I’m in finals right now.

Normally, I’ve got a lot of self-righteous pre-yuppie disdain for all things sugary. While I may, in fact, have consumed multiple liters of Mountain Dew per week when I started college. I fell off the wagon when I saw Super Size Me and realized just how many pounds of sugar I was ingesting (really - go ahead and mock me) and switched mostly to coffee (which I take black because I prefer it that way — even coffee with sugar has quite a lot less sugar than soda).

But I’ve been drinking coffee with every meal for the last week or something; it’s about to burn a hole in my stomach.

So I did what anybody desperate to stay sharp but without the money to start a cocaine habit would do. I went to the campus convenience store and bought a really big can of Red Bull (I thought they came in only one size!). Then I drank it in like five minutes.

For the record? 220 calories in 16 ounces. So the same as soda. Sucrose instead of HFCS, if you care. It’s not exactly good for you.

But that stuff gives you wings.

Time for my obligatory controversial statement: While I definitely don’t know much about human physiology, I could swear that that stuff works better than coffee. It makes me less jittery, but still makes me want to sail across the Charles River under the cover of darkness and claim the Prudential Building for God and the Queen (note: while you absolutely should click on that link, there is a single audio usage of the ‘F’ word. Just a heads up). Is is the magical blend of amino acids or the placebo effect? It’s hard to say. Anything banned in Denmark has to have something going for it, though.

After consuming that monster can of Red Bull, I spent three hours working on a single problem on a take-home final, cleaned my desk, realized that I had been using the wrong boundary conditions, rewrote the offending part of the routine I was using, and still didn’t get an answer that made any physical sense.

Then I fought a grizzly bear. With my fists (more slight impoliteness. But seriously, if you don’t laugh at this you’re old. Or less stupid than me).

I can’t afford to drink Red Bull every day, and it probably wouldn’t even be the smartest idea to get into the habit of drinking it every week (after all, I wouldn’t want to build up a resistance to placebo). But it’s good to know that it’ll be there for me.

Almost as good as it is to know that classes will be over soon.

1. Even when the tea is free, people will reuse teabags when the tea is a floor down but there’s a hot water dispenser right down the hall.
2. Mountain Dew is, in fact, the breakfast of champions.
3. The signs that say you can’t have beverages in the computer lab don’t apply after 8 PM.
4. There is no such thing as too much orange juice.
5. The only problem with storing beer in the office fridge is that you’ll inevitably forget about it for six months and the cap will get rusty.
6. Washing your coffee cup is optional.
7. Unless you take your coffee with cream; then it’s not.
8. Especially if you don’t empty your cup at the end of the day.
9. If that day is a Friday, then god help us all.

I cannot stand alcopops. I can’t stand the marketing to women (or conversely, the lack of marketing to women for beer, scotches, gins, etc). T00 many college-aged women just give up on beer (well, yes, nobody likes beer initially) and stick to the Smirnoff ices, the wine coolers, the Bacardi breezes and god knows what other . Take high fructose corn syrup, add artificial flavouring and food colouring.

Regardless of the sociological & health-related reasons, this little tidbit provides all rationale needed for disliking Smirnoff Ice & it’s kin…

How many calories are there in a bottle of SMIRNOFF ICE®?
SMIRNOFF ICE® has 228 calories per 12-ounce bottle, that’s about 70 more than a super-premium/imported beer but don’t worry, that difference in calories is about the same as one hot wing, five little pretzel twists OR 3 tortilla chips…with nothing on ‘em.

Smirnoff US Website

What? Who on earth would find that reasoning logical?

Let’s do some bullshit mathematics, why don’t we? First, face value: 228 calories per 12 oz bottle? I’m a smaller than average person — my estimated daily calorie intake is in the 1700-1800 region. 7 bottles of Smirnoff Ice is my entire daily calorie allowance (plus my death by diabetes). Now let’s consider I drank my daily calorie allowance in Guinness instead (150cals/12oz and a 20934802934x better tasting drink)… that becomes 11 bottles, which means I could drink my normal limit of 6-7 beers, and still have room for lunch. Those additional 70 calories per 12 oz-bottle? That is 44% more calories per bottle. Drinking 3 beers is practically the same thing as drinking 2 Smirnoff ices — make it become a habit, sprinkle in a dose of 20-somethin’-year-old binge drinking, and you’ve got a recipe for absolute disaster.

Please, for the love of everything decent in the world, don’t drink alcopops. If you’re just in it to get drunk and you don’t like the taste of beer & wine, then just take shots and cradle a glass of water in between them, and keep on trying beers/wines/cocktail concoctions you enjoy and won’t cause massive obesity with the liver cirrhosis.

I recently had the distinct pleasure of dining at one Mr. Bartley’s in Harvard Square. Most of the things on their menu are solid, and therefore aren’t of much interest to liquephiles like you and me, but I did encounter the darndest concoction: the frappe.

A “frappe” is pronounced “frap” (we require none of that high-falutin’ French here), and it is made of milk, ice cream, some flavoring that I assume comes in syrup form (said a Southern-bred friend: “It tastes like that powered strawberry milk I drank as a kid!” and indeed it did), and a blender.

In other words, it’s a milkshake.

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I mean that in a good way.

Here’s a secret: Harvard Square is nice. Really nice. If my Institute were next to Harvard Square, instead of a bunch of biotech labs and homeless people, I would be a happier man. We may have the CBC (I’m not giving you a link because one of these months I’ll get around to properly introducing it to you), but they have everything else.

So I go to Harvard whenever I have a thin excuse. Yesterday there was a topical guest speaker, so off I went with most of my lab. We quickly discovered that the stupid train wasn’t running, so we weren’t in any hurry to get back afterwards (I used to say that the MBTA would be a better system if the buses ran, the trains went farther out, and it were possible to get home from the bar at night - now I can add “when the T isn’t broken” to that list). One of the postdocs suggested: “Hey, do you wanna try the most intense hot chocolate in the world?”

Well duh.

L.A. Burdick offers up exactly that, at least as far as I know. It’s mostly an all-purpose upscale chocolatier, and secondly Harvard’s 30,000th coffeeshop. The hot chocolate comes in three sizes: demi, small, and large. “Once I got the small, but I couldn’t finish it and had to throw it out,” she said. “They have white, dark, and milk chocolate flavors.”

“There’s only one kind of chocolate.” I said.

“Exactly.”

So we each ponied up $2 and got a demi-sized dark hot chocolate in a tiny, tiny cup. The stuff goes a long way, though. My interpretation of the forumla is equal parts Swiss chocolate bar and milk, but I imagine if I tried to do that myself it wouldn’t work out so well. It’s not too sweet, but it’s about the richest beverage I can imagine.

This is one of those rare occasions where words fail me, but trust me, it’s the least stupid I’ve ever felt spending $2 for four ounces of non-alcoholic liquid. I’m not by any stretch a chocolate connoisseur, but I would at least consider going back if I found myself in the neighborhood with someone who was into it.

I’m scared of what happens to people who drink a large, though.

American news is generally a little too fair and balanced for my tastes, so I get a lot of my news from our friends across the pond. Because of that, I read an article a few days ago outlining the Tories’ plan to raise taxes on strong beer, cider, and malt beverages.

Now, let me open up with the obvious: I support taxing malternatives for the same reason I support taxing Abercrombie and Fitch: they’re just too highly correlated with sociopathic behavior (because this is a serious blog about serious topics, I’ll refrain from any terminology that ends in -baggery). And I am irreconcilably opposed to any legislation, in any country, that would increase the price of Belgian ale. So let’s call this proposal a step forward and a step backward.

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Rather than argue over whether or not vinaigrette counts as a liquid and therefore, eligible for a blog post (which, being slightly stupid and inebriated, Neil & I did discuss at length), I figure I’ll just post it up.

The bottle cap of this Trader Joe’s balsamic vinaigrette came off looking exactly like this — no human manipulation! Another sign of how awesome Trader Joe’s is?

(And for those who care — vinaigrette, being a oil-in-water emulsion, is about half aqueous. Good enough!)