Malternative Universe
Zima, we hardly knew ye.
By Jason Wilson and Meg Favreau
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An era came to a quiet end last week, when MillerCoors announced that it would be discontinuing the sales of Zima, the original "malternative."



If you are, say, in your late 30s and I say "Zima" to you, what comes to mind? Maybe your former crush on heroin-chic Kate Moss? Maybe living in your mom's basement playing Nintendo Tecmo Bowl? Maybe sitting on a ratty apartment couch watching the season premier of 90210? Maybe the wincing memory of that lousy temp job you had right before they invented The Internet and everyone else made a tech fortune?



I realize that Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder didn't drink Zima in Reality Bites. But every one of the proper nouns in the preceding sentence resides in the same place in my mind. Zima totally feels like something out of Douglas Coupland novel. In fact, in Coupland's novel jPod, one of the characters says, "drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do."



Everything about Zima was wrong, every note tone deaf, every step a mistep. The Zima marketing people grasped hamhandedly at the early 90s slacker fad — sort of like those fashion designers who tried to sell upscale flannel shirts in their boutiques.



One misstep was that ridiculous "Zomething Different" ad campaign. You remember, the ones with the group of supposedly hip Gen X-ers (the collection of whom would never actually be friends with one another in real life) grilling non-traditional fare on a roofdeck? "Are those burgers free-range?" asks one of the young women. "Who cares?" replies the narrator.



Perhaps these ads were effective, but they surely missed their target. Here's evidence of that: Within days of Zima's launch in the summer of 1993, my mother bought me and my brother (who were then in our early 20s) a four-pack of Zima. Maybe she believed this was a symbol of the "Zomething Different" lifestyle her children aspired to? Who knows? We drank three of the four bottles, and stopped. Ugh, the taste! Then for next decade, one lone bottle of Zima stood in the back of my parents' refrigerator, untouched, though that bottle often came up in conversation. For instance, the bottle of Zima would be used:

a) As a point of comparison ("I'd rather drink that bottle of Zima than…")
b) As the reward for a dare ("Dude, if you go run down the beach naked, I'll drink that Zima")
c) As a punitive threat ("If you don't shut up, I'm going to pour that Zima down your throat.")

Here's what I'm trying to say: Zima will surely go down as the one of the most maligned drinks ever invented. And yet. And yet.



Zima does leave something behind, and that something would be the legacy of the malternative. In fact, MillerCoors said it was discontinuing Zima in order to reduce "complexity" in their brand portfolio, and would allow it to focus more on other malternative brands such as Sparks. Think about it: If it wasn't for Zima, there'd likely be no Sparks, no Mike's Hard Lemonade, no Twisted Tea, no Smirnoff Ice.



The supreme irony of Zima's legacy, of course, is that it wasn't upwardly mobile Gen X-ers who adopted malternatives, but rather our younger brothers and sisters. These types of drinks are often referred to as "alcopops" and sometimes come under harsh criticism by people who believe the drinks are marketed to kids as starter-liquors.



That's the way it played out among our staff. Meg says the first thing she ever consumed, as an underage drinker, was a Smirnoff Green Apple Twist. She agreed to bravely revisit the horror of those formative years, and this week hosted a tasting of the remaining malternatives on the market. It wasn't pretty, but her tasting notes follow:

Bartles and Jaymes Mojito Mike's hard lemonade Smirnoff Ice Twisted Tea, hard iced tea Sparks caffeinated malt beverage
Bartles and Jaymes Mojito

Bartles and Jaymes, the creator of the wine cooler, produced the best of the offerings we tasted. Balanced lime and mint flavors left the panel feeling like they were tasting a high-end soda, not a candy-flavored drink made to lure teenagers into drinking. Comments included, "Actually not totally horrible," and "Ok." We also tried another Mojito manufactured by Bacardi, and it was awful enough to garner the comment "Repulsive. It tastes like gum spit."

Mike's Hard Lemonade

Mike's Hard Lemonade is like the kid in school who just wants to be left alone, so he goes to classes, does his homework, and tries not to say anything offensive. The flavor is fake — there's no getting around the Country Time-style taste. But mostly the beverage garnered shrugs. One taster said she liked Mike's tinge of salt, and even the most vitriolic comment, "It smells like a cleaning product," was followed by, "but it leaves your mouth feeling fresh."

Smirnoff Ice

If there we had been able to find three more flavors of Smirnoff Ice, we would have had a bottle to signify every circle of hell. But we made do with six flavors that ranged from the gag-worthy candy sweetness of Raspberry Burst to the almost tasteless Triple Black. One taster, age 22, said that the most common use she's seen for Smirnoff Ice is as a chaser at parties. Another taster noted that the original Smirnoff Ice is closest in taste to Zima.


Twisted Tea

The only uncarbonated malt beverage in the bunch, Twisted Tea led us to a discovery about our group of tasters: Almost nobody liked regular iced tea, which meant that this beverage was pretty well hated. Only one taster took a shine to it, remarking that, "It didn't taste all that different from Snapple or Lipton's." But another likened the tea's flavoring to dishwasher detergent.

Sparks

The most hated of all the drinks we tested, Sparks is also what MillerCoors is asking distributors to replace for Zima on their shelves. An alcoholic energy beverage that's popular with hipsters, Sparks prompted one tester to say, "It looks like urine. It really looks like urine," while pouring some out of the battery-styled can. After he took a sip, he followed up with: "It's unbelievable how bad that is." Nobody could think of anything better to say.

David Letterman's Top 10 swipes at the McCain-Palin ticket
The late-night talk-show host hasn't missed an opportunity to skewer the candidates since McCain stood him up at the last minute.

October 17, 2008

Top 10 Letterman swipes at the McCain-Palin ticket
Since John McCain stood up David Letterman at the last minute Sept. 24, the "Late Show" comedian hasn't lost an opportunity to take a dig at the GOP presidential hopeful or his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

10. "Sarah Palin is right now training for tomorrow's vice presidential debate in Arizona. And she says it's really helped her on foreign policy because from Arizona she can see Mexico."

9. "John McCain watched the debate and he loved Sarah Palin's performance. As a matter of fact, he applauded so much that all the lights in his house kept going on and off."

8. "By the way, have you heard this? This just in . . . a backwoods hiker has found the wreckage of John McCain's campaign."

7. "You know, I don't normally do this. I gave up drinking a while ago, but I started again. And I'm watching the debate last night and here's what I did -- I did a shot every time McCain said 'my friends.' So I'm blotto."

6. "Tom Brokaw was the moderator. . . . At one point Tom tells Obama and McCain that they were going to now answer questions that came in over the Internet. And you know what McCain said? He said, 'Uh, Tom . . . is that the same as the telegraph?' "

5. "At one point John McCain referred to Barack Obama as 'that one.' 'That one.' 'That one.' And McCain later . . . he apologized. He said he got confused. He thought he was at the bakery. 'Uh, a couple of crullers . . . uh, that one . . . and uh, that one.' "

4. "Sarah Palin. We like Sarah Palin, right? She's a lot of fun. Miss Alaska. She is saying that she doesn't know who Barack Obama really is. Doesn't know who Barack Obama is. That's interesting. She also doesn't know who Sarkozy is, Gordon Brown, Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, the list goes on and on."

3. "John McCain says he's going to win. John McCain is going to win the third presidential debate. Of course, he also told Custer the surge was working."

2. "John McCain is going to take this opportunity to unveil his new campaign persona. His new campaign personality, to really energize the last couple of weeks of the campaign -- Fighting Underdog. Fighting Underdog. That's John McCain and the campaign. And if that doesn't work, then he's going to go to Sadistic Yard Bull."

1. "You heard what happened at a rally yesterday. Sarah Palin mistook some of her supporters for hecklers. And you know, confusion happens in all walks of life. For example, a few weeks ago, John McCain mistook her for a legitimate candidate."

Musical tastes and personality type are closely related, according to a study of more than 36,000 people from around the world.

Body Odour - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Musk

by Liz Upton, 20 June 2008

Body Odour - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Musk
Some years ago, I used to work in an office with a guy who didn't wash. There is no subtle way of saying this: he stank.

The odour of a human body is complicated. It's not all armpits and stale sweat; most of your pheromones are produced by the oil glands on the scalp, and my old colleague had oil glands aplenty. There is (excuse me for the indelicacy) that groiny smell particular to men - women have their own smell too. And there are feet, and farts, and untold grotty things trapped in bodily crevices. My ex-colleague announced himself with a loud smell before he entered the room, and stayed there for a long time after he'd left.

Oddly, we're very shy about smelling and being smelled. Nobody ever mentioned to Mr Nosetrembler that he had a problem, for fear of upsetting him and embarrassing themselves. Instead, the desk next to him just remained empty, while everyone else brewed excessive amounts of fresh coffee, wore a lot of cologne and kept the windows open. For years. It's the same modern instinct that has us larding on the deodorant in the morning, using air freshener in the bathroom and soaking the bedsheets in Febreze fabric conditioner. Body smells are simply not the done thing these days, so much so that we can't talk about them in polite company, and perfumery is one of the places you can look to for proof. Just look at how we're constructing fragrances - since the 1990s, Calone, a synthetic molecule which has an oh-so-clean ozonic, marine scent completely unlike any beach you've ever been to, has become boringly ubiquitous. In large measure, this is because we think it makes us smell fresh and clean. (Think Eau d'Issey, Calvin Klein Escape, Kenzo pour Homme, Aquawoman by Rochas and so on.)

When I was a child, my brother and I had a He-Man doll - yes, I know you men like to call them figurines, but face it; they're dolls - called Stinkor, who came packaged with a little comic called 'The Stench of Evil'. Stinkor was not a favourite of our mother, who demanded we went into another room before playing with him. He had a scratch-and-sniff patch on his front which released an overwhelming musky reek. It was terrible and glorious. Of course, we scratched and sniffed again, and again, and again, until poor old Stinkor wore a hole in his chest. Something odd was going on here; Stinkor smelled dreadful, but his musky tang was strangely addictive. Human body smells, like those of my old colleague, can be horrifying once they've fermented and aged a little. It makes us forget that in other circumstances, like Stinkor's, they can also be fascinating, exciting, dangerous, beautiful and even sexy. I've one friend who loves it when his wife is pregnant, "because she smells like puppies". Another friend will only date men with hairy chests, "because I love the smell". (Why do people only ever admit these things when drunk?) And you've all heard about Napoleon's short but lustful battlefield message to Josephine reading: "Am returning in three days. Don’t wash."
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How I Think I Smell

by Walker Minton, 21 August 2008

How I Think I Smell
I like the smell of perfume. A simple timeless pleasure of things that smell good. However, like many things, once I start to think about a little, the simplicity has a tendency to evaporate at the speed of citrus top notes.

The complexity starts with a problem of over indulgence; I am fortunate enough to possess many bottles. The catch is that with the rich diversity in my cupboard comes a very modern dilemma: options are too many, criteria too few (or to put it another way: which shall I wear today and why?)

Part of my solution is not to wear them. I like to sniff perfumes direct from the bottle or from a blotter; spraying toilet paper is a favourite method. This allows me to indulge in sensual pleasure without the commitment of a whole day of smelling of it. It also seems to reveal the detail so much more clearly than a remote sniff captured floating up from skin. It allows me to unpick the accords and how they relate to each other, to really absorb the transitions from top through middle to base. I can appreciate the craft, the progression, the depth, the balance, the beauty, the detail and the gestalt.

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