in search of the perfect caffeine

My quest for a non-coffee caffeine beverage has been a difficult one. Here are my past contenders:

• Mountain Dew. Doesn’t taste very good and includes a whole bunch of sugar.
• Diet Dew was tried for fewer calories but it tasted like Slurm.
• NOS energy drink. Barely acceptable taste, but has enough caffeine to keep me going on the worst of days. Full of sugar and bizarre chemicals.
• Green tea (I don’t like black tea very much). Bland. I make double-dose green tea because it’s pretty weak but it still doesn’t quite provide enough buzz. Has healthful qualities, though.
• Caffeinated water. I know it exists, but I have yet to find it on store shelves in Seattle. You can order it, but it’s silly to ship water across the country.

I give up, what’s the best low-calorie, non-coffee beverage for delivering caffeine to the brain? No mainlining. No pills. Gotta be drinkable and palatable.

FYI: My unofficial Web research on caffeine levels in drinks:

Green tea – 8-20 mg (1 cup)
Black tea – 25-100 mg (1 cup)
Mt. Dew – 55 mg  (12 oz.)
Coffee – 80-150 mg (1 cup)
NOS energy drink – 187.6 mg  (16 oz)
Starbucks Grande – 330 mg (16 oz)
Fixx Energy Shot – 400 mg (0.17 oz) Take two and notify next of kin.

after four years – the ouija mouse pad speaks

It was September of 2005 when the mystical Ouija mouse pad last communicated through this blog. The long time lag is probably a good thing considering the content of its messages. In any case, I was astonished to find that it wanted to speak again tonight. I’ll relinquish control and let it do the talking:

Listen to the mouse pad, earth children, for I speak only truth. I will speak truth to the extent that you can comprehend it, which means this will be a very short message. Sorry about your “brains.” Heeeeyah ha ha! Ha. Whoops. Little Ouija planchettes all over your world are spinning off course. Must…regain…control.

Ah, there we are. It’s time for my oracular pronouncement. The message is coming through: “A hard rain’s gonna fall.” No, that’s not it. “The eagle flies at dawn.” No! “I’m getting someone whose name starts with a P.” Drat. These are the wrong channels. Damned new broadcasting standards. All right. I’m moving my virtual antenna to point at the nether regions. Now it’s loud and clear. 10-4, good buddy. Today I have an encomium (look it up, you lazy seeker of knowledge) to humanity, such as it is. Ahem.

“You are a child of the space-time continuum. No one asked for you in particular to be here, but your number came up. Know this: nature does not abhor a vacuum, it yearns for a perfect, infinite vacuum and might just get there, but you’ll be long gone and non-existent when it does, so rejoice. I will now share more practical wisdom. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, imagine a million monkeys typing the number zero on loud, clacking, manual typewriters for eternity. You are not one of these monkeys, so rejoice and dream dreams. I will now reveal what is in my heart. I love humankind. You are neat. Your knobby heads are fascinating. Your snouts are appalling yet extraordinary. Goodbye.”