Apparently, Pepsi realized that people love soda made with cane sugar, and would rather drink these types of variants than the mass-market versions made with high-fructose corn syrup. While more expensive to produce, there’s clearly a market for this, which is why people seek out Mexican Coke in the States when possible, despite the cheaper canned or plastic versions being more widely available. Heck, we even stopped drinking Coke once we couldn’t get the cane sugar version on the east coast.

Pepsi apparently intends to release Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback in the States soon, but whether these will be limited-run sodas remains to be seen. Hopefully this move will wake Coca Cola up, because we’re tempted to jump back on the soda bandwagon, siding with Pepsi, should Coca-Cola sit idly by. At least, until we find a local, direct-from-Mexico source of Coca Cola.

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We’re not Starbucks whores as it were, but we certainly enjoy our fancy Starbucks espresso beverages, be that a simple latte, or a fancy seasonal like Starbucks’ exceptional Pumpkin Spice Latte. We’ve done the Starbucks card thing in the past, but unless the two-hours of free internet accompanying a drink purchase is what you’re after, the basic Starbucks card is a waste of wallet space: it’s just as easy to charge a drink to a credit or debit card, or pay in cash. That’s why when we heard about the Starbucks Gold Card, we were skeptical. Then we read more about it.

In short, the card costs $25 per year. It works just like a normal Starbucks card, only you don’t need to put any money on it at all. Instead, just hand the card to the cashier when you make a purchase, and you get 10% off. In addition, buying the card earns you a free drink of your choice that day, and registering the card earns you a coupon for a free drink on your birthday. For us, this means saving about $6.40 given current prices. In our case, we even lucked out and got two drinks for free the day we bought the card, so out-of-pocket at the end of the year, we’ve only spent $15.40 on the card. With 10% off on our usual drinks (saving $0.32), we need to buy 48 drinks in a given year to break even. That’s a mere four drinks per month, so even if one Starbucks drink at the end of the work-week is your reward for a job well done, the Gold Card is worth every penny.

We’re not quite sure how Starbucks is making money on this thing, but we’re glad we picked one up. Sounds like an exceptional stocking-stuffer for the upcoming holiday season, too.

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Warning: spoilers below.

Apocalypto is the touching tale of an Indian a Mexican a Native American who changes colour. He comes from a small village that calls pigs “tapirs”, and hunts them with intricate booby traps that would make Indiana Jones jealous. The chameleone-sque Native American, named Jaguar Paw, is a practical joker, much like all the men in his village except for his exceptionally big neighbor, who we will call Little John.

The villain in the movie is the evil Mayan Empire, who sends an Einsatzgruppe to Jaguar Paw’s village to kidnap pretty much everyone but the children. The Mayans are masters-of-arms, and Jaguar Paw and his neighbors (hereafter “Jungle Dwellers”) are no match for them, despite the hulking mass of Little John. These children are later forced to fend for themselves in the jungle, and ultimately inspire the writing of Lord of the Flies, then presumably die, as we never see them again. Before the main battle sequence between the Mayans and Jungle Dwellers, Jaguar Paw stashes his wife and son away in a long-abandoned sarlacc pit, right before Jaguar Paw gets his ass-kicked. He is then force-marched, along with the rest of the Jungle Dwellers, to the dying lands of the evil Mayans. On the way, the war-band, with captured Jungle Dwellers, comes across a lone child with boils, who starts talking nonsense and then makes Nostradamus-like predictions. Only, the predictions aren’t neat little poems, nor in French, and are much creepier because they come from a diseased child.

In Maya-land, rich people wear green ink. They also have funky hairstyles and some, like the Emperor, have pieces of jade magically stuck to their faces. This is due to Mayan magic, which was once very potent, until the gods decided to punish the Mayans by killing their crops and spreading disease among the people. Making jade sticky enough not to fall off one’s nose, however, is still magically possible.

Jungle Dweller women are auctioned off to the green-skinned Mayans, while the men climb a Mayan temple to be sacrificed to the Mayan sun-god. This is the part where Jaguar Paw changes colour for the first time. He is painted blue to show that he is sad and hopeless. A fat kid laughs at him, and Jaguar Paw ponders how he can not die, and then he is miraculously saved by a freak solar eclipse. He and the Jungle Dwellers who haven’t been sacrificed are then forced to play a game of run-away-from-the-flying-objects-and-dodge-a-melee-weapon-at-the-end-of-the-field. Jaguar Paw beats this game using Indian Mexican Native American Jungle Dweller sneakery, along with the help of Little John (who never got to showcase his strength in the way we hoped before he was killed). This is when Jaguar Paw kills the son of the Einsatzgruppe leader with an arrowhead, then makes off across a mass grave and back to the jungle. (See what Mel Gibson did here? The Jungle Dweller returning to the jungle?) It should be pretty clear how the rest of this goes.

The ensuing chase scene lasts days, like some sort of freak Elvish/Dwarfish pursuit across Middle Earth where conveniently, everyone’s stamina is maxed out during an important plot element. After tricking a Jaguar into killing his pursuers, Jaguar Paw orphans a poor jaguar cub when the Einsatzgruppe kill the jaguar in revenge. One dude points out how the combination of a diseased, prediction-telling child, a freak solar eclipse, and the convenient jaguar-killing-a-man incident is a bad omen, but he is silenced not long thereafter by a snake-bite to the jugular, thus validating his concerns. The rest of his troupe press on nonetheless, whereupon they follow Jaguar Paw over the side of a waterfall, where one of the troupe members inconveniently bashes his head on a rock. This is where Jaguar Paw changes colour back to red brown Native American.

While Jaguar Paw has, at this time, shown an exceptional ability to dodge flying objects (despite being hit with a non-fatal arrow), he is not bright enough to not fall into a pool of quicksand. Nonetheless, he somehow manages to swim through it and climb out, whereupon he gains immense luck and shortly thereafter finds a poisonous toad. Now grey (see: Gandalf the Grey), Jaguar Paw pulls a MacGuyver and fashions poisonous blow-darts, which he uses to dispose of another pursuer. Having mastered the art of stealing bases in baseball during his tribe’s league games, he also manages to run at an attacker, slide beneath the attacker’s swinging weapon, and gracefully pick up a bludgeon which he uses to dispatch another enemy. There is glorious blood-mist in this scene.

Back at his old village, Jaguar Paw stumbles upon his wife in her watery hole (it’s raining at this point, and the sarlacc pit is steadily filling up with water). Oh, and Jaguar Paw is no longer grey now, but back to his original colour, just like he’s back at his village. (Gibson, you genius!) Here, Jaguar Paw uses boob-trappery to take out the Einsatzgruppe leader, just before stumbling upon Christopher Columbus and what we assume are boatloads of diseased blankets.

In the end, Jaguar Paw manages to pull his wife and now two kids (yeah, she had a baby while in the pit) out of the hole, whereupon they live happily ever after roaming through the jungle. With no shoes.

This BuzzCap brought to you by Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA and Palo Santo Marron.

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When we ranted about “special” editions of video games last month, we mentioned the Nuka Cola bottle opener that gamers can pick up by pre-ordering Fallout 3 at Best Buy. Our annoyance over this pre-order bonus is that it’s a Best Buy exclusive, which may be good for Best Buy, but positively annoying for those of us who already pre-ordered the game elsewhere. Having an incentive to order from a particular retailer when a game developer makes an exclusive deal to give away a special bonus is one thing, but having two different retailers with different exclusives for the same game is just not fair. Are mega-fans supposed to buy the same game twice just to satiate their fandom?

Let’s be honest here: the Amazon “Survival Edition” of Fallout 3 is way cooler than the Nuka Cola bottle opener, and for the ridiculous price associated with the Survival Edition, there’s no reason Bethesda couldn’t have throw in the bottle opener which probably runs them less than a dollar to manufacture. So here we are with choices to make, but fortunately, one choice is simple: order the Survival Edition from Amazon, then pre-order the game at Best Buy for five dollars. That five bucks buys you the bottle opener and a five-dollar-off coupon towards the upcoming Fallout 3 strategy guide, so if you pick up the latter, you’re not out any money at all. If you don’t plan on picking up the strategy guide, or if you’re cheap like us, just hold onto your Best Buy pre-order receipt, and bring it in after the game is released, and just tell Best Buy that you’d like to put the five-dollar credit towards another title instead. That way, Best Buy still gets their money, and you get free Fallout swag.

With the bottle opener in hand, one last question remains: who at Bethesda do we need to kill to get a bottle of Nuka Cola?

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Somewhat surprised were we when we came across a post decrying the old brown Starbucks logo in favor of the censored, common-place green one. In said post, author Maxator doesn’t so much mind the bare breasts that most people complain about, but instead doesn’t like the idea of the Starbucks mermaid holding her “mer-legs” apart. Going so far as to call the whole thing “offensive”, Maxator’s comments appear without an understanding for the logo’s core theme, never-mind a mermaid’s anatomy.

The original logo, unlike the polished, cartoony new green one, is not meant to look refined. Rather, it’s designed to look like a 15th century European woodcut depicting a twin-tailed mermaid, which is also known as a melusine. In fact, many historical melusine drawings depict the creatures in a similar way as Starbucks has, and the only pornographic notions are those inferred, not directly implied. Perhaps that’s why the melusine is even seen in European heraldry, and why the image is quite appropriate as Starbucks’ logo given the corporation’s intent to sell their outlets as a patron’s “third place” outside work and home: the melusine’s alchemical representation is that of unity: earth and water, body and soul, etc.

As far as we’re concerned, Starbucks should bring back the old logo permanently. Those who think the old logo is hideous are clearly missing the point. We happen to like the old-world feel of the Pike’s Place Starbucks store, and wish that all newer stores embodied the same theme. Screw the spit and polish and unnecessary censoring of the new logo. It’s almost as though Americans want to be offended.

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Lately, a number of people we know have gotten onto the weight-loss bandwagon, which to us seems about six-months early since we’re not even close to the holiday season yet, but to each their own. The methods we’ve recently heard for losing weight range from crazy dietary restrictions (like no alcohol!) to long-winded work-out routines. Even more recently, our friend Maxator started what he calls the “hunter gatherer diet”, which effectively cuts out processed sugar and flour, and potatoes. The diet has worked for him, as he’s lost 20 pounds in 30 days, with no other major behavioral modifications other than the types of food he eats.

While some of Maxator’s friends may have been surprised at Maxator’s weight loss resulting from his modified diet, we were less surprised, as his modifications are very similar to those described by other individuals. For example, StrongLifts.com proposes a similarly healthy diet, albeit with the goal to fuel fast muscle growth by increasing protein intake. The core phlosophy at StrongLifts.com is simple: earlier generations didn’t struggle as much with weight because they were constantly working, and the more manual labor done, the greater muscle strength is, and those with greater muscle strength tend to burn fat much quicker/easier than those who are weak and flabby. In other words, by building muscle and not taking in carbs/sugars that can’t easily be burnt off, weight problems will be minimal.

Both Maxator and StrongLifts.com refer to prior generations and their food intake. These comments remind us of Mean Genes, an absolutely excellent book, which we would make required reading if mendax.edu were a reality. In short, Mean Genes is a reflection of man’s behavior as it relates to many years of genetic programming/evolution. In other words, the authors pinpoint why people tend to do certain things based on the things our ancestors had to do to survive. While the scope of the book exceeds the subject of this post, there’s a chapter on health and beauty that refers to the foods modern man is drawn to, and why that is. For example, the western world prizes sugar, to the point where high fructose corn syrup is in a significant percentage of the things we eat and drink. We’re drawn to such sugary substances because ancient man needed a desire for then-rare sugars that occur in nature, such as fruits. These sugars weren’t just tasty, but they were tied to foods that had nutrients necessary for survival. Unfortunately, programmed to seek out sugar, modern man indulges in all-too-accessible sugars, which corporations exploit easily.

The point? Cutting down on sugars that we don’t need will help us regain a healthy balance in regards to our food intake. The willpower to do so isn’t always easy, but as Maxator has shown, is quite possible to gather. What we find comment-worthy about his ordeal isn’t the focus on weight-loss, however, but rather in the premise that natural foods are inherently better for consumption that unnatural ones. For example, a major tenet of his diet is the lack of processed sugars and flour, which many organic eaters have touted for years.

For those who don’t know about processed sugars, we’re not simply talking high-fructose corn syrup, though that’s obviously one of the worst kinds of sweeteners. Rather, even table-sugar is processed, which is immediately evident in its coloration: “pure” sugar isn’t white, it’s brown-ish. In fact, cane sugar is bleached just like flour is, to give it that super-clean unnatural whiteness that people are so fond of. In the case of flour, the processing is even worse, because not only is flour bleached, but most of its nutrients are ripped clean in the process. That’s why ingredients like “whole wheat flour” are so important, whereas the lack of the words “whole wheat” tends to refer to a much less healthy product. As for sugar, if cancer-inducing Splenda is not one’s cup of tea (it’s certainly not ours), consider using raw cane sugar, which can be found in most grocery stores, and also served in little brown packets at many cafes (Peets and Starbucks included). For home use, there’s also organic blue agave nectar, a syrupy substance that sweetens foods and drinks beautifully.

The health benefits of eating naturally aren’t the only gains for an individual, however: natural foods tend to taste better than processed foods also. For example, while we grew up drinking milk, at one point we stopped drinking a glass of milk a day, and for decades never considered going back. Sure, we’d eat dairy products and even put milk in our espresso drinks, but we simply didn’t find milk tasty enough to drink solo. That is, until recently, when we first realized just how much better whole milk was than the needlessly skim milk most Americans buy, and later in just how much better organic (and especially raw) milk tastes than the processed crap found in most stores.

It’s easy enough to point at natural foods as hippy foods, but this is a misnomer: they’re legacy foods that technocrats deemed unnecessary in order to promote capitalism and production over time-tested health benefits. That’s not to say that processed foods are without nutrients entirely, merely that they’re sapped of many nutrients one could otherwise find in a natural counterpart. And that’s not hippy, it’s ancestral.

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When news exploded about Starbucks shutting down 600 stores in the near future, we weren’t particularly surprised. That’s because since our patronage of Starbucks some five years ago, we’ve seen a general lack of consistency in the brand. Even in the same city, albeit the considerable city of San Francisco, consistency among Starbucks stores has lacked to the point where group outings for coffee once prompted discussion about which store to go to if we wanted the best atmosphere, versus the best drink.

When all Starbucks stores were closed a couple months back for the staff to be retrained, it made sense, since employees at different stores did things differently. For example, in some stores, a “zebra” mocha will be stirred with a spoon when it’s made, while in other stores, the unmixed concoction will be served as-is. Even the water used in the mocha mixture differs from store to store, and while some stores make their mixture fresh every morning, other stores complete the mixture in bulk, and then save it for days.

The differences mentioned above make the drinks taste different, and that’s poor form for a company whose widespread footprint across the nation implies consistency. This consistency is what we consumers expect to find in a store with the same name and decorating as the one across town, the State, the country, or even the world. When that consistency fails, consumers may as well go to a competing brand, especially one that does manage consistency better than Starbucks.

Then there’s the issue of potency, which is one of the chief reasons for running out to get coffee in the first place. Perhaps its the fact that we’re used to coffee in general, but on days where we’ve had coffee consecutively, Starbucks doesn’t offer the pick-me-up they used to, while competing brands like Peets simply offer a product with a higher caffeine content. In other words, for the same $3.50, we can get a stronger drink at Peets, and one whose taste we can expect, whereas at ye olde Starbucks, we’re over-charged for an espresso that’s weaker and possibly strange to our once-Starbucks-attuned taste-buds.

During a recent interview clip from NPR, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was correct in blaming Starbucks’ poor financial performance on the company itself, rather than on its competition. In other words, it’s not the competition that’s getting a leg up on Starbucks, but rather Starbucks putting a leg down out of hubris. Of course, as many have pointed out, the closing of 600 stores isn’t entirely significant when one realizes that there are around 10,000 Starbucks stores in the United States, and in many cities, not a problem to find multiple Starbucks stores within a block of one another.

Nonetheless, hopefully the closing of 600 stores will finally bring to the company’s attention the real problems, and bring back the consistency and buzz that its consumers want.

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We’ve had an article from MAKE Magazine starred in Google Reader forever, and only recently got around to seriously looking into building a home carbonation system ourselves. The Cool Tools article linked to by MAKE describes a simple system for carbonating beverages at home, and is pretty dead on in regards to its description of savings potential. In summary, the system described can make over 1133 liters of carbonated water per refill of CO2. We’ll simplify this number some more, and downgrade the estimate to 1000 liters of water per 20-pound CO2 canister.

In the city of San Francisco, where bubbly water is sold cheaply at around $1.30 per liter, that thousand bottles of unflat water we’d like to drink would run us $1300, while the system we decided to put together, which is practically identical to the one featured at Cool Tools, ran us a measly $208. (We did opt for a smaller CO2 tank, though, at five pounds, rather than the 20-pounder at Cool Tools.)

At Cool Tools, the price was cheaper yet, because they were able to find many of the parts used online, while we were less patient and instead grabbed the requisite materials from San Francisco Brewcraft. The lesson here is that the parts for a home carbonation system don’t need to be scrounged up, but can instead be found at a one-stop brick and mortar retailer, in the form of one’s local brewing shop. Naturally, there are also a number of online brewing stores one can purchase the parts at also, but we found that San Francisco Brewcraft was reasonably competitive with online vendors.

Admittedly, the 250 bottles of water we can carbonate is a rather irrelevant number compared to more practical comparisons. At a fair estimate of consuming six liters of store-bought carbonated water per week, we’re leaving $7.80 at the grocery store each weekend, which comes out to $31.20 per month, or $405.60 per year. In other words, our home carbonation system pays itself off in about half a year, which is substantially better than buying bottled seltzer, and also better than buying proprietary carbonation systems, as the latter have more overhead in terms of CO2 refills or in parts replacement.

Beyond that six-month timeframe, we’re talking pure savings, since the system is already paid for, and the water we carbonate is then effectively free. At least, it’s free until we’ve gone through 250 liters, at which point we’re looking at a CO2 refill which will set us back another $20 or so. For completeness-sake, 250 one-liter bottles of seltzer means that our five-pound CO2 canister will last for about 42 weeks, or about 10 months.

Some may decree that bottled seltzer is cleaner, but to this claim, we merely counter that we can easily filter water with our Brita pitcher before carbonating, and though Brita filters will cost some additional overhead, the cost is negligible compared to the amount of money we’ll save on home carbonation after six months.

As for procedure, the steps over at Cool Tools are a good start. The regulator we purchased has a nice fail-safe should our hose connections suffer terminal failure. The professionals at San Francisco Brewcraft affixed the hoses to the regulator, however, so we have no doubts as to the hose’s security. Basically, we fill a water bottle with water, afix the carbonator cap, and then squeeze out whatever air is left inside. We then attach the hose running off the regulator to the cap, turn the valve on our CO2 canister, and then pop the valve that runs to the regulator. There’s a small surface dial on the regulator that lets us control the PSI entering the water bottle. (Numerous sources claim that most plastic water bottles can hold 40-50 PSI, not the 200 claimed by Cool Tools.) We ran our PSI just past 30, shook the water bottle vigorously, then switched the system off. Voila – cheap, home-made seltzer, which tastes just like the stuff we were buying for $1.30+ per liter at the grocery store. (Instructables has a keen video of the process.)

While we’re quite happy with the system we’re using, the downside is that we’re still forced to keep plastic bottles around. In reality, what we want to do is get rid of any sources of BPA, and this we can do by simply carbonating our water in a three-gallon cornelius keg, which is made out of stainless steel. This setup would allow us to carbonate 11.3 liters of water in a single go, and with a spigot attachment, we can pour our carbonated water directly into our drinking container of choice, or into any BPA-free storage bottle for portability. We’re aiming for a three-gallon keg because it can be stored away more easily and in more places, including the mini-fridge we use for beverages. The three-gallon cornelius keg runs for more than a five-gallon keg, but the trade-off is worth it. This three-gallon accessory runs for $120 through San Francisco Brewcraft, with comparable prices online.

The total cost of our completed system will be around $350, which is still cheaper than a year’s worth of bottled carbonated water. Plus, compared to the latter, our system will have much less of an environmental footprint, since we’re significantly reducing the amount of plastic bottles that need to be produced, destroyed, and transported. In effect, carbonating water at home makes you green, and fancier than your flat-water drinking friends.

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When I read on Daring Fireball that Starbucks was dropping T-Mobile as the carrier behind their hotspot service, I was overcome with annoyance, as this meant that the bundled hotspot service I get with my T-Mobile data plan would be next-to-worthless, and put me squarely back in a position of having to pay $20 per month for the same service. Fortunately, Daring Fireball’s brief note was a half-truth, which is detailed by WNN. In actuality, while T-Mobile is being dropped as Starbucks’ hotspot carrier in favor of AT&T, T-Mobile will be a “roaming partner”, which means that those of us on T-Mobile data plans will still have unlimited hotspot access at Starbucks locations across the country. Thank the digital gods for that, because it means that unlocked iPhones on T-Mobile are still a way better deal financially than keeping them attuned to AT&T’s over-billing of similar services.

While no mention of AT&T customers getting similar free wifi is mentioned, it’s interesting that Starbucks Card holders (the pre-paid cards available at all Starbucks stores) will get two free hours of wifi access each day, making them a near must-have for digerati on-the-go. This begs the question: rather than keeping one Starbucks Card active, can one double their daily online time by simply keeping two cards active, each with half the amount of money on them? Or, will Starbucks require a daily purchase for the online time to go into effect?

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