutral' quality of Coke or Pepsi, does not lend itself well to flavor variants. This drink is proof of that. Accompanied by an inexplicable rave-influenced advertising campaign, Red Fusion aspires to some kind of soft drink uber-hipness, but the best the drink itself can deliver is that is comes up just short of being nauseating. Of course, by not being nauseating, it has an advantage over many of the other drinks I sampled, but it's not actually good or anything. First of all, it's not so much red as it is reddish-brown, and as much as it pains me to say this, the overall visual impression it makes in a glass is that of liquefied bloody stool. As for the taste, it has in common with many other hipster beverages, from Gatorade Ice to South Beach lizard squeezings, the quality of being deliberately vague as to the flavor it's trying to invoke. Most drinks marketed towards today's callow, moronic youth attempt more to conjure a mood, an attitude, or, at their most specific, a color rather than an actual flavor, and Red Fusion is no exception (which is unfortunate, since Dr. Pepper is already altogether too evasive about what it's supposed to taste like). It's a bit like regular Dr. Pepper with most of the intensity removed and replaced by something inexplicably fruitoid. Not good, but the bottle is a nice accessory for a low-rent dance party.

MOUNTAIN DEW CODE RED. I actually tried this before I gave up soda, and God almighty do I miss it. Leaving aside its questionable marketing (the first of this current wave of extreme-hipster sodas, Code Red has, bewilderingly, focused on hackers and ghetto youth as its target demographics), it's just really good soda. It has all the nasty, rosin-packed caffiene kick of regular Mountain Dew, as well as Dew's sort-of-citrus essence, but it's even sweeter than regular Dew, if you can conceive of such a thing, and has a simple, understandable flavor profile (Mountain Dew with cherry flavoring). It goes down easy, it's clearly artificial without being grossly chemical, it gives you an espresso-like buzz, and it's delicious! Even the diet variety isn't that bad. Highly recommended.

PEPSI BLUE. This is just a horrible, horrible idea. I can't think of any reason that this vile-tasting, garish-looking, horribly packaged crap was even made, unless it was the fact that all the other extreme-hipster sodas were orange or yellow or green or red or clear and Pepsico just figured they should make a blue one for the sake of completeness. The food chemistry interpretation of berry flavor is already extremely gross -- it's just a crypto-fruity, ultra-sugary mess of confusion -- and, when combined with cola flavor, of all things, it's just unspeakable. The absolute worst of the lot, the only reason this is worth buying is so you can pour it down the drain and help rid the world of it forever.

PEPSI TWIST. This is Pepsi's version of lemon cola, and since I've already talked about its crummy advertising and coma-inducing packaging above, all I can add here is that it actually tastes pretty good in both the regular and diet varieties.

SPRITE TROPICAL REMIX. I didn't even know this drink existed until I saw it mentioned on someone else's web log; I was frankly shocked to see it at my local 7-11. Sprite would seem to be a pretty good candidate for flavor experimentation, given that lemon-lime lends itself much easier to the addition of other flavors than does cola; and other efforts in this field (particularly Cherry 7-Up) have been moderate successes, so despite the terrible name I was ready to give this one a fair hearing. This was a bad, bad mistake. Sprite Tropical Remix is just awful. It tastes like Zima that's had the alcohol boiled out of it and replaced by ground-up children's aspirin. As remixes go, this belongs somewhere in the P. Diddy canon. If it weren't for the existence of Pepsi Blue, this would be the worst soda I've ever tasted.

VANILLA COKE. I have been a longtime fan of the kind of vanilla Coke you can get at soda fountains (as well as certain generic or off-brand vanilla colas, particularly Kroger Big K Vanilla Cola), so I was pretty excited about Coca-Cola coming out with their own official interpretation of the drink. It could easily have been a disaster; Cherry Coke is mediocre at best -- leagues below the kind you can get at soda fountains -- and Lemon Coke, as I've noted, is rotten. But on first tasting, I was pretty impressed: the vanilla flavoring was light and subtle, and the Coke-ness far outweight the vanillocity, which is exactly as it should be. It also had an appealing package (the cream coloring on the stripe is a nice touch) and a mildly funny ad campaign. On repeated tastings, though, it's lost a little of its appeal; it's a bit too sweet, and if you don't drink it right away it develops a rather disgusting oily film. However, it's still a lot better than it could have been, and it's a hell of a lot better than Sprite Tropical Remix. And, in the end, isn't that's what's important?