Tears of the Sunkist

My love affair with Sunkist Lemonade has hit a snag.

Let me start at the beginning. You will probably recall how I fell head over heels for Lift during my trip to New Zealand and Australia in 2000. Sunkist Lemonade is the only true American counterpart to Lift I've ever seen, but finding it in the US has proven nearly impossible over the years. Only once did I ever see it "in the wild," at a gas station in Wisconsin (but one had exploded and all the cans were sticky, so I didn't get any); the rest I've had only because Drew brought it back from Minnesota. Until this past weekend, when I quite by chance discovered they now stock Sunkist Lemonade at at least one Jewel in Chicago. Ridiculously excited, I bought two fridge packs (about all I could carry at the time or I might well have gotten more). Yes, I've been drinking basically no soda lately, but I figured I could make a minor exception.

Tonight I had a late dinner (9:15ish) and had a can with it. Then, because I was really enjoying it, I had a second can a little later, maybe around 10 or 10:30. Then I went to bed about 12:30 and couldn't fall asleep, which seemed odd because when I left work at 7 pm, I was so tired my eyes were starting to water.

And then I remembered - Sunkist Lemonade, just like regular Sunkist Orange, contains caffeine. A quick check of the can confirmed this. And now it's 3:15 in the morning, I have to get up in (ideally) less than five hours, and I have yet to be able to fall asleep.

Bear in mind not only that I wouldn't have had Sunkist Lemonade so late in the day if I'd remembered it contained caffeine, but until Sunday when I bought the soda and drank three cans in one three-hour span (yes, I know), I had had nothing containing caffeine, to my knowledge, in months. No wonder my stomach acid seemed worse today.

Anyway, this blows. I'll finish the cans I have - which is like 18 more - and then I may have to swear off my favorite soda of all-time. Yes, it will be better for me, but it will also be less fun.

Root, root, root for the beer team

It's sort of ridiculous that it took me five months to get around to posting this, but for anyone who was excited by the prospect of reading about another root beer taste test, the results for the second root beer taste test - held on February 3, for crying out loud - are finally online. As I'm sure you could guess, Drew and I performed the test with Alma administering.

In other news that relates vaguely to the stupid title I came up with for this post, I've been making a lot more posts to the Cubs blog lately. So if you're a Cubs fan, that may hold interest for you. Or not.

Suck party weekend

This is hardly going to go down as the worst weekend in my life - August 8, 2004 pretty much has its weekend sewn up - but it's gotta be top five. Which I suppose says more about my sheltered existence than anything else. Nonetheless, it was not very good. First, Drew and I did the second root beer taste test on Saturday, and it was massively disappointing. Roommate Katie asked us what the moral was after it was over, to which I replied, "Either we don't like root beer as much as we thought, or... I don't know." We tested 25 root beers (probably a few too many, in retrospect, but I only started to feel it right at the end), and I only gave out four above-average grades - and two of those were to the house brands of Target and Walgreens! I don't want to ruin the write-up so I'll stop there for now, but suffice it to say it was disappointing.

Then, of course, came Sunday. Half of me saw this coming and half of me hoped it wouldn't. But there's no getting around it: the Bears played terribly. Half of that is due credit to the Colts - barring the one big run in the first quarter, they really held Thomas Jones down fairly well (15 for 112 looks great, but take away the one 52-yarder and it's 14 for 60, which is fine but nothing spectacular). The other half is a vicious cycle involving the defense. It could not stop the Colts. The bend-but-don't-break philosophy is fine if you're going to put up several touchdowns a game, and especially if you're going to get a bunch of turnovers and hang onto the ball yourselves - the Saints game, in particular, worked this way. This game, though? Not so much. The Bears turned the ball over five times, negating the three they got back. And Manning and the Colts were only too happy to take 5-8 yards on virtually every play. The Bears' D was so worried about the long pass that they played the safeties too deep and let Manning have every short pass he wanted - so Manning just kept moving the chains and moving the chains. This resulted mostly in field goals (although they gave up the Wayne TD despite playing the safeties deep), keeping the score looking close, but looking at TOP and total yards tells you the story of the game:

TOP
Colts: 38:04
Bears: 21:56

Total Yards
Colts: 430
Bears: 265

Ugly. You know why this happened? The defense was so scared of the big play that it played overly safe, feeling fine as long as it held the Colts to few or no points. What no one seemed to think about was that (a) the time on the field was not good for the defense and (b) the time off the field was not good for Rex Grossman. With minimal exception, Grossman's best games during the season came when the defense shut down the other team quickly (with either short drives or turnovers) and allowed the Bears' offense to get back onto the field and Grossman to do his thing. In this game, the Bears' defense spent a ton of time on the field because it refused to try and stop the Colts cold. Manning seemed flustered by blitzes, yet, fearful of allowing the big play, the Bears rarely blitzed. The tackling was woeful. Peyton Manning isn't a future first-ballot HOFer because he can only beat you one way, guys - Manning was willing to take what the defense was only too happy to allow. So while the game looked closer for longer, in reality it was never that close once the Colts grabbed the lead.

To recap: Devin Hester was awesome, and Thomas Jones was okay, and the rest of the team pretty much sucked. The Colts played well, don't get me wrong, but the Bears really looked bad, and given how historically bad Indy's D is I don't think we can give them all the credit for that. Maybe the Bears can get back here, but Grossman needs to mature a bit more first, among other things. It wasn't all his fault, but he looked like a rookie making his first start, which is not what you want from your starting QB in the Super Bowl. Bottom line: the Bears didn't deserve to win, and frankly should probably consider themselves lucky to have lost by as little as 12. Ugh.

Oh, and was it me or did the commercials SUCK? I think this was the worst crop ever. There was only one that I really thought was okay - the Bud Light one with the axe guy - and even then I only really liked it for the last line. And what was with all the damn suicide jokes? GM and Washington Mutual found jumping to your death funny enough to include it in the plots of ads? Good Lord, people. It was even worse than Frito-Lay and Coke using black history to sell products; at least those ads had respectful tones, even if they were cheap money grabs at heart.

The Coke GTA parody was okay, but not great. The only other memorable one - for the wrong reason - was the absolutely vile Doritos ad implying that the cashier and the guy with the mustache have sex on the register. Gross. Federline's Nationwide ad might have been funny if we hadn't all seen it ten times already. The Snickers ad was moronic. And whatever happened to that one that was supposed to feature a marriage proposal? Did I miss it somehow?

Cola nuts

First of all, a slightly belated birthday shoutout to my dad, who turned 35 for an unspecified number of times on Friday. I got him the new Shins album, which I also picked up for myself on Tuesday. A review of that is coming soon.

In the meantime, Drew and I did another pop taste test on Saturday, this time a test of colas (Drew, for some reason, was very interested in doing a cola taste test). It was more interesting than you might think at first, but ultimately it was kind of... well, why spoil it? The results of our endeavor are linked from the Soda/Pop Page.