Category: Foodstuffs

Pepsi That Came After The One Before It

Wifey and I were out at the groceteria pickig up some fruit and veg the other day (also a pie), and an endcap happened to capture my attention. It was an endcap filled with a new Pepsi product, Pepsi Next. Being a member of the Pepsi family that I’d never seen before, I was intrigued. Learning that I could save four bucks by buying two cases was the factor that convinced me to buy in.

Pepsi Next is not a new product, but like I said, I’d never heard of it before. I chalk it up mostly to the fact that I don’t watch TV at all. Oh, and I guess some of it has to do with the fact that only in the last couple weeks has it become available in Canada. Yeah, that’s probably the one. It’s been sold in the States since 2012.

Pepsi Next is a Pepsi for a world where the acceptable daily amount of sugar for an average human is six teaspoons. Or something like that. It claims to have less 30% sugar than the “regular leading cola” has. Whether that’s normal Pepsi or not, I haven’t a clue, but Pepsi Next still has 26g of sugar per can, so that’s still almost double the daily recommended amount.

It’s still an alright compromise though. I love the taste of Pepsi, but am a little wary of it’s horrible effects on my body. Pepsi Next is less horrible for you, and it still has a pretty decent taste. Somewhere squarely between Pepsi and Diet Pepsi. I am not at all a fan of Diet Pepsi or any of the other low/no-calorie sodas, but Pepsi Next is far enough away from it that I can still enjoy drinking it. I’ve been trying to cut down on my sugars, but I’m not ready to let go of soda, so I think Pepsi Next is going to be my go-to soda from now on.

And let’s not forget the best part: that can! Oh my God, it’s such a perfect shade of blue. My horrible photography skills don’t even begin to get across how achingly beautiful it is. It’s the same shade of blue as the water that you see in travel agency pictures of beaches. That particular blue is my absolute favourite blue, if you couldn’t tell by me draping my website in similar shades.

In closing, Pepsi Next is quite alright. It’s not a straight-up substitute for real Pepsi, but it’s a good ever-so-slightly healthier alternative. Though it might be more accurate to say that it’s ever-so-slightly less unhealthy, because no Pepsi has ever even had aspirations to have a health benefit.

Trouble a-brewin’

So I got this message in my e-mail inbox a couple days ago:

ROCKY SNOW POPS.

Hello:
I need you to REMOVE this site immediately!!!
This is effecting my business and I will be forced to take legal action.
http://www.torrentialequilibrium.net/art0070.html
times have changed….everyone seeks internet today
and to get negative feedback from retailers is not acceptable.

I expect a response back immediately.

So yeah. That happened.

I did reply with a sternly-worded message about how I’m in the clear and that criticism is just something people have to deal with. Also I made fun of the broken English, but in a semi-professional way. I’m not entirely sure that this isn’t some weird new kind of spam, but we’ll all just have to wait and see if I get a response back.

I don’t get e-mails regarding TE and/or its content very often, but when I do, they’re always wildly entertaining. Or you could flip that W for the less hyperbolized version.

You maniacs! You blew it up!

Yeah, so, I guess I haven’t had Froot Loops for a while, or else this change in the box art is really recent…

I suppose it was inevitable that they’d eventually render Toucan Sam, but I just didn’t want to believe it. It’s totally for the worse, too. He looks absolutely awful and more than a little bit creepy now.

Kellogg’s, please listen to me. Make Sam two-dimensional again. You don’t have to go all the way back to thick black lines and solid colours (though I’d certainly appreciate that), but this… this is just an abomination. Even though I’m not comfortable with it, I’ll accept that most of the time, change is a good thing. I’ll even argue for it in some cases, but this is not one of those times.

Dear God… I don’t even want to think about what’s happened to Tony the Tiger.

X-Mas Gift Roundup: 2013 Edition

Hey, so Christmas happened a while back. Maybe you’d noticed? I sure did, because I got a freakin’ amazing haul of gift this year, and you know how much I treasure material possessions. So obviously I want to brag talk about them on the internet.

I don’t really have any sort of screed to come in on, I just wanted to note that I haven’t done an X-Mas gift round up since… 2007!? Holy cow! That’s even farther back than I’d thought! Man… that was a pretty great Christmas. Looking back on those pics, I can even remember it pretty well. Yeah, I was so excited that morning that after The Unwrappening was over I fell asleep while watching Bender’s Big Score.

So, uh, let’s just get started then, yes?

Continue reading X-Mas Gift Roundup: 2013 Edition

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: November 2013

The good news is that winter is here and I no longer have to feel bad about spending all my time inside playing video games. The bad news is that… well, there isn’t any bad news at the moment. It’s December that’s got all that holiday business to it; November is fairly smooth sailing as far as having free time goes.

That said, real life tried its best to get in the way, but November was still a fairly productive month for gaming. This month, I continued my recent trend of finding games that I could finish in an afternoon, and I think I’ll be keeping that up for a while. It’s fun to dive into epic games that take the better part of a year to finish, but sometimes the thing that really hits the spot is a game that I can start and finish in one sitting.

I don’t have any new categories for this feature this month, so that’s good. I figured that my tendency to obsessively categorize things would have me introducing a new one each month. But that doesn’t seem to be the case… yet.

~ Now Playing ~

Adventure Time: Explore The Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW! (Wii U) – It was a small pain in the butt to actually secure a copy, but it was worth it. Between the abundance of Adventure Time charm and having another game that The Wife will play with me, I’m pretty happy with this game. It’s also a lot of fun too, being a dungeon crawler that hearkens back to old-school fare like Gauntlet. Games like this aren’t really made any more, which is too bad because I quite enjoy them. We’re currently 50 floors down.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: November 2013

Is this the world we created?

I took this picture at some point last year, and I don’t think I ever got around to actually putting it into a blog post. Time doesn’t really dull the pain of knowing that I live in a world where not only do Fruit Ninja plush toys exists, but said toys cost twelve bucks (after taxes).

Twelve bucks. For a plush fruit. That (presumably) splits in half.

It’s not quite stupid enough that I need to call for another divine flood or muse about why suicide booths don’t exist yet, but man, Fruit Ninja toys. I guess that good ideas really were an exhaustible resource.

Oh lately it’s so quiet

I learned the hard way this morning, that my body will no longer tolerate me eating like a young man. Back in the day, I used to pack away as much of whatever I wanted, and all would be good. I might get full after a while, but hey, full is good.

Last night, I ate two polish sausage hot dogs, half a thing of fries, a few peanut butter cookies, and a big ol’ root beer. This sounds like a standard meal for me, and I figured it would be as much. But this morning I woke up with the absolute worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also I was still burping out the smell of hot dogs. It was a horrible, disgusting morning.

I look back now, and shudder to think of the disaster I averted by opting to not get that third hot dog.

All this to say… there’s not a lot going on. Who would have thought that my entire schtick was buying silly crap and then writing about it? Turns out that I don’t actually do anything interesting, I just used to make the “most” of my disposable income. I’m sitting here, racking my brain for something I’m interested enough to write about at length, but I’m at a total loss. So stories about hot dog burps are the best you’re gonna get right now.

I suppose I could start playing Fallout: New Vegas and regale you with tall tales about my further adventures in post-apocalyptic America, but there are just so many other games I’d rather be playing right now (and honestly I think I’d rather go back to Skyrim before starting New Vegas). Also, I feel like I’m falling back into the habit of only writing about video games, and I really want to pull back away from that. Yes, video games are pretty much all I do, but I’d sure like to be able to at least pretend for a while that I have other interests.

A Decorate-Your-Own-Cookie Halloween

Halloween is fast approaching (tomorrow!) and I’ve done a terrible job of trying to post Halloween-themed things on here. And also doing Halloween-themed things in real life. Wife and I have been watching as many horror movies as possible, but that’s about it. We didn’t even bother to dig out the ‘Ween decorations.

I did buy these cookies a while back though, and they are undoubtedly the most Halloweeny thing that I’ve done this season. So good on me for that, I guess.

Somehow, I managed to keep them hidden (on the kitchen table) from Wifey until last weekend, when I deemed it appropriate to bring them out and get into the Halloween cookie spirit. She was pretty damn stoked, and that was pretty much the point. Both of us get unusually excited about anything that comes with a tube of icing packed in, and these cookies had three packs of icing each, so it was basically Christmas in October up in here.

If you’ve never seen a product like this, they’re naked cookies that come with a few packs of coloured icing and some sprinkles, so that you can work your own artistic magic on the cookie. These were pretty cheap, and came with two cookies each. They were a steal if I’v ever seen one.

Of course, being cheap, there had to be some sort of catch. That catch is that the chocolate pumpkin-shaped cookies were fused together. Trying to separate them ended with a big mess, and both cookies were broken in the process. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with the cookie in that photo, but a lot of the top cookie’s backside remained stuck to the bottom cookie. I wasn’t pleased. The ghosts came apart nicely though.

I tried to “glue” my pumpkin cookie back together using some of the black icing. It didn’t work out too well, but it held together long enough to get photos, and I suppose that’s the best I could have asked for.

We then proceeded to bust out the icing and decorate our cookies. I cut the holes in my icing packets too big, and it didn’t squirt out very well, so my pumpkin looks like complete garbage. After that mess I decided to just go with a simple design for the ghost. I’m a terrible craftsman, so I’m going to blame my tools; the icing did not want to stick to the cookies at all, but it sure as Hell wanted to stick all over my fingers.

Wifey’s came out looking fairly nice though. Her Barney-coloured pumpkin is a cute little mess, and I really like the eyes on her ghost. They stare into your soul like no cookie has before.

It should be noted that I had a ton of icing left, so I slathered it all over my ghost once I was done with pictures. Also, the bag of sprinkles that come with these things has enough sprinkles to liberally cover four to five cookies, so there were orange and black sprinkles everywhere by the time I was done. Like, look up at my pumpkin there, and imagine him with at least three times as many sprinkles. You just can’t waste all that perfectly good sugar, right?

And that’s about that. I quite enjoyed devouring the ghost cookie, but the pumpkin cookie was that gross off-chocolate flavour you get with cheap cookies. It wasn’t very good at all.

A Ninja Turtles Halloween

I wish I could get into Halloween more, I really do. It’s my second-favourite holiay and my first-favourite season, so why don’t I go more crazy over it? Money, mostly. It’s hard to buy up all the mummy-themed candy and pumpkin-shaped decorations when you’re living paycheque to paycheque. But I can still justify spending a few bucks here and there on some cool stuff.

To that end, when the Halloween season begins, I like to make trips down to the square and check out the Shopper’s Drug Mart to see what they’ve got. It’s a bit of a gamble, as the popular stuff it usually marked up like crazy at Shopper’s, but if you’re shopping outside the box you’re fairly likely to find something cool for a decent price.

Like this bag of Ninja Turtles candy, for example. Two dollas for this bag. That is not only decent, but a pretty great price in my book. Plus I bought it mostly because I wanted to take pictures of it, so that’s one more box checked off on the “candy for trick-or-treaters” list*.

The price made me happy, but what made me sad is that this is the only Ninja Turtles candy I’ve seen so far this season. Granted, I haven’t been watching like a hawk, but this is the kind of thing that should stand out to me. I was expecting a little more TMNT love on Halloween, as Nick’s Ninja Turtles have their faces plastered on damn near everything, so why put on the brakes for Halloween candy?

The bag unsurprisingly contained exactly what it claimed: suckers and candy lumps. “Soft center pops” is kind of a weird way to put it, don’t you think? Truthfully, I don’t, but I was trying to come up with something more interesting for this paragraph than complaining about how blurry that picture came out.

The “candy chews” are about as boring as you’d expect. They’re just that regual old block of coloured sugar with a tiny tire track down the middle. But this time, wrapped in Ninja Turtles! Yes, that’s enough to get me excited about these candies. What can I say? I’m easy.

It’s notable that despite their cheaply-mass-producedness, these sugar lumps are not bad. They aren’t a candy I’d actively seek out, but they’re edible. So when I find one in a surprise bag a dozen years down the line, and when it crumbles to dust as soon as I open the wrapper, I will know that at one point, these candies were pretty decent. And that will be my light in the darkness. Or something.

The suckers are less good, but then again, I have a tendency to hold suckers to a higher standard. The truth of the matter is that I’m poor because my wife and I spend an exorbitant amount of money on gourmet lollipops. That’s also the reason that I have a hard time getting behind cheap little suckers like this, even though they really aren’t bad.

I do really like that picture though. It looks like the suckers are all wearing little capes.

I guess If I have to have any sort of final thought, it’s that I’m pretty disappointed in the candy chews. But of the candy types in the bag come in three different wrappers, but there are only two colours of chew to the three colours of suckers. Also the suckers are all different flavours and both chews taste the same. Tsk tsk.

*Yes, I ate all the candy I opened and fondled. The rest is for trick-or-treaters.