What does Backward Dilbert have to do with The 4 Best Soda Flavors That Should Be Revived*? (Semidaily List) (*See article for this.)

I saw the other day in the store that Pepsi was selling "Pepsi Throwback" and "Mountain Dew Throwback," the...

... okay, I've seen that for some time now. It's been there in the soda aisles for a while, right across from where Mr Bunches always stops to get his crayons, but if I'd said "I saw back around the beginning of the year a few months ago that..." it wouldn't have had the same ring, because then you'd be thinking "Well, sure, but why are you talking about it now, instead of something more timely, like Charlie Sheen? Isn't this meant to be a pop culture blog? And isn't 'pop culture' right now dominated by throwing 'tiger blood' or 'F-18' into sentences at random?"

...which is all true, but I'm not going to listen to the questions of some hypothetical (?) reader(s) who are just trying to distract me, anymore than I'm going to listen to, well, um, other things that are trying to distract me.

It's early. I can't come up with analogies until my pizza-for-breakfast has kicked in, which should be any minute now.

The throwback in "Pepsi Throwback" is that it's made with "real sugar" which is a throwback to the days when things were made with real sugar, including soda, the days before we discovered saccharine, and certainly before we discovered that saccharine does really bad things to people, things I would be more specific about except that I'm not sure what saccharine really does to people and I don't feel like going to look it up. Instead, I'll just note that my spellchecker recognizes the word "saccharine" and knows how to spell it, which is kind of interesting to me because I'm pretty sure that saccharine isn't used in regular conversation at all, or even in irregular conversation, so why would that word be programmed into spellcheckers? I mean, I'm sure it doesn't use up all that much space in the memory of a computer, but it does use up some space. Someone once told me that each letter equals one bit of information, or at least I think someone once told me that, and since "remembering (maybe) what someone (maybe) once told me" = "reliable knowledge in today's world" I'll go with that, which means that remembering how to spell saccharine uses 10 bytes on my computer -- plus 10 on my home computer, plus 10 on my phone, which knows how to spell it for text messaging (I just checked) so that's 30 bytes of information that I can't use for something else, like storing a phone number, unless I want my computers to forget how to spell saccharine in order to remember your phone number.

That doesn't seem like much, but remember that there are as many as 100,000,000,000 people in the world, and if 1/10 of those people have computers and 1/10 of those people with computers have a need to store one more phone number than their computers have memory for, then 1,000,000,000 phone numbers are not being remembered, so consider the lost productivity that represents, because you can further assume that at any given moment, 1/10 of those people whose computers don't have enough memory to store that last critical phone number are instead looking it up, doing that instead of something productive like figuring out that if you read Dilbert strips backwards, they make as much sense...

... I'll have to come back to that and explain it...

... those people are instead using their time and their boss' resources to look up a phone number, and probably getting distracted, once online (because who looks up numbers in a book anymore?) by Dilbert or something, so they're even less productive -- 100,000,000 people, worldwide, not doing anything productive and becoming a drag on the economy all because Microsoft had to $*(#&$ make sure that we know how to spell saccharine.

Nice work, Bill Gates.

(If you thought about questioning the math I used there, don't bother: It's the same exact math that NASA and other "scientists" use to estimate how many Earth-like world are out there.)(Seriously. Read this article, and notice that every single number is an estimate, as signified by the use of the word "about.")

About Dilbert: I don't read Dilbert everyday, but I have it bookmarked (on my work computer, of course; I don't use my computer at home for reading. I use it for blogging and for letting Mr F and Mr Bunches watch videos of people falling down the stairs, which is really what they watch nowadays, and which are surprisingly common on Youtube.) When I notice the bookmark, I usually go and get caught up on Dilberts but I read them in reverse chronological order, starting with whatever day I'm on and paging backwards, and what I've noticed is that it makes no difference -- even though Dilbert usually has a storyline, that storyline does not unfold in what would be described as strict chronological order, so you can actually pick it up at any point and read it forwards or backwards and it makes just as much sense either way.

And now you know what I'm doing while the rest of you are looking up phone numbers and/or correctly spelling saccharine.

All of which explains why I'm thinking about sodas today, or, rather, it doesn't explain it at all but I've blown a lot of time on the introduction, so let's just pretend that's all an explanation and I'll give you the list of

The 4 Best Soda Flavors That Should Be Revived*
(*I promise it doesn't include Crystal Pepsi because I'm not all about cheap references simply to make an emotional connection with you, unlike some other people I could name if that pizza breakfast had kicked in yet.)

In no particular order -- well, in numerical order, but really just in the order I thought of and typed them - -they are:

1. Sarsaparilla. Did you know that sarsaparilla and sassafras were once almost interchangeable in soft-drinks, but that sarsaparilla, which comes from a vine native to Central America and was probably discovered by Cortes (or so I just made up) won out because sassafras -- which is also used to treat head lice and is I'm pretty sure the only thing that was ever both a soda flavor and head lice treatment -- causes cancer? Has anyone ever done a study of just how many things we put into soda that cause cancer?

Sarsaparilla is fun to say:




2. Cream soda. Like ribbon candy, cream soda seems to be gone but it's not really -- it's just buried in the aisles that nobody goes into. It's been around since before it was patented by James William Black in Canada back in 1886, and the fact that it was a Canadian who patented it means that if you drink cream soda now, someone is going to call you a socialist and think that you favor universal health care, like that's a bad thing.

The original soda name was taken from ice cream soda and it used to be served with ice cream floating in it, but that wasn't necessarily the same beverage that Black based his soda on, as there have been other recipes around for the soda. The earliest known recipe was in a farmer's magazine in 1852 and was made from water, cream of tartar, Epsom salts, sugar, tartaric acid, and an egg.

You could, if you bring this back, omit the egg. But it wouldn't be cream soda.





3. Baby Ruth Soda. Baby Ruth is widely known as a candy bar. But the name was trademarked as a: "NONALCOHOLIC MALTLESS BEVERAGE SOLD AS A SOFT DRINK." (The original is in allcaps; I just pasted it.)(And I don't have to say cut and pasted it because that's the only way you can paste something on the computer. It's like cease and desist, in a way: you don't need to say both in order for it to make sense.)

The trademark was registered to Sun-Maid Raisin Growers of California, in 1927, which makes me think it was raisin flavored soda, which you're saying "gross" about, but isn't it really just grape soda, only dried out? I'm not 100% sure that a raisin-flavored soda would be a bad thing.

In fact, as I sit here, I'm not 100% sure what raisins taste like.

If it seems crazy that there was a soda named after a socialite, remember that nowadays we name milkshakes after celebrities.



4. Coca-Cola: After This American Life trumpeted that it had found the original Coke recipe, only to realize (but not highlight) that it wasn't really, Coca Cola executives invited people to make their own, if they wanted, using the "found" recipe; Coke shrugged off the idea as though it was no big deal, so why don't other soda companies jump all over this and create something like "Mountain Dew Throwback Original Cola," advertising it as "made with the original secret recipe Coke doesn't want you to know about" and getting people to all try their soda?

They wouldn't have catchy songs that were stylized versions of World Cup soccer songs, though:





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