great food if your oxen can ford the river
Maybe I am too accustomed to the stereotyped labeling of the northeast united states and national chains but I can’t help wondering if this Mexican restaurant primarily serves corn meal biscuits and any rabbits you caught en route. Stranger still, it is in Helen, a German-themed tourist town, in north Georgia.
I was there for four days last week. I took thousands of pictures. Some of them weren’t even blurry, but I am too tired to finish this sentence. I also spent two days in Atlanta, the Coca Cola capital of the world, also in Georgia. For once I was in an area where I could reliably trust no place would only have pepsi when I wanted coke, but I just drank water the whole time, and occasionally iced tea.

They don’t have “iced tea” in Georgia either, preferring unpalatable “sweet tea” but that is great once I squeeze four lemon slices into it. And here is a picture of that, apparently. You can tell I was out of my home since the broken android brand mobile device I usually employ in this era is visible here so I must have been using the bigger mechanical digital camera that I bring on long trips, because it takes pictures of the wider variety of supermarkets and public restrooms I visit away from my home much faster and blurrier than any touch-screen device. A drink that isn’t good, at all, “starry.”

I never heard of it before I got to the Laguardia airport; I researched the matter and learned that Sierra Mist sodee pop was discontinued at some point. Then replaced with “mist twist,” then returned, then discontinued again and replaced with this.
Unless it was singularly responsible for the debilitating bladder ache I felt for the next hour before I was free to tend to that, I would say that Starry “hits” exactly the same as every other bland “lemon-lime” drink since 7-up changed its recipe to taste like Sprite in 1998. And even that I didn’t think about until this napkip was already crumpled, on its way out and separated from the actual product it accompanied, hence this being one of the blurry shots I mentioned.
I asked for starry because the drink was “free” and despite flying out of Atlanta and offering coca cola’s horrid Minute Maid “”juice”” brand, the flight only stocked Pepsi-brand non-juices, I wanted to ingest some calories on the flight, but was morally opposed to purchasing food at airport prices.

I had reluctantly reacquainted myself with Minute Maid on the previous week’s incoming flight and imagined I was set for life on that. So what the heck I thought, I will try this thing that it wants me so badly to try. And indeed it was badly.

I would like a proper national brand of this stuff.
That is not Mt. Dew; apart from the garish dye they are fairly dissimilar. For sodas, I mean.
Even the local restaurants that have Foxon Park on tap don’t offer the green flavor. Instead they have “Gassosa,” which tastes like Sprite.

It is frustrating that a company which has a superior citrus drink more heavily emphasizes the one that tastes like a less-good but better-known citrus drink. But that is how capitalism works. Most effort is put into remaking, rebooting, and ripping off stuff that already exists and aren’t great but are proven to generate revenue. But even with that in mind I don’t know why pepsi makes a big fuss over releasing a new soda that is indistinguishable from its old soda.

It’s essentially what McDonalds does with the mcrib sandwiches, getting press every other week when “it’s back” even though nobody seems to notice or care when it leaves. the pepsi company has to design and manufacture new logos and labels (and inadequately sized promotional napkins), and distribute them to every business that was selling sierra mist whenever it does this, if those places even go to the trouble of changing the drink machine labels, nevermind the menus, which makes building name recognition for the rebranded product complicated, since if somebody orders sierra mist off last month’s menu and gets a cup of Starry instead they probably won’t even notice. Unless the server says “sorry, we have starry” and then the buyer has to wonder what starry is and ponder whether to try it. Heapwhile mcdonalds just has to dust off the rip-shaped mold that the meat paste and pork syrup get sprayed into and pull the “mcrib is back!” sign out from under the counter.

Incidootily it is peculiar to me what a hullabaloo mcdonalds made about ‘grimace’s birthday’ last week when the character hasn’t been used in a quarter century and is best known now for appearing in a 1980s ad with Trump. All the mcdonalds characters got revoked because they were designed to represent mcdonalds food (including grimace, though not in my lifetime), which the company needed to be able to insist it was not targeting at children. They could show Ronald McDonald doing “healthy” things like playing basketball or doing his taxes or whatever, since he is at his core just a human who dresses funny. But you can’t rehabilitate the Hamburglar; he exists only to steal hamburgers and Mcdonalds isn’t allowed to put hamburgers into its marketing aimed at kids anymore, even though hamburgers is what it sells. And mcdonalds still has special “meals” specifically FOR kids, which have the same food in them, packed into boxes covered with imagery of OTHER company’s characters in promotion of material that will rot kids’ brains just as much as the food will rot their other organs. Everybody with money is lying, and the regulators all know it, but they don’t have enough funding or resources themselves to care about it. Meatwhile the politicians running on the platform of ostensibly protecting “our kids” get financed by companies like McDonalds and its happy meal cobranders, and want nothing more than to cut funding for regulation further, then seal the deal by appointing their like-minded buddies to all the chief positions. ha, ha haaaaaa

i SUPPOSE pepsi might be planning some longer term scheme, with a massive “Sierra Mist is BACK!” campaign planned for if its pseudonym doesn’t catch on, like when Coca Cola reintroduced “Coke Classic!” after New! Coke flopped in 1985 (which I am not old enough to remember but it was a popular joke topic for years). HOWEVER that only worked because Coca Cola was already the market leader and was just spooked by pepsi’s cola supposedly winning “blind taste test”s, in addition to fears that an alternative Coke would steal market share points from the main coke and might let pepsi claim to be the number one cola just because it didn’t have a second pepsi, unless new coke BECAME the main coke. The fragile egos of billionaires afraid of imaginary numbers were the only factor*. Whereas Sierra Mist was hardly bought by anyone at the time of its most recent supposed removal.
*AND the reason for the flop was the fragile cultural identifies of rednecks who care about marketing too much and mistake brand preference for cultural identity + bullying from complacent attention seeking doofuses who don’t have real problems. They have a lot in common with those now protesting woke. Woke is the new New Coke. I liked old 7-up better than new 7-up or the other drinks it changed itself to be as less-good-as but it truly is not of great importance to me.

anyway I have to go clean out the car since it looks like a hurricane tore off the roof and flooded it while I was away.