The End of an Era.

    As you probably know by now, my dad changed jobs last year and now works in Washington.  He spends weekends and holidays and such here in New Jersey, but lives in an apartment Maryland most of the week.  When my sister graduates high school, my parents will move to Maryland permanently (or at least leave the New Jersey house permanently behind).
    This, of course, necessitates cleaning of this house in preparation to move.  If you haven't seen my room here, it looks approximately like this:

And believe you me, it's been worse in the past.  This was taken after I'd started cleaning.

    I am a collector of various odd and not-so-odd things.  Baseball cards, for example - that's pretty common.  Less common - soda cans.  Let me explain how exactly this came about.
    In November of 1993, we took a brief sojourn to London over the Thanksgiving break.  On the plane, I got a can of Sprite which was not written in English.  I guess I never looked that closely, because I thought - or thought that I thought, if that makes sense - all these years that it was a German can, but having looked today, it was quite clearly in Dutch.  Anyway, though this can was open and empty, it inspired me to collect soda cans - and I would keep them closed and full.

See, it's made in Holland.  Apparently I never read this before, and also am an idiot because the words everywhere on the can are so obviously Dutch.

    Inspired by this, I collected various cans throughout my world travels, many of which will appear below.  However, I also collected pretty much any can that had any interesting feature, or not even.  I just collected normal old soda cans.  Consider this photo of some of the cans:

In this photo you can see only one can obtained outside this country (the small one at the top right).  The rest are, clockwise from bottom right: Storm, Tab, Diet Squirt, Surge, Pink Grapefruit Diet Rite, Fresca, Ruby Red Squirt, Diet Barq's, Red Raspberry Diet Rite.  There are others underneath these as well, such as A&W and Welch's Grape.  Obviously none of these are particularly interesting.

    Anyway, it was my original plan to hold onto some, if not all, of the cans.  Here's the problem: soda can, in fact, eat through the can it's in sometimes.  This had happened with several of the cans.  This made the shelf on which they were sitting a sticky mess, and made me just say "Fuck it."  So rather than saving the cans, even the ones which held some souvenir or sentimental value, I decided to empty them all, then take pictures of them as sort of a soda photo-journal retrospective.  I know you're excited.  Don't worry, I'm only going to be going through the ones that could be considered even remotely interesting.

Foreign Cans

    Let's start with the cans amassed on my various world travels.

British Isles

    Have no fear, I'm not even going to focus on all of the ones above.  I have individual photos of Light 7Up, Pepsi Diet, and Pepsi Max if you really care.  But you don't, so let's move on.

Real lemons!  Real taste!  Real old!  This Club Lemon was nearly seven and a half years old when I poured it out this morning, as I obtained it in Ireland in July 1996.  Of course, this isn't any older than most of the collection - consider the expiration date on this can of Tab.

Stalkers in the know are currently scratching their heads and saying, "But Flax never went to France!"  This is true.  For some reason, the kiosk near the Tower of London was selling cans of pop that happened to be in French.  And they were also some odd limited edition Olympic commemoration or something.  Wanna see the ingredients?  Sure you do.

"Refreshing beverage with vegetable extracts.  Ingredients: carbonated water, sugar, caramel color, acid E338" - I have no idea what that translates to in standard American acids, probably malic - "vegetable extracts, caffeine."  I'm not sure what it is about the Europeans and Coke having vegetable extracts, but the British cans say the exact same thing, only in English.

The eight cans in the front of this shot are all miniature.  The slimmer ones are 150 ml and the fatter ones are 200 ml.  I should have thrown in a real can just for scale, but who cares.  They're small.  You believe me, right?  Individual shots of the Cokes and the other three normal sodas will only be linked here.  I actually picked those up myself on various trips across the pond (both in 1994 and 1996).  The other three, my sister brought back from her trip there in whenever it was.  2000?  Same time as I was in Australia?  Sounds right.

Action Man!  Considering that the Brits require cans of diet soda to be marked up with "only effective for weight loss when combined with a balanced diet," it's hard to imagine that they'd allow an orange and pineapple soda to market itself as a "thirst quencher," but there it is.

Now, can you tell me with a straight face that this doesn't look delicious?  The name, in case you can't piece it together, is officially "Fatal Contraption," which also sounds like something I want to be drinking.  I'd say it's "meant to appeal to kids," but since when do kids need to be tricked into drinking soda?  It was quite red as I was pouring it out, looking kind of like the blood it advertises, but being straight-up cherry flavor smelled more like cough syrup.  Maybe that's where the trick comes in.

Evidently the Brits know cream soda as "marshmallow soda."  Why Bart Simpson is hawking it, I have no idea - I guess to point up the "manic" aspect, as though the 25 grams of sugar that can probably contains wouldn't make it pretty clear sooner or later.

South Africa

    We might as well go in order.  I didn't save much from South Africa.  I'm not sure why - stuff there wasn't unique enough, perhaps.  Here was an interesting one, though.

Canada

    The stalkers are again wondering what's up.  I forget how exactly I got this can - I think Christmas one year.  I did not get it myself, though, having never been to Canada.

The best part, of course, was this slogan: "The Champagne of Ginger Ales."  Do you think we can convince Korbel to start billing itself as "The Ginger Ale of Champagnes?"

Australia/New Zealand

UPDATED! (12/21): Self-proclaimed quasi-semi-fruit-expert Alma did some research and discovered that "Paeroa" is a town in New Zealand which produces the mineral water that was used in the soda.  Choose from (a) adorable, (b) impressive, (c) completely weird.  (Note: May have more than one answer.)  L & P still tastes kind of like Sprite, if it were produced by Ned Flanders.  My favorite part of this can is the oxymoronic slogan, "World Famous in New Zealand."  And this website is world-famous in Rich and Drew's apartment!  Frankly, I don't know why anyone would drink this when Lift is available.

Speak of the devil - it's Lift and its Pepsi counterpart, Solo.  You have no idea how hard it was to pour these out - my favorite flavor of pop, it's found basically nowhere in this country, I have two cans sitting there - and they're three and a half years old and I probably shouldn't drink them.  I poured out the Solo, but saved the Lift for last - after I poured out half of it, I took a sip.  I am a weak, weak man.  It tasted fine considering its age - and add about ten points for being Lift - but it's probably just as well that I didn't drink the whole can.

Commemorative and Other Cans

    In this section, we look at the cans that have some sort of interesting marker on them, or I just felt like discussing, however briefly.

Though I referred to the Dutch Sprite can as the one that started it all - and legitimately so - this can was what convinced me that holding onto old pop could be considered a financial investment.  I'm pretty sure I paid ten bucks for this thing at Union Market back in 1995 or 1996 - it's a Canadian Coke can commemorating the Blue Jays' second World Series win in 1993.  And yes, it's in two languages too.  Consider it ten bucks poured down the drain - quite literally, in this case.

The old-school Cherry Coke can.  This is one of my favorite can designs ever - the purple and black with all the cherries.  Just thought I'd mention it.

Yes, Virginia, they do still make New Coke.  Some people liked it, you know.  It's called Coke II these days and only sells in some markets - I got this at a grocery store in Lake Zurich back when my aunt lived there.  Originally it was part of a six-pack, but the other five were consumed, some by me.  New Coke - it's not that bad!  But I prefer Coke I.

This one's kind of random.  I bought it for like, 50 cents at a dollar store in Pennsylvania.  Love those regional brands.  I have little doubt that this soda sucked hard, so it's just as well that I only saved it.

This can of Diet Sunkist promises "huge orange taste!"  And it produced a huge orange smell when I poured it out.  But I think that the huge orange taste would have been mitigated somewhat by the huge broken-down Nutrasweet taste.  Diet soda has a shelf life of about six months; this one expired eight years ago.

The old Jolt cola in red and white (the current one uses black, gold, and red, or thereabouts).  It was on this can that my best Halloween costume ever was based.  I'm pretty sure I got this can at Cornell in 1996.

The shadiest can of soda in history.  This is like the Señor Cardgage of soda cans.  Sometime in 1995 or 1996, I was at the Shop Rite in West Orange and this single can was sitting on the shelf.  It's pretty odd for single cans to be sitting there - this is the same store that once gave me a hard time about buying single cans pulled from six-packs, although the Shop Rite in South Orange always let me (like I'm buying a six-pack of Golden Peach Diet Rite just to complete my Diet Rite collection, puh-leeze).  Also, this can has no nutrition facts (which were already mandatory, even back then), just a short ingredient list and where it was produced (eastern Pennsylvania somewhere).  Just today as I was pouring it out, I noticed the bottom of the can.  Considering when I bought it, it's a good thing I was only saving it, seeing as it was significantly older than even its purchase date.

Finally, the Super Bowl cans.

Having emptied all the cans, and taken photos of the ones worth remembering here, another part of my childhood bit the dust.  Meet Mr. Recycling Bin:

Well, that's about it.  If you stuck around this long, congratulations!  You officially have even less of a life than I do.  But you deserve some sort of endurance reward, so here you go, another blast from the past: an art project I made in middle school (I'm thinking sixth grade, but I can't be sure) that's been sitting in the living room ever since.  I made these monks out of clay, glazed them, and they went through the kiln.  It's still about the best-looking artistic thing I've ever done (you can judge for yourself whether or not that says anything about the rest of my shit).

Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes...