Lawsuit To Coors: Take Sparks Off Market

If you’ve ever been to a party with people too hip to drink Mike’s Hard Lemonade but not nerdy enough to be a beer geek, you’ve no doubt drank Sparks. The energy drink not only supports Coors (”The Republican beer!”), it looks and tastes like somebody combined Red Bull and battery acid. That means teenagers drink it. It also contains alcohol, which does the same.

As such, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has sued Coors in an attempt to force Sparks off the market. CSPI cites cites a study (.pdf) that suggests caffeine impairs one’s ability to tell drunkenness; whether that’s true or not, good luck getting science to guide drug policy. (This is a hilarious drug policy joke, trust me.) The release goes on:

Sparks’ juvenile web site and guerilla [sic] marketing appeal to young consumers, according to CSPI. The web site offers a recipe for a drink called a “Lunchbox,” consisting of half Miller beer and half Sparks, and elsewhere, the site proposes consuming Sparks for breakfast alongside omelets. The company also hosts give-aways of Sparks at house parties, sponsors events unrelated to beer such as art shows, and engages in other unconventional marketing practices, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Oh, look, it’s all there: Unconventional marketing! A”Lunchbox”! Breakfast! Gorilla marketing! The Journal Sentinel, man! A full-fledged conspiracy to get kids to drink. Scoob, we gotta do something!

The group has already forced Budweiser to can its similar (but unsurprisingly worse) drinks. Unlike Tilt and Bud Extra, people actually drink Sparks, so it’s safe to say this suit will go nowhere. But let’s imagine a whistleblower comes around, with documents that say employees of the company that sells alcohol wanted people (even underage people!) to drink alcohol. We will be shocked, we will demand hearings, we will somehow be utterly surprised by all of this. And we will have hipsters who do more cocaine and teenagers who mix Red Bull with vodka and drink a lot more alcohol with a lot more caffeine in it. Well, maybe.

via Join Together
Photo of Ken (my apologies, man), Creative Commons license

High Gas Prices Chase Teens To Malls

KYW 1060 has a report today about how high gas prices have forced teenagers to cut down on cruising, a time-honored tradition where kids ride around in their cars for hours and hours and hours without any real point. (Frankly, I still find it kind of awesome as an adult.)

It’s a warm, sultry Thursday night and a portion of a shopping center in Richboro, Bucks County in Pa. is filled with parked cars belonging to teenagers who ordinarily would be out cruising the streets. But not this summer. Eighteen-year-old Greg Borden says times have changed: “We usually come here to make plans and we used to all take our separate cars to where we were going, but now that gas is so high we just take one car and we usually try to not go to far either.” [...]

It’s the same story all across America. Parking lots, shopping malls, and movie theaters are now the favorite gathering spots for teens.

It’s neat to know teenagers are now gathering in malls, parking lots and movie theaters. As opposed to my day, when we gathered in basements, malls, movie theat–hmm, wait a second.

Also: Kudos to Larry Gatti, quoted in the piece, for getting the word “sucks” (which actually offends some people) onto the radio. And also for having a rhyming name.

Gas Costs Force More Teens to Cut Down on Cruising [KYW 1060]
Photo via CGoulao, Creative Commons license

Letter Writer: Teens Are Ugly Opium Eaters

Did you guys read the current issue of the Northeast Times yet? If you didn’t, you missed this letter, possibly the best one the paper has ever printed. (And it is really a tough contest.)

Sick and tired of the teens in Fox Chase

I am writing in response to Miss Sondra Lorino’s letter last week (Memo to bike-seat thief: You’re a coward). Frankly, I think it is utterly ridiculous that these hoodlums stole an innocent girl’s bike seat. I myself am sick and tired of the teenagers in this neighborhood. Last week I was walking my beloved Boston terrier Otto though the path at Burholme Park, when he cut his paw open on a broken beer bottle left by ignorant teens. It’s bad enough they’re hurting the neighborhood, but now small children and animals? Luckily my dog was OK, but who’s going to pay the vet bill? Maybe next time instead of buying a case of Zima or whatever they’re drinking these days, they can reimburse me for Otto’s left paw.

I also noticed Ms. Lorino’s concern about the recreation center. This too makes me very angry. It’s a recreation center meant for the youth, but it’s filled with teenagers and drugs. It’s beginning to remind me of an opium den in Taiwan. It’s occupied with ugly-looking teens and little kids using playground equipment. Does this make any sense? You tell me!

Who’s here to stop all these? Fox Chase Town Watch? Where are they? We would be better off having a blind version of the A-Team minus Face and Mr. T. Sure, I do see them patrolling, and they do help out a lot, but we need more. We need to reinforce the curfew laws. I see kids no older than 14 running around the neighborhood at 4 in the morning all souped up on God-knows-what. They’re out there throwing pennies and apples at people. Also I see the young girls walking around drunk with grown men. Where are the parents? Remember, the world revolves around action and responsibility.

Ahh, yes, the ol’ “blind version of the A-Team minus Face and Mr. T” reference. And I think it’s silly this letter writer doesn’t get why the young girls are walking around with grown men: As he proved in his previous paragraph, teenagers nowadays are ugly. Plus grown men can get something better than Zima, which not even teenagers drink anymore.

With apologies to Vogt Playground, which isn’t even in Fox Chase. Eh.

Breaking: Bored Teenagers Are Destructive

If you haven’t spent much time in the suburbs (or, alternatively, haven’t seen Stand By Me), you might not be familiar with the teenage art of mailbox destruction. In the suburbs, there’s not much else to do besides hang in basements and drink in the woods, so people come up with ridiculous games to play. One of them is going down a street and destroying mailboxes, with cherry bombs, baseball bats, rabid wolverines, whatever.

The Bucks County Courier Times has a big article about teen vandalism today, noting that it picks up in the summer because kids don’t have to go to school. It also notes that most kids don’t know why they destroy mailboxes and blah blah blah.

There’s also this sentence: “While there is only one way to throw an egg, there apparently are several ways to destroy a mailbox, according to police reports detailing the destruction.” Oh, come on — hasn’t this guy ever heard of an egg catapult?

Teen vandalism can come with high cost [Bucks County Courier Times]
[Image from the comic strip Gil Thorp]

British Teens Way More Awesome Than American Teens

To the United Kingdom!

Video: British Youth Gone Wild [CNN.com]