I just had an ice cold Pepsi this afternoon.

It was 35+C (ok, in the mid-nineties), I had just come back from a long hot walk through the kidfest day at the Artfest and I just had to have it.
It was so refreshing, and cool, and invigorating. Why it was exhilarating.

Don’t know about the “Aids Digestion” bit – ‘course it was Diet… not the same, eh?

It will, probably, be the only pepsi I have this month.

So, us physical science bloggers can be like total sluts, what with Pepsico having bought a blog on scienceblogs.com and many of the other bloggers quitting or suspending operations.
Not. Well. Handled.
Say. No. More.

But that wasn’t why I did it.
Not. At. All.

See, I can’t get a coke on campus.
Nor may I be shown in a photograph with a coke product in an official capacity, and there’s some other stuff…
Pepsi totally pwns Penn State – and man we’re cheap at that…

Something to do with the whole Blue & White thing – couldn’t really do a deal with coke with that (actually we could, you know, make it be a “red white and blue” theme, actually be kinda neat… given a good enough an offer), people might get confused and think we’re Wisconsin or something.

So, now Pepsico has bought into scienceblogs.com, and this is a problem.
Food Frontiers (link to Pepsico old blog) – they kinda need to work on their content.
But, hey, they are on twitter!

So, now I’m, like, totally pwned by Pepsico, they’ll probably buy the IoP next and totally fence me in.
You’d think they’d throw in a research grade telescope facility, or at least a new planetarium for the arboretum site or something.
An endowed Chair in Theoretical Astrophysics!
Those are cheap.

Hey, I like Quaker Oats – the original, not the instant, of course.
And their snack bars are quite tasty and make you feel less guilty about eating what is essentially glorified candy bars with fiber.
Does that count?

I do seriously no longer drink sodas, except in dire need, like while driving across texas, in summer – when I need something cold and caffeinated and iced coffee is not always an option.
I have however pinky promised to keep it to less than once per month or so on average.

When I was a kid, in Iceland, I drank coke.
It came in glass bottles, reusable, with a substantial deposit making it worthwhile for kids to gather those tossed by drunk teens so as to get the refund.
Nice bit of cash that.
Made with Icelandic water, and beet sugar. Very tasty.
I had a real coke a few weeks, ago, mid-June. Turns out there are shops which import coke, in glass bottles, made with beet sugar, from Mexico. (It was too sweet.)
You pretty much can’t get real coke in the USA – local stuff is made with high fructose corn syrup, not real sugar, and it always has that funky plastic aftertaste, whether from can or (plastic) bottle.
So does Pepsi.

I switched mostly to diet as a teenager/university. Drank whichever brand my immediate partner or social circle liked, no point having two things around a small student pad. Taste was not really a factor. Nor was flavour.

Then came grad school.

Ph 205: Quantum Field Theory
The lecturer, much admired, always, I mean always, got a cold diet pepsi from the vending machine down the hall, brought it into class and put it on the corner of the lectern.
Within 3 weeks 87.3% of the physics first year grad students were drinking diet pepsi.
That took care of the California years, including NoCal.
Man, pepsico owes Caltech a few millions for that one. They can pay it straight to the Quantum Computing Center.

Then it was back to the UK, and mostly coffee, with an occasional coke, us sophisticated European postdocs only drank sodas as post-modern subtly ironic statements on the capitalist hegemony.
Like us sophisticated faculty, eh?

Now, as an old fart with kids, I got trapped in a rationale of my own making.
We won’t generally let the kids drink soda pop fizzies (which side of the soda/pop divide am I anyway, it runs through near here somewhere).
Too much sugar, the diet stuff is crap for them, it is diuretic, an appetite stimulant, rots their teeth with the phosphoric acid, if not the high fructose corn syrup, and it inhibits bone growth.
So, said me kids, “why do you drink soda, pabbi?”.

duh… er, Duh… er, DUH!

So, I don’t anymore.
Mostly.

I do like oatmeal though.
Quaker oats totally rocks.

PS: “Brad’s Drink”? Really? A bully drink!