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Why do journalists drink so much Tab? Futhermore, if, as conservatives would like us to believe, the political and cultural tempo of the country is being dictated by the pulse of the liberal media and they all guzzle fantastic amounts of Tab, why is Tab not more popular?
Absolut is ditching their famous bottle ads campaign (which is 25 years old) in favor of references to pop culture sans bottle. (via do)
Waiter Rant on how to order wine without looking like an asshole. “When I see someone [smell the cork] I know I’m dealing with a complete amateur. Guess what you’re gonna smell? Cork!”
USASODA.com has tons of images of old soda cans. They’re a little hard to find, but there’s good stuff if you dig around a little bit.
Pepsi’s market cap surpassed Coca-Cola’s last week for the first time ever. The secret to their success? Diversifying into other snacks (Frito-Lay) and beverages (Tropicana and Gatorade).
The SF Chronicle has a list of the top 100 wines of 2005.
Update: This list covers only wines from CA, WA, OR, and ID, not from the whole US or world. (thx, rich)
Scientists in the UK have quantified the beer goggle effect. (via cd)
Meg recaps our daytrip to the Mekong Delta. If you go, partake not of the rice and banana wines. Holy antifreeze, Batman!
For our first lunch in Saigon, we met up with Graham from Noodlepie, a Saigon-centric food blog. We cabbed it from our hotel to Quan Co Tam - Banh Canh Trang Bang to have one of his favorite Vietnamese dishes, banh trang phoi suong (literally “rice pancake exposed in the dew (at night)”). Here’s the outlay:
It’s a simple dish; just boiled pork wrapped in thin rice paper with an assortment of herbs, pickled onions & carrots, cucumber, and raw bean sprouts. As you can see from the photo (or the much better photos that Graham took on a previous trip), the plate of herbs that they give you is quite impressive and varied; one smelled like lemon, another like fish. All wrapped up and dipped in fish sauce, it’s delicious and simple.
Afterwards we headed to the market, Graham for dinner fixings and us for some browsing around. Before we parted, he treated us to a sugarcane & lemon drink (mia da) and a pennywort smoothie (not as bad as I’d thought for something that tasted like salad through a straw). Thanks for the nice lunch, Graham!
Red Bull was originally a Thai energy drink. I’ve seen the original in the stores here, along with several competing brands.
Some fun images of advertising painted on fingernails. That’s some seriously intricate work…love the soda pop nails.
Any Starbucks in the US (and 22 other countries) is supposed to sell you a cup of fair trade coffee if you ask them to. The Starbucks Challenge is motivating people to take them up on their offer. You can track people’s progress or join in the fun yourself.
Winerd (wine + nerd, get it?) is a board game that involves wine tasting and looks like a cross between Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and Asshole.
Interview with Sidney Frank, the guy who brought Jagermeister to the US in a big way and sold his Grey Goose vodka brand to Bacardi for more than $2 billion.
Pairing wine with fast food. How about a 2003 Pinot with your Kentucky Fried Chicken or a nice Cabernet to go with your Taco Bell Burrito Supreme? Need more pairings for fast food? Try here, here, or here.
I’m in luck because it would take more than 260 cans of Pepsi to ingest enough caffeine to kill me. How much of your favorite beverage can you drink before suffering death by caffeine?
A company called Enologix uses spectroscopy and chromotography to predict wine scores with a high level of accuracy. Critic Robert Parker introduced wine scoring (here’s his perfect score list) but some say that his dominance is not such a good thing.
So, you wanna go into the wine business…. Well, listen up kid, here’s some good advice from someone who’s been there.
Just what the heck is the difference between all the different kinds of Diet Coke?. Diet Coke is actually sugar-free New Coke? Neat.
Tom Standage says bottled water is “bad to the last drop”. It’s more expensive than gasoline, doesn’t taste any better, and isn’t any safer.
Steven Shapin reviews Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses, a “social life of beverages”. Standage is one of my favorite technology/culture writers; he wrote about the telegraph in The Victorian Internet.
The NY Times picks some good bottles of wine for under $10. For those of you who want to move up from the Two Buck Chuck a little.
Coke is using 500,000 liters of water/day in India despite water shortages. Coke is threatening to sue a photographer who put up a billboard critical of that water usage.
Greg Allen keeps winning free Diet Coke but is having trouble redeeming the prizes. “Coke put me in this situation where I feel like a wronged, government-cheese-stealing welfare queen, whose resentment builds with the fresh taunt of each unredeemable winning lid I find”.
Slideshow of the making of Barcade, the bar/arcade in Brooklyn.
Steve makes prison wine out of moldy bread, ketchup, grape juice, raisins, garbage bags, and tube socks. “It’s hard to believe this started out as a bag of fruit snacks and grape juice. Yet somehow these ingredients went from sweet and child-like to harsh and alcoholic quicker than Lindsay Lohan.”
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