Not much has changed since I last smacked the keyboard and pushed the stupid "publish" button, which for some reason always takes 3-4 clicks to actually work. Perhaps this is WordPress's way of making me really think about what I'm putting out there. Or maybe it's because I use a really hideous wireless mouse that refuses to function if its receiver is within 37 miles of any other electronic device.

I turned 30. Big, scary number. I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel just a little bit old. With my vices, 30 is practically middle-aged. And I'm now faced with the awful truth that most of the world's hottest celebrities are younger than me. That just pisses me the fuck off.

I'm fine with being 30 in real life. On the Internet, I wish I was 26 or 27. I should've lied about my birth year when I started X-E, because then I'd have another 3 or 4 years before people who hate me would have the right to describe me as "some thirty-something idiot who writes about soda and fruit snacks all day." Oh well -- I cannot escape my destiny:

Looks like I missed the hubbub, but apparently, the latest Mountain Dew spinoff was chosen by "we the people" for a national release. More importantly, the latest Mountain Dew spinoff is some kind of crazy ass electric blue. My brain and heart are at odds on this one. My brain wonders how PepsiCo could forget the massive risk involved with blue soft drinks, as evidenced with their earlier "Pepsi Blue" nightmare. (Which I covered in that oft-plagiarized opus, Dead Sodas.) Still, my heart loves the idea of drinking carbonated Romulan Ale too much to care.

When it comes to blue drinks, everyone wants to like them. Hell, just typing the term "blue drink" had made me 15% happier overall. We want to like blue drinks -- and maybe we genuinely do -- but when you get all objective and philosophical about it, there just aren't going to be a lot of opportunities to down a bottle of blue soda without feeling stupid. It's a little too precious. If McDonald's started shaping their McNuggets like ninja stars, I'd be the first person in line for a golden arches tattoo, but I'd probably never eat Chicken McNuggets again. I don't know if that's a truly correlating analogy, but it's late, and I'm stoned.

Did I really get this far without even telling you the name of this new blue drink? Seems I did. It's Mountain Dew Voltage, and it's "charged" with raspberry citrus flavor and ginseng. I always panic when I read "ginseng" on a beverage label, because it's usually code for "something that will make me sad." But it's not so bad. It's sweet as fuck, and I sorta feel as if I'm drinking from a pool of seventeen different soft drinks upon every sip, but it's not so bad. Actually, it tastes like melted down Fla-Vor-Ices -- and that is definitely "not so bad."

And it is blue. Really blue. It's not quite "ocean blue," but if you were to color an ocean using crayons, it's that kind of blue. It's crayon ocean blue. I don't foresee myself purchasing Mountain Dew Voltage too often in the future, but then again, as the first few paragraphs detail, I'm only allowed to drink warm milk and Sanka now. Fuuuuuck.

Click here to visit Voltage's official website. It could change your life, though probably not as much as eating a cherry fruit snack version of the Operation dude's funny bone.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around these. Kellogg's has taken plenty of hope shots in the past, but Operation fruit snacks? Seriously? Operation? It's a nice idea if you're a fool blogger who needs to lose some writer rust on an easy target, but what about everyone else?

Fruit snacks are mainly marketed to elementary school kids, but are children really going to pick Operation over Batman, Optimus, Miley, Barbie and whatever other fruit snack themes are out there? No way, I say. Fruit snack themes usually come by way of a certain something's Q score at the schoolyard, and "the wacky doctor game" just does not rate in 2009.

Looking at the snacks, I realize that it'd take a psychotically advanced mind to connect Operation to them without the clues provided by the box and foily wrappers. There are frogs, birds, bells, dogs -- all stuff that ties into the board game, but not in any remarkably iconic way. Really, it's the sort of inane assortment you'd expect from a generic brand of fruit snacks found at the comically ethnic closeout store on the wrong side of the tracks. Plus, from everything I've seen, the individual packets include too many yellows and nowhere near enough reds. I consider this a personal insult, and so should you.