Coke to Introduce New Pepsi-Flavored Coke

s Pepsi’s heavily marketed new nasty blue cola starts hitting store shelves this week, Coke is putting the finishing touches on its own new soda: Pepsi Coke. The new cola, subject of heated rumors for months and developed under the code name Cokesi, is a Pepsi-flavored version of its Coca-Cola Classic brand, and will appear in regional markets in August.

The apparent coincidence of the two launches is a familiar trick in the ruthless cola wars, in which the business world’s two most famous and petty rivals are forever scheming to one-up and stink-finger each other. Pepsi is hoping that its own blind stab in the dark, Pepsi Blue, a berry-flavored cola described as “what it would taste like if fruit could scream,� will be the aorta-spurting death blow it has been hoping to deal to rival Coke for decades. Naturally, Coke wants its hunk of the spotlight as well, and has little interest in “being stomped into asshole powder,� by rival Pepsi, as the industry jargon goes. With the release of new Pepsi Coke, Coca-Cola hopes to hit Pepsi right where it lives, namely in producing Pepsi-flavored sodas for the national market.

Coke’s tactics are not new in the industry. The last time Pepsi tried to re-invent the wheel by making it a different color, Coke responded quicker than the producers of the 1988 comedy Vice Versa. Pepsi’s Crystal Pepsi, a clear cola that tasted like a robot had pissed on a box of Nerds candy, was quickly one-upped in 1992 with Tab Invisible from Coke, a move that confused consumers and sent them back to drinking water.

Hoping to not only match Pepsi, but match them twice, Coke is also hedging its bets by releasing its own new berry-flavored blue drink, Fanta Berry, ensuring that Pepsi Blue won’t be lonely during its short slide into pop-culture trivia obscurity.

Stan Villanowski, a Coke spokesman and terrific liar, denied that Fanta Berry is being launched in response to Pepsi Blue. “Pssssh. Who told you that? What an imagination. Fanta is the No. 1 fruit-flavored soft drink in the world,� he said. “Plus, it comes in those cool cascading dispensers that make it look like Fanta is already being digested. Fanta Berry is a logical extension for the Fanta brand, bringing balance to the Fanta Univerise.� Besides, the drink will also be more of a cobalt blue rather than the “dirty antifreeze blue� of Pepsi’s new cola, he added.

Fanta, sold in over 70 flavors at failing fast-food chains in over 188 countries, was relaunched this spring as a national brand in the U.S. and is sold in four flavors: orange, strawberry, grapple and pineappleberry.

Pepsi appears to give less than two shits about the new Coke brand. “It seems our idea ‘blue’ them away,� said a Pepsi spokesman, Harvey Pearsons, pausing expectantly for a laugh that never came.

If we’re going to have to choke down blue Fanta when the fifteen year-old vegetable behind the counter puts it in our Icee cup on accident, then will we at least have the consolation of seeing how they work in a blue Fantana — a new member of the fruit rock group created for Fanta’s ad campaign?

“There is a Fantana that represents the four major flavors of the Fanta brand,� Mr. Villanowski said. “They’re not the only ones on the island of Fantana, however, so it wouldn’t surprise me if a berry Fanta eventually joined the Fantanas here in the U.S. for their New Year’s jam with the Cokeanistas and TABBA,� Villanowski continued, getting a paranoid look in his eye. “I’m buying up all the tickets I can so I can scalp them when the time of the concert grows nigh. Then, with that money I can finally quit this lousy job and move to New Zealand, where the Fantanas would never think to look. And I’m bringing lots of bottled water.� Mr. Villanowski continued much like this for about three-quarters of an hour, cutting patterns into his tie with a pair of scissors as the commune news gradually inched its way closer and closer to the door.

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Tonight the city is packed like a cheap suitcase, my friends. It is brimming over with miserable, sweaty recluses, who sit naked in their stench-ridden plaster of Paris hovels like the penthouses of the damned. They spend their unfortunate lives brewing up Byzantine conspiracy theories like pots of runny black coffee, in an ass-clenching attempt to pass those painful small hours of the night's midsection, hours that cling and drag like a moss-covered gallstone. And not just tonight, no. Last night, as well. Most likely last Tuesday. Maybe other nights, it's hard to say.

True enough, there are still some intrepid dreamers who sniff glue or make Popsicle stick models of Eartha Kitt's gigantic ass when the boredom horn comes calling, cutting a crimson swath through their sleepwalking nightmare lives. But countless others have no hobbies at all, and instead attempt to break boredom's dark stranglehold by dreaming up improbable conspiracies galore, spiraling out into infinity with their paranoid cake-baking.

But the twisting corridors of this sickly web don't end there, good friend. This lonely waltz demands several more dancers to move their hips in and out when the suggestion is made, like freak-dancing mulatto robots. This latter-day ecosystem of conspiracy is made complete only by the existence of the noble dubunker, the conspiracy theorist's natural predator! Without debunkers, the conspiracy theorist population would grow wildly out of control, regenerating exponentially and savaging the natural cultural landscape. It would choke out all other indigenous lifetypes, like bad drivers and hypochondriacs. The beautiful diversity of nature would quickly and unceremoniously be destroyed, like a bedwetting puppy that was a gift from your ex-wife.

You might argue that this could be a good thing, especially the next time some sex-crazed zealot of questionable lineage backs his 4-Runner over the top of your humble sparkbox of a car, pausing only to spew a smoking stream of white-hot vitriol out his driver-side window before he peels out, and his bumper sticker tells you to go hump a penguin. But diversity is sustainability my friend, and without every variety of unfortunate asshole out there in the world, the whole circus tent would come down like a giant scale model of the Notre Dame cathedral, one made of lubricated dominoes.

Pluck one sphincter-searing malcontent from the beautiful mosaic of life and when your back is turned, six other varieties of life would disappear in the bat of a bat's eye. The nursemaid, the wax statue enthusiast, or the twice-baked grandmother, perhaps? Or could it be the surgeon, the Harley mechanic or the last unmolested boyscout? That's just the thing, my friends, the choice is not ours to make, and when we start yanking fibrous polybendanium stalks willy-nilly from the high-tech camping tent of nature, no one can say just what will come falling down around our ears next.

And what is life without the ammonia-scented wonders of nature? The dizzying variety of crawling, backward-twitching creation, a rancid, festering cornucopia of tropical ooze clogging our eye sockets like a pudding-thick discharge? Not a whole flaming lot. It's a couple of stale Styrofoam coffee cups rolling around on the floorboards of a cobalt blue 1985 Chevy Nova, friend, and personally I'm one who has been down that road before. You can have it. It only goes to Wisconsin.

So before you go to bed tonight, say a humble prayer of thanks to the noble debunker, for all too often they go unrecognized and unthanked. Yet regardless, they bravely trod forward, never once complaining. And when life leaves a steaming batch of road apples on their path, they make delicious apple pie.

And I think we can all learn a valuable lesson from that.

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A nation awoke last Monday already colossally beyond-tired of hearing about Janet Jackson's titties, yet knowing intuitively they'd have to endure at least a month of teeth-gnashing from the three people in the world who were offended by sort-of seeing a woman's breast on TV. While most of the nation wouldn't have cared if Janet had smoked Justin Timberlake's icky boy-band pole onstage during the halftime show, many have written in with the same question: What's the big deal? Hasn't this shit happened before?

The answer, obviously, is that of course it's happened before you moron. So why is it such a big deal this time around? In part because of Janet's reputation, and in part because of the shock that something interesting actually happened at a football game. The CBS switchboards were flooded with calls within moments of the incident, with irate viewers complaining either that they only got to see one lousy tit or that they were in the can and missed the whole damned thing.

Much of the hoopla originates from Janet being known as the "most-normal" Jackson, which is sort of like being voted the most fun-loving Nazi at a German summer camp. If MTV'd had their first choice, and Britney Spears hadn't been tied up in a previous engagement stripping for Thai schoolchildren, nobody would have been fazed at all by this halftime anatomy lesson. Britney could have whipped a rubber chicken out of her cooch onstage without anyone batting an eyelid. But since America was half expecting Janet to rip off her fleshy body suit and finally reveal that Michael is the only Jackson, and he just dresses up as his "siblings" like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, the unexpectedly realistic boobage on display was highly unsettling for most everyone who thought they had this whole "family" thing figured out.

Far less controversy farted out of the grapevine when hip-hop star and former pornstress Lil' Kim let most of it hang out of the mammary-flashing dress she wore to the Grammys in 2000, even though her outfit left less to the imagination than a Lubriderm commercial. But Kim's worn goods weren't anything new to anyone who'd ever turned on MTV or accidentally wandered into a porno store, while viewers had only seen Jackson mostly naked in videos, magazine photos and on album covers.

Fittingly, Lil' Kim's tried-and-true promotional technique of screwing a lot of guys in movies before she embarked on a hip-hop career harkens back to classical impresario Ludwig Van Beethoven, who dropped his shorts in a crowded restaurant to promote the struggling composer's fourth symphony "Symphony 4: More Lovin' from Beethoven" after his first three Symphonies ("Introducing...," "Gotta Feeling in My Heart," and "Rubbin' It,") did poorly in Nielsen polls of what people were humming back in those days.

An event strangely similar to the Jackson Superbowl fracas took place in 1988, when Tonight Show host Johnny Carson wore shorts instead of his trademark suit one night on the show as a joke, only to find the joke was on him when he sat down at his desk after the monologue and the studio and TV audiences caught a flash of his dapper white gonads. This unfortunate event received almost no media attention at the time, and the sighting was quickly and vividly disavowed by all present. Needless to say, not many schoolchildren were bragging that they saw Johnny Carson's nuts pop out when they returned to school the following Monday. Sales of bicycle shorts plummeted and a kind of embarrassed silence fell over the nation.

Viewers with a good memory for this kind of thing were reminded of Today Show host Dave Garroway from the 1950's, who chronically forgot to zip up his fly and as a result frequently had his baggage get loose during musical sketches on the show. 1950's viewers pretended they hadn't seen anything for years, until Garroway was fired after a memorable interview with Jayne Mansfield in 1956.

The same Jayne Mansfield created a fervor all her own at the Oscars a year later, when the actress's irrepressible bosoms got loose and hurt a small child while she was on stage presenting an award. America was so offended that Oscar ratings soared until 1974, when Robert Opal streaked naked across the stage during an acceptance speech and shocked a nation that had never seen a man naked before. Oscar ratings have never recovered.

Perhaps the grandmammary of all accidental TV nudity was The Faye Emerson Show in 1950, when the host's famous plunging neckline finally caught up with her and allowed her breasts to escape custody, giving the audience a view of female anatomy so shocking it caused the 1950's.

Over the next 50 years, various bits of accidental T&A found their way onto the small screen, from The Price is Right contestant in the 70's who had her unmentionables deblouse while she was coming on down (writing an early epitaph for the fad of snaps instead of buttons as clothing fasteners), to the 1976 episode of Charlie's Angels when star Farrah Fawcett finally threw her fans a nipple-shaped bone during an undercover prison sequence.

By the 1980's, real intentional nudity was finding its way to television screens, sapping the accidental kind of its ability to titillate. Bra commercials began using live lingerie models instead of hilarious mannequins or retarded women wearing bras on the outside of their clothes, and in 1989 Lonesome Dove viewers saw far more cowboy cock than they had ever bargained for. By the time America was treated to the sight of Dennis Franz's bare hairy ass on NYPD Blue in 1993, (prompting Jay Leno to remark "I only have a 20-inch TV, so I couldn't see it all") the nation had really seen too much and was calling for the networks to put some goddamn pants on these people.

Where does that leave us now? Can television nudity ever really be accidental and exciting again? We can only hope. Because despite ever-present nudity on cable and the Internet, network television retains its unique ability to shock and titillate people who've never heard of cable or the Internet.

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