Girly Drink!

At Albertson’s today I picked up a sales flier and noticed that Wired X energy drinks were on sale 10/$10 for 16 oz.

Since Eric’s kind of looking for an energy drink to replace Albertson’s possibly-going-defunct Max Velocity and I’m always looking for “diet” energy drinks we figured we’d give them a try.

Eric picked out the Wired X 3000. 3000 as in 3000mg of taurine per 16oz can. It proudly states that fact as well as caffeine and inositol stats on the boldly colored blue and orange can. I chose their “diet” flavor: Wired X Passion Fruit with Calcium. In the black and PINK can, just in case you hadn’t already realized it’s being totally marketed toward women.

While the ingredients listed caffeine, taurine and inositol, there’s no stats for them on that can, just the stats for calcium and a few other vitamins (like 3000% the RDA of B₁₂!) were in the Nutritional Facts box. So, I figured I’d go online to see if they had any numbers. And they do. Any I’m not terribly impressed. 100mg inositol, 54mg taurine, and a mere 94mg caffeine. That’s half of the amount of inositol and caffeine that Eric’s had. A weenie-ass amount of taurine when compared to what Gazzu’s low carb has. Do they really think they have to defang this drink to make it marketable to women? But hey, I am getting 200mg of Aloe Vera Leaf Extract. All us women know what that’s good for right? Right?

Unfortunately, it does taste really good. Since I’ve never had passion fruit before, I’ll compare it to a nice tart peach. Better than the red Kool-Aid taste of Gazzu, though not as plain-jane mixable as diet Max Velocity. I’ll probably pick it up again when it’s on sale. For variety.

And of course, if you pour it out, it is pink…

Girly Movies?

Cinematical Seven: More Than One Woman … (The Bechdel Rule) – Cinematical

Not only am I not a feminist, feminism confuses me–if this is what a facet of feminism is. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t even notice when there is an overage or lack of female characters. It doesn’t appear on my radar screen. But my thought on The Rule is: why would I want to limit myself. Yeah, I realize The Rule has been done partly for humor, partly as commentary, but my immediate response was to think of all the great movies I wouldn’t have watched if I were as biased as this Rule. My top ten-ish list of movies is full of films that don’t have two women who talk to each other in them (Tombstone, Pyscho, The English Patient, The Sixth Sense, Strange Days, Se7en, Ghostbusters) though they occasionally have a strong woman character or two and occasionally have female characters that meet bad ends. Some of the best movies of the past year or so didn’t have (many) women in them: Zodiac, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Breach. And although two others had strong female characters (Eastern Promises, Mr. Brooks), they didn’t talk to some other woman about…stuff. This isn’t to say that I avoid movies that would qualify under The Rule, I just don’t understand why I’d want to pick and choose based on that other than standards of actual quality.

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Speaking of movies, we’ve watched a couple lately.

The Bank Job
It was really no better or worse than I expected and I’ll put up with a lot for Jason Statham. There’s some instances of the bank robbers being pretty stupid and the rest of the world being pretty clueless. I don’t know if that’s in the realm of the “true story” upon which this is based, but it can be pretty frustrating watching characters do dumb things. The ending had a few nice turns though, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. And hey, shirtless Statham in the end scene.

21
And if you weren’t sick of watching working class criminals doing dumb things, than 21 has some “genius” types doing dumb things to send you over the edge. Keep in mind while watching this movie that card counting is not illegal nor is winning a huge pile of loot while playing cards in Vegas. Why a particularly dumb thing is done in this movie, I’ll never know. But the card playing was pretty cool. I’ll give them kudos for keeping it interesting and pretty to watch.