Here are a few product reviews posted this week from other blogs we follow.

Looks like someone might get sued. I have no problem with it, unless drinking it increases Facebook friend requests from those people who were dicks or never talked to me in high school. (via ED Junkie)

Caffeinated ice cream? This is where caffeinated product technology has taken us? Boring. How about caffeinated laundry detergent so I can get a boost of energy every time I wear one of my thongs. (via Caffeine-A-Holic)

I think I’ve watched too many X-Files episodes to drink something called blk. water. (via Thirsty Dudes)

A Lay’s potato chip from Poland that tastes like chicken and spices excites me. I wonder if a Lay’s potato chip from the United States that tastes like barbeque sauce would excite snackers in Poland. (via Food Junk)

If I want to feel pleasure and pain from chocolate, I prefer having hot melted chocolate poured slowly on my chest and not chocolate made with the world’s hottest pepper melting on my tongue. (via Chocolate Reviews)

Update: Click here to read our Hot Sauce Pringles review

New Pringles flavors make me giddy.

Whenever I discover a new flavor, I pick two cans up, start shaking them like they were maracas, and do a little cha-cha. After I do my little dance, I put the two cans back on the shelf because the Pringles inside are probably in pieces thanks to my violent rhythmic shaking and then I purchase an unshaken can.

Well, it looks like I’ll be doing my Pringles can dance and horrifying unsuspecting shoppers if I can get my hands on the limited edition Pringles Original Hot Sauce. I learned about the new flavor via a review by our friends over at Review Spew.

Unlike the Tapatio-flavored chips Frito-Lay introduced a few months ago, these hot sauce flavored potato crisps aren’t attached to a brand name hot sauce. They aren’t even attached to an obscure hot sauce with a silly name, like Satan’s Blood Hot Sauce, Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally … The Slap Heard Around the World Hot Sauce, or Sphincter Shrinker Hot Sauce.

Yes, those are real hot sauce names.

A serving of Pringles Original Hot Sauce has 140 calories and 9 grams of fat, and they can be found at Walmart.

Update: According the commenter Echo710 below, the Hot Sauce Pringles come in three varieties: Original, Chipotle, and Garlic. Also, the line might be a Walmart exclusive.

Source: Review Spew

Since I live on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s known for its pineapples and mangoes (but mostly pineapples), you might be thinking I could make a better smoothie than McDonald’s new Mango Pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie.

However, while my magic smoothie making hands/magic massage hands/magic magic hands would probably, nay, most definitely make a better tasting smoothie made with fresh fruits, magic, and aloha, it wouldn’t be an overall better smoothie, which should be one that is not only tasty, but also reasonably priced and easy to make.

If I were to use my superb skills to make a mango pineapple smoothie, it would turn out to be one expensive smoothie. Because, while the volcanic soil on this rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean bear these two tropical fruits, they aren’t cheap fruits if you buy them from a store, farmer’s market, vendor on the side of the road, or on the black market.

Sure, I could steal the fruits by sticking them down my pants from anyone of the places I previously mentioned, but while the mangoes will make it look like I have huge cajones, the pineapples and their spiky skin make them the worst possible fruit to stick down my pants.

So instead of purchasing fruits that may taint poke me and are a pain to cut into pieces because of either a tough skin or a huge pit in the middle of it, I think I’d prefer to have McDonald’s prepare their Mango Pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie for me.

If you ever want to make a Jamba Juice employee jealous, tell them how easy it is for their McDonald’s counterpart to make a smoothie. While a Jamba jockey has to physically dump each ingredient into a blender’s container, all a McDonald’s worker needs to do is punch a couple of buttons on their blender and then watch it dump and blend all the ingredients. It’s like something you’d see on the Jetsons.

The McDonald’s Mango Pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie is made using fruit purees, low-fat yogurt, and ice. It has a consistency that’s almost perfectly in between thick and watery with tiny ice crystals floating throughout it. The smoothie smells like a ripe mango and its flavor is mostly mango with a little pineapple at the end, giving your taste buds a tasty tropical 1-2 punch. For fruits that come in the form of purees that are sucked through a tube and spit out into a blender, I was surprised by how much they tasted like the fresh versions of the fruit. I was also a little weirded out by how fresh the puree tasted.

Overall, I think the McDonald’s Mango Pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie is better tasting than the original Real Fruit Smoothie flavors — Wild Berry and Strawberry-Banana. Is it better tasting than what I could whip up? No, because when you put a blender in front of me, I make refreshment gold. But I think it’s cheaper and easier to make than whatever I could create. Plus, I don’t have to worry about pineapples poking holes in my crotch.

(Nutrition Facts – 12 ounces – 220 calories, 10 calories from fat, 1 gram of fat, 1 gram of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 40 milligrams of sodium, 49 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, 49 grams of sugar, 3 grams of protein, 45% vitamin A, 25% vitamin C, 8% calcium, and 2% iron.)

Item: McDonald’s Mango Pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie
Price: $2.49
Size: Regular
Purchased at: McDonald’s
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Best tasting McDonald’s Real Fruit Smoothie. Gives your taste buds a tasty tropical 1-2 punch. Nice consistency. My magic smoothie making hands/magic massage hands/magic magic hands.
Cons: Pineapples poking holes in my crotch. It’s a little weird the fruit puree tastes like fresh fruit. Prices of mangoes and pineapples. Cutting mangoes and pineapples. Stealing fruit.

Someday, the creepy BK pillowcase featuring The King I’m about to give away will be valuable. Probably not tomorrow. Probably not next year. Probably not a decade from now. But the creepy BK pillowcase will be valuable when the robots take over the Earth because it will make a wonderful sack for gathering food while trying to avoid being detected by well-armed robots.

But that’s not for a long time, so the winner of the BK pillowcase will have to decide whether to keep it as a collectable and later sell it on eBay for tens of dollars, use it to cover a pillow, or turn it into a sack to help feed the survivors of the future great robot war.

And the person who will have to make that decision when they win this creepy BK pillowcase is:

Mir

Congratulations to Mir, who was selected using an online random number generator (who will probably be General Online Random Number Generator during the great robot war).

Also, thank you to everyone who participated. I hope to have another prize drawing soon.

Confession time: I was once a fan of a jam band.  It’s not the sort of thing one admits to easily, but I feel like we’ve built up a level of trust.  For years I resisted efforts by friends to convert me to the jam band mentality.  In college my roommates would eagerly put on Phish’s “Meatstick,” and I’d shake my head while leaving for class and still be rolling my eyes an hour later when I returned in time to hear the final notes.  What was the appeal of long, rambling songs that were the musical equivalent of Grampa Simpson telling a story?  But in late 2001, I got dragged along to see O.A.R. play at a local club, and I… just… connected.  It was a perfect storm of the general contentment and malaise that sets in midway through senior year, meeting laid-back songs about drinking, hanging out with friends, and crazy games of poker.

And with that, I was hooked.  I went to a half-dozen O.A.R. concerts, successfully converted friends and family, watched them on Letterman… and for a brief period of time, I longed to attend Bonnaroo.  Never very seriously — I think even then I realized only liking one band was not a good basis for attending a three-day musical event.  But still, it remains the one festival I’ve ever really given any serious thought to, and my ears perk up whenever I hear it mentioned.  Enter: Ben and Jerry and their latest hippie offering.  Not to get stereotyped as the ice cream guy, but today we’re looking at Bonnaroo Buzz, yet another Fair Trade-certified flavor from everyone’s favorite not-necessarily-gay duo from Vermont.

For starters, please don’t ask me to explain how the flavor has any connection with Bonnaroo whatsoever — it’s coffee and malt ice cream with whiskey caramel swirls and English toffee pieces mixed in.  Seems like a more appropriate title might be “Flavo(u)rs of the British Isles,” or perhaps “Feck th’ English (Though Their Toffee’s Not Bad),” but I guess that would be a hard sell to your more conservative grocery stores.  It still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, though, because while I’m certain many of the attendees at any given Bonnaroo are indeed buzzed, I think that’s an entirely different buzz from the kind one gets from coffee.  I like imagining Ben and Jerry trying to explain it to consumers: “Naw man, we wanted to put the good stuff in, but ‘the Man’ wouldn’t let us.  It’s cool though, just talk to Steve, he’ll hook you up.  In the meantime we just put in whiskey, and coffee, and toffee, ’cause that totally rhymes, man!  Whoa… did you ever really look at the back of your hand?”  Then it’s just twenty minutes of giggling.

Bonnaroo Buzz has the misfortune of having to follow up on me reviewing two good-to-very-good Ben & Jerry’s flavors, and unfortunately it doesn’t quite measure up.  Coffee ice cream fans may want to bump that score up by a point or two, but it just doesn’t hit exactly the right balance, with not enough caramel flavor spread throughout.  Or rather, the smoothness of the caramel is able to briefly balance out the coffee bitterness, but it fades quickly while the bitterness lingers, which is not ideal.  The toffee tastes good, crunchy but not teeth-shatteringly hard, although there were two massive chunks that really needed to be broken up into smaller pieces; not sure if that’s standard or if I just got an “off” carton.  Still, I can’t say that the toffee flavor ever blended seamlessly with the ice cream so much as being two decent but distinct tastes.  And I don’t know about you, but when I see the word “whiskey” on any product, I expect to be drunk after I’ve consumed a quarter of it, so strike three, Bonnaroo Buzz.

In general terms there’s a limit to how “bad” Ben and Jerry’s ice cream can really be — you’d still take it if it was offered to you — but compared to many of its forebears and peers, Bonnaroo Buzz isn’t in the same class.  For O.A.R. fans, it’s like when they start playing “Delicate Few”… you kind of look forward to it, but then when you hear it you remember it’s not really one of your favorites and it’s probably time for a pee break.  But, hell — every song is someone’s favorite, so if coffee ice cream is your thing, give it a shot.  The rest of us will be in line for the bathroom.

(Nutrition Facts — 1/2 cup — 280 calories, 130 calories from fat, 14 grams of total fat, 9 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 60 milligrams of cholesterol, 115 milligrams of sodium, 33 grams of total carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 25 grams of sugars, 4 grams of protein, 10% vitamin A, 0% vitamin C, 10% calcium, and 0% iron)

Other Ben & Jerry’s Bonnaroo Buzz reviews:
Fish and Spaghetti
Castles and Cooks
Need Coffee

Item: Ben & Jerry’s Bonnaroo Buzz
Price: $4.79
Size: 1 pint
Purchased at: Acme
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: “Hey Girl” live.  Senior year malaise.  Getting your British on.  Smooth caramel.  Solid but not adamantine toffee.  Ice cream that could conceivably get you drunk.
Cons: “Meatstick.”  Getting stereotyped as the ice cream reviewer.  Names that don’t make sense.  Lingering coffee bitterness.  Toffee boulders.  Ice cream that doesn’t actually get you drunk.

To say the energy drink market is crowded would be an understatement. So many companies have jumped on the energy drink bandwagon that I don’t think the bandwagon moves anymore because its wheels have been crushed by the weight of all those companies who want a piece of the multibillion dollar energy drink market. Or the bandwagon might not be moving because Steven Seagal’s energy drinks are as heavy as he is now.

One of the latest companies to jump on the bandwagon is V8.

V8 V-Fusion + Energy drinks are made by combining a blend of vegetable and fruit juices with green tea. The green tea provides 80 milligrams of caffeine, which is the same amount in a skinny can of Red Bull. Each energy drink has 50 calories and don’t contain added sugar. The 2.5-ounce V8 Energy Shots contain a blend of nine vegetable and fruit juices, plus green tea. Each energy shot also provide vitamins A, C, E, and a number of B vitamins.

The V8 V-Fusion + Energy Drinks are available at 2,400 Walmart locations and retail for $3.98 for a six-pack of 8-ounce cans. The beverages come in two flavors — Pomegranate/Blueberry and Peach/Mango. ED Junkie posted a review of the V8 V-Fusion + Energy drinks. The V8 Energy Shots retail for $2.99 and are available at participating locations in Colorado, Florida, and Minnesota.